Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  “A very strange sort of radio astronomer,” she clarifies.

  A SETI radio astronomer.

  Twelve years later, in 1988, the 300-foot telescope the team used for this experiment was 16 years older than it was ever supposed to be. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory had built it as an interim solution, intending to tear it down and make something better within a decade. But money is always tight in the sciences, and when the 300-foot continued to work well, they just kept it around. Until they had no options.

  On November 15, 1988, telescope operator Greg Monk helmed the controls when metallic sounds rang around him. The building shook, like an earthquake that came from above. He ran outside to see what was happening.

  All around the control building, pieces of mesh and scaffolding made a pile of debris like ruins some future society might find. The 300-foot telescope had collapsed. Monk walked back inside to find that a support beam had pierced the toilet.

  The next day, tabloid papers claimed extraterrestrial laser blasters had destroyed the telescope: ZAPPED! BY HOSTILE SPACE ALIENS, one headline claimed. If only! That may be the second most likely cause, but the first is metal fatigue. The telescope was just old and tired.

  In Green Bank’s modern-day gift shop, you can buy a tiny piece of the 300-foot’s mesh surface, hot-glued to a wooden plaque with a picture of the telescope in its fresh-faced youth. The plaque lists birth date and death date, as if the photo belongs on a table at a funeral.

  Back in 1980, after her Green Bank trip, funerals weren’t on Tarter’s mind. But marriage was. She and Welch had both been granted sabbaticals, which they planned to spend in Europe. Passports and paychecks would play out more easily if Jill and Jack were Jill and Jack Tarter-Welch.

  Shana didn’t understand why her mother and Welch needed to get married. “Things are just fine the way they are,” she said. It was just a piece of paper, and Welch lived with them already.

  But besides the logistics, Tarter told her daughter, “It’s a good idea. I like the idea.”

  Shana thought about that for a while, considering whether she also liked the idea, and whether she liked the idea of her mother acting on this idea that she liked.

  “Just don’t change your last name,” Shana said. Her class roster ran long with hyphenated names that took the whole afternoon to pronounce. “I don’t want to be one of those.”

  Tarter agreed. Besides, in journals, women who changed their names became marked with a scarlet-letter superscript, accompanied by a “formerly known as” footnote. “It felt like ‘aka a criminal,’” Tarter says.

  Tarter and Welch married on July 4, 1980—a day representing togethered independence, and a date neither of them would accidentally forget in the years to come. Welch flew them to Gualala, north of San Francisco Bay, for their honeymoon.

  That year, she sewed Welch his first paisley shirt. An authentically Instagram-hued photo now shows the shirt hanging from that year’s Christmas tree.

  “Life,” she says, looking at the picture in 2015. “Life.”

  She closes the photo album.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE AND NEW PROJECTS

  On her first trip abroad, Jill Tarter, soon to be 37, stood next to the baggage carousel in the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, waiting for her duffel bag. It was as heavy and overstuffed as a couch. Next to her, Welch waited with a slim suitcase containing a single pair of pants, no shoes, and a few shirts. She admired him for knowing how to pack a suitcase worthy of the international terminal. It was worldly, she thought. The sense of sophistication was something she admired in Welch and had also found attractive in Bruce. It was something she wanted for herself.

  It’s hard to imagine, now, that Tarter was once provincial, maybe even a little rough. She attends the World Economic Forum; she has season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony and is genuinely familiar with the works of contemporary architects.

  This striving for significance added to her excitement about a meeting that was set to occur at UC Berkeley in 1980. Eminent scientists like Carl Sagan and Philip Handler met at the university’s Space Sciences Laboratory to discuss an idea that sounds almost as science fiction as aliens: the catastrophic events that cause mass extinctions, like the ones that slayed pseudosuchia (creepy pre-crocodiles) and dinosaurs, which occur with almost clockwork-like regularity.

  Everyone began to seat themselves for the briefing, while those in charge debated whether recordings should be allowed. Like so many game-altering ideas in science, this concept of repeated occurrences of extinction-level grand events throughout the history of life on Earth could be a crazy fantasy—lifted out of dubious and scattered statistics—or it could change our conception of life on Earth. As officials readied the equipment, Billingham led Tarter toward a smiling man in a turtleneck.

  “This is Carl Sagan,” Billingham told Tarter, gesturing toward the floppy-haired man that everyone in America already knew for his role in the television show Cosmos. Sagan reached out his hand.

  “And this,” Billingham continued, “is Jill Tarter.”

  Before they could talk more, the meeting got started. Scientists Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, walked up to a podium and presented their half of the big announcement. Walter had been on a geological expedition in the canyons of Gubbio, Italy, looking at limestone. In it, he found a thin layer in between the regular rock strata, like the middle part of an Oreo cookie. Looking at the different layers of rock on our planet is like looking back in time, just as looking farther out in space is. The farther down you go into a canyon hike, for instance, the older the rock next to you is. Each layer was, at one point, on Earth’s surface. So when a strange set of chemicals appears, you know something strange was happening on Earth’s surface at whatever time that rock formed. And this layer of rock happened to be from the time when dinosaurs went extinct.

  Walter brought a sample of the mineral sandwich to Luis, who had access to a mass spectrometer. A mass spectrometer is like a fingerprint reader for elements and molecules, revealing the chemical identity of a sample. When the results came back on the rock layer, they revealed a lot of an element called iridium—a shiny metal that’s the second-densest in the universe, and one that doesn’t appear often on Earth.

  What could have left so much iridium? the Alvarezes asked each other.

  The only thing that made sense, they eventually concluded, was a space invader—like an asteroid, a type of object known to be rich in iridium. If an asteroid had crash-landed, it would have brought its own chemistry and then splattered that chemistry into the sediment. When Walter and Louis figured out how long ago this collision would have happened, they came up with the answer to every kindergartner’s favorite question: what killed the dinosaurs?

  An asteroid, they concluded. This same asteroid that left this iridium.

  Then, two other scientists—David Raup and Jack Sepkoski—took the stage. Billingham had funded their research into the extinction of sea animals, and they had made a morbid timeline of the mass deaths in Earth’s oceanic past. Every 26 million years or so, as if on schedule, swarms of species disappeared.

  The four scientists then put their work together into something more significant than the sum of the parts: extinction-level space rocks might hit Earth, like trains arriving at a station, every 26 million years.

  The first time you hear it, it makes your spine feel cold. It makes the universe sound malicious, intentional—like something is in charge. But the scientists set out to find an astrophysical cause. The meeting’s attendees threw ideas out fast and furious, demolishing most of them in the next sentence. Maybe an unknown planet (Planet X) or a nearby star (the Death Star) passed close to the outer solar system with some orbital regularity. Its gravity could perturb the rocks in the asteroid belt, flinging them to Earth. Or maybe as the solar system moves in its orbit around the galaxy’s center, it moves in to denser pockets of space at regular intervals, and that extra mass do
es the same rock flinging.

  Regardless, the report that came out of the event concluded that “the work of the Alvarez group has emphasized something that should have been recognized earlier: The Earth is not alone!” That’s something Tarter had thought about in terms of planets like Earth and intelligent beings like humans, but she had not quite considered how much extraterrestrial factors affect the life that already exists here. Those interwoven threads became part of her worldview: we are part of the universe, not beings simply peering out from a bubble and into a universe.

  After the meeting was over, Tarter walked with Sagan back to the parking lot.

  “What would be the level of light,” he wondered out loud, almost as if to himself, “if one were able to stroll on the surface of Venus, rather than in the Berkeley Hills?”

  Tarter struggled to come up with a plausible answer, but she needn’t have bothered. Sagan responded to his own question: about as bright as an overcast day on Earth.

  Sagan was always “on,” Tarter thought, always performing for a bigger audience than the one present. And she was right: When episode 4 of Sagan’s Cosmos TV series later aired in October 1980, a showing that Tarter and Welch watched with their blended family, Sagan asked the TV viewers the exact same question.

  And he never forgot Tarter. Although he did not himself participate in much SETI, he would become a public advocate for and educator about what he considered a vital human question, as well as an admirer of the person—Tarter—who did much of the day-to-day work and big-picture strategizing about how humans could investigate that question, rather than just talk about it.

  Soon after the meeting, Tarter and Welch took their sabbatical year in Europe. In Germany, they lived in an apartment underneath the bowl of the Effelsberg Telescope, yet another radio antenna. Shana, as well as Jeanette and Leslie, Welch’s daughters from his previous marriage, hated it. The only good thing about the city of Bonn, they thought, was that the McDonald’s sold beer.

  Better for everyone was Paris, where they lived at no. 1 Place Paul-Painlevé, at the junction of Rue Saint-Jacques and Boulevard Saint-Germain, across from the front door of the Musée de Cluny. The flat had 15-foot-high ceilings and parquet flooring with ruts from hundreds of years of familial footsteps. Each morning, Tarter and Welch bounced down the stairs, past the outdoor pipes that brought water up because the place had been built before plumbing, and out onto the Rues. They jogged through le Jardin du Luxembourg. At night, they went to Alliance Française for language lessons.

  But money from the university didn’t always appear when it was supposed to. There were no ATMs, and no automatically calculated exchange rates. So when their wire transfers from Berkeley arrived in the Old World, the money went into a French bank account, where it waited for months to be joined by the francs supplied by their French hosts. Near the end of their sojourn they were scarily cash poor. Every day, Welch went to their bank to inquire about the payment.

  “Has it arrived?” he asked the teller.

  “Pas de tout,” the teller responded, every day.

  But at the last minute, the teller responded, “Oui!”

  Tarter sewed the boatload of paper money to the inside of Welch’s jacket for their upcoming trip home, home ec talents meeting smuggler skills. Except for sleeping, Welch didn’t take that jacket off until they were back in the States.

  They once again loaded up their Saab, baggage in the trunk and on the roof, to ride the hovercraft that would take them across the Channel. Shana lifted her suitcase to her mother, who placed it next to the others and tied them all to the top. Shana’s luggage was filled with new European clothes. She was much more sophisticated, having spent this year acquiring fine taste in fashion, than her mother had been at her age, despite the fact that Shana now claims her mother is the fashionable one and the good-clothing gene is recessive.

  But when they arrived at the port, Shana’s shopping suitcase was gone. They all imagined some field in the quaint-cottage countryside, now covered in silky blouses.

  “Everybody back in the car,” Tarter said.

  Everyone drove back to Paris; everyone scoured the shoulder the whole way. But they found no trace of the clothes. When they finally got to London, Tarter liberated some of the cash from Welch’s jacket and sent Shana on a shopping spree.

  Tarter calls this mishap their “second demerit as parents.”

  The first was years earlier, when a 10-year-old Shana interrupted the dinner conversation, which as usual revolved around astronomical mysteries and scientific politics. Out of the blue sky, Shana declared, “I want to be a shopkeeper.”

  “How did you decide that?” Tarter asked. “And what do you want to sell?”

  “I don’t know what I will sell,” Shana said, “but I want to be a shopkeeper because you close at five and leave all your work behind.”

  The oblique, yet pointed, rebuke clearly still stung. Still, Tarter’s colleagues, and her daughter, too, agree that she did put priority on her family, perhaps at the expense of the sleep she doesn’t get. “Although all we saw was the working side of Jill, she has this softer side that isn’t always visible to us,” says Harp. “You could tell by the way she talked about her daughter and granddaughter that she really maintained a life outside of all the work that she did.”

  Tarter and Welch didn’t yet know it, but they were going to return to trouble when they got back to the States. A few years earlier, in 1978, a senator from Wisconsin—William Proxmire—had discovered NASA’s SETI program, a fledgling thing that the agency had just begun funding in 1975. Called the Microwave Observing Project (MOP), it was under the leadership of Billingham. MOP, at that point, was just design studies focused on the nuts and bolts of engineering the technology but not yet actually building that technology. A year later, NASA formed an official SETI department at Ames with a complement at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Proxmire didn’t like it.

  Once a month, Senator Proxmire skewered one publicly financed project that he believed was a waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned coin. Upon these unlucky projects, he bestowed his Golden Fleece Award. The name alludes to both the verb to fleece, meaning “to con or overcharge,” and the chivalrous 30-knight medieval group called the Order of the Golden Fleece. Every month from 1975 to 1988, he sent a press release giving one group this dubious honor.

  He bestowed his first prize on the National Science Foundation, which had shelled out $84,000 to study why people fall in love. “I object to this not only because no one—not even the National Science Foundation—can argue that falling in love is a science,” he said, “not only because I’m sure that even if they spend $84 million or $84 billion they wouldn’t get an answer that anyone would believe. I’m also against it because I don’t want the answer. I believe that 200 million other Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right on top of the things we don’t want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman and vice versa.”

  Proxmire, who looked like a bald hawk, was fastidious and frugal in all aspects of his life. He never missed a roll-call vote. He gave 3,000 separate speeches supporting an anti-genocide treaty. He jogged 10 miles every day and even wrote an evangelistic book called You Can Do It: Senator Proxmire’s Exercise, Diet, and Relaxation Plan. And while he did get hair transplants and a facelift, he refused campaign donations, paid his own travel costs, and spent less than $200 on self-promotion each election cycle. No one was ever going to give him a Golden Fleece Award.

  In 1978, he set his budget-slashing eye on NASA’s fledgling SETI program.

  I am giving my Golden Fleece of the Month award for February to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which, riding the wave of popular enthusiasm for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is proposing to spend $14 to $15 million over the next seven years to try to find intelligent life in outer space. In my view, this project should be postponed for a few million light years . . . While theoretically possible, there is
now not a scintilla of evidence that life beyond our own solar system exists. Yet NASA officials indicate that the study is predicated on the assumption that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings are out there trying to communicate with scientists here on Earth. If NASA has its way, this spending will go forward at a time when people here on Earth—Arabs and Israelis, Greeks and Turks, the United States and the Soviet Union, to name a few—are having a great difficulty in communicating with each other . . . At a time when the country is faced with a $61 billion budget deficit, the attempt to detect radio waves from solar systems should be postponed until right after the federal budget is balanced and income and social security taxes are reduced to zero.

  First, it bears pointing out that a light-year is a measurement of distance, not time. Second, these are not unique complaints. Today—and in reference to basic research on everything from supernovae to shrimp—practical people say their tax dollars would better be spent directly improving human lives. There’s some merit to that, on its face. But Ed Catmull, in his book Creativity, Inc., wrote a smart rebuttal to that sentiment and to the Golden Fleece Awards generally:

  The truth is, if you fund thousands of research projects every year, some will have obvious, measurable, positive impacts, and others will go nowhere. We aren’t very good at predicting the future—that’s a given—and yet the Golden Fleece Awards tacitly implied that researchers should know before they do their research whether or not the results of that research would have value.

  But the SETI scientists, in their disgrace, were in good company. A great deal of legitimate, respectable scientific research—Department of Justice investigations into why prisoners desire escape and studies of the sex life of screw worms, which ultimately led to the cattle parasite’s eradication—had been similarly roasted. It wasn’t a career or project ender for anyone. While scientists sometimes sued Proxmire for libel or felt head-hanging angst, the SETI team was more used to public ridicule than most scientists, then and now. After all, they were searching for smart aliens. Tarter thought the stigma would disappear the next month when Proxmire moved on to someone else’s science.