Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  It was Tarter’s turn to be silent, confused because he had just told her the prize consisted of six figures and she knew the ticket price boasted four.

  “TED,” Anderson continued, giving a TED-talk-esque spiel about TED, “is about getting others involved in your project to help you make it happen.”

  Tarter nodded and then, realizing Anderson couldn’t detect it over the phone line, said, “Ah, yes.”

  She felt defeated, seeing the carrot on a string in front of her, having it snapped away, and being told it wasn’t exactly a carrot.

  “Now we have to craft your wish,” Anderson continued.

  “I thought that was weird,” Tarter says now, “because it’s my wish.”

  After emailing back and forth for a while, Anderson helped Tarter decide her heart’s desire: “I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company,” she said.

  It’s a little vague, a little hand-wave-y, and phrased to tug at your limbic system. A little, in short, like a TED Talk.

  “We didn’t exactly know what it was going to mean,” Tarter says, “but it seemed like a good idea. The involvement of people is clearly something that I wanted to see happen, but how were we going to make that a reality?”

  In her personal notebook from that year—filled mostly with calculations of antenna sensitivity and about wooing the military into telescopic collaboration—she wrote Anderson’s contact details. And in stoic script next to the phone number, she wrote, “I’m a prize winner,” as if she might forget.

  The wish would remain vague for its (standard 18-minute) TED-conference unveiling. The TED team and Tarter could figure out later how Tarter would change the world; the important thing now was to declare to an important audience that she would change (and already had changed) the world.

  Tarter worked with TED’s speechwriters to come up with a talk that was perfectly condensed, perfectly moving, and perfectly perspectived. The team wanted to wrap her life’s work into a neat bow, as a present to all the Earthlings with streaming-quality Internet connections.

  Tarter didn’t really want that. Her life’s work was complicated. It involved units like star-megahertz and technology like cryocoolers and calculations of how near to a star a planet had to be to have its water evaporated away. But just like TED “isn’t about money,” it also isn’t really about depth. It’s about big and important ideas presented in a way that screams, “I am a big and important idea.” This stripped-down version, which told the listener how to feel instead of giving them the information and letting them decide for themselves—a mindset that undergirds scientific thought—seemed wrong to Tarter.

  But in the end, Tarter drank the TED Kool-Aid, and her PowerPoint presentations have been forever altered, now favoring stock images and single-statement text over bullet points. It’s helped her maintain her scientific celebrity, because it’s true that the number of people who want to hear the words “star-megahertz” in their free time is small.

  On the day of the TED Talk, she wore a floral Japanese top and flowy black pants. She put on mascara and lipstick, feeling like she wore a mask but knowing the camera preferred the high contrast.

  She stepped in front of the audience full of people she imagined might lift her up into their world of privilege, where they carefully chose where their money went because they had more than they needed, not because they had so little that they had to ration it.

  “So my question,” she began. “Are we alone?”

  She moved across the stage and continued.

  “The story of humans is the story of ideas—scientific ideas that shine light into dark corners, ideas that we embrace rationally and irrationally, ideas for which we’ve lived and died and killed and been killed, ideas that have vanished in history, and ideas that have been set in dogma. It’s a story of nations, of ideologies, of territories, and of conflicts among them. But, every moment of human history, from the Stone Age to the Information Age, from Sumer and Babylon to the iPod and celebrity gossip, they’ve all been carried out—every book that you’ve read, every poem, every laugh, every tear—they’ve all happened here.”

  A picture of Earth popped up. Then, it flashed to a picture of the galaxy, a “you are here” arrow plopped like a T-shirt graphic at our planet’s paltry location. Next, a picture of the large-scale structure of the universe, where our galaxy is one of hundreds of billions. You get the sense that you are small, worse-off than a virus squirming in the sink.

  We have looked for others living their small, germy lives on other planets, but we haven’t found anything. And so far the answer to Tarter’s initial question—the one in her talk and in her life—is that we are alone.

  “It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of the search that remains,” Tarter continues. “All of the concerted SETI efforts, over the last forty-some years, are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the oceans. And no one would decide that the ocean was without fish on the basis of one glass of water.”

  It’s a metaphor she uses often, and it works—because the ocean definitely has fish, and we know what fish are, what an ocean is.

  But after this regular line, Tarter expresses for the first time the career goal that has come to dominate her late-in-life work—the one that took over once she realized she might not find life beyond Earth before her own life ends: that SETI can benefit humanity even if humans are completely alone in the cosmos, or so nearly alone we will never know we’re not. And that benefit comes through a shift in worldview, or cosmosview, in which we all collectively and individually realize how similar we are—by virtue of having followed the same evolutionary path on the same planet—and that we shouldn’t fight or hate or discriminate or other negative verbs that rhyme with those. We are all Earthlings, in other words. And she hopes that if people feel—really feel—that they’ll start acting better.

  This idea, she believes, should spread—both as an identity and as mindset that comes coupled with it. It could become “the Earthling meme,” she says, spiraling into all social circles like a LOLCAT, like a virus, of which she is patient zero. But how, exactly, beyond tidy speeches, is unclear.

  But back at the TED conference, the search has not ended, and neither has the TED Talk, in which Tarter stated her official wish a bit more concretely: to create a digital system in which people could actively help analyze SETI data.

  “The first step would be to tap into the global brain trust,” she said in her speech, “to build an environment where raw data could be stored, and where it could be accessed and manipulated, where new algorithms could be developed and old algorithms made more efficient. And this is a technically creative challenge, and it would change the perspective of people who worked on it. And then, we’d like to augment the automated search with human insight. We’d like to use the pattern recognition capability of the human eye to find faint, complex signals that our current algorithms miss.”

  But still, how?

  The TED solution began, of course, with a luncheon. Conference attendees interested in helping Tarter help Earthlings showed up for salads and iced tea. And because it was 2009, 99 percent of them wanted to build just the greatest website ever for the project.

  But together, the lunchers came to the idea that the key was open-sourcing: of software, of data. They wanted to put SETI’s work in the public domain so the public could participate. After all, if we are all Earthlings and the search for extraterrestrial life is so fundamental to our psyches, shouldn’t we all be able to help? And so with Dell, Adobe, and a group called Galaxy Zoo, which developed a program that lets regular people classify real galaxies and spun that off into a more general citizen-science platform, they set about planning how to bring their philosophical project to the people.

  Soon, a site called SETILive was born. Here, users would be able to see real-time data coming out of the Allen Telescope Array and decide whether or not any blips or bleeps came fr
om aliens. An online place called SETIQuest became the website on which people could access and manipulate raw data and tweak the analysis software themselves, potentially finding types of signals the scientists had not thought of. The new director of open innovation, Avinash Agrawal, formerly of Sun Microsystems, was critical to the implementation of the new philosophy and the developments to back it.

  But not everyone at the institute liked leaving the cathedral and entering the bazaar, letting people play around with their algorithms. They didn’t want to put raw data online in real time, although that was standard operating procedure for the open-source community at large. They didn’t want to clean up and document the legacy code they’d been developing since 1995 and then put it on GitHub, a repository for open-source and available software programs, for all to see.

  But despite their objections, Tarter pushed them into the bazaar, and “open-source diva” Danese Cooper showed them the ropes. In 2012, at that year’s TED conference, Chris Anderson unveiled SETILive as a live site, while a snowstorm pummeled the Allen Telescope Array, threatening the incoming data’s nice presentation to the fancy people.

  At SETILive, anyone could log on and classify signals into categories—noise or something suspicious (probably from humans but potentially from aliens)—as data poured in from the telescope. And people did do that. For a while. But then they got bored. They were stuck at desks, doing the same thing over and over again. Science like this (and really, the day-to-day of all science, no matter the discipline) is tedious. And SETI—so far, by definition—doesn’t discover much, so neither do the people doing SETI. The user base dwindled, leaving the same few fervents appearing in the forum with their candidate signals. The institute team didn’t create the technical support they needed to solve problems or innovate for the users. And eventually, in 2014, the institute shut the site down.

  Today, Tarter would like to create an app that lets people swipe to classify.

  “Like the Tinder of science,” I say.

  She asks what Tinder is.

  I explain.

  “So it’s for sex,” she says.

  “Sometimes,” I say.

  “All social media is for sex,” she muses.

  “What about LinkedIn?” I counter.

  “LinkedIn is definitely for sex,” she counters, staring wistfully out the window of her house. “The Tinder of science. I like it.”

  Ultimately, she and the institute have decided it’s better to leave the boring tasks to computers. Because not only do they not get bored, they are always in the process of becoming smarter and more powerful. The data that SETILive users classified came from parts of the radio wave spectrum that were regularly contaminated with human-made interference. Tarter had hoped humans could sort out those signals and figure out which spacecraft they came from, so the telescope could go back and look at those frequencies when a problematic spacecraft was below the horizon.

  The telescope’s real-time processing software had just been ignoring this data because it was too hard to compare, that fast, the suspicious signals to known sources of human interference, to see if they matched and could be thrown out, or if they warranted follow-up. Today, just a few years later, supercomputers at Ames are poring back over all this tossed-out data to glean from it what the humans didn’t. “If they find quicker and more sophisticated algorithms for classifying this interference,” says Tarter, “then they will teach the computers at the ATA to do it in near real time and open up more of the spectrum.”

  SETILive enlisted people to help decide whether a signal is “real.” But people could also help send a real signal into space. Distant alien citizens might, if they exist, suss out its realness and parse it for meaning. The idea that Earth should transmit messages to aliens and not just try to receive them is called active SETI or METI: messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And in the past few years, more and more scientists have begun to take the idea seriously. The SETI Institute has initiated public discussions about the whether, how, and what of it all.

  The first of these occurred in 2015 at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There, Tarter had organized and was chairing a panel on which four speakers would share their contentious, contrasting views on whether active SETI might save or kill us all. And so on a balmy California February day, the spectators and press gathered in the ballroom of the San Jose Marriott, ready to hear the pros, cons, and conflicts. But as the start time approached, Tarter was noticeably not milling among them.

  Five minutes before the start of the event, my phone rang, and Tarter’s name appeared on the caller ID.

  “My car blew up,” she said.

  It was unclear what this meant, beyond its consequences: The car was not in motion, and Tarter was alive but not inside the San Jose Marriott. She wouldn’t make it in time for the discussion of whether or not we should broadcast messages to extraterrestrial intelligences. But the show, she said, should go on.

  And so in the room where Tarter should have been, the panelists puffed themselves up for the start. These men—Seth Shostak, science fiction author David Brin, judge David Tatel, and astronomer David Grinspoon—soon took their priestly seats above the crowd.

  “We’re sorry our big sister couldn’t be here,” Shostak said, as an opener.

  And then they launched in. They each had their own set of personal agendas within the meeting’s official agenda, and they almost acted in two dimensions. David Brin considers himself a futurist, a forecaster ready to foretell calamities of all sorts for humanity, like the singularity, in which robots become self-aware and turn us into space-age serfs, and the possibility that if we send ET a radio message, ET will blast us with lasers and steal all our precious metals.

  Seth Shostak was the fast-talking SETI—and active SETI—enthusiast, always ready with a ridiculous simile (like “life is as durable as Christmas fruitcake,” from his book Confessions of an Alien Hunter) and spastic hand gestures. He’s pro broadcasting all of Twitter out into the void, because the message would contain so much information in 140-character chunks that it could decode itself.

  Judge Tatel was staid, liked order in the court, and spoke to federal precedents for large-scale decisions like whether to stream sociological commentary to the cosmos.

  David Grinspoon played the part of rogue astronomer, with an upper ear piercing, soul patch, and email address that ends in @funkyscience.net.

  They talked past each other for 60 minutes and came to no conclusions.

  Tarter arrived 15 minutes after the session’s close, as the speakers stood near the door and the next session’s audience wandered in. She promptly got in a fight with David Brin. She thinks his view is ridiculous. He thinks hers is dangerous.

  A 2012 document called the Second SETI Protocol, which has been introduced to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space but never officially adopted, outlines the best practices for shouting into the void—both in the case of responding to ET’s call and to calling ET ourselves with no invitation. It suggests, as a start, the following three:

  1.The decision on whether or not to send a message to extraterrestrial intelligence should be made by an appropriate international body, broadly representative of Humankind.

  2.If a decision is made to send a message to extraterrestrial intelligence, it should be sent on behalf of all Humankind, rather than from individual States or groups.

  3.The content of such a message should be developed through an appropriate international process, reflecting a broad consensus.

  Part of Tarter’s goal with these meetings is to figure out how to come to that broad consensus and then actually have the world come to it. But no official body has adopted the protocol, unlike the protocol for how to deal with the receipt of an extraterrestrial broadcast, called the First SETI Protocol, developed by the International Academy of Astronautics, which has a post-detection group now headed by Paul Davies. So no one can stop your Uncle Al fr
om setting up a transmitter in his backyard and singing Taylor Swift to Proxima Centauri b. Uncle Al, though, is not exactly what bothers Brin and others that share his opinion: it’s that someone with a bigger broadcaster—an institute, say, or a country, even—could send a message saying whatever they wanted, and it would be legal.

  The thought leaders converge, again, on the SETI Institute on Valentine’s Day, the day after the session at the AAAS, to continue their discussion and elaborate on their closely held and never-changing beliefs.

  The room is set up with six long tables and a branded backdrop. A tech guy—Ly Ly—is in the process of centering the live-streaming camera straight on the institute’s logo. The room populates itself slowly, never growing as dense as Tarter had hoped.

  “Doug promised fifty,” she says, referring to the number of crowd members and to philosopher Doug Vakoch, the institute’s director of interstellar message composition. She looks around the room at the half-empty chairs.

  “I’ve been reining in Davids Brin and Grinspoon,” she informs me, quietly.

  She does not want so much fighting, because too-polarized opinions always remain twain. They can’t meet, let alone in the middle. And this is how she had pictured the idealized event: people with different opinions come together, they intellectualize the knots out, and then they shake hands and talk about going back to the UN. On top of that, she wanted to begin to discuss how to reach a global consensus (or at least one from a representative subset) about what a message, if sent, should actually say. This is part of her new mission, after all: to use SETI as the melting pot in which things melt into non-uniform uniformity, so the potatoes taste like the carrots and the carrots taste like the potatoes, but they retain their separate identities. It’s ambitious, perhaps as unachievable as finding aliens. And the day’s discussions illustrate the difficulty of deciding whether to broadcast at all, let along bringing together the whole world’s opinions on what a broadcast should contain.