Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  These women began investigating what they had in common besides male bosses with wives. They were all competitors, they found, all aggressive and gregarious (Jill’s fifth-grade report cards, for instance, reported that “Jill talks too much,” and then “Jill still talks too much.” She had taken first place in county government day, but not because she was into politics—because she was into winning.) And while those inclined to exercise may have, had they lived in the 1990s, captained lacrosse teams, they were all former cheerleaders and drum majorettes, the only sports available.

  But most interesting to Tarter was that many of these accomplished women had lost their fathers at early ages. Statistically, only 7 percent of kids have dads die before they’re 20 years old. And although correlation doesn’t equal causation, the women set out to find a cause. Why would parental death lead them to high-powered science careers? Because grief requires distraction? Because they learned to be independent? Because 50 percent fewer imposed societal expectations held them back? Because they were used to feeling detached and alone?

  No, Tarter tells me. “It’s carpe diem,” she says. They knew if they wanted to do something, they should do it—right now. They wanted to do science. So they did it. Right then. Without caring about what other people thought. Tarter felt a kinship she’d never felt before.

  She doesn’t express regret often, taking a “mistakes are lessons from which you can learn” attitude. But she does seem chagrined by her attitude toward other women before this forum, an event that she says changed her completely.

  “I got to realize how much I’d actually bought in to being one of the boys,” she says. Particularly back then, to succeed and be taken seriously, women couldn’t always be themselves, lest differences from male leadership encourage the male leadership to use phrases like overly emotional or weak.

  Harp explains it this way: “She’s developed this way of being, this way of dealing with people to sort of maximize her effectiveness. It works out better if she lets people think that she’s tough. People pay more attention to her.” The extent to which that is nurture as opposed to nature is impossible to know. But the tough shell is just that—a shell. After the first few interactions, or outside of business situations, it cracks. And she has learned to be nicer to others like her.

  “Back then, I wasn’t very kind to the few other women scientists that I’d met. Because I thought, ‘Oh, we can all do it; nobody needs support,’” she explains. She may have even been tougher on those women, unconsciously. “It made me think about being kind and supportive to other women. And so if there has ever been an opportunity to hire a woman, I have.”

  Lindsay, Tarter’s 2014 summer intern, is an example. She’s more than 10 years older than most of the other students, who are barely allowed to drink the Coors Lights they buy at the store. Lindsay, on the other hand, went back to school for astronomy after working in television for years. She abandoned a career full of sitcom scripts and HD cameras in favor of a career full of . . . well . . . computer scripts and CCD cameras. It seems like a strange move: why school at all, why astronomy, and why this alien-based internship?

  “I thought the only way to do the things I saw in movies was to work on the scripts,” she says. “But then I realized all the things I like in movies are about science.”

  She could do science without the rat race of Los Angeles, the late payments and scrambling for gigs. She mentions Back to the Future and its “science-based” DeLorean. And then she smiles wistfully as she recalls the movie Contact. It inspired her.

  “Dr. Tarter is basically the most famous female scientist,” she says.

  The other interns express similar sentiments. During their Hat Creek trip, they got into a debate, while eating sandwiches on top of a volcano, about the pronunciation of one particularly bright star: Vega (coincidentally, the star from which the extraterrestrial message comes in Contact). It’s Vee-guh. No, it’s Vay-guh. Back and forth. A few minutes into the argument, a quiet student on the outer edge of the circle spoke up.

  “Dr. Tarter says ‘Vay-guh,’” she offered.

  The matter was settled.

  After their marital separation in 1975, Tarter and Bruce wanted to co-parent—with joint custody, as equals. But that was almost unheard of back then. So the couple remained married and shared custody for a year, while living apart, to show the confused judge empirical evidence that they could both be good parents, alone together.

  They shuttled Shana back and forth between houses in Berkeley and Danville, sending her to a private school midway between. Shana had two beds, two sets of school uniforms, two toothbrushes, and after a while two dental retainers. Mom and Dad agreed: No good cop, bad cop.

  Tarter took Tuesdays off to make a midweek weekend. They traveled to the Oakland and San Francisco zoos; the California Academy of Sciences; the Alexander Lindsay Junior Museum; the beaches at Point Reyes, Muir Beach, Alameda, and Point Richmond. Always, always ice cream cones.

  When your life gets sliced into pieces, though, a scar stays even if you don’t bleed out. The world wasn’t the way Shana wanted it to be, and she was not in charge of it. But Shana healed herself well, in part, because of gymnastics. Here was an intact portion of the world that she could control, and the fact that the rest of her world was screwed up didn’t matter.

  “That was the place to be,” Shana says of the gymnasium.

  After Tarter and Bruce’s empirical demonstration of co-parenting, the judge considered the evidence and concluded he should grant joint custody.

  Tarter’s postdoc research at NASA’s Ames Research Center, like her PhD work, dealt with brown dwarfs and what was then called the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which became the Spitzer Space Telescope (it launched in 2003).

  Still, Project Cyclops stared her down. She became obsessed with the idea of finding out whether humans are alone. She could not ignore the tingling it had left on the back of her neck—the feeling that she should turn around and look back. So when she heard that John Billingham—the NASA manager whom she and Bowyer had whisked to Hat Creek—was hosting a series of SETI workshops at NASA Ames, she attended the first one. The workshops would later come together into a NASA report called “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

  She walked up to Billingham and reintroduced herself. “I have more than forty hours a week,” she told him. “I’d really like to get involved with SETI. What can I do to help?”

  He nodded. As someone who first studied medicine, then designed spacesuits, and then swung to SETI, he understood the pull of the search. It was strong regardless of whether you had a full-time job, a new boyfriend, and a daughter. He invited her to come to his small Interstellar Communications Committee meetings, where the scientists asked questions like “Do we know what the sky looks like naturally, without alien broadcasts? How would we recognize an unnatural signal?” and “Do other stars have planets?” These were exactly the kind of questions whose uncertainties paradoxically set her mind at ease.

  “I was getting to know Jack and airplanes,” Tarter says of the months after her marriage ended, when her SETI work was truly beginning. They began to see each other and hop in planes together for unofficial, non-alien purposes. They spent Sunday brunches at the house they soon began renting together. They flew to spontaneous picnic spots on the Baja coast, where they camped and watched the Milky Way. They found a fly-in-only resort in Oregon. They took afternoon airborne jaunts to Nut Tree, California’s first major road stop, midway between San Francisco and Sacramento.

  Soon, they took their first longer trip together—to the International Astronomical Union meeting in Grenoble, France. What happened there—a little wine, a lot of talking about thermonuclear reactions and spectral indices—isn’t that memorable. But their return was. When Tarter turned in her travel expense forms to the National Research Council, she wrote, “The other half of the hotel room is covered by Jack Welch.” That did not compute to the puritan council. But NASA high
er-up and Tarter’s friend David Black, who later had a brief stint as the CEO of the SETI Institute, pushed her paperwork through the system.

  He told the council, “It’s okay. They share a room every night.”

  Tarter and Jack soon quit renting and purchased another house in the Berkeley Hills. Being there and looking across the water is like living in a lost jungle tribe and seeing a distant civilization you’re not a part of—San Francisco—but then still being able to walk to the farmers market. So when they saw this house in the hills for sale, they made an offer without even going inside. That home, where they still live today, has cedar siding and sits on a one-and-a-half-lane road that cars have to bushwhack through. A second-story entrance is built into the hillside, with the deck 50 feet above the ground and redwoods threatening to block the view.

  When you’re standing outside the house at street level, it seems unassuming, with brownish paint and a wreath on the door. It looks like someday the trees might take it over. It’s dark. But if you ring the bell, Welch will rise from the dining room table, wander over to the door, and open it. The light inside surprises your eyes. The whole far wall is windows, two stories high. Framed pictures cover the few walls that aren’t windows—a Picasso sketch, a People magazine photo of a younger Jill and Jack, framed programs from Jack’s daughter Jeanette’s bass performances, a pixelated version of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, titled The Wave of the Future. To sit in one of the ivory leather armchairs that faces the bay is to take a seat in the bridge of starship Enterprise.

  In December 2014, Shana visited this house. She flew in from Lander, Wyoming, the tiny mountain town where the National Outdoor Leadership School is based and where she is the assistant director of the Wilderness Medicine Institute. Lander is the kind of place where everyone understands if you need to leave work at 1 P.M. for a 12-mile hike followed by some V5 bouldering to clear your head. She’s visiting to help Tarter dump the furniture in her old bedroom. It’s the same rearrangeable particleboard furniture that filled Tarter’s first apartment on Virginia Street. After they finish at the dump, Shana goes to visit Bruce in Danville, where he still lives. Plus ça change . . .

  Around the same time Tarter, Welch, and Shana sewed their lives together, Tarter’s scientific identity began to shift, too. She was moving from astronomy to becoming a SETI scientist. She, along with astronomer Jeff Cuzzi, flew to DC and met up with astronomer Tom Clark. The three then embarked on a long hairpin drive from DC to Green Bank, West Virginia. That scientific outpost, where Frank Drake performed the first SETI search, had updated its hardware in the decades since: Engineers had built a 300-foot telescope in 1962 (just after Drake’s experiment). The dish tilted in just one direction, on an arc like the swinging ship ride at carnivals. From the edges of the dish, two arms reached toward the middle and touched at the top, where the receiver lived. That receiver turned the signals from radio waves into electricity, which carried coded within it information about the frequency of the radio waves from the cosmos and their strength. Cables then routed the signal down the arm to the control room, a squat brick building underneath the dish. The engineers designed the telescope’s supporting structure and mesh surface to last only 10 years, just enough time to figure out what they should construct next.

  The first night of their experiment, Tarter, Clark, and Cuzzi gathered in that control room. With its gray panels full of toggle switches, incandescent light-up buttons, and tuning knobs, the building resembled a cockpit. The team’s flight plan was this: Figure out what narrow, station-like radio signals came naturally from the sky—from astronomical sources like supernovae and black holes. The scientists would have to be able to identify those and toss them aside during SETI searches, since they would be looking for similar signals that came instead from biological beings. How could they tell a molecular cloud from an intelligent civilization?

  In the process, it was possible—always possible—that they would find that civilization, or even those civilizations. Searching for extraterrestrial civilizations is like waiting for the cable guy to come: you’re always ready, on edge and dressed, even though he probably won’t show within the anticipated window.

  Clark knew how to use the 300-foot telescope from his days running a global observatory spread across the planet. A few years before, he had created a network of radio telescopes, linking them together to act like one telescope when he pointed them at the same object at the same time. It’s kind of like how a bunch of fish team up into a school and swim together to look larger. For telescopes, the trick gives them better resolution: the telescope functions like one as wide as the biggest separation between any two antennas. So if you hook four 100-meter-wide antennas together, and the closest one is right next to you but the farthest one is 100 miles away, together they give the resolution of a telescope 100 miles wide.

  In the pre-Internet days, linking the telescopes was not easy. It required recording all the data on magnetic tapes, with atomically precise time markers. Then, the tapes were synced with each other, like sound engineers line up actors’ video mouths with their audio words. Tarter, Cuzzi, and Clark used these same magnetic tapes to perform this Green Bank SETI experiment. The exercise was aerobic.

  Clark held up one of the rolls, 10 inches across and heavy as a barbell. He lifted it up onto the drive, fed its tape into the slot, and pressed go. The telescope couldn’t just point at any object. It could move in a north-south line, up and down, pointing toward the horizon or up at the sky’s apex. But it couldn’t look east to west. It had to wait for objects to pass over as they rose and set. In their steady 12-hour journeys from one horizon to the other, they spent just three minutes strolling through in the telescope’s view. During those 180 seconds, one tape took data. And the team needed to mount a second tape on a second machine to take data on what came next. Then, they had three minutes to go back to the first machine and set up another new tape. Ad infinitum (or so it seemed).

  Tom Clark smiled. “Ping Pong,” he called it.

  The first tape of any set was “on source,” meaning the telescope was pointed right at a specific object passing overhead. The second was “off source,” meaning it was pointed at blank sky. If a signal appeared in both—if it showed up when the telescope couldn’t actually see the star system in question—it wasn’t “real.” It didn’t come from that star, but from Earth, a radar in Roanoke or a pickup’s spark plugs. This is actually the hardest part of SETI: distinguishing ourselves from the other.

  The scientists prepared to look at their list of candidate stars, bouncing back and forth between the tape reels. Tarter knew it was wise, even then, to keep her hope at some baseline level—too much crest led to too much fall. And the potential for being fooled, being wrong. These were the careful early days of a new relationship, when you don’t want to betray your fervor.

  So, stoically, they looked at her long list of sources. On. Off. On. Off. Tape. Tape. Tape. Tape. And then, coming from one of the star systems, a beacon appeared. It showed up in the on source. Disappeared in the off. There in the on the next day. Gone in the off. Just what they were looking for.

  By the third check-up, they were all a little wide-eyed. They watched it appear in the on-source observation. Yes. Good.

  But when they tried to look at the off tape, they found it was corrupted. No results. They would have to spend a restless, no-REM-sleep night waiting for the source to rise again above the horizon.

  Tarter allowed herself to wonder if the signal was “real.”

  She called up Billingham.

  “What do we do if this turns out to be right?” she asked.

  There was no protocol for who to tell what when and how, he said. She was on her own.

  On the fourth day, they pointed the telescope at the star. The signal showed up. Then, the sky moved and the telescope pointed away from the star, to the off-source position. And the signal came back—just as bright as ever. For a microsecond, Tarter felt the jolt of the discovery, almost as
if it were pulsing through her. But then her brain intervened: Remember, a real, right signal wouldn’t show up in the off-source tape. The telescope wasn’t looking at the star system, so if the signal still remained, it had to be coming from somewhere else. It was likely earthly interference—not evidence of alien technology, but evidence of human technology. The scientists had found us—intelligent, technological, communicative hominids.

  But what was this technology? And how had it mimicked a space source for so long?

  It all comes back to the way the world turns. The physical day is actually 23 hours and 56 minutes long (the missing four minutes are what we make up for with leap years). For a star to travel from one spot in the sky all the way around Earth (from our perspective) and appear again in that same spot doesn’t actually take a full 24 hours: It just takes 23 hours and 56 minutes.

  Someone, Clark said, was turning on a piece of electronics at the same Earth time—around 8 A.M.—every day. The first three days, that didn’t match up with the time the off-source location was overhead. But each day, the star’s overhead appearance slid closer to 8 A.M. by four minutes. And on the fourth day, both times—the time they looked at the star and the time they looked off—fell after but near 8 A.M.

  Eight in the morning, Clark realized, is when shifts change. Telescope operators get in their trucks and drive down the long NRAO road toward the lone highway, to the diner or to say goodbye to their kids before school. And when they reach the gate, they turn on their CB radios. Ping. An intelligent signal. On day 4, the CB was still within range when the off-source tape was recorded.

  Despite the disappointment, it was on this trip that Tarter decided 32 was the perfect age—because it was her age—to become a radio astronomer.