Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  “You can use the telescope,” Welch said. “And, what the hell, I have this old surplus computer that no one wants. I’ll donate it to the cause.”

  It was a PDP 8/S. Bowyer didn’t know what to do with that dinosaur. No one did—no one except his former teaching assistant.

  Bowyer walked up to Tarter’s desk and plopped down the Cyclops Report.

  “Read it,” he said.

  She did. And she didn’t stop for two days. When she finally looked up, red-eyed, from its pages, she was like a person entering a dream world. She could find the answer to the questions that had lived in the back of her mind since childhood, as scientifically as she could probe the plasma interiors of stars.

  Are we alone?

  This is the first time in history when we don’t just have to believe or not believe, she thought. Instead of just asking the priests and philosophers, we can try to find an answer. This is an old and important question, and I have the opportunity to change how we try to answer it.

  Like any conversion experience, this one made the world make sense. “I just knew I’d found the right place,” she says, “never having thought about it before.” It felt like home. And it synced her back up with people on her own planet, those she now found herself working with and those she simply passed on the street. “There was a feeling of connectedness,” she says. “I was doing something that could impact people’s lives profoundly in a short period of time.”

  Her doctoral work then dealt with brown dwarfs—the balls of gas too small to be stars and too big to be Jupiter—and was funded by taxpayer dollars. She’d always felt uneasy about that, wondering about her research’s relevance to farmers in Iowa. But when she decided to become part of SETI, her mind stilled. She walked down the street happy, knowing that her work would matter to the lives of the people she passed. It could mean something to them. “I didn’t have to worry anymore,” she says.

  Without the Cyclops Report, which appeared in her life because of outdated computers and a botched teaching assistantship, she probably wouldn’t have become a SETI scientist at all. “It wasn’t in my planned universe,” she says. “But chance favors the prepared mind.”

  And whether or not it was clear to her, no doubt the universe was unfolding as it should.

  Although should is a misleading word: The universe has no plans or predestinations. Whatever does happen is the thing that happens, and that is the thing that should happen. And what happened is that Tarter told Bowyer she would join his fold. They called their SETI project SERENDIP—a tortured acronym meaning Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations.

  CHAPTER 3

  MAKING THE ALLEN TELESCOPE ARRAY

  It is 1 A.M. on March 10, 2014, in Northern California, and Jill Tarter’s face peers from the doorway of a dorm in the Hat Creek Radio Observatory residence hall.

  “It’s beautiful out there right now,” she says, gesturing toward the window.

  Tarter walks down the hallway past the observatory’s library (which is filled with copies of the Astrophysical Journal dating back to the 1940s) and the lounge (which houses a particularly riveting issue in a burn bucket next to the fireplace). She steps out of the dormitory and onto the cold-steeped cement. The mosquitoes that normally plague the area around Hat Creek Observatory, home to the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, have all gone to bed. The air feels clean, the planet quiet and emptied of creatures. Tarter looks up.

  Above hangs a clear, dark sky. The stars look like the crafts kids make at school: crisp pinpricks in the blackest construction paper, a UV lamp shining behind them.

  “I can’t even find the North Star,” says Tarter. “I’m going to go get my glasses.”

  She has hardly reemerged with her spectacles when she rushes back inside for her iPhone.

  “I think that’s Mars,” she says, pointing at a bright reddish dot. After her celestial chart app boots up, she hefts the screen toward the sky, scanning across a quadrant. “It says Mars, Saturn, and Pluto are all near each other,” she continues. She returns to staring at the sky, turning her head a few degrees at a time to change perspectives.

  Each star is a sphere of plasma whose inward-pulling gravity perfectly balances the outward-pushing pressure from nuclear fusion. This symmetry is called hydrostatic equilibrium, and it’s what makes a star a star. Flaring and sun-spotted, they impose their radiation on the space around them, light-years from us. Maybe that space is home to planets, which maybe are home to biology, which perhaps evolved into beings smart enough to understand starlight.

  This scene is almost too easy a mirroring of Tarter’s childhood memories. Looking up from the deserted beaches of southern Florida, she was certain that an alien child was looking at the sun. Their gazes, she imagined, met in interstellar space like awkward strangers’ on a subway train. She has this thought over and over. It is the kind of Groundhog Day observation that keeps her motivated to continue the search, despite the vastness of the universe, the brevity of human life spans, and governmental desire to spend money on missiles instead of science.

  A thousand yards away, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA)—Tarter’s dream observatory, or at least a version of it, made for and dedicated to SETI work—scans the sky in search of intelligent life long after she has returned to sleep.

  The idea for the ATA came from a series of workshops held from 1998 to 2000. These posh gatherings, collectively called SETI 2020, plotted the route of SETI research for the next 20 years. While scientists and their university salaries don’t expect overly cushy conferences, Tarter and her SETI colleagues didn’t want those usual invitees: They wanted Silicon Valley technologists—specifically, Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems, David Liddle of Interval Research Corporation, and Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft—on board. And Silicon Valley technologists, with their dreamy entrepreneurial visions, require minibars and rooms of their own, with views.

  At the conference, the attendees’ main conclusion was “SETI needs its own telescope,” closely followed by “And perhaps we should figure out how to build it.” Though piggybacking had worked well in SETI’s early decades, to gather and handle the stream of data they expected, they would need their own setup and computers hundreds of times faster than those that existed. The tech moguls, used to thinking about the big thing after the next big thing, suggested the SETI scientists “make a bet on technology,” specifically on a concept called Moore’s law. This law, which is just an observation of what happens in the real world, states that computers double in power every two years. It has held true since the first gigantic Macintosh. Even if you haven’t heard of this modern-day math, you know how slow your two-year-old laptop now seems compared to shiny new ones on the shelves of Best Buy. Papadopoulos and Liddle felt sure they could count on Moore’s law: The computing power doesn’t exist today, but it will be there tomorrow, when you need it. And it will be cheap(ish).

  It was a Silicon Valley idea, new to the scientists, and it felt radical back then, when everyone still had dial-up AOL and videos didn’t go viral because they took too long to load.

  With the future’s unimaginably shiny computers in mind, Tarter and her colleagues made a plan for their SETI-specific observatory: a bunch of small antennas—350 of them—that worked together. If you point multiple antennas at the same thing at the same time, you can merge their views to make a single superior image. The telescope’s combined vision will be as sharp as if it came from a single telescope 3,000 feet wide, rather than from hundreds of 20-foot telescopes spread across a 3,000-foot-wide area. It’s a neat trick. After all, building a bunch of identical dollhouses and sprinkling them around a mansion-sized lot is much easier than constructing the mansion itself. “We were the pioneers of building a giant telescope out of lots of little telescopes,” says Dan Werthimer, who worked on SERENDIP and the ATA and has been a leader at UC Berkeley’s SETI program since its earliest days.

  The team estimated the ATA’s co
st at $25 million. The SETI Institute just needed to find the money and a place to plop the antennas. Long-established collaborations between the Radio Astronomy Lab at Berkeley and the SETI Institute, starting with Jack Welch’s 1980s offer to host the SERENDIP piggybacker, made the question of location easy: the two organizations would work on the telescope together and build it at Berkeley’s Hat Creek facility. The Institute would largely build it; Berkeley would largely operate it; they would split its observation time 50/50. “The original vision for the ATA was a world-class telescope,” says Werthimer.

  But the money question remained. Luckily, Tarter knew someone who had $25 million to spare and a soft spot for SETI. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, had donated to a project called Phoenix in the 1990s. She asked him if he would again like to support and save SETI. While the team awaited Allen’s response, they began building a prototype array under system scientist Douglas Bock: a collection of practice antennas on which they could test each new part, before transplanting them into the real-world antennas. The prototype lived in a horse paddock outside an empty barn in Lafayette, California, with the control center in the former tack room.

  The night before the prototype’s dedication ceremony, Tarter stayed up late, working and refreshing her email. She works a lot—seemingly all the time. “She puts in more time than anybody else on the project,” says Gerry Harp, who took over as the director of the Center for SETI Research when Tarter retired and has gotten many late-night emails from her. “She’s just an amazingly energetic woman. I remember that she would work long days and then go home and do email and write stuff all night long, and I don’t know when she slept.” (I’m pretty convinced she doesn’t.)

  She hoped Allen would respond with a yes, so they could announce his endorsement at the next day’s ceremony. But the inbox disappointed, and she eventually headed to bed. Not wanting to wake Welch, she attempted to take off her pantyhose in the dark. But instead of being stealthy, she tumbled over and shattered her elbow. Later, X-rays in hand, Tarter tried to map the many ways she’d broken her bones.

  With 13 pieces of titanium and straps embedded in her arm, the newly bionic woman sat through the dedication. “I kept wanting a more heroic story to tell,” she says, and sighs. “Pantyhose.”

  A few months later, Allen’s email—a yes—came. But the yes was conditional: if the SETI Institute and Berkeley made a list of milestones—proving step by step that they could develop this telescope and its new technology without screwing up—he would support them, in installments, as they reached each goal.

  “‘We can do that, fine,’” Tarter says now, imitating herself back then. “We didn’t know what we were talking about.”

  As with any large-scale engineering project, things took longer and cost more than anticipated. Tarter was frustrated.

  “Whenever we or anybody would report having completed something, Jill’s first question always was, ‘Well, when will you get the next thing done?’” says Harp. “Everybody always felt like, ‘We just did this.’”

  It was frustrating to the employees to feel like their accomplishments weren’t appreciated along the way. “In a way, they felt like she didn’t value their contributions because it was never enough. You could never do enough,” says Harp.

  It became such a trope that, after a while, they just laughed it off. “But of course we had to answer the question about the next thing,” he adds. They also had to fix each difficulty with the existing resources before they could ask Allen for more funds to do that next thing.

  Once, Allen visited the prototype telescope to check on their progress. When he turned to the side, he found a pile of horse shit, which had previously escaped everyone’s notice, right behind him.

  “Well,” Tarter said to him, “at least we’re not wasting your money on infrastructure.”

  After Tarter and the rest of the team—which included Harp; software engineer and telescope operator Jon Richards; astronomer Seth Shostak, who took over as the institute’s co-director after Tarter retired; Dave DeBoer, the project manager; Werthimer and other Berkeley astronomers; an engineering team at Minex Engineering—met the milestones they’d laid out for Allen, they pitched him once again: you supported research and development; now let’s make a telescope that doesn’t live in a barn. But it’s going to cost more than we thought. And, it being January 2003, Allen had just lost $7 billion on Charter Communications.

  He wouldn’t build all 350 antennas, he said. But if the SETI Institute constructed 200 of them, at a cost of $27.5 million, he would give $13.5 million (the remainder of the initially promised money). As a cherry, he would donate a large amount of that sum up front so they could construct a 32-antenna demonstration array in Hat Creek so the observations could start and the astronomers could try to convince the National Science Foundation to start supporting the operations. Just get other people to donate the difference, he said. He would even give some speeches to potential donors the institute lined up.

  “We’re pretty brash as an institute,” Tarter says, “and we thought we could do it.” But when they went to wealthy people and talked grandly about how the ATA could help us find our place in the universe, understand where we come from, and investigate fundamental questions of the cosmos, the response often went something like, “Well, Mr. Allen’s name is already on this telescope. He’s a lot richer than I am. Why doesn’t he finish it?”

  By Halloween of 2004, UC Berkeley petitioned Allen to shift fundraising responsibilities from the SETI Institute to the university. They were fundraising professionals, or at least had access to professionals, they said—they were part of a university with an endowment. The presentation convinced Allen, who said that Berkeley would be put in charge not only of the site and fundraising but also of the remaining batches of money.

  Before he fired the institute, Allen invited Tarter to attend a party—a birthday celebration for Bill Gates—on a Caribbean cruise ship that he’d had driven to Alaska. He chartered private flights for all 500 of his guests. Designers constructed a four-story stone fireplace in the main entrance lounge and redecorated the shipside restaurant every night with Alaska-themed sets. Movie stars and tech billionaires lounged everywhere. But across the vast ballroom space, Tarter spotted her own species: other scientists. “I didn’t know them,” she says. “But you can just recognize them.” They, alongside the rich and/or famous, soaked in the one-percent life that night, sipping thematic cocktails and watching icebergs calve.

  Before the cruise, Allen had given them all a task: decorate a balsawood totem pole to be exchanged during an on-board potlatch. Tarter stayed up two nights in a row, carving and painting. “It was an assignment, and I always do assignments,” she says. Her days of procrastinating were over.

  She chipped away at a likeness of Jodie Foster, standing tall atop a Thunderbird model car, headphones on: Contact. It’s charming. And Allen must have liked Tarter (at least enough to see her as 1/500th of a social event) and the idea of a SETI success. But without other wealthy donors stepping into a partnership, he would soon decline to support the telescope further. “He didn’t want to be embarrassed,” Tarter says. Then, imitating others gossiping about him, she says, “‘Oh, you know Paul and his ‘Little Green Man’ thing.’” If other people donated the remaining millions, no one could say he alone bet on a dud or a crazy venture. Werthimer says that Allen “just lost interest in the telescope.” Allen himself declined to comment for this book.

  So the SETI Institute and Berkeley attempted to go it on their own. But Berkeley still couldn’t attract donations, either. And, left without the ability to build hundreds of antennas, Tarter and her colleagues used the money they had to build just 32, and convinced the US Naval Observatory to add on 10 more and potentially use them to track satellites in space.

  Radio astronomy, the field inside which SETI sits, has always had a strangely cozy relationship with the military. The technology that allows scientists to effectively catch radio waves fro
m space has its roots in the most terrestrial of pursuits: war. Engineers developed radar for World War II, and that required big antennas that could both blast and receive radio-wavelength photons.

  But because the technology for intercepting communications from other Earthlings—their surface radio chatter, their satellites’ pings—is essentially the same as intercepting the blast from a supernova, the two sectors support each other. Decommissioned military telescopes can become astronomical instruments, and the Department of Defense can buy time on science scopes (rarely, as you may imagine, does the opposite happen).

  The Green Bank Telescope sits in a 100-square-mile area called the National Radio Quiet Zone, where broadcasters such as pop stations, cell phone towers, and Wi-Fi routers are limited or banned outright. That quietude makes it easier for the telescopes to seek out signals from, say, the beginning of the universe, because they’re not drowned out by earthly noise (a cell phone on the moon is “brighter” in radio waves than all but two of the brightest natural sources). But the government didn’t establish this restricted zone because it loves astronomy so much—the Green Bank Telescope is conveniently located just over a mountain ridge from the Navy’s Sugar Grove Station, which Edward Snowden’s leaked documents would later reveal as a key player in the ECHELON surveillance program, tasked with intercepting international communications.

  And while scientists don’t often like to own up to their military connections, the truth is, defense departments always have more resources than scientific ones. And that can be hard for scientists to turn down, even if they don’t necessarily want to help surveil who knows what or whom.