Making Contact Read online

  MAKING

  CONTACT

  JILL TARTER

  AND THE SEARCH FOR

  EXTRATERRESTRIAL

  INTELLIGENCE

  SARAH SCOLES

  To Earthlings everywhere.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  TERMS

  PEOPLE

  ONE

  HOW’D A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU GET INTO A FIELD LIKE THIS?

  TWO

  BABIES, BROWN DWARFS, AND BIG MOVES

  THREE

  MAKING THE ALLEN TELESCOPE ARRAY

  FOUR

  THE FUTURE OF THE ALIEN-HUNTING TELESCOPE

  FIVE

  A QUESTION FOR OUR TIME

  SIX

  THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE AND NEW PROJECTS

  SEVEN

  THE QUEST FOR CONTACT

  EIGHT

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  NINE

  EXTREMOPHILES AND EXOPLANETS

  TEN

  SHOUTING INTO THE VOID

  A TIMELINE OF SETI

  FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  During a conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), Jill Tarter left her purse on a bus—a bus I happened to be driving. At the time, I was fresh out of graduate school, working at my first post-education job as a public outreach officer at the Green Bank Telescope. On that particular night, my job involved driving a large vehicle full of SETI dignitaries to the telescope so they could eat dessert underneath its dish, then driving them back, and never crashing.

  I parked the bus and ran after Tarter, who was then the director of the SETI Institute and whose fictional alter ego, a character from the book and movie Contact, had been my childhood inspiration for entering the radio astronomy world.

  “I think you left your purse,” I said when I reached her. I extended my arm, the bag hanging awkwardly from it like I was a person who didn’t carry bags.

  She said, “Thank you,” smiled, and continued toward the observatory’s lounge.

  In that same lounge, astronomers had held the first SETI conference a half-century earlier. They gathered under the rainbow light of a 1960s chandelier and debated this: Are we alone in the universe? And if we’re not, how much company do we have? They poured the foundation for the SETI work that would come, stacking itself atop their conclusions, asking over and over those same initial questions and investigating them with new scientific knowledge and technology.

  As I watched Tarter walk away, I thought about how I could have recited her resume to her, having watched her career ever since I’d known what a career was. That milestone of mental development coincided with my watching of the movie Contact, based on a 1985 book by Carl Sagan about the discovery of alien life, when I was twelve. I was enraptured in a way I hadn’t ever been before, even though I’d been reading dubious but thrilling books about wormholes and black holes and time travel for years. Here, in SETI, was this whole scientific world that I didn’t know existed, and here was this person leading its charge—a fierce, determined, stubborn, smart woman who asked big questions about the universe and didn’t hear “No” as “No” but as “Keep trying.” I wanted to be like her, to investigate the kinds of mysteries she investigated, to know the things she knew.

  I watched the film obsessively, mouthing, “If it’s just us, that seems like an awful waste of space,” along with Jodie Foster, who played the extraterrestrial finder Ellie Arroway. I read and reread Sagan’s book, glossing over my inability to understand ruby masers, obsessing instead over my cosmic insignificance and the broad brushstrokes of the big cosmic questions.

  At my first college astronomy internship, with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, I lived in a house with five other interns. One night, we watched Contact together. Here’s why: it was the thing that had brought us here. And that’s something I’ve heard from many astronomers around my age, especially the women: Contact was their earliest inspiration, the first depiction they saw of what astronomy was, and the first time they saw a scientific character and thought, “I see myself in that person.”

  One of the other interns said, “Did you know she’s partly based on a real scientist?”

  That real person, the intern continued, was a woman named Jill Tarter.

  Fictional Contact follows Arroway as she searches for a radio signal from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization, battling bureaucracy, politicians, economic woes, statistical unlikelihood, institutionalized sexism, and her own emotional demons. As a nonfictional woman scientist and a SETI scientist, Tarter faced the same challenges. But this is where the two women’s stories depart: Arroway finds a signal. E.T. calls. E.T. sends instructions for building a spaceship. Humanity builds the spaceship (not without trials), and (not without trials) Arroway becomes the sole passenger. To my knowledge—and I’ve interviewed her a lot—Tarter has never been on a spaceship. But if our real world does make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence—a discovery that would be one of the biggest and most impactful humans have ever made—we will owe much of the thanks to the real Tarter, who got in on the early days of the field, kept it alive during its lean years, and pushed its science and technology forward, even as politicians, the public, and even other scientists said the endeavor was not worthwhile.

  After I returned Tarter’s purse that night in Green Bank at the SETI conference, I biked home, to astronomer Frank Drake’s former bachelor pad—a farmhouse that, set up against the woods and complete with a chicken-slaughtering room in the basement, many found remote and creepy. But I loved it, and I loved knowing Drake had lived in this house when, in 1960, he made the first modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called Project Ozma.

  He didn’t find what he was looking for. That night, I looked up at the bright swath of Milky Way stars and wondered when, or if, anyone ever would.

  Three years later, when I was an editor at Astronomy magazine, I wrote Tarter an email, informing her that we’d met for five seconds when she lost her purse and then asking if I could write a biography of her. After a bit of back and forth, including the question “Why should I believe you can write a whole book?” she agreed.

  Today, I’ve had the privilege of doing countless hours of interviews with Tarter, of asking her questions I haven’t even asked my own family members, of getting to know her in a way that has made her a regular person to me and not that soft-focus, pedestaled hero she was to me when I was younger. We’ve torn apart file cabinets and photo albums; I’ve pestered her peers about her personality; I’ve slogged through transcripts of congressional meetings and 300-page conference reports—all with the idea of understanding how Tarter came into herself, how she came to SETI, how SETI has evolved since becoming a science, and how its future may play out.

  Tarter has spent more than 40 years trying to answer the question “Are we alone?” And never during those decades did she know how close she may have been. The wondering keeps her up at night. But her scientific questions are, in some ways, the same as the existential questions that keep us all up at night. We have all spent dark hours wondering about our place in it all, our aloneness both terrestrial and cosmic. Tarter’s life and her life’s work are not just a quest to understand life in the universe: they are a quest to understand our lives in the universe.

  So, spoiler alert: this book will not tell you whether They Are Out There. But hopefully it gives some insight on earthlings, and what we’re doing down here.

  TERMS

  100-Year Starship: A research program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched in 2011. Its mission is “to make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system a
reality within the next 100 years.”

  Active SETI: The act of broadcasting messages toward space with the idea that they may be received by extraterrestrial civilizations.

  Allen Telescope Array: A SETI-centric telescope made of 42 radio antennas. The SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, completed this scaled-down version of the array in 2007, primarily with funds from the Paul G. Allen Foundation, hoping to expand it eventually to 350 antennas. After Berkeley backed out, leading to a hibernation in 2011, the organization SRI International took over management.

  Ames Research Center: The NASA center located in Silicon Valley and the place within the agency where SETI got its start. The center is now a leader in astrobiology and the search for exoplanets.

  Arecibo Observatory: The home of the 305-meter-wide telescope on which Tarter and colleagues have done SETI observations for NASA’s High Resolution Microwave Survey and the private Project Phoenix. Some of the data that feeds the University of California, Berkeley, SETI@Home program also comes from this telescope.

  Band: A range of frequencies or wavelengths.

  Bandwidth: The range of frequencies or wavelengths to which an instrument is sensitive.

  Blueshift: The apparent squishing of electromagnetic waves into a shorter wavelength that occurs when an object is moving toward the observer.

  Breakthrough Initiatives: The Breakthrough Listen project to do SETI, the Breakthrough Message program to send a missive to space, and the Breakthrough Starshot idea to send a suite of small probes to the nearest star. The initiatives are all funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

  Contact: A 1985 science fiction book by astronomer and public figure Carl Sagan that portrayed a successful SETI project. The fictional astronomer who found the fictional aliens was, in part, inspired by Jill Tarter. In 1997, director Robert Zemeckis adapted the novel into a movie of the same name, starring Jodie Foster.

  Deep Space Network: A NASA-operated network of radio telescopes that primarily downloads data from and uploads commands to spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit. SETI scientists have also used them to test equipment.

  Doppler effect: The redshifting or blueshifting of electromagnetic waves (be they in the radio, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, or gamma range) that happens when the object emitting the light is moving away (redshift) or toward (blueshift) the observer (usually a telescope).

  Drake equation: An equation that SETI pioneer Frank Drake created as a kind of agenda for the secret Order of the Dolphin meeting in Green Bank in 1961. The equation considers the factors that would lead to intelligent, technological, communicative life in the Milky Way and multiplies them together to estimate the number of communicating civilizations that likely exist in our galaxy at any given time.

  Electromagnetic Radiation: The spectrum of light, made of photons, from radio waves to gamma rays.

  Extremophile: An organism on Earth that exists in extreme conditions that most life would find unpalatable.

  Exoplanet: A planet outside our solar system.

  Feed: The part of a radio telescope that funnels the radio waves from space toward the instrument that actually detects them.

  First SETI Protocol: More formally called the “Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” this protocol describes the steps scientists and political leaders should take to verify and react to a potential message from extraterrestrials.

  Frequency: The number of light waves per second that passes by a given spot, measured in units like Hertz and megaHertz.

  FUDD: The Follow-Up Detection Device, used by the SETI Institute. The device—identical copies of which lived at the main telescope and a remotely operated backup telescope—analyzed candidate signals in real-time and could provide evidence that a signal came from space and was not interference from earthly devices.

  Green Bank: An observatory site in remote West Virginia. Frank Drake’s first SETI project took place here in 1960, as did the Order of the Dolphin SETI meeting the next year. Tarter did early SETI work there, and she and her colleagues used the 140-foot telescope for Project Phoenix. Today, the Breakthrough Listen project runs partly on the 100-meter-wide Green Bank Telescope.

  Habitable Zone: The region around a star in which a planet can harbor liquid water.

  Hat Creek: The town and observatory site of the Allen Telescope Array.

  HRMS: The High Resolution Microwave Survey, NASA’s first full-scale SETI project, which began observing in 1992 with the Arecibo Observatory. In 1993, Congress canceled the project.

  Jodrell Bank: An observatory in Lower Withington, England, at which Tarter and colleagues performed initial SETI experiments, and where Bernard Lovell secretly used the SETI team’s equipment to search for signals from Russian spacecraft.

  JPL: NASA and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located in Pasadena, California. During the High Resolution Microwave Survey, which involved deeply targeting specific stars and doing shallower but wider surveys, this site led the “survey” part of the project.

  Kepler Space Telescope: A planet-hunting telescope, launched in 2009, that has found thousands of planets outside our solar system.

  Light-Year: The distance light travels in a year, or 5.9 trillion miles.

  Maser: A word that stands for “microwave amplification by stimulation emission of radiation.” It is essentially a laser—naturally occurring or made by a person—that emits photons at a very, very narrow set of wavelengths (like the single, pure color of a laser) but at the lower energies of radio waves, microwaves, and infrared waves. Tarter and colleagues investigated masers in the universe because they believed they represented the narrowest-band signals nature could produce, so anything narrower had to come from a synthetic source.

  METI: Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, another term for “active SETI.”

  Mobile Research Facility: The mobile tractor-trailer out of which the SETI Institute ran the High Resolution Microwave Survey and Project Phoenix operations at each site.

  Moore’s Law: The observational idea, put forth by Gordon Moore in 1965, that the number of transistors on each square inch of an integrated circuit doubles every year. A decade later, he revised the idea to a doubling every two years. In both forms, it predicts the exponentially growing power of computers. That growth, though, cannot continue at the same pace forever, although it has held relatively true so far.

  MOP: Microwave Observing Project, the planning-stage precursor to NASA’s High Resolution Microwave Survey.

  Mopra: The second telescope Tarter’s SETI team used remotely during observations with Australia’s Parkes telescope.

  Narrowband: A signal that exists over a small range of frequencies, like a radio station broadcast.

  NASA: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

  NRAO: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

  Order of the Dolphin: The code name for the group of 10 scientists that gathered in 1961 for a SETI meeting in Green Bank, West Virginia, after Frank Drake’s first experiment.

  Parkes Radio Telescope: The 64-meter-wide radio telescope in Australia where Project Phoenix began after the scientists were allowed to purchase time on the telescope. Today, Breakthrough Listen uses the telescope for SETI work.

  Project Cyclops: A NASA-sponsored study into the kind of telescope that could realistically search for an alien civilization, released in 1971. The committee proposed an array of many small radio antennas that work together, as the Allen Telescope Array’s antennas do today. NASA never built this proposed telescope, but the report from the project first inspired Tarter to join SETI as an enterprise.

  Project Ozma: Frank Drake’s first SETI project, in which he used the 85-foot Tatel telescope in Green Bank to search for radio signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1960.

  Project Phoenix: The private SETI project that “rose from the ashes” of NASA’s canceled High Resolution Microwave Surve
y. It ran from 1995 to 2004, using the telescopes at Parkes, Green Bank, and Arecibo.

  Receiver: The part of a radio telescope that collects and detects radio waves, analogous to a camera at the focus of an optical telescope.

  Redshift: The apparent stretching of electromagnetic waves into a longer wavelength that occurs when an object is moving away from the observer.

  RFI: Radio frequency interference, or human-produced radio waves—from things like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, digital cameras, satellites, and spark plugs—that appear in and contaminate radio telescope data.

  Second SETI Protocol: A proposed document detailing how to decide whether to purposefully broadcast a message to space, with the idea that it could reach an alien civilization, and the best practices for such a broadcast.

  SERENDIP: An ongoing set of SETI projects named the “Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations.” Tarter worked on the initial version, and the Berkeley-run project is now on its sixth incarnation.

  SETI Institute: The institute that Tarter co-founded to study all aspects of the existence, formation, and evolution of life in the universe. It came into being in 1984, and it continues today in Mountain View, California, employing scientists who research topics ranging from exoplanets to extremophiles to Martian geography. The SETI Institute also operates the Allen Telescope Array.

  SETI Live: A short-lived citizen science program that allowed users to categorize signals from real-time SETI data delivered from the Allen Telescope Array. The funding for the project came from Tarter’s 2009 TED Prize.

  SETI Quest: The TED Prize–sponsored portal that allowed members of the public to participate in the SETI Institute’s work, in the form of software and algorithm development and citizen science.

  Wavelength: The distance between two peaks of an electromagnetic wave. Radio waves (including microwaves) range from about 1 millimeter to 100 kilometers.