Making Contact Read online

  Many women’s careers ended up on ice. But Mika continued her research, as a non-faculty member, investigating the neurons that control voluntary movement. She became a renowned expert on the synapse, writing seminal research papers. Still, Cornell didn’t hire Mika as faculty until 1967, 16 years after she and Ed moved permanently to Ithaca and long after she was an established scientist. She, said Cornell’s statement, “finally receiv[ed] the professorship she deserved . . . [and] became a strong role model and rights advocate both at Cornell, and nationally within her professional community.”

  Mika, even at the time, expanded the possibilities of what “female scientist” meant to Tarter. “I was looking for role models,” Tarter says, “always looking for role models. You can be good at what you do in science. And yet you can be the social heart.”

  At the party, Mika stood next to her pound cake and told jokes and anecdotes. “She was a master raconteur, who told stories to diffuse tension, or simply to bring joy,” her colleagues wrote after her death, “and she used this talent with enormous success as chair, colleague, and friend.”

  But then she could launch just as powerfully into the cellular causes of neuromuscular disorders. “Whether over the kitchen table or on the ski lifts, she never hesitated to bring up science,” continues the remembrance. “The intellectual exchanges between her and Ed were exciting and memorable to participants.”

  Later in life, Mika and Ed together created a technique to see individual signaling molecules in cells, the chemicals that tell our bodies what to do. The duo mapped our bodies’ smallest constituents, just as Bethe dug down into an elemental part of stars. Their science was about getting to the core of things.

  But that night at the party, Tarter couldn’t look away from how Ed and Mika jousted and joked intellectually. It was an equilibrium she wasn’t used to seeing among spouses.

  Tarter reached for the pound cake. Leaning back, she chewed, her body still radiating the heat it had generated.

  After Bruce finally finished his degree, NASA’s go-to communications vendor wooed him with a large salary. He knew he didn’t want to be an academic, and so, out of his many job offers, he’d chosen this one—the most industrial one he could find. “In those days if you could sign your name, you could get a reasonable job,” says Bruce. The company, Aeronutronic (an Orwellian portmanteau of aeronautics, nucleonics, and electronics) was in Newport Beach, California. Bruce drove their car across the country to their new home, while Tarter (still pregnant) flew with their cat, Petronius, who was named after the feline in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel The Door into Summer. The fictional cat refused to leave the house if there was snow on the ground. Instead, he trekked from door to door, sure that one of them must be “the door into summer.” He believed that by changing his location, he could change his circumstances.

  Newport Beach was full of doors into summer. The town sits along the last coastal curve before the Mexican border, north of San Diego and south of Los Angeles. It’s a liminal place, isolated inside its own surf-, beer-, and boat-centered existence. It boasts the only airport named after an actor (John Wayne) and the most dangerous surfing spot in the United States.

  At this spot, known as the Wedge, when a wave approaches from the south, it hits a rock jetty constructed in the 1930s. That collision sends a reflected wave back toward open ocean. The backward-traveling wave collides with the next incoming wave, and they add together into a larger wave. That wave then hits the jetty and sends yet another reflected wave back—you see the pattern. The process happens fast and progresses chaotically, in the mathematical sense: small changes in the starting conditions lead to radically different and sometimes catastrophic outcomes—out-of-nowhere 30-foot swells, riptides that want to drag you to the edge of Earth. Even the most weathered surfer can’t always predict the waves’ breaking points, which are often in only ankle-deep water. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the bones that could snap. Engineers built the jetty to give Newport a harbor—a calm, safe space. But they also inadvertently created a monster. Surfers there say, “Small days you’ll break your back, and big days you’ll drown.”

  Newport Beach is largely the same now as it was in the 1960s, aside from the price of real estate and the disappearance of pastel hotel signage. An ocean inlet cuts into the shoreline, creating two islands that look like the lenses in a pair of sunglasses. Every piece of land has long slips reaching out. The water channel snakes inland, where it crosses the Pacific Coast Highway. This highway, Tarter often thought as she and Bruce sat in traffic, was the only path to the only hospital. And it was usually packed with tourists in polygonal Art Deco cars and Volkswagen vans.

  Luckily, their daughter, Shana, decided to emerge into the world in the middle of a July night, when traffic was light. Bruce and Tarter sailed to the hospital, and soon Shana emerged screaming onto this planet.

  Another being. It was so simple, so natural, like some fundamental law of the universe.

  Tarter planned to start grad school at UC Irvine, just inland from Newport, the fall after Shana was born. Bruce’s job was great, good-paying, solid. They had a nice apartment. They were secure. Those conditions could easily have led to a clear-cut, SoCal, all-American family. Then one day, not long after they moved, Bruce told Tarter they needed to talk: he didn’t want to work at Aeronutronic anymore. So he wrote to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just east of San Francisco, where he’d done his summer internships. And soon, they sent him another job offer (he is currently the lab’s director).

  “We’re putting graduate school on hold,” Bruce told her.

  Still, despite this tension, Bruce’s dissatisfaction with his career, and Tarter’s own limbo, they both have fond memories of their brief stint in SoCal. “I remember it as one of the better times,” says Bruce.

  They moved up to an apartment in Danville, next to manatee-like hills, that summer, with canyons that glowed gold in the summer and green in the winter. The seasonal grass there shoots up after the first rain, more mushroom than plant. Poison oak, too, grew in this climate. Tarter always had a rash blooming across her forearms, right where the cat rubbed against her. She took to sipping the toxic urushiol oil in dilution, thinking a confrontation with the poison in miniature might help, a remedy much touted by the rangers who worked in the canyons behind their home.

  The fall application deadline for nearby UC Berkeley had already passed, so Tarter stayed home to take care of Shana, who was starting to speak. When they walked to the grocery store, Shana pointed to ads in the window and said words aloud. Tarter told herself Shana couldn’t be reading already—could she? Shana then tried to prevent Tarter from doing the same, by disposing of Tarter’s glasses down a storm drain and pulling all the books from their shelves.

  When this year was over, Tarter was more than ready to accept UC Berkeley’s offer of admission to their graduate astronomy program.

  On the first day of graduate school, Tarter walked toward Campbell Hall on Berkeley’s campus, on her way to see the chair of the astronomy department, Ivan King. The building was a plain rectangle with a flat roof broken by a telescope dome. Grids of perfectly spaced windows peered from all four sides. Tarter stepped through the doors, uncertain how things would go but sure this was the right step. Here she was, in Berkeley, about to find out why stars exist in the first place. Although waiting for Bruce to finish school, waiting to get pregnant, and leaving Newport Beach were not part of the plan, they had led her, eventually, here, to the endpoint she’d always envisioned, beginning with those nights on the beach.

  She arrived in King’s office. He had piled academic journals on every surface—monoliths and ziggurats honoring the gods of peer review. The Astrophysical Journal’s 1963 editions; Nature volume 204, issue 4965. If you asked him to find the seminal article about the initial mass function of dwarf galaxies, he would reach one-sixth of the way down the stack next to the coatrack and whip out the right issue. In an interview with the Americ
an Institute of Physics, he claimed that a youthful administration of the IQ test gave him a 196. “I gather it’s sufficiently off-scale that a number like that is not terribly significant,” he said to David DeVorkin, “but that was the thing that hit the newspapers with a splash.”

  They greeted each other, and the two other female graduate students—Kate Brooks and Linda Schweizer—soon sat down with them.

  “You three ladies are so lucky,” King began, “that all the smart men got drafted for Vietnam.”

  In other words, spaces existed for them in the department only because more-brilliant boys were away at war. Tarter went rigid, blood rushing toward the core of her. Although she didn’t look at the other women, she sensed the same process was taking place inside of them—fight or flight. But they all battled their animal instincts, while King smiled unknowingly at them. When the orienting conversation was over, Tarter, Brooks, and Schweizer walked into the hallway and watched King’s door shut behind them.

  “What the fuck?” they repeated to each other, knowing there wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

  The science Tarter saw around her in the coming years at Berkeley—the observational kind King did—wasn’t the kind that appealed to her. “I wanted to know how it worked,” she says. “The old model of going up to the telescope on the mountain night after night, making images and making images—it wasn’t my thing.” She wanted to bring a bit of the engineer in her to astronomy.

  It was a seed of discontent that would eventually grow into a SETI career.

  During that first year at Berkeley, professor Len Kuhi hired Tarter to program a telescopic instrument called a spectrometer. Spectrometers parse the light—which scientists sometimes call “electromagnetic radiation”—that comes into a telescope. Light is the only way we can learn about the universe. We’ll never touch a star or feel a black hole’s gravitational field, but we can collect light (photons) from them. Although they have no mass—photons are, materially, nothing—they are our only connection to the cosmos, and they come in lots of different sizes and energies. The highest-energy photons are called gamma rays, and the lowest energy photons are called decametric radio waves. The visible light that our eyes sense is middling in energy.

  All of this light travels in waves. The length of each wave—the distance between each crest—represents a different color. A wave with a length of 500.1 nanometers is slightly bluer than a wave of 500.2 nanometers. Your eyes can’t catch that subtlety. But astronomers build their tools better than the eye, to give humans sensory superpowers. Kuhi’s spectrometer could spot the small differences between light waves, separate them according to their lengths, and help interpret what those differences meant. Light of 589 nanometers indicates sodium in a star, while a brightness that peaks at 883 nanometers tells you that the star is 9,980 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Berkeley had a 30-inch optical telescope, and Kuhi had hooked the spectrometer to it like a Lego. Tarter’s job was to automate the spectrometer so that even hapless students could use it. Kuhi showed her the PDP 8/S computer she would use for the work. It was the first personal “minicomputer” (a svelte 100 pounds), and the first computer at all to cost less than $20,000 (which, at the time, would have bought a nice house in the suburbs). They called it a desktop because it technically could sit on the top of a desk, but it hardly resembles those of today. It had no language, experiencing instead permanent aphasia: the user had to speak in symbols—long strings of 1s and 0s, written in an unintuitive base-8 code called octal. And even with this simple code, the computer could understand just 11 commands, which the user had to string together in combinations. A set of rust- and bone-colored switches sat in the console, above a panel of lights with inscrutables next to them: TAD, ISZ, DCA, ION, PARITY.

  She punched her octal onto one-inch gray tape, which she had to unspool from long rolls. When she made a mistake, she taped over the mispunched holes and poked through where she should have put holes in the first place. The patchwork told the tale of every error. She rolled the tape back up so the PDP 8/S could suck it in and read it. It was awful.

  When the project finished, she bid farewell to the PDP 8/S, hoping never to see it or its parity errors ever again. But the dinosaur technology would lead her to SETI, which then led to her becoming Jill Tarter, alien hunter.

  But she still wasn’t there yet. She was becoming just a regular radio astronomer, and so she attended her first American Astronomical Society meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1971.

  “I don’t think either she or I had ever been out of the continental United States at the time,” says Bruce. On top of that personal specialness, Bruce—at least retrospectively—sees the meeting as a watershed moment for astronomy in general and young astronomers, like them, in particular. “Astronomy was essentially a fairly moribund, uninteresting field up until the mid-1960s,” he says. It was like early biology, where people just cataloged and classified (although in the case of astronomy, they were classifying stars and not jungle birds). “In the 1960s, it exploded,” he continues. “There were black holes, starting in 1963, and there were X-ray sources. The entire field had just gone off like a supernova.”

  A bunch of physicists, like Bruce, became astrophysicists. And all of that excitement about the novel and energetic universe, and all the energetic and novel people, came together at the meeting. There was astronomy going on, sure. But also Jeep rides through the jungle, casinos, booze, drugs, sex. “The world was just turning on,” says Bruce, “and the social revolution was there. You put that together with a lot of young people, and . . .” He trails off, and specifies that he didn’t do the drugs—he had a security clearance to keep.

  After the official conference and its unofficial debauchery, Tarter and Bruce didn’t have to fly immediately back to California.

  “Come on,” said Stuart Bowyer, a Berkeley professor, said to them, gesturing in the general direction of the ocean, which was visible between the swarm of hotels along Condado Beach. “I’m going to rent a surfboard.”

  It was so hot and humid that they couldn’t tell if they were sweating or if the air was just condensing on their skin. The ocean sounded perfect to Tarter. Bruce disagreed, preferring to stay in the hotel room and work, so Tarter went on her own. When Bruce tells the story today, a bit of old jealousy creeps into his voice.

  At Condado Beach, the waves broke tepidly, more rolling than slamming into shore. On the surfboard, Tarter first felt good, balanced, aware of the ends of her limbs. But then her feet began to lose their place. She didn’t know where she stood, couldn’t tell where her body was in space. She slipped toward the water.

  Just beneath the surface, thousands of individual polyps had been secreting calcium carbonate for years. This substance hardened, bit by bit, to form a coral reef.

  When Tarter’s thigh collided with the coral, it slashed big gouges into her leg. The crash broke some polyps off and sent them drifting out to sea; others remained stuck in her leg.

  When Tarter returned to the hotel lobby, blood everywhere, Bruce took one look at her and headed to the bar.

  “You got yourself into this,” he told her. “You can get yourself out.”

  Today, he says, “I think the Puerto Rico thing was—if not an epiphany—probably in a funny way the time when Jill and I began to realize that our paths had diverged.”

  During Tarter’s second year of graduate school, in 1969, she became a teaching assistant for surfing Stuart Bowyer’s general astronomy course. He used a textbook called Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by Ivan Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. Shklovskii wrote the tome in Russian and allowed Sagan to edit the American edition. Sagan “edited” liberally, doubling the book’s length to broaden both its subject matter and audience. It was Tarter’s first introduction to academic study of the possibility of intelligent life in the cosmos.

  The book begins with the beginnings, in a section about cosmology, talking about “the universe and its parts,” from stars and galaxies to how
they got there. In the second section, it looks into the origins of life on Earth—which we don’t fully understand now and certainly didn’t in 1966! But the authors speculated, in this chapter, about whether biology could have arisen on other planets. The third section takes the questions a step further, speculating about whether any of that hypothetical biology could have evolved into something smart, something whose technology we could find. It looks at radio searches for such life, like the one Frank Drake had performed just a few years earlier, and searches for laser signals, which scientists would not undertake for decades. And although Tarter enjoyed discussing it with the students, it didn’t tell her her future. “It is a bit ironic that this first brush with SETI left me pretty untouched,” she says. “I never would have predicted that Carl Sagan would become a colleague and SETI would be my focus.”

  Bowyer looked like Buddy Holly and was prone to making grand statements during lecture. The students brought these statements to Tarter in their homework sessions. “What did Professor Bowyer mean?” they asked.

  She couldn’t substantiate the claims. And worse, she wasn’t exactly prepared to answer their more grounded questions, and once accidentally drew a plot with an axis labeled as “wavelength” when it should have read “frequency,” teaching them that hot objects mostly emit photons at lower wavelengths, when the opposite is true. Her knowledge ran a bit ahead of theirs, but not by much, and her poor end-of-year student evaluations reflected that. A tribunal of faculty members, who sat stern behind a desk, interrogated her about her experience at the end of the course. They told her that, under other circumstances, they would help her improve her teaching skills. But because Bruce had a high-paying science job, and they had limited money, they had decided to give her teaching fellowship to someone else.