Making Contact

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Making Contact Page 10

by Sarah Scoles


  The ATA’s upgrade was mainly funded by a man named Franklin Antonio. On November 14, 2012, the SETI Institute announced that Antonio, the co-founder and chief scientist of communications giant Qualcomm, had given $3.5 million to the cause. An engineer himself, he likes to be briefed on (minute, monotonous) details in paper form first, so that he can dial in to any teleconference fully informed and with intelligent questions on how his money is being spent.

  Antonio and six other engineers founded Qualcomm in 1985, becoming one of the early Silicon Valley legends. The company began by helping long-haul truckers communicate with each other by satellite, and it evolved into one that provides your smartphone with that nice LTE next to its 4G. They specialize in wireless, Internet, semiconductors, and everything else Silicon Valley stood for before it stood for apps.

  In that way, it makes sense that Antonio would fund the venture. Maybe looking for communications from aliens is the next logical step in world telecomm domination, now that cell coverage and mobile Internet are on lockdown. On the other hand, his donation pattern doesn’t quite add up, and his ethos doesn’t quite fit with Tarter’s. He has donated thousands to the Republican National Committee. China recently hit them with an antitrust suit. Antonio hardly lives in the same left-leaning, one-Earth world Tarter inhabits, or the one most SETI scientists—who are on average more liberal and dreamy than the average person—occupy. But because he gets the goal of finding ET, this may be the definition of a time when beggars don’t permit themselves to be choosers.

  Tarter wants to use Antonio’s feed as an olive branch, extending it toward the regular radio astronomical community. The radio astronomy community is, on average, less antagonistic toward SETI than other astronomers are. SETI scientists and traditional radio astronomers both primarily use radio telescopes—from those in Green Bank to Australia to Hat Creek—to detect radio waves from space, so the data collection, instruments, and analysis are often similar. But radio astronomers’ radio waves come from inanimate objects like supermassive black holes and supernovae, while SETI scientists hope for signs of animated, conscious sources. But they can meet against the walls of parties to discuss the latest additions to the Low Noise Factory. They generally all started out in traditional radio astronomy and had the same education, before the SETI scientists veered off in their own directions. Tarter calls radio astronomer “her people,” and these people did award her their highest prize in 2014—the Jansky Lectureship, given to one radio astronomer per year. “Jill is being honored for her role in pioneering methods for searching for extraterrestrial intelligence using radio techniques, as well as her leadership in the emerging field of astrobiology,” Tony Beasley, the director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said at the time.

  However, while SETI scientists use radio astronomers’ telescopes, radio astronomers rarely use SETI’s telescope. More than 300 antennas short of where they planned for it to be, it’s just not as good as other bigger, better facilities at its current specs. Those larger facilities usually have federal funding, because governmental agencies see them as benefiting the scientific community as a whole with reliable results released regularly, whereas historically the government has been reluctant or, more often, outright hostile toward funding something as fringe as SETI.

  Tarter would like to convince astronomers, though, that they can do good traditional science with the upgraded ATA, while the SETI Institute does SETI in the background. The bait? A newly discovered mysterious phenomenon called a fast radio burst, or FRB, which Tarter calls a “furby.” SETI scientists and regular radio astronomers are both obsessed.

  In 2007, Duncan Lorimer and his partner, Maura McLaughlin, sat at home sifting through old data from the Parkes telescope in Australia. In that old data, Lorimer found something strange: a huge, single, singular pulse of radio waves. Lorimer told McLaughlin to come look at this crazy thing, which just appeared as a big black splotch on the graph, tapered at both ends like two teardrops stuck together. The burst had lasted just 5 milliseconds, but in that tiny amount of time, it had released more energy than our sun does in a month. It had traveled, they calculated, 3 billion light-years before it arrived at Earth. During the initial excited speculation, other astronomers threw together papers explaining how something so energetic could happen so fast so far away. The theories were all big and bangy: a flare from an ancient black hole, cosmic strings, unknown dynamics inside supernovas, supermassive stars smashing into each other. It became known as the Lorimer burst, because only Lorimer ever saw one. The situation was like living in a kids’ book, where the children know Narnia (or fairies or elves) exist, but every time they try to show their parents, the fairy disappears. Speculation turned to doubt, and “What is it?” became “Is it really?”

  Four years after the initial discovery, an Australian research group led by Sarah Burke-Spolaor suggested that Lorimer had been fooled: his bursts actually came from Earth. Lorimer didn’t believe it was true, but many others did. Scientists later discovered that the bursts Burke-Spolaor saw came from microwaves. When astronomers at the telescope site opened the microwave door a little early, without pushing Stop first, a flash of radiation flew from the open door before the mechanism shut off.

  Then, in 2014, Burke-Spolaor found a real burst herself (though the name Lorimer-Burke-Spolaor burst didn’t catch on). Soon, another team discovered four more. They changed the phenomenon’s name to fast radio bursts. One of these even burst into the sights of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, meaning that FRBs weren’t just a fluke. And in January 2015, scientists in Australia announced they had watched an FRB happen in real time using the Parkes radio telescope. They had pointed the telescope at a place where nothing was bursting, and then something had burst—3 milliseconds, a day’s worth of solar output. Since then, astronomers have found a total of 18 sources of these weird bursts, including one that repeats itself. In January 2017, they were able to localize that repeater, showing that it came from a tiny galaxy 3 billion light-years away.

  But even today, and with that one known galaxy source, no one knows what object inside a dwarf galaxy might shoot these FRBs into space, and whether the maker of the 17 others is the same.

  At the beginning of the FRB saga, Tarter found the bursts suspicious—possibly SETI-style signals. “Engineered signal,” she says.

  She means the bursts seem designed—like a beacon, or a cosmic lighthouse. NOTICE ME! they scream. I look almost-but-not-quite natural! That’s a quality Tarter and others have long said extraterrestrials’ messages might have. If aliens make signals that are fraternal twins of natural ones, traditional astronomical tools will detect the signal just in the course of doing their everyday jobs—and then hopefully terrestrial astronomers will notice that something looks a little suspicious.

  But once more popped up, from parts of the universe very distant from each other, Tarter thought aliens an unlikely source—after all, why would civilizations across the cosmos send the same type of missive? The astronomical community, some of whom once considered semi-seriously the idea that the bursts came from a who and not a what, agrees with her new opinion. “I think that it’s unlikely that these are from aliens,” says astronomer Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University. “It would take a lot of energy for aliens to make a broadband signal. They’d need to harness the energy from many, many suns. It’d be a lot easier for them to make something bright and narrowband.” It would be easier, in other words, for them to make the kind of FM station–style broadcast that Tarter has focused on finding since the earliest SERENDIP days of SETI.

  Still, radio astronomers looking to find more FRBs can use SETI-optimized telescopes like the ATA—which have wide fields of view and can splice signals into tiny chunks of time to look for on-off flashes, whether they be from Alpha Centaurians or unknown objects in distant galaxies. And they can do so over a wide range of frequencies.

  Because of those capabilities, and whether or not the ATA ever becomes the worl
d-class telescope its creators imagined it would grow into, it has been an important R&D project and a test bed for the next generation of observatories. “The concept has already come to fruition,” says Werthimer. Its large number of small dishes construction is the way of the future. The world’s largest telescope, which the international Square Kilometre Array collaboration is building, will have thousands of antennas spread across thousands of miles in South Africa and Australia. Like the ATA, it will swallow huge chunks of the radio band and split them into tiny frequency pieces, at tiny time intervals. It will see signals that burst, as well as ones that stay lit up, and will know how wide or compressed they are in frequency. The Square Kilometre Array and its predecessor and prototype, MeerKAT, both owe a great deal their instrumental development to the ATA—the first telescope to collate and process such fine time and frequency data from so many antennas.

  And so, while Tarter is spending her retirement years (and assets) trying to make sure the ATA survives, Werthimer contends that even if it dies off, its children will thrive.

  CHAPTER 5

  A QUESTION FOR OUR TIME

  But before SETI had its own struggling telescope at Hat Creek, the scientists let their instruments piggyback on other Hat Creek telescopes, as they did in Tarter’s first SETI project: SERENDIP. Just a few months after Professor Bowyer gave Tarter the Cyclops Report in 1972, he had lined up his list of SERENDIP essentials—someone to talk to his ancient computer (Tarter), a computer to deal with the data, and a telescope. He needed only one more thing: money. And a man named John Billingham, soon to be the head of NASA’s Extraterrestrial Research Division and former head of Project Cyclops—had plenty.

  Billingham had been interested in searching for life in space since his earliest days in the space agency. He’d heard talk in the hallways about the strange-named field of exobiology—exo meaning not of this Earth. Scientists now call the study astrobiology, and today it mostly means the search for non-technological signatures of life on other planets: biosignatures. For example, if astronomers see oxygen (O2) and methane (CH4) together, that’s suspicious: methane could mean farting fauna or volcanoes; oxygen can come from photosynthesis or from when ultraviolet light strips carbon dioxide into its constituent parts. Astronomers haven’t found a non-biological scenario that puts both methane and oxygen into an atmosphere.

  But Billingham’s awakening interest in space biology wasn’t about molecules and microbes. He was interested in the smart stuff: He wanted to learn how to find intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations that could communicate with Earth. That’s why he and Barney Oliver, the Order of the Dolphin supporter who had flown in to Green Bank to spy on Drake’s experiments, had led Project Cyclops. After that initial work and the federal decision not to build the telescope, Billingham had gone on to convene six NASA workshops on interstellar communication, one on cultural evolution, and two on the detection of planets beyond the solar system. With his interest in the topic of aliens and his disappointment at the lack of governmental investment in what he took to be a fundamental scientific question, Billingham seemed to Bowyer a likely candidate to support the low-budget, low-risk SERENDIP project.

  So Bowyer decided to pitch him, in style. And so it was that Tarter ended up on a regional airport runway at O89 in Fall River Mills, California, during the closing days of 1972. Jack Welch, who was also a pilot in addition to being the head of the Radio Astronomy Lab, had rented a Cherokee Six airplane for the big day. The three of them were flying Billingham up to the Hat Creek Observatory to show him their equipment. Whisk was the verb Bowyer used. Billingham could stand under the 85-foot telescope to which they would attach their alien-hunting instruments. They would bedazzle him with their anachronistic computer.

  The team whisked Billingham from San Jose to Hat Creek. They whisked him into the town’s finest diner. They whisked him around the observatory site. They gave him the chance to put his money where his white papers were. And then, the day nearly over, Bowyer whisked him to the local liquor store to get drinks for the flight home. Mixology, surely, was the way to a NASA manager’s heart.

  Bowyer plopped himself and the booze at the back of the plane and sent Tarter to sit up front with Welch, upsetting the proper weight and balance distribution for the small plane. Welch looked dapper in a cap and sunglasses. Tall, kind, gentle, smart, and funny—the usual good qualities, the ones people always list when someone says, “Why do you like that person?” She buckled her seatbelt as Bowyer poured, soon taking the drink he handed her.

  Welch started the plane and began taxiing down the runway, lifting the nose off the tiny tarmac and pointing it above the mountains that encircled the valley. Tarter felt that extra little lift right after takeoff, the kind that shows up in your stomach like an emotion. The telescope dish receded beneath them. The whole observatory site started to look like dollhouse astronomy, like they’d all just been playing at being scientists. But it was far from playtime for Tarter. SERENDIP was the most serious project Tarter had ever been part of since she completed her PhD. And maybe, she thought, it might actually come together.

  Then a beeping started sounding from the control panel. Tarter knew what the noise meant: it was a stall warning. She watched Welch’s face, in the same way that commercial passengers survey their peers to see whether they should panic at big turbulence. But Welch didn’t even blink, so Tarter pretended everything was normal, just like a good passenger, while Welch lowered the plane’s nose until the stall warning silenced. And slowly, slowly, he spiraled and spiraled, climbing them to cruise altitude.

  “Who needs a refill?” Bowyer asked, as they cruised back toward the Bay. He hadn’t even noticed the alarm.

  Although Billingham didn’t bite that day, he would support SETI in the future, from starting a systematic SETI program at NASA to serving on the SETI Institute’s board, and would become one of the most important people in Tarter’s life. Welch would, too.

  And SERENDIP I, which did come to fruition without Billingham and got funding in 1976, after a few years of tiny grants and volunteered hours, has continued up to a sixth iteration, a commensal instrument that sits inside the Arecibo radio telescope to this day. It’s much more sophisticated than the original instrument, says Werthimer.

  “SERENDIP listened to one hundred channels at once,” he says. “At the time, we thought, ‘One hundred channels—that’s really cool!’ Now, of course we look at one hundred billion channels.”

  Werthimer recalls that, during the SERENDIP days, a female engineer was a strange being to have on an engineering project. “People told Jill she wasn’t going to make it because she was a woman,” he says, referring to engineering and science colleagues.

  Tarter still goes to Hat Creek, sometimes still in planes with Welch, to whom she’s been married for 37 years. They frequented the restaurant closest to the observatory—the Bar K, which recently closed—which they loved for its supersized milkshakes and its post-and-beam homeyness. They were friends with the owners—Jack and Donna Garner—who worked as much as Tarter and Welch even though “they’re really old,” says Tarter. But every summer, Welch stayed at their house in Berkeley while Tarter took student interns to the Bar K instead.

  These interns are part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program, which pairs undergraduates with established scientists for a summer research project at any of dozens of sites across the country. The “summer students,” as most institutions call them, usually live in dorms at their host institution. The SETI Institute interns live in old military barracks at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

  They spend most of their 10 weeks working at the SETI Institute, stuck in the middle of Silicon Valley suburbia along with Ames. But for one week, they travel in Astro vans up to far northern California. Here, they get to use the ATA themselves, explore the landscape, cement their budding and doomed romances, and learn to cook for themselves en masse. And so it is that Tarter ends up at a Safewa
y in July 2014, paying for ten jars of pasta sauce, pounds of ground beef, and seven bags of spring-mix salad as part of seven carts of groceries. She uses the SETI Institute’s credit card, which the bank then freezes because buying ten jars of pasta sauce doesn’t fit with the institute’s usual pattern.

  Afterward, the students put the groceries away and gather in the telescope’s control room. As they wait for their turn to operate the ATA, they turn to artistic pursuits. On a whiteboard, they draw nearby Mount Lassen in the process of erupting. Their dead or dying bodies, each with identifiable hair and clothing, litter the landscape below the volcano. The image’s title appears to be “BOOM.” The next day, they will hike up and down another inactive volcano inside Lassen National Park, visit a lava tube, and watch steam rise from acidic hydrothermal vents. They will learn about the geology of an active Earth, which is meant to give them insight about the surfaces of distant planets. On those planets, which might seem inhospitable at first glance, there could be weird life that might survive in the hot, low-pH pools there, as it does on Earth. In the 1980s, scientists started discovering these hardcore life forms—extremophiles that survive in the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic spot in the world, or a half-mile underwater in an Antarctic lake.

  This whiteboard drawing is the students’ vision of their future exploring one of these extreme earthly spots.

  Tarter’s own research summer intern, Lindsay, perches on the windowsill, watching a thunderstorm emerge from the nearby mountaintops. The clouds look like the fingers of an outstretched hand, reaching over still-snowy peaks, creepy.

  Tarter peers out the window. “I hope that doesn’t come here,” she says. “We don’t need any lightning.”

  In the parched and brushy landscape, thunderstorms aren’t a nice excuse to sit on the couch reading. They mean wildfire. Most of California looks like a matchstick. The state is in a years-long drought. All along the interstates, flashing LED signs proclaim “Severe drought, help conserve water.” Almond farmers are burning their trees so they don’t suck water from the ground, and San Francisco has stopped irrigating its medians. Much of the state is yellow, brown—sick-looking but somehow still beautiful.

 

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