by Sarah Scoles
Frank Drake, SETI’s founding father, was a bit angrier: he nominated Proxmire for membership in the Flat Earth Society, in an article published in The Scientist. “When Christopher Columbus left Spain, there was no evidence the New World existed,” Drake told the reporter, “let alone Wisconsin.”
The award didn’t ruin them. But a few years later, in 1981, Proxmire decided to wage full-on war against SETI. He read an article in the magazine Reason called “NASA Flimflams Congress.” According to this piece, “NASA officials publicly maintain that no SETI activities continue at all today, except perhaps for a very few low-level investigations that are not part of any organized plan. In my first inquiries to NASA I was told outright that no SETI program exists, and Reason editors checking up on my story were told the same things.”
The author, Robert Sheaffer, then offered (true) evidence to the contrary. His editor, Marty Zupan, wrote in a sidebar that Donald DeVincenzi, head of Ames’s Exobiology division said that “Ames and JPL were doing a little work on how it would be done if it were to be done,” but in the parlance of the agency, there was “no SETI project.”
NASA did have a SETI program—the same MOP design study program they had had for years—but they hadn’t been trying to hide it, insists Tarter, just as DeVincenzi implied.
Like most stories, this truth seems to be midway between these two. NASA probably didn’t want to broadcast its alien activities, and so they may have been semantically slippery about their word choices. “No SETI project” may have been an evasive way to say “no active search is going on” while alluding to the R&D activities, which were for a future SETI search.
When Congress met to discuss the 1982 budget, Proxmire stormed in, wielding this article. NASA obviously had not taken SETI’s Golden Fleece Award seriously. He and his fellow congresspeople sliced SETI entirely from that year’s projects.
Crushed, Tarter and Billingham sat down together to write an official termination plan, detailing how to dismantle their dreams piece by piece. It was like being shot in the foot and then being told to amputate it yourself.
But Billingham carefully, cleverly found unspent money from the previous fiscal year that he could distribute throughout the next 12 months—so this would be merely a lean year for the team, not a famine. He kept them and their brand-new prototype equipment alive. And in the meantime, SETI’s biggest celebrity—Carl Sagan, who thought and spoke a lot about SETI—went to Proxmire’s office to chat.
Sagan believed that like most other politicians in the 1980s, Proxmire would respond to Cold War rhetoric. If we found an alien signal, Sagan told him, that would be an indication that technological civilizations like ours can survive without nuking each other out of existence. In a world where adults built air raid shelters and kids hid under desks for bomb drills, the logic resonated. It’s something SETI scientists still say, although the specific threats to humanity’s survival they might reference have changed. A long-lived alien civilization means there’s hope that we can turn around or adapt to climate change and not exhaust all our resources with our huge population—that’s still a hard hitter today.
Perhaps it was Sagan’s charisma, or perhaps Proxmire really did care about cosmic longevity. Regardless, Proxmire relented and agreed to restore SETI’s budget in 1983. Sixty-nine prominent scientists from 12 countries also signed a letter, published in Science, saying the world should begin “organization of a coordinated, worldwide and systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”
And so in 1983 NASA reestablished its SETI program, with Billingham as team leader. “But NASA didn’t just try to slide it in again,” Tarter says. “They went back in and said, ‘Hello, we’re not cutting this. This is something we really want to do, and here are all our justifications.’” This is the biggest, most human question humans have ever investigated; if we don’t seek we’ll never find; we finally have the capability. It was the Cyclops Report all over again.
NASA requested $1.5 million each year for five years to continue work on a multichannel spectrum analyzer (MCSA), the prototype SETI instrument Tarter and the other NASA types like John Reykjalin had been working on for MOP. It would detect radio waves and then split them into tiny channels, or stations, as small as 1 hertz each. Automated software would then search each station for anything more than static. They planned to connect the MCSA to an existing set of radio telescopes in remote regions of Puerto Rico, Australia, France, and West Virginia, as well as a set of smaller NASA-owned telescopes called the Deep Space Network. These radio telescopes lived in near Madrid, Spain; Tidbinbilla, Australia; and Goldstone, California. Normally, NASA used these antennas to send commands to and receive data from spacecraft, like Voyager, launched in 1977, then somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn. Now, however, the network would receive data from—well, who knows what, or who.
Before the SETI scientists could find smart-looking signals from space, though, they needed to understand the strange signals the universe produces naturally, and the signals humans put out with their satellites, sitcoms, and station wagons. SETI needs to be able to distinguish these natural and human-made radio waves from the ones that might come from extraterrestrial beings. As the SETI team began to plan an actual search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Tarter focused on finding the narrowest-band radio waves that came from astronomical objects, not biological beings. Most very narrow signals that we know of are synthetic—made by us. So SETI scientists thought extraterrestrials might compress their signals, too. But to figure out how concentrated a signal had to be to look “smart,” Tarter needed to know how concentrated nature made its own signals.
Every color we see is actually just a particular wavelength of light. Red is 650 nanometers; yellow is 580 nanometers. Our sun looks yellow, but it doesn’t just emit yellow light. It shines across a wide spectrum of colors, with yellowish being the brightest. Lasers, on the other hand, send out “coherent” light, much more focused around just one wavelength. Space has its own lasers (although space chose to call them masers, which stands for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) made of radio waves, which are the most coherent radio sources in the universe. You can’t see them with your eyes, because your eyes can’t detect radio waves. But if your eyes were radio telescopes, the masers would look just like lasers. For one figure who has been important to SETI and is famously depicted in fictional form in the movie Contact, radio waves are like visible light waves. Kent Cullers, the blind astronomer who worked on SETI beginning in 1985 and contributed key signal detection hardware and software, truly gets radio waves. “My sensory connection to the wider universe is not vision but radio waves,” Cullers said in a SETI Institute interview. “. . . Because Braille can now represent mathematics and diagrams, not only the world but also the universe is open to blind people.”
SETI’s spectrometer, with which Cullers worked, could split an incoming radio signal into tinier channels than any that came before. The scientists could tell, for the first time, exactly how compressed masers’ radio waves are. Then, in the future, if a SETI instrument picked up anything more compressed than that, the scientists would know the signal was either from technologically competent extraterrestrials who squish their signals like we do, from some undiscovered kind of celestial object, or from humans. They called this “defining the SETI sandbox.” And, like curious kids, they wanted to play in it. But getting time on big telescopes was hard when you just wanted to test something and not do a more meaningful experiment. Usually, for national telescopes, a jury of scientist peers ranks written-up proposals and allocates the time to the worthiest projects. SETI didn’t often make the cut.
NASA, wanting to help the project they had funded succeed, suggested Tarter use the JPL’s radio frequency interference–detecting van for her project (yes, a van). It didn’t have vinyl seats and Indian-print tapestries like other 1980s vans. Instead, engineers had stuffed it with scientific instruments that could create 65,536 radio channels as narrow
as 300 hertz each. For comparison, an FM radio station spans 50,000 hertz.
One day, Tarter received a call from JPL astronomer Sam Gulkis: Jodrell Bank Observatory in England wanted to borrow the van. And if Tarter and her team would agree to shepherd it across the pond and show the British scientists how to use it, they could do SETI on the observatory’s 250-foot Lovell Telescope. The offer seemed too good to be true. And as with $10 Coach handbags, the offer was, indeed, too good to be true, something Tarter wouldn’t discover until she was already ensconced at the observatory.
In England, Tarter found that while she loved tea, she hated tea time. During each ceremonious drinking session, she bounced her leg like she was about to lift off, eager to get back to work. She longed for the rhythmic hum of cryogenic dewars and cooling fans rather than the hum of conversation. The observatory’s director didn’t work much at all in the afternoons. Lovell gave public tours of his landscaping, the gardens on the telescope property, where he lived. Look what man hath wrought! The universe may be beyond mastery, filled with black holes and supergiant stars he could not touch, but he could master the terrestrial domain.
She shared the spectrometer with Gulkis and other scientists and engineers she hadn’t met, and she also teamed up with Jim Cohen, a radio astronomer from Manchester, who was an expert on masers. Something seemed off, though. The engineers were always tinkering and fixing, although it seemed like nothing was wrong. Still, her and Cohen’s search was going well, as they systematically narrowed the channel widths and found no radio signals as squished as 300 hertz. That meant SETI’s future 1-hertz instruments would reliably turn up only synthetic signals, whether from extraterrestrials or Earthlings.
“This is great!” Tarter said to her JPL colleagues. “This is the first time we’re doing SETI observations outside the country.”
They nodded, nervously laughing and coughing into their hands. “Yep,” they said. “It sure is a big moment for SETI.”
She shrugged their strangeness away, chalking it up to the everyday awkwardness of engineers.
“And then I found out,” she says, “it was all a sham.”
For 21 years, Lovell had been obsessed with detecting radio communications from Soviet spacecraft (also known as spying). Although he had a whole observatory at his disposal, he had never been able to intercept the signal. Neither had the US government—which was also interested. When Lovell heard about SETI’s spectrometer, he realized it was the perfect instrument to pick out the weak, narrow signal from a Soviet Venus probe called Venera. He could hijack its high-resolution images of the planet’s surface. So together with scientists at JPL, he had dreamed up a scheme: they would tell the SETI scientists they could do their preliminary work at Jodrell Bank. They would let the SETI scientists hook up their instrument, they would tell them they were doing SETI, and then they would, behind the scenes, spend most of the time trying to find Venera. The whole team knew about the scheme—except for Tarter.
When she found out from Gulkis, she stormed from their meeting room. And then she stormed right back in. Her colleagues were surprised: they had assumed she was in on the secret, too.
“I thought we were doing SETI here, guys!” she said.
They went back to shrugging and looking askance.
Lovell, it turns out, did find what he was looking for. In 2011, the National Security Agency declassified a document titled “The Longest Search: The Story of the Twenty-One-Year Pursuit of the Soviet Deep Space Data Link, and How It Was Helped by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”
The report details the history of the hunt, including the SETI involvement. “The SETI specialists were given sanitized search parameters and limited feedback on results,” the report says. And then the kill: “At 0635Z a teletypewriter at DEFSMAC clattered briefly with a crisp message: ‘We have it.’ The twenty-one-year search was over,” it proclaims.
Ruse aside, Tarter still got her data: The most squished natural signals were indeed 300 hertz wide. These came from saturated hydroxyl (OH) masers, which shine from the vicinities of stars and from faraway galaxies that emit a lot of infrared light. But her hoorays were muted.
Despite Tarter’s annoyance, she kept an end-of-stay appointment with Lovell. When she entered his office, she found him standing behind his desk staring at a coffee-table book. “He’s looking at these pictures, and he’s crying,” she says. “Think of an elderly British lord of the realm, tears just streaming down his face.”
The pictures were of Dresden, after World War II bombs turned it into a flat, fiery place.
“My sister tells me I should be ashamed,” he told her. He had helped develop the radar technology that allowed the bombers to drop their payloads so accurately, killing 135,000 and decimating a once great city.
Tarter looked down at the pictures, at the horrible things humans can do to each other.
“I didn’t experience that,” she said, “but I think that’s the way London would have looked if not for you.”
He nodded and closed the hardcover.
“I never did make it to his garden,” Tarter says now.
When Tarter returned, she and two hundred other astronomers descended on Cornell University to celebrate Ed Salpeter’s 60th birthday. Salpeter was a beloved figure in astronomy—a humble generalist and great skier with a good sense of humor, and the man who’d taught Tarter’s first astronomy course. “I don’t ever remember Ed working on a trivial problem,” colleague Yervant Terzian said in Salpeter’s Cornell University obituary. He was “always ready to look at new problems in new fields, and a young colleague quoted him as saying there were problems to be solved on backs of envelopes of various sizes,” wrote astronomer Virginia Trimble for the American Astronomical Society. Many attendees said, at the celebration, that Salpeter taught them that scientific research should be a joyous experience (a lesson some scientists never learn). And indeed it was Salpeter’s star formation course—full of the most interesting questions, Tarter had thought—that had spurred her on to her study of astronomy in the first place. Perhaps it was his zest, so contrasted with the joyless engineers’ attitudes, as much as his source material that compelled Tarter and impelled her toward her current career.
At the party, thirteen scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, gave the gathered partiers an update on the state of the universe, from black holes to dark matter to the scientific publication process (do astronomers know how to have a blast, or what?).
On the same trip, Sagan, whom Tarter now had seen at several scientific conferences and workshops on SETI, and his wife, Ann Druyan, invited Tarter and Welch to a cocktail party at their cliff-hanging home above the Ithaca gorges. The two had been married for just three years. Their love was so electrifying that a brain scan of Druyan contemplating Sagan is etched into a golden record placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft—a record meant for extraterrestrials to find, or not, and learn something about humanity through our images, astronomical plots, music, and neural patterns. In a picture from that same year, Sagan and Druyan’s eyes both bore holes through the film—Sagan’s with ingratiating smile lines, Druyan’s with a 10,000-yard intensity.
“Carl’s writing a science fiction book,” Druyan whispered to Tarter.
Tarter rolled her eyes. Everybody knew (Sagan and the New York Times had made sure they knew) about his record-breaking publishing advance—$2 million.
“We think you’ll recognize someone in it,” Druyan continued.
“But I think you’ll like her,” added Sagan.
Sagan, she discovered, had modeled the book’s main character on her.
“As long as she doesn’t eat ice cream cones for lunch,” Tarter told him, referencing a well-known guilty pleasure, “no one will think it’s me.”
Besides, she thought, how much “her” could it be? Sagan was just a famous guy she ran into a few times a year in professional settings. But then he sent her a pre-publication copy.
“I remember reading it, a
nd it just felt so familiar, down to the death of my dad, an uneasy relationship with my mom, and the 1957 T-Bird, my fantasy car,” Tarter says. “How did he get inside my head? How does he know?”
To be such a charismatic figure, Sagan likely had to understand the drives and motivations of those he interacted with. When Sagan looked at Tarter, it seemed he looked through her, X-raying to find out what her gears and switches looked like, what made her tick.
Later, moviemakers used Sagan’s fictional alien-hunting character—whose name was Ellie Arroway—to imagine SETI’s financial situation correctly. In Contact, the government cuts funding to Arroway’s SETI project, forcing her to shrink her dreams. Then, they terminate the project, and Arroway has to travel the world in search of private donors to fund the project. In one climactic scene, she pitches the importance of SETI to a world-dominating tech company called Hadden Industries. The sharp-suited gatekeepers, CEO S. R. Hadden’s employees, shake their heads. Her proposal sounds like “less like science and more like science fiction.” Arroway explodes all over their sterile corporate boardroom.
“Science fiction,” she repeats. “You’re right, it’s crazy.”
She slams down her poster. “In fact, it’s even worse than that,” she continues. “It’s nuts. You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an airplane. You know, you get people to go in and fly around like birds. It’s ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon? Atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right?