Making Contact Page 3

  When Tarter was 10, her father took her for a seaside walk to teach her the constellations. He pointed up at each set of stars, explaining how they seemed to connect into a coherent picture. But they were actually light-years apart, he told her, only by happenstance lining up in our sights. Standing on the deserted beach with her father, toes knocking against the seashells she collected and categorized during the day, she considered the idea that those stars might be someone else’s suns. It made sense to her. And on some planet circling one of those stars, some other creature was probably walking along some other coast with her (his, its) parents. They could peer up at their sky and see our sun, which would be a part of constellations unrecognizable to us.

  This is all very romantic—the mythology of a person, a convenient story in which the arc from past to present is clear. But such a hindsight-hued vision of history simplifies the way life actually is. Back then, Tarter was just a kid daydreaming about aliens. There is, really, nothing special about that. I did that; you probably did that. Sure, Tarter was smart, interested in exploring the universe from an early age (envious, for instance, that Flash Gordon got to drive the spaceship while his female accomplice, Dale Arden, waited around in a short skirt). But no one could have crowned Jill Cornell the future queen of SETI back then. There was no way to know she would eventually emerge from the crowd of other kids who had the same ideas.

  But because she did emerge from the crowd of other kids who had the same ideas, the beach scene seems different—filled with foreshadowing and prelapsarian mythos. Before there were committee meetings and congressional hearings, before telescope groundbreakings and technology mishaps, before fundraising pitches and receiver upgrades, there was only this walk. There was only this childhood certainty that the scene was duplicated, triplicated, even quadruplicated elsewhere.

  Tarter grew up on the water—on Florida vacations as well as at home, in a small lakeshore apartment in Eastchester, New York. As an only child, she spent most of her conversational energy talking to adults, and her parents’ full focus fell on her. She lit up under her father’s beam of attention. He fostered their similarities—a love of deciphering the innards of objects, a desire to pull fish out of water, and a sense that the universe could be grabbed and dragged down to Earth for examination.

  After he fought in World War I, Jill’s father, Dick, attended Swarthmore College. When the school offered him a scholarship to stay and study graduate-level astronomy, he declined, becoming a professional football player instead. Tarter has newspaper clippings, found in a family trunk that once belonged to Dick’s mother, from his athletic career. The yellowed pictures, whose ink has bled into three generations of fingertips, show him in 1920s sports gear. The kneepads are flimsier than inline skaters’, and the whole ensemble looks like a traumatic injury waiting to happen. But Dick himself looks tall, strong, charming—like he didn’t need kneepads anyway. Like if he told you something, you would believe it, or would at least want to.

  Dick wanted his daughter to be self-reliant, and so he set milestones for her to achieve before she could do whatever it was she wanted to do. He let her go canoeing with him only if she portaged the boat, and she was allowed to attach herself to his hunting and fishing trips only if she braided her own hair first (a task that Jill’s mother, Betty, had performed for years, but one for which Dick had no time or skill). By the time she was eight, she had mastered the art of hair engineering and grown boat-hefting muscles, so she spent much of her free time with her father and his friends in sportsmen’s camps. She caught snakes, fish, and the equivocal attention of her mother, Betty.

  “What would they think?” her mother asked her.

  Who are they? Tarter thought. And what do I care?

  Betty informed Dick that their daughter was not developing the way a girl should. She wasn’t graceful. She had a habit of draping reptiles across her shoulders. But she was only eight, so a social 180 was still possible. The next day, Dick hoisted Tarter and set her on the washing machine, which was her mother’s most prized possession and which occupied a large portion of the real estate in the kitchen. Whenever Dick sat her down there, Tarter knew they were going to have a conversation. This perch put her at eye level with her father, and she looked at his irises, waiting.

  “Your mother thinks,” he said, in the timeless way of fathers, “that maybe since you’re getting older, you should be spending more time with her, rather than me.”

  Tarter waited.

  “Learning how to do girl things,” he continued. Whether or not he believed his own words, he insisted: this is what it means to grow up.

  “Why do you have to do one or the other?” she asked. “Girl things or boy things?”

  Dick had answers, sociological ones that Tarter didn’t want to hear. “These are the ways of the world,” he said.

  Luckily, having spent so much time with her father, she knew how to manipulate him. She combined tears and logic, batting back rebuttals. Rhetoric plus emotional reaction yielded the desired product.

  “Well, as long as you’re willing to work hard enough,” he relented, “I don’t see why you couldn’t do anything you want.”

  His cave-in opened up an escape route, a way into the world she wanted to inhabit. Tarter calls what she said next the Washing Machine Declaration. What was the most male thing she could be, besides an actual boy? She knew from hanging around the sportsmen’s camps that lots of those guys were engineers. And although she had only vague notions of what an engineer did all day, she hardly paused before proclaiming, “I want to be an engineer.”

  “And that was that,” Tarter says now. “From that moment on, that was just what I was going to do.”

  She hopped off the washing machine.

  If she was going to be an engineer, her father was going to help her act like one. One day, he handed her a plastic transistor radio.

  “Take it apart,” he said. “And then put it back together.”

  Cracking open its shell, she found a whole world of indecipherable circuits, ribbons, and resistors, all communicating with each other. Finding and then dismantling that world was easy, but reconstructing it was not. There were pieces left over, bits of metal that seemed not to fit anywhere. She called for her father in a childish voice—the kind that adds an extra syllable to “Dad”—wanting him to make the inscrutable parts make sense again.

  “You need to figure it out yourself,” he said.

  She did, in short order.

  “I was fearless when he was around,” she says. “He was the center of my universe.”

  But that center wouldn’t hold.

  “Yes, he was ill,” she says, of the cancer that killed him just a year or two after he gave her the radio. “Yes, he was in and out of hospitals with cancer, and I had no idea how serious it was. But of course he was always going to be there.”

  Given her grasp on evidence in the rest of her life, it’s clear that her emotional universe was subject to different laws from the physical one. It’s a characteristic that holds to this day, an almost “law of attraction” philosophy: If she believes something won’t, or will, happen, it won’t (or will).

  In spite of Tarter’s denial, Dick died when Tarter was 12, just four years after the Washing Machine Declaration. His death shook her like a high-Richter earthquake—totally devastating, seemingly illogical, and completely unexpected. The ground was supposed to stay firm underfoot. But now that her father was gone, she knew familiar terrain could shift without warning, or rip itself apart. Her universe, the universe, became a centerless thing, vast and hard to comprehend.

  Dick’s death rooted one particular idea in Tarter’s brain, an idea that would go on to have as much effect on her life as any academic degree or astronomical insight. The day he died, she remembered a question she had wanted to ask him. She doesn’t remember what it was—it wasn’t anything particularly important. “It was just this realization of a big black void,” she says. “I couldn’t ask him anything any
more.”

  I should have asked him yesterday when I had the chance, she thought, the lesson stitched painfully into her brain.

  When she was older and knew more Latin, she recognized the lesson as carpe diem. If you have an opportunity, take it. Now. Or else it may sublimate from something concrete into something absent.

  Her father’s death also transformed the Washing Machine Declaration into a compass that oriented her life for years. “I told my dad I was going to become an engineer,” she says. “And I wanted to make my dad proud.” Imitating her determination those 60 years ago, she continues, “‘Goddammit, there’s no way I’m going to wimp out.’”

  She probably used such profanity then, too, despite what they may have thought.

  Tarter began researching what engineers did all day, and what sort of an education a person needed to do whatever that was: physics and high-level math in high school, she found, courses that fell into the “it’s just not done” category for women, even if the classroom doors lacked NO GIRLS ALLOWED signs.

  “The guidance counselors of the era were just so awful,” Tarter says of high school in the late fifties and early sixties. “‘Why do you want to take calculus? You’re just going to get married and have babies.’” (She, in fact, did get married and have a baby. But it turns out that physics was—wonder of wonders—still useful and that one endeavor did not mutually exclude the other.)

  Her physics teacher, whom the students called Doc, looked like her father. That similarity lit up her brain in places left dark after her father died. This interpersonal déjà vu led her to trust him with an extracurricular problem.

  The fashion accessory du jour was a chicken wishbone, strung through a chain and worn as a charm. Suburban students walked around looking as if they might break into a pagan ritual at any time. Tarter wanted to silver-plate hers. A metal-wrapped wishbone never breaks. She would never have to battle for the long end, never herself get the short end. She knew bronze-plated baby shoes existed, so somehow, somewhere, someone knew how to alchemize objects’ exteriors. While she wasn’t that someone, perhaps Doc was. After class, she walked up to his desk. She could already imagine the eyes of the other students, envious of the shiny anatomy augmenting her own like extra bionic ribs.

  “This is what I want to do,” she said, telling Doc about the bones and the baby shoes. “How do we do that?”

  It’s a simple and somewhat vain sentiment in this scenario. But “This is what I want to do. How do we do that?” is also the essence of science.

  “I don’t know,” Doc said. “But I’m sure we can find out.”

  They scoured the library; Doc wrote letters to the shoe-coating companies, who told him the process was proprietary. But they gave enough hints for Doc to know he needed to combine acid and silver arsenate. And in a public school physics classroom, the two lowered the graphite-infused bone toward the chemical solution, turning it into an electroplating cell. Tarter and Doc watched as atoms attached themselves to the submerged bone. They lifted the object out of its bath, its crown breaching bright and promising. The next day, Tarter was the news item of the school day.

  But later that week, she looked down to find the wishbone—covered in the scientifically shiniest metal on the planet—had already tarnished. She took it off and tried to scrub it clean but succeeded only in rubbing the shine itself off.

  Today, when cough syrup sales are regulated and classroom dissections happen via software, this caustic-chemical collaboration would never be allowed. “Who knows what arsenic fumes were coming off that,” she says now. “But Doc was just one of the best role models you could have about science, being curious, and figuring it out.”

  The desire, perhaps even the need, to “figure it out” remains central to Tarter’s personality today, when she is in her early seventies. As Tarter recalls aloud those high school years, she is sitting on the deck of her vacation house at Donner Lake in Northern California.

  She still loves to be on the water, near large concentrations of the molecule that gives us, and possibly others beyond our atmosphere, life. (It’s also the molecule that her husband, Jack Welch, discovered lives in the clouds of gas between the stars.) She and Welch bought this shoreline cabin in 1989. Decks protrude from each of the three stories, revealing a spectacular view of our planet on every level.

  It is September 2014, and in the past hour Tarter has twice demonstrated the kind of inquiring mind Doc and her dad instilled. First, while chopping vegetables, she declared that she had always wanted to write a book called Physics for Housewives. “Just solutions to common problems,” she said, “or how cooking with a convection oven alters your baking game plan, or how to fix a vacuum cleaner.”

  Second, when Welch declared that his electronic keyboard was out of tune, Tarter scavenged the Internet to find out how something electronic could possibly be sharp. This made no sense, since the notes came from frequency-generator chips, which are programmed to do only one thing—play the right note. “How can they be wrong?” she asked. It was not the “how” of incredulity, but the “how” of engineering—what physical mechanism could skew the tone?

  She leaned over the edge of her easy chair, looking at the laptop planted on its footstool. An unexpected voltage spike could have reset the tuning away from the standard frequency, shifting all the keys, she learned.

  The lake-facing living room wall, in front of her, is nearly all windows. Across from the wide glass panes, just inside the front door, wooden letters proclaim that this place is “Jill and Jack’s” (and not, one will note, the reverse). A framed full text of Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” hangs nearby, inscribed on lacquered parchment and backed with grainy wood. “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here,” the early-twentieth-century poem says. “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

  Bookshelves play host to John Grisham thrillers, the Cyclops Report (a 1970s NASA report on SETI, still the field’s scripture), a Mathematica manual, and a hardcover copy of Vogue Sewing. The room’s centerpiece, though—the one that draws the eye—is a framed print of Earthrise. This iconic Apollo photo shows Earth hovering over the moon’s horizon—the first view of our planet as a planet. It is Tarter’s favorite astronomical image. Another copy of it hangs from the wall of her office at the SETI Institute, this one signed and dedicated by Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the photo while orbiting the moon on Christmas Day, 1968. When humans saw Earthrise, Tarter believes, we understood our cosmic connection for the first time: what exactly an Earth is, what it means that Earth is in this larger outer space.

  As Tarter gathers her thoughts, preparing again to wander the halls of high school, she looks out over the lake, its water placid and cold. Donner is a high-altitude reservoir fed by snowmelt and streams both under- and aboveground. From the shore, the bottom drops out quickly. At its deepest point, it’s 330 feet from surface to silt. She looks intently outward, like her teenage memories might lie on the other side of the lake. As if, as happens when we look out into the universe, she is seeing back in time.

  “I wanted to take Shop,” she says. “But no, I couldn’t do that because I was a woman, so I had to take Home Economics.”

  She shrugs and looks through the sliding glass door at Jack, whose fingers meander over the sharp piano keys. “I learned to sew back then, and it’s been incredibly useful,” she says. “For a long time, I made all of Jack’s shirts, because he loves paisley material and he’s got a thin neck and ape-long arms.”

  She looks over at him, as if checking the evidence to make sure her conclusion is correct.

  “And then I told them, ‘I’ve taken Eome Ec. Now I want to take Shop.’”

  She was a tall teenager—taller than the boys, all the way through high school, even though she had skipped two grades. She wanted to compete athletically, but Title IX did not exist yet, so her school had only two options: cheerleader or d
rum majorette. “Clearly I was not going to be a cheerleader,” she says. “Nobody was going to throw me up in the air. But, thunder thighs and all, I did in fact have the motor skills to do baton twirling.”

  This choreographed, costumed activity was a good thing, until Doc surprised Tarter by sponsoring her to take a physics course at Columbia University. College students, the big city: it would have been fantastic—except that the class met on Saturday mornings, when she had to be on the football field throwing shiny sticks into the air. The physics class stayed on the sidelines while Tarter spun batons with the centripetal force she had opted not to learn about.

  “A really intellectual person would certainly have taken the physics opportunity,” she says. “But I did it the same way I’ve always done things: the first commitment you make is the one you stick to.”

  You become an engineer, goddammit, and you go to drum majorette practice.

  While she was good with goals, she wasn’t quite as adept with deadlines. As junior class treasurer—a campaign she’d won by giving out bags of jellybeans labeled “Vote for Jillybean”—she had volunteered to cover a school-prom arch in flowers. Flowers made of Kleenex. Tarter was tasked with folding, scrunching, stapling, and pinning all of these tissues before the event. But she had put it off, and instead of sitting down and scrunching, folding, stapling, and pinning, she was panicking.

  Her mother finally asked her what was going on.

  Tarter started crying and explained between gulps of air that she needed to make hundreds of paper-based plants . . . now.

  Betty called her friends, mothers of Tarter’s friends, and asked them all to come over and fold, scrunch, staple, and pin. “We’re going to work until it’s done,” she told Tarter.