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That’s why two million people put on their tinfoil hats and proclaimed on Facebook that they would storm Area 51 to try and uncover humanity’s biggest secret.

So how did we get here? To understand, we need to take a look at the history of earth’s search for aliens.

Around 270 BC Greek mythology came up with stories for every little thing in space, while some of history’s earliest storytellers told fables of earthlings reaching the moon and finding ungodly creatures.

Of course, now we’ve reached the moon and we know that no one’s living up there … and, sadly, that it isn’t made of cheese.

But in West Virginia’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory, there was hope. Project Ozma was what many recognize as the first real attempt to try and find a trace of aliens.

Astronomer Frank Drake led the charge in 1960, pointing a radio telescope into the sky to try and eavesdrop on whatever might be out there.

There was no answer. But he did not waver, and he came up with a mathematical equation to estimate the number of other worldly beings in space.

Drake’s equation says the number of transmitting civilizations in a galaxy is a product of seven things: The rate that stars form each year; the percentage of stars that have planets; the number of planets per solar system that can support life; the percentage of those planets that have life; the percentage of those planets where intelligence develops; the percentage of species that have space technology; and the average lifetime of those communicating civilizations.