by Sarah Scoles
Maybe he had been wrong.
She ran to a phone as soon as the plane landed. “Are we okay?” she asked.
“No,” a colleague said. “It’s done.”
Bryan had won. His press release, typed onto stationery mocked up to look like the SETI Institute’s letterhead, was headlined SENATOR BRYAN ENDS THE GREAT MARTIAN CHASE. “As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow,” the release continued. “Not a single Martian has said ‘take me to your leader,’ and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval. It may be funny to some, except the punchline includes a $12.3 million price tag to the taxpayer.”
“Don’t leave me alone with any sharp objects,” Tarter said to Welch when she arrived home.
Just a year earlier, at the HRMS launch, she had been so hopeful, had thought such grand thoughts, had compared her team to Columbus, for God’s sake. And now the dream was dead. She couldn’t even push a boulder if she’d tried. All the boulders had, in fact, been summarily carted away.
To the world, though, she showed a stoic face. “This is an enormous setback,” she said to the New York Times. “NASA has spent 20 years and more than $50 million to develop sophisticated digital receivers capable of listening to tens of millions of frequencies at a time. Now, with the observations getting under way, the project is killed.”
Barney Oliver was less circumspect when he wrote for the science newsletter Signals:
Millions of transistors, memory cells, and other high-tech products of our ingenuity have been woven into a brain whose sole aim in life is to detect and verify the origin of tiny signals—less energetic than the smallest atomic particle—that have crossed the light years we cannot. Such signals will tell us that we are not alone, that the astonishing process that has produced us out of the fiery furnace of the Big Bang has also occurred elsewhere. Lo, from that single fact, all our philosophy would be enriched. To save the American Taxpayer about eight cents per year, we are to be denied the chance to explore the universe and the sentient life forms that fill it.
It was the kind of oratory Tarter would later give. But that October she could only mope and avoid her knife block.
The next day, though, a call came from the targeted-search project scientist John Dreher, who had joined the team in 1989 after leaving a physics position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You know,” he said, “if what we were doing yesterday made sense, it’s still going to make sense on Monday. We just have to find some other way.”
CHAPTER 8
THE LAST CHAPTER
The next Monday, Tom Pierson called everyone to the SETI Institute’s boardroom, where he had piled fundraising books in the middle of the table.
“Everybody pick one,” he said, pointing to the stack, “and read the last chapter.”
The final section of any book about “institutional development,” a financial euphemism, concerns the Big Ask—how to convince those with fortune and fame to bestow the former upon you so you and they can obtain the latter. Ideally, before reaching this section, fundraisers have gained a base of small-scale donors. Then, from those, they have culled and cultivated the richest, most dedicated patrons. And eventually they ask them for something huge—millions of dollars, the deed to their estate, their firstborn. “We didn’t have time for all that,” Tarter says. “We had to get money and get it right now.” And so Pierson sent them diving into the denouement.
Pierson, who co-founded the institute and helmed it until a cancer-induced medical leave in 2012, was one of the few in the room who wasn’t a scientist or an engineer. Development was his gig. Pierson’s rounded nose and puppy-brown eyes did his character justice. He was kind and loyal to, even defensive of, his employees, qualities they reciprocated equally. And so Tarter and her colleagues hit the books, took their suits (some unused since their last-attended funeral) to dry cleaners, and practiced their pitches in front of mirrors. All except Barney Oliver: Oliver didn’t need to practice. But when his colleagues began to make their shortlist of people who would maybe help government-rejected scientists find aliens, he held up his hand to stop them.
Oliver had more connections in Silicon Valley than any of them, because of his decades with Hewlett-Packard, and many favors he hadn’t collected on, so Pierson put him in charge of contacting the potential donors. But Oliver said, “I can’t talk to anyone until I talk to Bill and Dave [Bill as in Hewlett; Dave as in Packard]. Anyone I talk to is going to ask me what Bill and Dave are doing.”
He secured them all an appointment.
At the Hewlett-Packard offices, paintings of California countryside landscaped the walls: the lumpy golden hills, which resemble the humped backs of giant creatures; the snow-packed peaks of the Sierras, whose water is the only reason people can live here at all; fogged-over sea rocks straight out of a fantasy novel. Tarter watched them pass her by as she headed to the executive suite with Oliver, Pierson, and Frank Drake. They all shook hands with Hewlett and Packard and sat down.
Oliver gave the executives a speech about humanity’s deep future and our blood-borne need to find out if we’re alone. It’s the ultimate question! But, he said, the government had recently decided it couldn’t care about those most fundamental human impulses.
“Damn politicians,” mumbled Packard—ironically, as he himself had acted as US deputy secretary of defense in the 1970s and whose company sold billions of dollars of equipment to the government.
Tarter then took over the presentation with the specs of the project itself—the frequency ranges they were searching for extraterrestrial transmissions, the sensitivity of the antennas, the stars they planned to search. She thought that even if she didn’t give the slickest oratory, she at least gave an accurate one.
At the end of their speeches, Hewlett nodded a few times. “Thanks very much,” he said. “We’ll discuss it.”
The meeting over, the group then ushered themselves back through the paintings of paradise. Oliver led his pack back to the office he still held at the HP Labs, putting his arm on Tarter’s shoulder as they walked. She shrugged away from him; she hated it when he did that, and he did it often.
“Barney looked like my dad, and for me he was a father figure,” she says. “But, boy, did I have difficulties with him. He could be just too patronizing.”
Although she thought of him as a mentor, and was grateful to him for all the energy he devoted to SETI, the dynamics and gender politics between them too often tilted in his favor. The arm thing. The “which hunts.” And he often dismissed her scientific arguments in a disagreement. While she sought the approval and support of a father figure, she also wanted to be seen as a mature expert and not a girl in need of permission and correction.
Tarter let go of some frustration with his attitude toward women when she thought about how she’d seen him treat his wife, Suki, at a NASA anniversary celebration three years earlier, when she began to show overt symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. After the illness had begun to vignette her consciousness away, he continued to bring her to such social functions; he patiently explained who all their old friends were, how to butter bread, what this or that banquet was for, and why she was welcome there. And later, he established the Priscilla Newton Theater Arts Scholarship at the University of California Santa Cruz to commemorate her interest in dance and the theater.
At the NASA celebration, Suki began to cry at dinner.
“Suki, what’s the matter?” Welch asked.
Suki said, “I don’t know who I am.”
The statement rang through Tarter. Although she claims she spent most of life—until a few years ago—thinking of herself as immortal, the old-age loss-of-self did sometimes burst through her more-youthful consciousness. Who are we when we don’t know who we are? she wondered. If we are only our memories, what are we when they’re gone? What is a self? The questions spiraled like accretion disks. But she simply smiled and said, “You’re Suki Oliver. You are married to Barney Ol
iver. You have three children. You were a really good community theater actress. We are pleased to have you join us for dinner tonight.”
Summaries of self can’t help but feel like eulogies. Where else (besides perhaps awards applications and dating profiles) do we list our most fundamental fundamentals, and what we will leave behind? And Tarter wondered, What would someone say to me if I asked them who I was? She was beginning to think about her legacy, without even realizing it.
As the SETI team approached the lab building, Oliver said, “I’ll buy you all lunch!” he said.
But as soon as they arrived at Oliver’s HP office, his phone rang.
“It’s Dave!” Packard said. “We want to talk to you.”
“I just promised I’d take these nice people to lunch,” Oliver told him.
The ducklings quacked at him: Go, go go! We can feed ourselves.
Half an hour later, Oliver returned from HP triumphant: “We got our first $2 million!” he shouted. H and P were in for $1 million each, as long as the SETI team could find others to match that amount. Tarter’s first solo fundraising success came in at $10,000 from Mitchell Kapor, founder of the software giant Lotus Development Corporation.
Gordon Moore of Intel was the next bigwig on the list. Intel was a sprawling complex of offices, partitioned like farmland. It contrasted sharply—in its looks and how the business functioned—with HP, which was known for its humble start in a one-car garage. But Moore listened to Oliver and his entourage, sitting in his double-wide cubicle. After checking with his family for their approval, he personally wrote a $1 million check.
They next went up to bat against Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. When Oliver first called, Allen’s administrative assistant said she didn’t want to bother him with this pitch. He’s busy, she said. He’s not interested.
Oliver cleared his throat and spoke in what others called his gruff, corporate warlord’s voice.
“You put this meeting on your boss’s calendar,” he said to her. “He can take it off if he wants to.”
Allen didn’t take it off, because Oliver was one of his childhood heroes. The meeting lasted nearly an hour and ended when Allen said he needed to talk with his sister, Jody Patton, who serves as the CEO of Vulcan, Inc., Allen’s investment and project management company, and the president of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Without any more prodding, Allen sent a handwritten check for $1 million. When it arrived, the team crowded around the rectangular paper, counting zeros.
The Big Asks continued. If Oliver couldn’t get in a room with an exec to “have a conversation,” he would offer more: “I’ll rub your feet, massage your hands, whatever it takes.” (No one ever took him up on that.)
The team eventually went back to Hewlett and Packard with their collection plate, demonstrating that they had matched the money. Bill and Dave shelled out a million more each, bringing the total to $7.5 million, including the $100,000 Oliver himself contributed. It was enough to resurrect HRMS, no government necessary. “Given the fact that it wasn’t possible to fight for it, I have incredible respect for Jill and her leadership, and I think she did a wonderful thing instead of giving up to move forward and turn it into a privately funded activity,” says Goldin.
It was the last time financial support would come so easily.
During the six months following the SETI project’s “termination,” as the scientists and NASA headquarters bureaucrats apocalyptically call it, Tarter went to the SETI Institute at 6:30 every morning. At a kid-sized desk in the corner of the boardroom, she sat as if in time-out, writing the “termination plan” that would allow the team to keep the equipment they had built. If they were going to use deep private pockets to continue the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, they needed to hang on to their instruments, which technically belonged to NASA. Tarter wrote pages and pages that cataloged every circuit and CPU, each component annotated with justifications of why it could only be useful to SETI astronomers and would be no good for anyone else at NASA.
Then, at 10 A.M. every day, Tarter drove down the road to NASA’s Ames Research Center to work on that very equipment. And then at 4:00 P.M., she returned to time-out and the termination plan. Assistant administrator Wesley Huntress, who replaced Len Fisk in Space Sciences, helped smooth the transition when he took the position in 1993.
After many such days, the federal government agreed that the equipment was worthless to anyone but the alien hunters, labeled it “surplus,” and donated it to the SETI Institute. JPL’s brand-new wideband feeds and receivers went to Arecibo Observatory on an intergovernmental loan. The SETI scientists were also able to hang on to their beloved trailer, the Mobile Research Facility, on which technician John Ross had worked tirelessly. They kept their home. They could go anywhere, do—maybe—anything. Or at least keep doing something.
Except that without NASA’s network of telescopes, they had to abandon the sky-survey component. And they had no connection to the military plane that could airlift the trailer to the telescopes. In a Hail Mary pass, Tarter wrote to Virgin Airlines’ Richard Branson, the blond-bearded hard partier who today wants to ensure that the one percent can daytrip to space. Did he have any front-loading 747 jets? Virgin’s slogan at the time was “Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do something.”
Tarter wrote to him, “Congress has just told us we can’t do SETI.” And now we need to borrow a big plane. The cannibalizing of his phrase (or something else) caught Branson’s eye, and he wrote back, wishing them luck but informing them that Virgin had no suitable jets.
When the SETI Institute resurrected their search for extraterrestrial intelligence, they called it Project Phoenix, a self-created mythology about rising from the ashes of congressional termination. Now all they needed was a telescope to which they could hook up their equipment and start searching. In the United States, the large radio telescopes—the only kind useful to SETI—are connected to the federal government, whether that be the National Science Foundation or NASA. The same is often true abroad. And because taxpayers support those telescopes, they are public, with some responsibility to “the people.” Organizations can’t just buy time on them—they need to be equal-opportunity, with proposals ranked by merit. For many taxpayer-funded telescopes in the United States, anyone (even you!) can submit their ideas and specifications and see how they measure up against those of other citizens. But, in the past, the committees ranking proposals and allocating time on the telescopes had put SETI toward the bottom of the list, or at least not high enough up to earn them observing hours. But soon, Tarter found a facility for which money did actually equal time.
While visiting Prague for a conference, she had a drink with the director of Australia’s National Telescope Facility, Ron Ekers. After listening to her plight, Ekers leaned back in his chair and pointed his glass at Tarter. “I’ve got a telescope for you,” he said. “We could rent you Parkes.”
Parkes is the 64-meter radio telescope made famous by the movie The Dish, in which scientists use it to downlink data from the Apollo landing after NASA’s engineers fail to do so, saving one of the most famous television broadcasts ever. While renting a telescope like this isn’t unheard of, it’s not often heard of. With costs today of up to $0.50/second, not many private groups have the resources, and not many telescopes offer themselves as commodities. But Ekers wanted to build a new kind of radio receiver—and the Australian government wouldn’t help. But Tarter could. For $250,000, Ekers said, he would give her Parkes 24 hours a day for 6 months, and the Australian engineers could build the receivers she needed. The two shook on it, making an international scientific deal over pilsners. Tarter went home to await the contract.
But then the signed contract didn’t arrive. Finally, the CSIRO lawyer called Tarter. “We can’t sign this,” he said. “Suppose Paul Allen decides to sue us if you come and use the telescope and then don’t detect ET?”
His worry had a basis: an Australian farmer had recently sued the organ
ization because of its weather-forecasting technology. He had used it to help plan crop placement, and it—and so he—had been wrong. And he’d lost his farm fortune.
Tarter (and Ekers, off-camera) explained to the Aussie lawyers that neither Allen nor any of the other donors had placed any “detection strings” on their gifts, and soon the contracts came.
Because the MRF trailer had no air transport, it had to travel by sea, a slow journey that began months before the scientists flew over. They gutted it ahead of time, so they could fix and upgrade the electrical innards while the trailer floated across the sea. Those guts, left behind, later had to travel to Australia in the scientists’ personal luggage. Although airport security wasn’t as tyrannical in the ’90s as it is today, 16-layer circuit boards, corrugated feed horns, and HP test equipment looked a lot like bomb parts. An International Traffic in Arms convention protects the temporary shipping of scientific equipment across international borders, even if that equipment looks like it might down a plane, and shields them from customs and duties. Tarter had written up the necessary inventory and believed she had all the right papers to bring the suspicious SETI electronics across international borders.
“We’re just going to Australia,” she thought. “We’re not going to the People’s Republic of China.”
All should be fine; besides, they looked like trustworthy, Dockers-wearing engineers. But customs always detained them, and customs officials’ gloved fingers clutched the corners of silicon rectangles, demanding an explanation.
In January 1995, after they finally made it out of the bowels of the Sydney International Airport, Tarter and 20 engineers descended on the Parkes Radio Telescope. “I honestly don’t know whether to call out the National Guard to protect you guys,” said the station’s head, Mark Price, “or just rent a whole bunch of Porta-Potties for the press and tourists.”