by Sarah Scoles
“Look, all I’m asking is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history . . . of history.”
It’s a speech not unlike those Tarter would later have to give to the Silicon Valley tycoons, when the government funding agencies terminated her own project. She, like Arroway, would have to travel—as she still does today—fundraising for her nutty-sounding scientific idea. But when the book Contact came out, SETI was still looking up. They’d just gotten their project reinstated by the government, after all.
“C’mon, Carl,” Tarter once said to Sagan, who’d helped with the movie script. “You’re going on about this, but we’re fat, dumb, and happy. We’re back within the fold at NASA. This time there’s too much momentum; this time it’s going to happen. I guess it’s just more dramatic this way, huh?”
But, as they soon found out, Sagan was “maddeningly good” at looking inside things—not just people but also organizations and governments—seeing how they worked, and carrying what-ifs to their logical conclusions.
Although SETI was safe, for the moment, the team still needed to be frugal—to use the small sum they had, while they still had it, as efficiently as possible.
“There has to be a way to stretch our funding and have room to build some real instruments,” Billingham said.
Billingham and Barney Oliver—the Hewlett-Packard vice president who’d been involved with SETI since his meeting with Drake in Green Bank—began business talks, and Oliver agreed (tautologically) to fund a study about funding. He could bring in outside help, as his administrative assistant, Elyse Murray, happened to be dating (and later would marry) a man named Tom Pierson. Unlike the SETI team, who learned business practices ad hoc, Pierson had an actual business degree and fiduciary credentials. Through Murray, Oliver contracted Pierson to draw up a set of business models.
“Here’s the money we have,” Oliver told Pierson. “Here are its constraints. How can we do more with the little we’ve got?”
Pierson came back a few weeks later, after studying the situation, and told them one easy solution existed: create a new organization, just for SETI. All members of the SETI team were doing their work at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The center paid for their office space, the light bulbs, the pencils. But only two of the SETI scientists were actual Ames employees. Everyone else, including Tarter, actually worked for one of the local universities, to which they had to pay part of their grant money, and just kept offices at Ames. “Indirect costs,” schools call this. Better known as “overhead,” these charges added 80, 90, and sometimes 100 percent or more to the grant money the project required, and compensated the university for the infrastructure they provided to support the research. But that’s not always where the money went. And the SETI researchers believed their funds could be better spent. Pierson suggested the SETI scientists form their own institution—the SETI Institute, a nonprofit, no boats. Their institution’s overhead could reflect the actual cost of doing business, buying pencils, and keeping the lights on.
“Why don’t you take a crack at writing the organization’s charter?” Billingham asked Tarter.
She knew nothing about writing charters, but she generally believed she could do anything whether she knew how or not, whether that something was taking a radio apart or writing a grant. (This is a PhD phenomenon—because an academic knows everything about one thing, they tend to believe they are or could be expert in basically anything else.) So she sat down and started typing. “I wrote it as broadly as I could,” she says. “We would be a research support home for scientists who wanted to tackle research having to anything to do with any factors of the Drake equation.” Recall that the Drake equation estimates how many communicative, technological civilizations should exist in our galaxy, based on how often stars form, how often they form planets, how often those planets are habitable, how often those planets are inhabited, how often the inhabitants get smart, how often they decide they want to have interstellar conversations, and how long they survive as a technological civilization (whew). So SETI Institute scientists could study stars, planets, geology, biology, anthropology—anything, really, as long as they could connect it to a term in the equation.
That charter—which led to the current mission statement, “to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to apply the knowledge gained to inspire and guide present and future generations”—became the founding document of the SETI Institute, which still exists today and at which Tarter worked until her retirement in 2012. Although the scientists originally conceived the organization to save NASA money, its incorporation also allowed SETI as a science to survive the opposition that would come later. It separated them from the government—so they could fundraise and accept donations, which governmental research organizations can’t—but allowed them to use federal funds, too, by applying for NASA research grants in subjects that were not explicitly related to SETI. As a separate entity, they could seek private money and do risky projects NASA and the National Science Foundation didn’t approve of but which turned the heads of the public and a few key philanthropists.
“Did you feel like you were doing something important then?” I once asked her. “Did you have a sense it would save SETI?”
Tarter shook her head and repeated “No” a few times. “It was just the right thing to do at that moment to move forward, and that’s generally what we did,” she said. “We expected that a year or two in the future, we would have to invent a new right thing.”
She paused, looking over at my notes. “I guess I had no vision,” she said. “Period. I had no vision.”
Pierson drove the SETI Institute’s founding documents—Tarter’s charter—to Sacramento, the state’s capital, on November 20, 1984, in his old Honda. He worried the whole way. Could he find the right offices in the bureaucratic maze? Had they filled out all the right forms? Where would he type alterations if he needed to? But the SETI Institute was successfully founded at 2:00 P.M. that same day. Tarter was the first employee.
Tarter submitted the SETI Institute’s first research proposal just in time for NASA’s December 1984 deadline. The document created a unified team out of all the people who had been helping with SETI at Ames, under one institutional umbrella. A few months later, NASA gave the SETI Institute good news: the grant had been successful, and they could start work in February 1985. At a meeting later in Green Bank, a number of outside scientists opined about how only tenured professors who’d spent their earlier careers studying other topics should do SETI, rather than having a dedicated team at various career stages—that was the way to keep it safe and taken seriously. “Trying to raise funds for people to do this as a vocation as opposed to an avocation was not realistic,” Tarter says, recalling their sentiment. And she worried for a while that she’d helped take her field on the wrong path, but later thought better of it and carried on.
And so never having been a team member, Tarter was suddenly a team leader: the head of the first SETI Institute project, which was known as Peterson’s Left Leg.
Working above people is not necessarily her strongest suit. Although Tarter is generous and has a soft side, that side is sometimes hidden beneath something harder. Tarter is inspirational, says Gerry Harp, who took over as director of the Center for SETI Research when Tarter retired. But in day-to-day matters, her persona can grate. “She is not intentionally abrasive but she is just so focused on what we are doing and the SETI search that she isn’t much of a touchy-feely kind of boss,” he says.
But leading the charge, Tarter felt hopeful, like maybe SETI could finally have a firm ground to stand on, with its single limb.
Peterson’s Left Leg was the pet name for the old multichannel spectrum analyzer (MCSA), the prototype SETI instrument that split the radio signal into stations. But to find out what those cosmic rad
io stations were playing, the scientists needed to do a complex transformation of the radio waves. Called a fast Fourier transform (FFT), the operation changes data from a time series into a frequency series—in other words, it takes the signals that come in over a range of times and adds together all the signals with a frequency of 1,000 hertz, 1,001 hertz, and so on. It’s kind of like making a bar graph that shows how much power is coming in at each frequency. On their own, Tarter’s team had developed a system that could flip-flop 72,000 1-hertz-wide channels. But, as always, they wanted more. However, a chip did not yet exist that could do fast FFTs on big datasets. “Well, we’ll just make one ourselves,” Tarter said. Or, rather, they would ask engineers at Stanford to make one for them.
She knew that Stanford’s Allen Peterson had Department of Defense money, and some of his graduate students, under astronomer Ivan Linscott, had been tooling around with FFT circuits. The engineers claimed they could create a chip for SETI that could process 10 million channels at once. This innovation had implications for industries like medical imaging (and, as always, defense), and so Linscott and graduate student Jay Duluk created a company called Silicon Engines to commercialize the technology, and electrical engineer and computer scientist Dave Messerschmitt helped oversee the collaboration. Despite their Silicon Valley roots, they ran into the same problems as most technological companies. The chip took longer than expected, and it went over budget. “Wringing of hands and clenching of teeth at NASA headquarters about not meeting milestones,” Tarter says of the time, laughing.
NASA is obsessed with milestones, conceiving of deadlines as validations of moral character, despite hardly ever launching a mission on time or on budget. But Silicon Engines did eventually produce the chip, which measured 8 × 8 millimeters. But it housed 34,000 transistors and could do 80 million operations every second. That was revolutionary in 1987 (today, laptops can do billions).
“We’re building a new machine to do some serious mining,” Linscott told the Stanford Daily in a press release at the time. “It’s virgin ground, and who knows what we’ll find, but I think we have a pretty good chance of detecting extraterrestrial signals.”
(Optimism, and probably stubbornness, kind of by definition, walk hand-in-hand with SETI. As Bill Borucki said of Tarter, “Someone who keeps going even though things look very bleak sometimes: that’s what you need.”)
When they did actually reach their milestone, Lynn Griffiths, the NASA headquarters program officer for SETI, called a meeting to say there were no hard feelings about how they hadn’t done it on time. “She came out from headquarters intending to smooth things over and say, ‘Atta boy,’” says Tarter. “She even had a rock in her purse on which she’d written something to commemorate their achievement, their milestone.”
But in true Silicon-Valley spirit, Linscott and Duluk took this milestone meeting to be a product release, and wrote a press release to accompany it, not mentioning NASA or the SETI Institute. The recriminations that followed, and further missed milestones, tore the start-up apart, with the partners bickering about who would buy out whom. The tattered remnants of Silicon Engines manufactured the crucial chips for the SETI Institute and then dissolved completely.
It was a work hard, play hard time in Tarter’s life. After each summer American Astronomical Society meeting in this era, Tarter, Welch, and a few scientific friends would charter a boat in the British Virgin Islands, where they would sail for a week. They docked only to eat dinners, and sometimes not even then. On one trip in 1988, astronomer Margaret Burbidge joined. She was an astronomy pioneer before Tarter was conceived—the director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the first woman president of the American Astronomical Society, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She had gained access to California’s Mount Wilson Observatory in 1955, when it was still reserved for men, by working as her husband’s night assistant. In so doing, she opened the mountaintops to all women.
Tarter often sat on the edge of their boat during the day, embroidering their course onto a touristy scarf on which a map of the British Virgin Islands had been printed. As she stitched the boat’s path she joked with Burbidge, one of her personal heroes. They sailed for only a few hours every afternoon, and then searched for fresh fish. And as the sun dimmed, the rum rose. They jumped into debates about topics like the origin of Shakespeare’s plays and deep observations of pelican behavior.
In pictures from the trip, the water seems to emit its own blue light, rendering the boat’s passengers otherworldly in their happiness. They are young. They are a little drunk. They are standing on the hull of a boat. They imbibe and argue long into every night, with Earth’s particular view of the sky above, the oscillation of its oceans below. They do not care, at this moment, that one day they will grow old, that these sailing trips will end and become something they only look back on. They seem to live just in this one moment of Earth’s history, occupying this particular layer of the rock record and not thinking about the ones below, or the ones that will one day press down from above.
Tarter once said that she has mostly lived her life thinking that she will be immortal, but the specifics of aging do worry her. Whenever she forgets where her keys are, she wonders if it’s a normal lapse or the beginning of something sinister. Every time she forgets a name, she mutters, “Damn anomia,” and then, as a directive, “Never get old.” One of her favorite sculptures is Rodin’s She Who Was the Helmet-Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife.
“This old, old, old woman,” she says, “but you can still see that she was once quite beautiful.”
By the time her mother was doing SETI science under the SETI Institute, Shana was in college at Cornell, her mother’s alma mater, with a year abroad in Durham. She brought a plastic pink palm tree with her, to remind her of California and the Pacific during Ithaca’s long winters and Britain’s rainy springs. During the summers before and after her academic year, she worked in remote southwest Scotland, excavating the first Christian church there. She and her pretty, long-haired boyfriend, Martin, lived in an old, damp cottage. There was no plumbing, and electricity only if they put coins into a box outside. The couple dug for evidence of ancient intelligent humans during the day and frequented the local pub in the evenings, where they also paid in coins for weekly showers. Tarter and Welch came to visit both summers, scooping Shana and Martin up in their rented Saab and whirling them around the island.
When Shana returned to Ithaca and graduated from college, she spun a cartwheel, just like her earliest (and Tarter’s last) school days. Tarter’s mother, Betty, sat in the audience, happy that at least one of her descendants would consent to a ceremony. “I never went to any of my graduations,” Tarter says. “I was always on to something else.”
At graduation the whole family coexisted for a few days in and around Shana’s tiny house in Varna, just northwest of Ithaca, to celebrate the occasion. Welch and Bruce, perhaps in an effort to deal with each other, were on a search for alcohol. No one would sell them any, since it was Sunday, and that was the law. Eventually, Shana reached under her kitchen counter and pulled out a bottle of tequila, its worm tossed by the currents in the viscous liquid, like an alien in a jar of mercury.
Bruce took it from her and poured them all a shot.
To growing up, to intelligent lives.
But the circle of life happens to everyone. One day in 1988, while Tarter was away using a telescope in Nançay, France, the phone rang in her hotel room. Welch’s mother had died in her sleep.
Tarter had never been to her husband’s hometown, but along with all Welch’s children they both traveled to Westfield, New York, to commemorate Ruth Welch’s 94 years on this planet. Tarter had never met the other celebrants, except for Welch’s sister Judy, but from the long nights she’d spent drinking scotch liqueur with Ruth, she knew that the ceremony would have pleased the rule-breaking operatic star.
Jack Welch’s family is, in fact, the Welch family of the grape juice. The
company began with his great-grandfather, a dentist and also a Methodist. Methodists in that era did not believe in wine, or at least didn’t believe in drinking it, so they used grape juice for communion. But unpasteurized juice doesn’t stay potable for long. One day just after the Civil War, the dentist read a paper by a man named Louis Pasteur. The elder Welch began experimenting with Pasteur’s germ-killing methods, boiling grape juice at home and bringing it to church to share. Soon, Welch’s Grape Juice became the second pasteurized product (following condensed milk) to appear commercially.
Welch’s father, however, wanted nothing to do with this juice or the family business. Instead, he took over a flexible coupling company in town and then became a deputy sheriff during Prohibition—even though (or perhaps because) Canadian bootleggers used the Welch’s Grape Juice lighthouse to get across Lake Erie. Someone later shot him in the ass while he was on duty, but he survived.
Nonetheless, because of this beverage legacy, Tarter and Welch inherited a large sum of money when Ruth died. They decided to use it to buy a house at Donner Lake. Together, they have used some of their extra money—like from Welch’s consulting work on the Allen Telescope Array and as part of Tarter’s role as a trustee—to help fund SETI, donating around $300,000 to the institute.
And the Donner house, which they still own, is now surrounded by the newly built mansions of retired Silicon Valley millionaires (and perhaps billionaires), much fancier than their own building. In 2015, a 130-mph windstorm snapped the top off the lodgepole pine that rises through their house’s three stories of decks. With the remaining trunk, Tarter plans to create a “Tarter-Welch totem.” A man skilled with a chainsaw will fly in from Boulder to sculpt different animals on each level—bear, osprey, owl (the familial icons for Welch and Tarter), and other local fauna—stacked in vertical layers like the fossils.