by Sarah Scoles
Webster tightened his facial muscles. He set his palms against the desk surface for a second. Then, silent, he lifted the case by its handle and carried it back to his hotel room like the deadweight it now was.
The next day, an Australian technician discovered that a capacitor had blown up early in the electrical path, and the deadly voltage never made it past that capacitor and into the rest of the electronics.
All they had to do was swap in a new capacitor and move on. Which they did, to the Parkes telescope. Miles and miles and miles they drove, down a narrow road with only Outback around them. Up ahead, though, Tarter could see something in the road. As they got closer, it resolved into branches—an outsized Australian tumbleweed, taller than the car. The driver stopped, and Backus ran out and pushed it out of the way, like a boulder.
Although the SETI program made sojourns abroad and moved toward maturity, members of the US House continued to speak out against MOP. They compared SETI scientists to the UFO enthusiasts and the unfortunates who believed their eggs had been harvested by aliens. In one case, a congressman from Tennessee put on a pig’s nose and talked about a pork-barrel project—referring to NASA generally, SETI specifically. In June 1990, Ronald Machtley of Rhode Island and Silvio Conte of Massachusetts took official action, introducing a motion to cancel all SETI programs the next fiscal year. Conte asked the somewhat chilling question, “Can we afford curiosity?”
Senator Barbara Mikulski, the appropriation committee’s chairperson, believed they could. “The committee reaffirms its support,” she said, “of the basic scientific merit of this experiment.”
But in May 1991, Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada aimed to stop SETI in the 1992 fiscal year, with an amendment to cut it from the authorization bill. He called it “the $14.5 million Martian hunt.” In a May 1991 press release, he elaborated: “At a time when our country faces massive budget deficits, urgent health care needs, and inadequate educational funding, federal government has no business financing something as superfluous as this.” Funding for fiscal year 1992 was restored in a joint conference committee, but when Congress began to consider the ’93 budget, the wrangling started all over again.
Tarter braced herself for another game-over.
But a senator from Utah—a Mormon named Jake Garn—was now on their side. Mormons—members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—believe that if they behave themselves in “this life,” they will be given a celestial reward in “the next life”: each faithful congregant will inherit their own planet. They will be the gods of this planet, which will have its own population. Mormons have long believed in an abundance of exoplanets, populated by smart, religious beings. “As man is, God once was,” the doctrine goes. “As God is, man may yet become.”
Mormons would be happy to get in touch with some of those other worlds, and prove themselves right. Senator Garn served as ranking minority member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, and they formed a formidable partnership to obstruct Bryan.
A Mormon-SETI alliance, or any collaboration between those who require evidence and those who don’t, seems strange. But on the door to Tarter’s current office hangs an inspirational decoration that Garn might have liked. A set of faux-aged boards, strung together with rope, displays the words
No whining
Be happy
Do your own thing
Enjoy life
Believe
Dream
Big
One difference, though: Next to Believe, however, Tarter has written “(but verify!)” in black Sharpie.
In April 1992, Congressman John Duncan of Tennessee introduced an amendment to strike down SETI’s 1993 plans. He had read an AP article about “setting up some SETI equipment in the Mojave desert to look for space aliens,” and he wasn’t happy. The onslaught continued: In June, Richard Bryan brought an amendment to the authorization committee to terminate the SETI project. He wrote:
There are those in this town who say that $13 million is not a lot of money, but that shows how out of touch the process is. The $13.5 million that we save under this amendment is the equivalent of providing 10,135 students with full-tuition scholarships to University of Nevada-Las Vegas, buying 115 new homes in Las Vegas, or providing day care for 3750 toddlers.
In an ideal world with unlimited resources, this program might be worth considering. I am a strong supporter of NASA and scientific research. However . . . we cannot afford a program as remote and uncertain as this.
The Joint House/Senate Conference Committee would decide who was right.
That committee, which included Mikulski and Garn, met for what seemed like eons. Finally, Mikulski’s staff director for the appropriations subcommittee, Kevin Kelly, emerged with the list of approved projects. Everyone stood around like high school theater kids waiting for the cast list to be posted. People mobbed Kelly, as he stood on a dais to pin a paper bulletin above the bustle. And over the ocean of concerned citizens, he hooked Tarter’s eye. “Thirteen point seven million,” he mouthed, “with language.”
This meant that not only did they get to keep searching, but their money couldn’t be taken away and used on something else, like university donors can specify that their donations can only be used to plant new grass. The churning crowd blurred into a background. “With language,” Tarter mouthed to herself, a verbal obfuscation that she had never been more grateful to hear.
The appropriations committee told NASA to remove the SETI Project from the Life Sciences Directorate and to reconstitute it within the Space Sciences Directorate. And then to rename it—change MOP to . . . something that sounded even less like aliens than “MOP.” So they pulled out their mirrors and blew some smoke: MOP became the even more innocuous High-Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS), aliens hiding behind the acronym.
“He Really Means SETI,” the team wryly joked about the acronym’s origin. Or, depending on Tarter’s mood, “Her Royal Majesty’s SETI.”
MOP/HRMS was set to begin soon after that. They had made their equipment mobile: it would all live in a tractor trailer. They planned to haul that portable house, and the signal-detection technology it contained, to the telescopes they would use. They had customized the structure so that a military C-141 plane could airlift it from site to site, starting with the initial observations in Arecibo.
As the HRMS team prepared to actually start searching, the LA Times asked Tarter if she thought they would find anything. She spoke about the SETI Institute’s technical prowess, highlighting hertzes and algorithms.
“I expect to be successful at that search,” Tarter told the reporter. “Whether that is sufficient to produce a signal, that is another question. I think anybody who is working on this project has a very good concept of just how enormous, how vast, this search that we’re starting really is. We hope to be successful in our lifetimes but understand that maybe it’s going to be our children that succeed in detecting the signal.”
Many years later, while she and I sat on the floor of the SETI Institute going through decades of archival files, she added a generation to that same sentiment. “I can’t guarantee that I’ll be around for the end of SETI—only our grandchildren may be,” she said. “But I can tell you that being around for the start has been fun and educational in ways I could never have predicted.”
When she did that LA Times interview, the SETI team had been taxiing on the runway for more than a decade. They were finally ready for their flight to begin. To actually do SETI. They planned the HRMS opening ceremonies for Columbus Day, 1992—the 500th anniversary of that man’s “discovery” of North America. The choice of date feels conspicuous and self-aware: made for press coverage. It would have been more prudent to keep the project’s launch private and low-key, if they wanted to evade public and political ridicule. But Tarter objected. She refused to be pushed into a closet just because people disapproved.
“Hell, everything else at NASA has a celebration,” she said. “We should have a launch party.�
�� Higher-ups like exobiology program manager John Rummel—who, along with Lynn Harper, had helped her run interference with NASA headquarters—advised her to keep it under wraps and under the radar.
“I didn’t listen,” she says.
On Columbus Day Eve, 1992, Tarter paced the Arecibo Observatory control room, making sure every winding blue cable was in place, every signal pathway was sound, and every cryogenic dewar did its job. She looked out the panoramic window into the ancient sinkhole below. The giant radio dish—a mirror of mesh 1,000 feet across—filled the space perfectly. Engineers had picked the telescope’s location by spreading out a topographic map of Puerto Rico and sliding a quarter around to see which valley could hold it. The quarter nestled precisely within a sinkhole 10 miles from the town of Arecibo. Three concrete pillars, which summer interns (and Tarter) occasionally climb to impress each other, rise from the edges of the basin, which the dish fills almost completely. Steel cables as thick as your forearm reach from the pillars toward the middle of the dish (although 500 feet above it). They hold aloft the radio-wave detectors and the electronics that make this huge contraption more than just a big bowl of chicken wire.
The Columbus Day Eve sun began to set, and the sky streaked the colors of an airbrushed ’80s T-shirt. Maybe somewhere else, on some other planet, some other sky was streaked the same colors. Maybe someone was there to watch. These someones wouldn’t know what the ’80s or T-shirts were, but they would know starsets.
Tarter turned from the window and prepared to test the equipment with Backus.
“Ready?” he asked.
She nodded.
They pointed the telescope toward Pioneer 10, testing just like always. It showed up, a slash on the screen, just like always. Then, they turned toward a few stars—more tests. The computers they had built talked back to them, delivering good and unexpected news: they had found an interesting signal, interesting enough to “send a shiver of excitement through everyone in the control room,” Backus told the New York Times. “Then it struck me,” Backus continued. “Maybe what we were seeing on the screen is exactly what we are looking for. Sometime in the next couple of weeks we might do it for real. Who knows?” The signal turned out to be from a physical, not a biological, source
Tarter stayed in the control room until 3 A.M. When she walked back to her two-room hut, with its floral-upholstered couch and bamboo table, the chirping of the jungle frogs was deafening. But the natural noise was a welcome change, taking her mind for a moment off the nervous hum of electronics.
A few hours later Tarter awoke and got dressed for the press. It was the day Her Majesty’s Royal SETI began. She prepared to keep the Cyclops Report’s promise.
Outside the control room, where coder Jane Jordan’s software prepared to search for alien signals, a crowd gathered, including Shana and her brand-new husband, who also took their honeymoon photos on the telescope’s catwalk during the same trip.
Billingham stepped before the crowd to give an opening speech. He had spent even longer than Tarter waiting for this moment. “This is the beginning of the next age of discovery,” he said. “We sail into the future, just as Columbus did on this day five hundred years ago. We accept the challenge of searching for a new world.”
The audience, including the scientists who had worked for more than a decade to make sure someone like Billingham could make a speech something like this, smiled taut smiles and looked out toward the radio dish.
“If you’re going to do this,” Oliver had long ago told Tarter, setting a gold statue of Sisyphus and his boulder on her desk, “you’re going to need this. Because you’re going to roll an awful lot of rocks up an awful lot of hills, and they’re all going to come tumbling down. And you’re going to have to do it again. That’s just the price of trying to do something new.”
Tarter thought maybe the boulder had finally crested—today, Columbus Day, 1992. She pressed the buttons that told the telescope to start observing. “We begin the search,” she declared. Simultaneously, Sam Gulkis did the same at the Goldstone telescope in California, starting the survey portion of the search.
The Arecibo Radio Telescope pointed at the star GL615.1A, 63 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. GL615.1A is like our sun but smaller and cooler. God, this is a really amazing day for humans, Tarter thought. Here we are launching this exploration simply because we’re curious. That’s a big milestone for humanity. We’re doing this.
A New York Times reporter covering the event waxed philosophical, too, about the telescope itself: “There was speculation as to what future archeologists might surmise if they happened on the ruins of these stone pillars, aluminum panels and huge steel cables and girders. Here a society with scientist-priests communicated with their gods in the heavens? Some Columbuses sought the cosmic Indies, never found? Or this was the place where humans listened in the jungle stillness and for the first time heard that they are not alone in the universe?”
Senator Bryan, perhaps via this very New York Times piece (newspapers were always causing trouble for SETI), caught wind of the celebration. He had wanted SETI gone, and here SETI was, starting up in earnest. At a hearing for fiscal year 1994, Bryan’s words sent a shiver through Tarter when she watched on C-SPAN: “Mr. Goldin,” Bryan said to Daniel Goldin, the head of NASA, “something in your budget doesn’t pass the smell test.”
“He was talking about SETI,” Tarter says.
Goldin says he was caught off-guard by the congressional opposition, in general, to SETI. As a new administrator, he knew the research program existed, but he didn’t know much about its specifics. He says he wished someone had warned him about what he was walking into. “I was so frustrated that I had only a layman’s understanding of the program,” he says, “and I’m a detail person, and I always do homework before I do anything, and especially before hearings.”
During that hearing, Tarter leaned toward the television, like it was a black box that could tell her future. Having knocked on as many White-House doors as she could, all she could do was wait for the final hearing, where people she didn’t know would decide whether her career lived or died.
“It’s hard to elevate the consciousness of Congressmen from mundane to heavenly matters,” Barney Oliver once said in an interview with the Times.
In September 1993, Congress met to talk about science and technology projects. To build solid rocket motors or to not build solid rocket motors? To build the superconducting supercollider (yes, a real thing) or to not build the superconducting supercollider? They had been going at it for days, slashing this and cutting that. Tarter watched C-SPAN for hours, thinking how much more boring it must be in that room. She switched off the television and went to pack her suitcase. She was scheduled to give a talk in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of the Wernher Von Braun Lecture Series at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The whole night—meant for the public—was about exploration and the human spirit. Tarter would speak about SETI, of course, and folk musician John Denver would serenade the audience with world-uniting songs.
John Denver was a pilot, like Tarter. He loved to look down on Earth from a height where the horizon stretched long and curved, and countries were just pieces of connected land. His 1986 album was, in fact, titled One World. “My music and all my work stem from the conviction that people everywhere are intrinsically the same,” he said in the folio John Denver: A Legacy of Song. “When I write a song, I want to take the personal experience or observation that inspired it and express it in as universal a way as possible. I’m a global citizen.”
It’s a hippie-era perspective, but one that space enthusiasts like Tarter also often embrace. That’s part of why Denver was such a NASA groupie. And for his efforts in sparking interest in space projects, Denver was awarded a NASA Public Service Medal in 1985. After the Challenger disaster in 1988, in which schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and six others died in a fiery explosion, he even dedicated the song “Flying for Me” to all astronauts, everywhere, a
lways.
And as much as Denver liked NASA, Tarter liked Denver. “This cements me as an old hippie,” she laughs, a statement she often makes about herself. “Like John, I’m a one-Earth protagonist.”
She stood backstage as Denver performed “White Horses,” swaying and watching the crowd do the same. They were all there together, in this moment in the dark in Huntsville, thinking about the long future, the big space, and their place in it all. It was kind of beautiful.
But at the same time, Congress sat behind long desks discussing whether to interrupt that line of questioning. “It was all overwhelming,” she says in 2015, looking toward the wall of her Berkeley home, where the plaque commemorating the Von Braun lecture hangs. “I was overwhelmed by the star power on the stage and the DC shenanigans threatening to terminate my world.”
Just before she was to succeed Denver on the stage, a staffer whispered in her ear: Senator Bryan had put in an eleventh-hour proposal to cancel the SETI program. Congress would vote in the morning. She calls Denver’s performance a Rocky Mountain high. This whispered news, though, she calls a Death Valley low. She debated whether she should give her lecture as planned or instead deliver an impassioned plea to bombard senators with letters of SETI support.
“It wouldn’t have done any good,” she says.
Tarter usually accepts the boulders and the grades up which they must be shoved. But she for once accepted that another person’s will could defeat her own.
The next morning, before the debate began, she left on a jet plane back to California. The congressional conversation took place while she was in the air. Even cruising altitude was not quite high enough to give perspective. While she looked down at the clouds and flipped through Skymall, her father’s voice came into her head. “I don’t see why you couldn’t do anything, if you work hard enough.”