Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  CHAPTER 7

  THE QUEST FOR CONTACT

  Tarter settled onto the speaker’s stool in the Burbank sound studio. “On the surface of an average planet,” she began reading, “circling an ordinary young star, an advanced intelligence searches the skies for evidence of life.”

  Director Geoffrey Haines-Stiles’s voice appeared in her ear, and his arm waved like a windshield wiper across the glass in front of her. He had written the script for the 1988 movie Quest for Contact, a romp through the cosmic haystack with narrator Jill Tarter. And she was butchering it.

  “No, no,” he said. “Like this.” He repeated the sentence back to her, the way she believed she’d just said it.

  She paused and spoke back into the microphone. “On the surface of an average planet, circling a—”

  “Cut.”

  This happened over and over. The director’s intonations sounded the same to her.

  Years later, when Jodie Foster narrated an education video for the SETI Institute, she showed up dressed in sweatpants and covered in baby spit-up, freshly off a plane from France. But Foster breezed into the studio, put on earphones, and read the script once without pause. She shook her hair out and read it again. And then she walked out of the booth and handed the script back.

  “Anybody who knows what they’re doing can get whatever they want from these two readings,” Foster said.

  The two takes sounded the same to Tarter, who can’t tell that a middle C is lower than a middle G, or the difference between mā and mà in Chinese. “I haven’t ever developed a voice,” she says.

  But as the head of NASA’s new SETI program, Tarter would have to. In 1988, Congress authorized the SETI Institute’s Microwave Observing Project (MOP) to receive $6.6 million of NASA’s budget for the 1989 fiscal year. After Congress agrees to dispense money, though, an “appropriations committee” actually decides how to pass that money out. It’s like asking the good-cop parent for an allowance—they say yes, but when bad-cop parent finds out, they may rescind the offer. That year, the appropriations committee decreased MOP’s funding by two thirds, to $2.2 million. It wasn’t enough to build any physical equipment that could actually start the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

  It makes sense that SETI isn’t politically popular. It doesn’t create many jobs; it doesn’t feed starving children. Many people, including politicians, thought of SETI as useless at best and science fiction at worst. Tarter wanted that to change. And to make that happen, she had to go to DC.

  On lobbying trips throughout 1989, Tarter learned well the monochrome hallways and mahogany desks of the nation’s capital. The low-level staffers, often sci-fi fans, helped Tarter find the tools to navigate Capitol Hill. Most key: books that listed committees, other staffers, politicians’ specialties, and room and phone numbers for senators. The staffers slipped Tarter information about secret hot-topic issues and insider knowledge of whose son-in-law worked in which state’s aerospace company.

  Tarter marched from appointment to appointment, riding the waves of support and dismissal. Some senators thought SETI was a fine idea. But others said it was irrelevant. Aliens, if they exist at all, live far away. And SETI can’t ever—in a million years—guarantee a slam-dunk, let alone guarantee one in a senator’s lifespan, let alone in a politically relevant timeframe. SETI may be philosophically appealing, but contemplating philosophy is one thing and investing constituents’ tax dollars in it is quite another.

  As Tarter walked out of each congressional office, feeling cosmically diminished, she often saw a silkscreened Gravity Probe B T-shirt flung over admins’ chairs. It was swag left by Francis Everitt, who had passed through lobbying before her. Scientists had first proposed the Gravity Probe in 1959, to measure and test Einstein’s general relativity. Development had spread and sputtered over decades. The project’s lead scientist, pleading for funding and mercy, was apparently trolling the same offices as she was, a few steps ahead, trying to ensure that his 30-year-old dream didn’t die. And it worked; Gravity Probe B launched in 2004, operated on orbit for 18 months, and delivered its final validations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity in a special issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity Journal in November 2015.

  The planning stages of “big science” projects, which can require teams the size of towns, often span decades. A scientist can spend their whole career developing an instrument that NASA, the National Science Foundation, or the National Institutes of Health cancels at the last minute. For scientists’ own sanity, they have to be sure, upon setting out on their career paths as bright-eyed twenty-somethings, that when they look back on their lives, they will be happy with how they spent their days—even if they spend most of those days on a project that gets canceled. In SETI’s case, even if Congress builds telescopes and those telescopes work perfectly, a null result—no beacon from another civilization—remains a possibility. Tarter has taken joy in the search, maybe even in its drama. And when she began, she and most other scientists, from Drake to Billingham and Oliver, felt they might succeed quickly. But after a few years in the field, she knew the Encyclopedia Galactica might never appear in their telescopes—and that they might not even ever get to build those telescopes and try.

  Congress restored SETI’s funding to $4 million per year late in 1989. Tarter spent so many nights at the DC Holiday Inn that they started to send her coffee mugs each Christmas, and she amassed enough frequent-flyer miles that TWA gave her an around-the-world trip—Hawaii, India, Paris—for free, for both her and Welch.

  It once puzzled me to think that Tarter had gone to grad school in Berkeley in 1968, bought a house there in 1980, and never left. It seemed provincial, like the hippie version of living your whole life in a tiny hometown. Why hadn’t she wanted to live other places, meet different people, and build decks on houses in other states? And then she handed me a printer-paper box containing decades of calendars. A full 30 years of her life look like a constant around-the-world trip. For her, it seems home was the novelty.

  Upon their return to the United States, Tarter leapt back into the new SETI program. “We needed to prove to the astronomical community that we knew what we wanted,” she says. “We put the NASA proposal together over and over and over again. We made pre-project plans, and we made project prototype production plans. We wrote a plan, and then the rules of the game changed, and we’d write another plan. And we’d write another plan.”

  And Barney Oliver was always there to correct their grammar. His mother had been a schoolteacher, and Oliver was known for derailing public speakers with such semantics. As a lecturer stepped merrily along the sentences of their presentation, they inevitably came to a line like “I’m anxious to see the results.” Not a nanosecond later, Oliver’s voice would boom from the back: “Eager,” he would shout.

  The speaker would look around, confused. “You’re eager,” Oliver would clarify in no softer a voice, “not anxious.”

  He took the same linguistic stick to SETI’s pre-project, project, and prototype plan write-ups. “I had a tendency to say which when Barney said I should be saying that,” Tarter says. “I’d have an assignment, I’d write it, and then I’d sit down with Barney and he’d change all my whiches to thats.” They both called these syntactical excursions “which hunts.”

  But one day, Oliver tried to change her anticipates to expects. “You can’t do that,” she told him, shaking her head. “I’m female, and I’m very devious. I’m going to do whatever is necessary, behind the scenes and behind your back, to make sure it happens. So I’m not expecting that outcome, goddammit, I’m anticipating it.” Grammar be damned. They had to get those grants.

  Around this time, in 1987, Tarter also discovered that someone with the same name as her undergraduate lab partner—Leonard Fisk—had become the associate administrator of space sciences at NASA. Tarter ordered an old yearbook to see if this was the same Len. It was. It felt good to have an ally.

  The NASA-funded SETI Institute
team began to work on two separate, complementary searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. In a November 1989 memo, the NASA SETI program manager, Lynn Griffiths, said of this full-on strategy, “If we have to go down, let’s let ’em know they’ve been in a fight. Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead.”

  Tarter would head up a “targeted” search, to deeply scan sun-like star systems within 100 light-years of Earth. By focusing on these near neighbors, the team could look more closely at potential civilizations whose broadcasts might still being strong enough when they reached Earth (just as your favorite station fades when you drive too far, extraterrestrial missives get weaker the farther you are from their origin). Their search, at frequencies from 1 to 3 gigahertz, would cover trillions of times as much ground, data-wise, as all of the previous SETI experiments combined.

  Bruce Murray, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory a few hundred miles south in Pasadena, would lead a “survey” that looked more shallowly over the whole sky, from 1 to 10 gigahertz. This survey aimed to turn up the behemoths of alien broadcasters, whose messages were sent so strongly that we could see them from far, far away.

  The sky survey equipment was being developed at JPL, while Stanford and the SETI Institute were developing the targeted search equipment. Tests happened at NASA’s Deep Space Network Goldstone site. So every Tuesday, Tarter and her colleague Peter Backus boarded a NASA 7 aircraft at Ames. Onto this plane, Tarter loaded three days of work clothes—T-shirts with science jokes or space mission logos, jeans, Asics—and a pile of journal articles to read on the hour-long flight. Once they landed at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, she and Backus leapt from the roll-up staircase and ran to the motor pool to pick up a car for the two-hour drive through the desert to the Goldstone complex at Fort Irwin. There, they dumped their gear in an old converted barracks and headed for the telescope and lab where Peterson’s Left Leg lived. They fiddled around with code and receivers and reseated circuit boards, preparing the equipment that would prove they could actually do what their years of drawn-up plans proposed. Once, they discovered a mouse harvesting cable insulation for its nest. After that, the team chipped in to help the station operators house and feed an unofficial—and undisclosed—cat.

  Fifty-six hours later, on Thursday afternoon, Tarter and Backus navigated the desert back to Edwards, hopped back aboard the plane, put their figurative seat backs and tray tables in the upright and locked positions, and curled against the windows to sleep for an hour. It was like being the child of divorced parents: always schlepping between home bases, beset by two sets of expectations, wondering occasionally whether it wouldn’t be better to just be a shopkeeper.

  One day, Tarter, Backus, and the JPL team finally got the spectrometer and the rest of Peterson’s Left Leg working. It could scan the sky for radio signals, split them up into tiny frequency bands, and show how they changed over time—or so the team hoped. To demonstrate it, they used their usual strategy: test the instrument’s ability to find intelligent extraterrestrials by seeing if it could detect intelligent human technology. This time, a spacecraft.

  The Pioneer 10 probe was, at the time, the farthest-away hunk of human-made metal. It had traveled billions of miles from Earth, beginning in 1972, and revealed the details of our own solar system for the first time as it flew by planets no other human-made object had ever been close to. Jupiter had a stormy blemish, Pioneer’s images showed; Saturn’s rings were full of holes; Neptune was nothing but blue. And then Pioneer continued onward, into the great black beyond us. Its far-off signal was weak. The SETI equipment would only be able to detect the spacecraft if everything functioned perfectly.

  On the day of the demo, Oliver arrived just before their first attempt to find Pioneer. Prepared for the worst, he stood at the periphery of the group, chewing on his glasses. He clenched his jaw, his teeth grinding against his glasses. All of the scientists watched him and the screens, waiting. They could feel each other breathing.

  And then, on the screen, a little white diagonal line sliced across the static. The white, standing out against the gray static, meant the signal was louder than the random noise around it. Its shape—a diagonal line—is just a reflection of the Earth’s rotation and of how the software displays data. The vertical axis shows the progression of time; the horizontal axis shows the radio waves’ frequencies. So a white pixel halfway across the screen and midway down says to scientists that something emitted a lot of radio waves in the middle of the frequency band, in the middle of the observation. A white line down the screen means something sent out radio waves at one frequency for the whole time; a white line across the screen means something sent a signal that came at all frequencies at just one moment in time.

  If the detector were right next to Pioneer, that former plot represents what it would see from the spacecraft: A white up-and-down slash—a frequency-specific “drone” that is continuous. But Earth’s rotation skews the frequencies that arrive on Earth from space. So even though Pioneer sends radio waves at just one frequency, it looks, from Earth, like that frequency shifts a little bit every second. Pioneer’s valiant pings—and the pings and blasts of anything outside our atmosphere, be they supernovae, satellites, or civilizations—show up as narrow arcs or wide tracks down and across the screen.

  That’s all a “signal” of any kind is: A white slash across a grayscale background. That was Pioneer. And that is how a communication from extraterrestrials—one of the most profound discoveries in human history—would look. Very simple, in other words. If there is a message encoded in the signal, it will be spread across many frequency channels and thus much harder to find, or perhaps embedded in the way the signal’s waves are oriented. Scientists might spend years, or whole careers, extracting the information required to turn that slash into something sensible, if it came from actual aliens.

  Astronomers have long sought to create messages that extraterrestrials could decode—simple, scientific visuals like those in the radio communique Frank Drake and his colleagues sent from the Arecibo telescope in 1974. Embedded in a radar broadcast was a counting lesson in the language of octal, symbolizing the numbers 1 to 10. Following that, using the same symbols, Drake placed the atomic numbers of the elements that make up the components DNA; below that and using those symbols, he broadcasted the chemical formulas for the more complex sugars and bases that make up the nucleotides in DNA; below that and using those symbols, Drake finally got to the meat of the matter: the number of nucleotides DNA has and a double helix that was almost comical in its old video gaminess. A human figure from the same pixelated video game followed, as did a schematic of our solar system and a representation of the radio telescope itself, complete with a boast about its diameter.

  The message attempts to teach its recipients how to read it. But, as the SETI Institute’s former director of interstellar message composition, Douglas Vakoch, often says, these beings might not have symbols in their culture—abstractions, like pixelated shapes, that stand for something concrete, like numbers. Hell, they might not have numbers. Double hell, they might not have eyes. Or any of our other senses.

  Those tasked with composing interstellar messages—or at least thinking about composing them—like to cite philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” whose central thesis is “You will never know.” You can imagine what using echolocation feels like, think about hanging upside-down all day, but even if you mastered those feats, they are just bat behaviors. You can never really—really—understand a bat’s experience of the world. And bats, while not strictly “like us,” at least evolved on our planet. Extraterrestrials could be more different from us than the very strangest organism on Earth.

  But, back at Goldstone, the team knew what the white-slash signal meant, because organisms very much like them—NASA engineers—had made it. It communicated, simply, “I’m here; you can see me.” And they could. The scheme and the instruments had worked.

  “It’s a
n exciting time for us,” Tarter told the New York Times. And speaking about the final, full project, which they hoped to launch in 1992, Backus told the same reporter, “In the first minute, we’ll accomplish more than all the other projects combined.”

  From then on, the SETI team hunted down Pioneer 10 every morning before starting work, as a test. If they could find humans, the thinking went, they might be able to find Others.

  But next, they had to test their alien-hunting equipment on the actual telescopes where they would actually be doing the search. So Tarter, Backus, and Larry Webster, the SETI program manager at Ames, trudged through the San Francisco airport. The big steel suitcases full of SETI instruments strained their elbows and made their torsos list to one side. They were glad to check them and send them off with a big SYD sticker on them.

  Their destination: Tidbinbilla, 205 miles from Sydney, a town that contains nothing much except the Canberra telescopes, which NASA built as part of its Deep Space Communications Network. The area lies in the “Australian Alps” (according to Australians) and is home to a nature preserve with animals Westerners consider exotic, like wallabies and kangaroos, the white-tailed deer of the Outback. Cows often meander around the telescopes, not caring at all whether outer-space signals slam into the dish above them.

  Once they arrived in the telescope’s control room, Tarter and Backus set their suitcase SETI equipment up on the desk. They felt smug and self-satisfied. Look at us! Such small equipment to do humanity’s biggest project!

  The hubris lasted only as long as it took to press the power button. Circuits sparked. Something popped. Smoke appeared.

  They had forgotten what everyone who travels internationally with a hair dryer knows: The wall outlet dispensed 50 cycles per second/230 volts, not the 60/110 of the United States. They should have thrown the computer’s trip-abroad toggle, a switch that worked as an adapter. But in their excitement and REM-bereft state, they had neglected that simple switch.