Adam Frank

Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester, known for computational research on star and planet formation and, increasingly, for his work on the astrobiology of civilisations and the philosophy of science. Co-founder of the NPR science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. Author of About Time (cosmology and human culture), Light of the Stars (the Anthropocene in astrobiological context), and The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (co-authored with Evan Thompson and Marcelo Gleiser). Part of a collaboration using the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics to study Super-Earth interiors.

Background

Frank’s research spans star formation magnetohydrodynamics, exoplanet interior physics, and astrobiology. He is the principal investigator on NASA’s first grant specifically for exoplanet technosignature research. His collaboration with Gavin Schmidt produced the Silurian Hypothesis — a formal inquiry into whether an industrial civilisation could have existed on Earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago and left no recoverable trace. With Woody Sullivan, he derived the Pessimism Line: the probability threshold (10⁻²²) below which Earth would have to be the sole technological civilisation in cosmic history.

His thinking has increasingly moved towards what he and his co-authors call the blind spot in science: the methodological exclusion of first-person experience that has powered scientific progress but generates paradoxes in consciousness research, the philosophy of time, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He is involved in a QBism (Quantum Bayesianism) collaboration with Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pienaar, and has a Templeton Foundation grant on semantic information in living systems. He practises Zen Buddhism and has done so for thirty years, which he regards as directly relevant to his philosophical positions on experience and agency.

Core positions

• Life and the planet co-evolve; the Hard Steps model is flawed because it treats the planet as a fixed background rather than a co-actor
• The burden of proof in astrobiology lies with the pessimists: 10 billion trillion habitable-zone planets have run the experiment; the Pessimism Line quantifies what it would take for Earth to be alone
• There is no indirect Fermi paradox — the search conducted so far is negligibly small
• Technosignatures (atmospheric, radiative, structural) are a richer and less assumption-laden detection paradigm than radio SETI
• The technosphere is currently immature (non-autopoietic); becoming a long-lived civilisation requires integrating it with the biosphere rather than undermining it
• Science’s exclusion of experience — the blind spot — must be addressed to make progress on consciousness, time, and quantum foundations; QBism offers a model in which the agent is central

In the wiki