Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  All of this new leadership in place, the Allen Telescope Array’s search strategy took a turn. Ever since Cyclops—that very first hypothetical SETI study from NASA—astronomers have said that if they looked at a million stars that were within 1,000 light-years of Earth, they would have a real statistical shot at successfully finding ET—or saying something statistically meaningful about not finding ET. This in mind, Seth Shostak pointed out that most of the nearest stars, statistically, are M dwarfs. And since we now know that every star has planets and a significant fraction have rocky planets in livable places, and since M dwarfs might be able to host life-friendly planets, the SETI Institute should focus on these nearby neighbors. He and the leadership canceled the Kepler and HabCat search and moved on to a catalog of 70,000 red dwarfs in the neighborhood, which the ATA watches three at a time.

  But the trouble is, scientists aren’t sure planets around red dwarfs can be habitable. The dwarfs are mean, flaring out radiation that could zap nascent life, the protective atmosphere, and the water a planet was born with. The planets—even if they are warm enough for water—might be dry as the bones of aliens that couldn’t survive there. And they may be “tidally locked” to their stars—one side permanently facing the suns. A habitable “belt,” scientists imagine, could exist on these planets. But it’s all theoretical. And it flies in the face of all past SETI logic, which goes like this: we only know of one example of life, and these are the conditions it likes, so we should look for those, because we at least know it’s possible. The new strategy neglects most of the planets of that sort, around sun-like stars.

  Tarter isn’t pleased that the Allen Telescope Array is focusing mostly on these maybes. But she has had to give up control. It’s not her institute anymore. And maybe Shostak is right.

  As extremophiles showed us, humans tend to underestimate life’s adaptability and overestimate its need to be “like us.”

  Scientists like Shostak and Tarter, who look for electromagnetic signs of intelligent, tech-savvy extraterrestrials, sometimes find themselves at odds with astrobiologists: those who look for chemical signs of not-necessarily-smart, probably microscopic aliens. The separation between the two groups began back in the 1990s, soon after Congress banned NASA from funding SETI research.

  At the time, Ames was NASA’s official center of space life sciences, which the agency had dubbed “exobiology.” Non-SETI studiers at the exobiology center began to get nervous that the reputation of the little green man and his problems on Capitol Hill would trickle down and taint perception of their own more grounded research. Wesley Huntress, the associate administrator for space science, suggested a name change—signaling a slight identity change, away from intelligent aliens and toward more traditional science—from “exobiology” to “astrobiology.” On May 19, 1995, around the same time Project Phoenix started, administrator Goldin officially declared Ames NASA’s center for this brand-new field.

  The desire of astrobiologists to distance themselves from what’s seen as a dubious endeavor has led to a kind of separation between some scientists who look for the marks of microbes and the ones who look for messages from more substantial beings. In a 2014 congressional hearing, Sara Seager of MIT, one of the world’s leading exoplanet astronomers, said, “[Astrobiology is] a legitimate science now. We’re not looking for aliens or searching for UFOs. We’re using standard astronomy.”

  When Tarter hears this on the livestream, she sighs, sad and used to it. “In some sense, you can’t blame Sara, right? But she certainly knows the history of what happened to SETI, and she doesn’t want to get caught in that same trap,” she says. “So, yes, I rankle every time Sara does that. On the other hand, I understand that from her career perspective, it’s the right thing to do. It is the wrong thing scientifically.”

  In December 2016, I had a conference call with three generations of women—Debra Fischer of EXPRES, Natalie Batalha of Kepler, and Margaret Turnbull of WFIRST, a future orbiting infrared telescope—who have dedicated their careers to searching for planets, signs of microbial life, or both, to talk about the division and occasional conflict between their fields and SETI, as well as how much the environment has changed, or hasn’t, for female astronomers since Tarter sat as the lone woman in her engineering physics classes.

  They all begin by saying that SETI and Tarter have been inspirational, reminding them of the big questions behind their own research. They see synergy between their fields. When Turnbull first watched Contact, as an intern at Harvard University, she was ready to scoff. “I was pretty sure, going into the movie, that I was going to know everything they were doing wrong because I was the smartest I’d ever been when I was a junior in college,” she says, laughing. “But by the end, I forgot all about that attitude and was basically standing on my chair in the theater saying, ‘That’s what I’m supposed to do!’”

  Not long after, in graduate school, Turnbull talked with Tarter in person. “How can somebody do their PhD with you?” she asked. She says Tarter told her that she and her colleagues were terrible graduate advisors, and she didn’t recommend it. But the next summer, Turnbull went to the SETI Institute anyway to work on the HabCat. And although she doesn’t do SETI now, she sees her own work—in exoplanets and astrobiology—as the best way to get close to those investigations that so inspired her in Contact.

  The women then ask each other how many times they have each seen Contact, a question that is first met with ooohs and aaahs, and followed by admissions that they watch it at least once a year. No fictional science movie—not The Martian, or Interstellar, or Arrival—has affected them as much as Ellie Arroway’s adventures and misadventures did.

  But they do understand and, in some ways, sympathize with the idea that what they do is mainstream, and what inspired them about Contact is fringe. “Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism,” says Fischer. “And the question is ‘How do you ever get to a meaningful null result?’” Meaning, “How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, ‘There is nothing. We are alone.’” And there’s not a good answer, because the thing about the universe is there’s always more of it to search. There are always new ways that aliens might communicate. And you could try different combinations of places and ways of looking forever and never concede.

  The inability to get a null result makes a study, in the eyes of some and in some philosophies of science, unscientific. That’s part of why Tarter and other SETI colleagues have tried to set limits—like looking at a million stars within 1,000 light-years—from which they can draw incremental and statistical conclusions. But then there’s the whole unscientific stigma that comes from pop culture perceptions of aliens. Batalha remembers being a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Ames Research Center, listening to a radio program about SETI and SETIites. “The host called them ‘Trekkies,’” she says. “That’s reflected in the politics of SETI searches.”

  The other women make nonlinguistic noises of assent, a practice they continue as we move on to talking about the politics of women in science.

  I detail for them a few things that happened to Tarter because of her womanhood: she worked alone in school because she wasn’t in the boys’ club; senior men took credit for her ideas; she was the only woman in many, many rooms.

  Decades later, this all still sounds familiar to them. “A lot has not changed, and that’s the problem,” says Batalha, who is the only scientific coinvestigator on Kepler who is also a woman. She does not like those stats, or that feeling. But she does like when Tarter shows up at team meetings, where she’s an advisor. “That helps—just having somebody in the room helps a lot,” she says. You are not alone, the presence of another like you conveys.

  On the WFIRST mission, Turnbull experiences essentially the same situation: she is the only female principal investigator. Another astronomer, Aki Roberge, works on her project and is often at meetings. “The only two women in the room: in gen
eral, that’s the situation,” Turnbull says. “And I’ve just grown so used to it over the years that I don’t really think about it.”

  At one big meeting, she looked around at the 200 people under the same roof, 198 of whom were men. “I was thinking to myself, ‘What happened here? Why aren’t there—of all these teams that are responsible for all these different instruments—why is ours the only one that is run by women?’”

  There are, of course, the big reasons: sexual harassment, outright discrimination, the old boys’ network working its magic. Then come the slightly subtler things, like unconscious bias among hirers, leading them to prefer those who are like themselves because they happen to read the ways that white men think and act as more competent. And then we have the subtle problems that men rarely notice. Batalha recalled a time when she and a female colleague had made a point multiple times to a senior male colleague in a meeting, and in follow-up emails afterward. A week later, he came up with the same idea, and thought it was great.

  This reminds Turnbull of another subtle situation that’s probably familiar to most women and invisible to most men. “I could be standing in a group having a group discussion at an American Astronomical Society meeting, and unless I made a point to say something really smart, I generally felt like I would be ignored, as a woman standing there,” she says. “Like, ‘Maybe she should go get coffee for everybody.’”

  They all sigh, thinking how different it’s not from when Tarter started her career, and also how different even the next generation’s situation isn’t from their own. Batalha, whose daughter is also an astronomer, sent a picture of her with her fellow interns: she was the only woman, wearing bright colors and surrounded by guys wearing black and gray. Batalha has a nearly identical picture from one of her own internships. “I was just thinking, ‘Oh my god, twenty-three years go by, and nothing’s different.” She neglected her first physics study group precisely because of these demographics. “I walked into that group once, and I felt so conspicuous I never returned,” she says.

  But some things are changing. When they were starting their careers, even talking about these problems, except within pink girls-only groups, was taboo. You accepted everything as the price of admission to the club of science. Now, sexual harassment has its own special sessions at American Astronomical Society meetings. There are astronomy-wide task forces to make the climate better not just for women but also for racial and sexual/gender identity minorities and those with disabilities. The changes feel slow, glacial even, but the ruling dynamics will crack soon. And maybe in the next generation, no woman (or black or gay or Muslim or transgender person) will have to be the only woman—the only anything—in the room, wondering if there is anyone else out there like them.

  CHAPTER 10

  SHOUTING INTO THE VOID

  In 2000, Tarter’s daughter, Shana, and her husband, Steve, crimped onto hope that they would match with a baby in need of parents through the Chinese adoption agency they were working with. And finally, two years after they submitted their papers, a stamp-sized picture came in the mail: this is your daughter, Li Yao, the letter said. They couldn’t resolve her features, her image being so small and so distant. But they knew, finally, she was out there.

  She waited for them in a foster home, where the orphanage had sent her to acclimate to life with a family, since she’d only known a room full of beds and unparented children for her whole short life. There, Steve and Shana found her, a baby swaddled in six layers of clothes. Marveling that this protoperson was theirs and that their lives would orbit a common center of gravity, they took her out into the world and unwrapped her. As they walked around town, people tugged on Shana’s own clothes, telling her to put more on her baby, more between her baby and the world. “Baby cold, baby cold,” they said.

  Two years later, Tarter went to visit Li Yao’s hometown, Guilin City. It looked, to her, like a rainy Las Vegas. The city planners had replicated famous worldwide bridges to allow people to experience the alien without actually going anywhere. And all around, women carried their children strapped to their backs like turtle shells.

  As Tarter traveled to the town’s far northern end, the dirt roads degraded into piles of bricks, left like shrines to buildings demolished. When she reached the orphanage, she met the man who’d chosen Li Yao’s name and two women who remembered caring for Li Yao. They gave Tarter a red dress to take to the girl, now two years old. Looking around at the 200 girls waiting for adoption and their own red dresses, Tarter promised to send pictures.

  Li Yao, now 15, bikes farther than most adults and climbs cliffs like she belongs to a different species. She’s won the state’s history competition twice. Tarter speaks of these accomplishments, and those of her other family members, as proudly as if they were her own. On Twitter, she lists her progeny in her profile, and her private Gmail address is an allusion to Li Yao’s name. Grandmotherhood, and motherhood, sit at the core of her identity, even if she missed many parent-teacher conferences, even if young Shana’s remark about wanting to be a shopkeeper still rankles in her memory.

  But as dedicated to family as Tarter is, she is also ever herself—a little flighty, distracted perhaps by big questions of the cosmos or a full schedule of conference calls. One day in March 2014, as we troll the Safeway near the Allen Telescope Array for breakfast foods (low-sugar oatmeal, bananas), decaf coffee, and a Belgian-sized bottle of locally brewed beer, she spots Mother’s Day balloons floating above the line of registers.

  “Shit,” she says. “Is that tomorrow?”

  She turns to the cashier. “Is that tomorrow?” she asks.

  “It is definitely the Sunday after this one, I think,” the young woman says.

  Tarter whips out her iPhone to look at a calendar. She makes a note to send Shana and her stepdaughters something. One, Leslie Welch, researches visual information processing at Brown University, and the other, Jeanette Welch, plays the bass with Orchestra Iowa and in her own rock band.

  All of these daughters grew up with Jill Tarter as an everyday person—a mom, a stepmom, who happened to spend a lot of time tapping on her computer and taking flights to telescopes. They were adults before she really became a public figure, a shift started with Contact, the movie much more than the book. But the business of minor celebrity really geared up when she was named one of Time’s Top 100 Most Influential People in the World, a laudatory category the magazine was just resurrecting in 2004 when they bestowed it on her.

  After she had that title and those glossy photos, Tarter became a frequently requested speaker, one who could collect hefty fees that she would donate to the SETI Institute, as she and Jack also did with the money they earned from selling their plane last year.

  That money made small differences, but she soon had much more substantial cash on her hands.

  In 2009, the phone rang in Tarter’s Berkeley home, reverberating against the living room’s tinted glass wall.

  “Hello?” Tarter said.

  “Jill,” said a British-sounding male voice. “This is Chris Anderson.”

  Tarter knew that name, knew what it meant, and made no attempt to keep her excitement inside her skin. “Oh, Chris Anderson!” she said. “I’ve always wanted to give a TED Talk.”

  Tarter had been watching these slick, 18-minute productions—which “thought leaders” around the world give to an audience of other thought leaders who can afford the $6,000 registration fee—on her computer since they’d debuted online three years earlier, in 2006.

  “This will be a very special TED Talk,” Anderson’s voice said over the line. “You’ve won the TED Prize.”

  Tarter hadn’t even heard of the TED Prize—what was a TED Prize? Well, according to the TED website, it “is awarded annually to a leader with a creative, bold wish to spark global change . . . The TED Prize accelerates progress toward solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.” The SETI Institute’s development director, Karen Randall, and board member Nathan Myhrvold, former
chief technology officer at Microsoft, had nominated her without her knowledge. Randall had, concurrently, been training Tarter in the art of public persona, teaching her to keep her eyes open when speaking (she has a habit of closing them) and to tone down the jargon and speak in expansiveness.

  Anderson informed her that she would receive a $100,000 award that she could use to fulfill a wish. That present came wrapped with a TED Talk and access to the organization’s deep web of contacts, their expertise, and (if the winner charmed them enough) their cash.

  “I know my wish!” Tarter said to Anderson, right away.

  She and the institute had been struggling with the ATA, which had stood still at a battalion of 42 antennas since 2007, when it was meant to be an army of 350. The institute itself couldn’t afford its scientists. While most of their researchers fund themselves through grants, the businesspeople and the people who actually perform the search for extraterrestrial smart life—not microbes or planets or water on Mars—get their salaries from the institute itself, which runs on donations. And so the heady search for alien intelligence had run up against very terrestrial constraints, the financial and political kind that have always dogged it.

  “I want to build 350 telescopes,” she said, putting both hands on the receiver and looking out at the bay, which had since Silicon Valley’s early days felt like a metaphor for vast, fluid possibility. “And I want to make an endowment for my scientists.”

  Silence came from on the other end of the line.

  “That sounds like money,” Anderson said. “And TED isn’t really about money.”