Making Contact Read online

  PEOPLE

  Peter Backus: Backus was a radio astronomer and programmer for NASA’s SETI program from 1985 to 1988 and its co-principal investigator from 1988 to 1994. After the program was canceled, he worked in management positions for Project Phoenix, as a software engineer for the SETI Institute’s search system and as a manager of the SETI Institute’s SETI observing programs. Today, he is a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

  Natalie Batalha: Batalha is an astrophysicist at Ames Research Center and serves as mission scientist for the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope, which she has worked on since it existed in only proposal form. She has been awarded a NASA Public Service Medal and is a leader on the agency’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science program to understand which exoplanets may be habitable.

  John Billingham: Known as the “father of SETI at NASA,” Billingham co-directed Project Cyclops and, afterward, began NASA’s SETI program. According to his 2013 obituary at the SETI Institute’s website, he “transformed SETI from an occasional experiment into a systematic program.”

  David Black: Black served as CEO of the SETI Institute from 2014 to 2015. His previous positions include president and CEO of the Universities Space Research Association, chief scientist for the International Space Station, and deputy chief for the Space Sciences Division at Ames Research Center.

  William Borucki: After designing heat shields for the Apollo spacecraft, Borucki masterminded the Kepler Space Telescope, championing its concept for decades before it became reality. He has received the National Academy of Sciences’ Henry Draper Medal and the Shaw Prize for his efforts in finding exoplanets.

  Stuart Bowyer: Bowyer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, is credited with founding the field of extreme ultraviolet astronomy. Tarter met Bowyer at Berkeley, where he showed her the Cyclops Report that inspired her to begin her SETI work. He headed the SERENDIP program on which she got started in the field.

  David Brin: Brin is a scientist, futurist, and science fiction author who has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell awards for his writing. In the field of active SETI, he is a strong voice in opposition of broadcasting messages without significant forethought and oversight.

  Richard Bryan: Bryan served as a Democratic senator from Nevada between 1989 and 2001. In 1994, he introduced an amendment that killed the nascent NASA SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey.

  Giuseppe Cocconi: Cocconi, a physicist, authored the seminal Nature paper “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in 1959, suggesting scientists could look for communications from extraterrestrials by doing radio searches around the wavelength at which hydrogen atoms naturally emit radio waves.

  Betty and Dick Cornell: Jill Tarter’s mother and father, who raised her up into the scientist and engineer she is today.

  Kent Cullers: Cullers worked as a team leader and subsystem manager for the targeted search portion of NASA’s first SETI project, on which he was also key to the digital data processing effort. At the SETI Institute, he was a senior scientist and project manager for Project Phoenix. The blind astronomer, Kent, in the movie Contact is based on this real Kent.

  David DeBoer: DeBoer is a research astronomer at the Radio Astronomy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on, among other things, the Breakthrough Listen initiative. In the past, he has served in leadership positions for the Allen Telescope Array and helped set up the Woodbury telescope for Project Phoenix.

  Bill Diamond: Diamond began a position as president and CEO of the SETI Institute in 2015, after spending decades in the world of industry, dealing with photonics, optical communications, X-ray technologies, and semiconductors.

  Frank Drake: Drake conducted the first modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called Project Ozma, in 1960. He authored the Drake equation and was a key figure at the Order of the Dolphin meeting, the first SETI conference. He also sent the first radio broadcast containing a message meant for extraterrestrials—the Arecibo message. Drake was the president of the SETI Institute from 1984 to 2000 and later was the director of its Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

  John Dreher: Dreher became part of NASA’s High Resolution Microwave Survey, its first SETI project, in 1989 and continued his SETI work on Project Phoenix when the federally funded search ended. Dreher also acted as project scientist and program manager for the Allen Telescope Array during its research and development period and continued as project scientist during its construction, while also working on its detectors.

  Ann Druyan: Druyan co-wrote the original Cosmos series, starring Carl Sagan, and created, produced, and co-wrote the 2014 redux, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, staring Neil deGrasse Tyson. She was also the creative director for the Voyager Interstellar Message project, which placed golden records—etched with a multimedia portrait of humanity—aboard the twin Voyager spacecraft. She and Sagan married in 1981.

  Ron Ekers: Ekers has been the president of the International Astronomical Union, the director of the Very Large Array, and the foundation director of the Australia National Telescope Facility. It was in this latter role that he rented the Parkes telescope to the Project Phoenix team.

  Debra Fischer: Fischer is an exoplanet astronomer at Yale University. She is currently developing a next-generation instrument called ExPRESS to find planets like Earth. She has discovered hundreds of planets—as well as the first exoplanetary system that contains multiple worlds, a discovery she made in 1999.

  Jake Garn: A Republican senator from Utah who championed SETI in government meetings during the early 1990s.

  Daniel Goldin: Goldin served as NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001. It was at the beginning of his tenure that Congress canceled the agency’s SETI program. He is currently the president and CEO of hardware company KnuEdge.

  Sam Gulkis: Gulkis co-led the survey portion of the High Resolution Microwave Survey from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

  Gerry Harp: Harp is currently co-director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research. He has worked at the institute since 2008, coming to the organization with a background in quantum mechanics.

  Mae Jemison: In 1992, Jemison became the first African American woman to go to space. An astronaut, medical doctor, and engineer, Jemison currently heads the DARPA-sponsored 100-Year Starship program, which aims to pave the way for future interstellar travel.

  Yuri Milner: A Russian billionaire, Milner founded the Breakthrough Prizes—awards in physics, life sciences, and math—as well as Breakthrough Initiatives, which include the Breakthrough Listen program to search for intelligent extraterrestrials, to learn more about life in the universe.

  Philip Morrison: A former Manhattan Project physicist, Morrison co-authored the 1959 Nature paper “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” suggesting scientists could look for communications from extraterrestrials by doing radio searches around the wavelength at which hydrogen atoms naturally emit radio waves.

  Chris Neller: A research assistant and admin at the SETI Institute, Neller was the reason Tarter kept track of her travel and paperwork.

  Bernard Oliver: Oliver, nicknamed “Barney,” led research and development at Hewlett-Packard for approximately 40 years. He traveled to Green Bank, West Virginia, to see Frank Drake’s early SETI efforts and attended the Order of the Dolphin conference shortly thereafter. He later co-directed Project Cyclops and became senior manager for NASA’s SETI program. When Congress canceled this federal project, he helped the SETI Institute secure private funds to implement the private Project Phoenix, for which he was a volunteer senior scientist.

  Tom Pierson: Pierson co-founded the SETI Institute and was the one who filed its official paperwork in 1984. He served as its CEO for decades afterward, growing it from its initial small staff, focused on SETI, to a multidisciplinary organization of more than 100 researchers.

  William Proxmire: Proxmire served as a Democratic senator from Wiscons
in from 1957 to 1989. He was an outspoken opponent of SETI and awarded NASA’s efforts to find life in the universe with his Golden Fleece Award—issued for what Proxmire deemed wasteful government spending—in 1978.

  Jon Richards: Richards runs the Allen Telescope Array’s observing program and keeps the public updated in real time about what’s going on at the telescope at SETIquest.info.

  Carl Sagan: What didn’t Sagan do? He was the host of the television series Cosmos; the author of the book Contact, which features a protagonist partly modeled on Tarter; and one of the masterminds of the Voyager golden records. He wrote many popular books and hundreds of scientific papers and championed SETI, and science in general, in the public arena. Decades after his death, people still name him when asked to think of a famous astronomer.

  Seth Shostak: Shostak is currently co-director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research. He hosts the podcast Big Picture Science and authored the book Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

  Bruce Tarter: Tarter’s first husband, Bruce was the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1994 to 2002.

  Shana Tarter: Tarter’s daughter and the assistant director of the Wilderness Medicine Institute at the National Outdoor Leadership School.

  Charles Townes: Townes, the inventor of the maser and the laser, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964. He was the first to come up with the idea of optical SETI.

  Margaret Turnbull: Turnbull is an astrobiologist and exoplanet astronomer who, with Tarter, developed the HabCat, a catalog of star systems that might be friendly to life.

  Douglas Vakoch: Currently the president of METI International, a nonprofit organization focused on active SETI, Vakoch was previously the director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute. He is the head of the International Academy of Astronautics Study Group on Active SETI: Scientific, Technical, Societal, and Legal Dimensions.

  Jack Welch: Welch, Tarter’s second and current husband, is considered a founder of molecular radio astronomy. He has directed the Radio Astronomy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley; has held the university’s Watson and Marilyn Alberts Chair in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence; and was key to the development of the electronics inside the Allen Telescope Array antennas. The National Academy of Sciences, of which he is a fellow, says he “started the field of millimeter-wave interferometry.”

  Dan Werthimer: The chief scientist for SETI at the University of California, Berkeley, Werthimer leads its SETI@Home project and the ongoing SERENDIP investigations. He is also now a key leader of the Breakthrough Listen program. When Berkeley and the SETI Institute worked together on the Allen Telescope Array, Werthimer was also part of that program.

  Pete Worden: Worden is the former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center and the current chairman of Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

  The Universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems

  like an awful waste of space.

  — Carl Sagan, Contact

  CHAPTER ONE

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

  On July 31, 2014, Auditorium 220 at NASA’s Ames Research Center fills with employees—a mix of 10-year-old button-down shirts, pleated Dockers, and the designer jeans of hip postdoctoral researchers. Pete Worden, the center’s director, steps in front of the crowd to introduce the afternoon’s speaker. Astronomer Jill Tarter stands to the side of the stadium seats, ready to deliver a talk called “Searching for ET: An Investment in Our Long Future.” She wears rimless glasses and the big bronze turtle earrings that go everywhere with her, her hands clasped behind her back. As Worden lists Tarter’s accomplishments—all related to her 40-year involvement in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)—she shakes her head and smiles, laughing when he says, “Most of us are still trying to find intelligent life here on Earth.” When Worden finishes and Tarter takes the stage, the audience lifts their smartphones to snap pictures of her in front of an introductory PowerPoint slide before the lights dim.

  “Your story—my story, our story—began billions of years ago,” she says. “But that probably doesn’t come first to your mind when you wake up in the morning.” A pause fills the air-conditioned room. “We need to change that.”

  The screen flashes to an illustration of the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, and then Tarter clicks to an image of a pinwheeling galaxy like our Milky Way, born 10 billion years ago.

  “We are intimately connected with these faraway times and faraway places,” she continues, “because it takes a cosmos to make a human.”

  People nod in assent, feeling like they do when a book’s narrator articulates a fundamental truth that they themselves have never molded into words.

  It has taken humans millennia to even begin to figure out how that cosmos made us, and we’re still not sure. We know a bit about how the universe began, how galaxies and stars got their starts, why planets exist, and what ours was like when the first microorganism claimed its spot in that strange ecosystem. But we don’t understand how earthly chemistry spat out that first living thing, or whether similar sequences have swept across other planets.

  “We want to know,” Tarter says, “where do we come from? Where are we going? What is? Why is? And of course, we’re really interested in whether or not there’s anyone else out there.”

  She shakes the projection system’s clicker, which is responding on a delay, like it’s communicating with a device light-years distant. “This thing is a bit jet-lagged,” she says, and the audience laughs.

  Given that we can’t even get PowerPoint to work properly, it’s clear that our civilization is very young, technologically speaking. And we don’t know how long it will survive. We could cause our own demise (climate change, nuclear war, antibiotic-resistant epidemic), or death could come from above (large asteroid on a collision course, nearby supernova, dying sun). But for how young humanity—and all Earthling life is—Earth resides in an ancient galaxy. And odds are, if we find anyone else inside, they will be much older than we are (on the cosmic timescale, if they were any younger, they would still be excited about discovering fire).

  Tarter’s face shifts as she becomes frank and colloquial. “Look,” she says, “I don’t expect extraterrestrial salvation. I don’t expect them to tell us how to solve our problems. But the very existence of such a civilization should motivate us to figure out a way to solve our own problems.”

  Maybe SETI will find such alien civilizations. Their distant and unimaginable lives will convince us that we, too, can avoid blistering our planet or blowing each other up. Maybe humans, or whatever we evolve into, could live long enough to build interstellar transit systems or some other sci-fi-seeming technology.

  But maybe SETI will fail. Maybe E.T. won’t phone home. Maybe there is no E.T.

  Tarter, who has spent nearly her whole adult life hoping the cosmic phone will ring, would of course be disappointed. But Tarter claims, in this speech, that the search will be worthwhile (actually, she says “really, really, really worthwhile,” emphasizing with an up-and-down gesture of her hand and closing her eyes), even if we don’t find any aliens. SETI holds up a mirror, showing us how we look from a cosmic perspective—a perspective that began 13.8 billion years ago and encompasses 2 trillion galaxies beyond our own.

  “And in that mirror,” she says, “we are all the same. It has the effect of trivializing the differences among Earthlings, differences that we’re willing to spill blood over. We have to get over that. I think SETI is a great way to do it.”

  The first search for extraterrestrial intelligence happened in 1960, in Green Bank, West Virginia, when Tarter was still in high school. Astronomer Frank Drake, a young researcher with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, had a bold plan and approval from the facility’s director. Drake had calculated that the observatory’s 85-foot radio telescope, which looks like a gigantic version of the old-timey satellite dishes still rusting in ru
ral yards, could detect extraterrestrial radio broadcasts as weak as the ones humans then transmitted. No one had ever sought out extraterrestrials before, and it was possible they were abundant and talkative, just waiting for us to tune in. For all Drake—or anyone—knew, every star was home to a thriving civilization, blasting the Encyclopedia of Everything You Want to Know about the Universe into space and hoping societies like ours would pick up the transmission. It was a heady time, filled with big questions and potentially bigger answers. Are we alone? How did we get here? Where are we headed?

  Drake selected two nearby sun-like stars, pointed the telescope at them, and scanned through frequencies much like you do when searching for an FM radio station. He sat alone in the buzzing control room beneath the telescope dish. As the night sky spun on, he wondered whether when he looked up at those two stars, called Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, someone—maybe with two legs and a radar transmitter, or four legs and a broadcaster he couldn’t yet dream of—was looking out from their own planet at a tiny dot in their sky: our sun.

  Over the course of four months, Drake sat in that control room for 115 hours, listening and hoping for signs of that someone.

  He heard nothing.

  Five hundred miles away, in suburban New York, a girl named Jill Cornell scrawled diligently away on her physics homework. Cornell, who later became Jill Tarter, first considered the possibility of alien life on a family vacation to visit her aunt and uncle on Florida’s Manasota Key. Her relatives had once been Manhattan bankers, but they got tired of the rat race and the nepotism rules that meant their marriage was a secret. So they chased the other American dream—to be free from the churn of chasing the American dream—and chucked their careers. They moved south to be beachcombers and construction workers. They built a succession of coastal houses, living in each before selling it and moving on. While the key is now filled with Airbnb vacationers clutching margaritas, Manasota once was nearly uninhabited, even lacking power lines during young Tarter’s earliest stays there. Without light pollution, the island sky seemed as dark as space actually is, Sagittarius for once looking like a convincing archer.