Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  The third Breakthrough SETI program, Starshot, plans to figure out how to send a probe to the Alpha Centauri star system. The leaders of Starshot are pioneering “lightsail” technology: they plan to launch a swarm of tiny spacecraft with a photon-catching sail and then send pulses of laser light—essentially just energy—to the sail, pushing the craft to 100 million miles an hour. At that speed, it could reach the planet Proxima Centauri b in just 20 years and then relay images back to Earth of what that world is like. Such a spacecraft, they estimate, could be ready within a generation. The mission was already in place as an idea when astronomers from a team calling themselves Pale Red Dot, a reference to Carl Sagan’s statement that Earth in cosmic context is just a pale blue dot, found an Earth-sized planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri.

  Tarter, meanwhile, has been part of another deep-space exploration program—the 100-Year Starship program—that, maybe someday, will involve humans.

  In September 2014, music blasts from the speakers of the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston: the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic,” Justin Timberlake’s “Spaceship Coupe,” Nicki Minaj’s “Starships.” The clock reads 20 minutes after 9 A.M., 20 minutes after the 100-Year Starship symposium was supposed to start. Tables with galaxy-speckled tablecloths constellate the room, which continues to fill with rocket scientists, science fiction authors, psychologists, microbiologists, self-proclaimed futurists, and curious spectators willing to front a registration fee. Despite their desire to embark on an interstellar journey sometime in the next century—the stated goal of 100-Year Starship collaboration—they seem in no hurry to begin this year’s discussions. Across the table from Tarter, a man dressed in steampunk clothes asks what the Wi-Fi password is.

  The Wi-Fi password is extraordinary.

  Tarter is reading and deleting emails on her iPad. She notes in a voice directed at her screen that attendance is lower at this conference than it has been in the past few years. 100YSS, as the group calls themselves, has been meeting since 2011, when they won a contract from the mysterious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Mae Jemison, the first female astronaut of color, heads the foundation.

  If you Google “DARPA + creepy,” you’ll get about as many results as if you Google “Jill Tarter.” DARPA handles the development of “emerging technologies” that might somehow be useful to the military. The military can appropriate and make use of pretty much anything, and DARPA invests in the “frontiers” of science and technology with the hope that pretty much anything advanced can advance spying, defending, and killing. Ironically, the agency began as a response to the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957, to ensure that the US would never again be behind. Or, as they put it, “to prevent technological surprise like the launch of Sputnik.” They’ve expanded that from defensive to offensive, hoping not only to forestall but also to create technological surprise, leaping out from under-the-radar planes with invisibility cloaks and laser-based weaponry. They’ve made robots that cross uncomfortably into the Uncanny Valley; they’ve developed satellites that see in Soviet windows; they have a project called Combat Zones That See, in which a web of connected cameras tracks everything in a city that moves; they’re looking in your brain to see how it fires when you say a specific word, and then using that knowledge to implant words in your head. Or to put it more simply, telepathy. And in 2010, DARPA teamed up with NASA’s Ames Research Center to fund the organization with the best business plan to foster research into interstellar travel, hold up for 100 years, and (just maybe) end with a one-way trip to some godforsaken star system. Despite that lofty goal, the Starship program is mostly still conferences, and the initial grant—which mostly covered those conferences—is gone. Still, the organization remains in existence, and Jemison hopes to continue to use it and the community of thinkers and doers she has assembled to propel humans to the stars.

  Tarter is interested in the starship itself, and the journey, and other star systems, and generally being starry-eyed. But the conference is, in general, a bit starry-eyed. At the same time that an outsider might feel inspired, walking in to a meeting that feels so proactive and forward-watching, she might also find herself a little wary of the motivational-poster talk going on. Your sincere brain wants to believe; your cynical brain wants to scoff and ask if you accidentally stepped into a cosmic Comic-Con.

  Tarter keeps a lump of skepticism in her throat, at the ability of humans to keep organized and not let daily friction slow the project to a stop (especially once the founders die and somebody’s children have to take over). But also at the possibility of interstellar travel itself. “I can envision very smart, small probes being sent and surviving,” she says. “But I don’t know about with big, wet technology—biological space travel. But because I don’t know, that’s precisely why I signed on to the advisory committee for the 100-Year Starship study. I take Arthur Clarke’s second law—that the only way to know what’s possible is to venture a bit into the impossible—quite seriously.” (That phrase may, in fact, be on one of the posters outside the conference room.)

  But, she continues, “as we tackle these challenges and begin to succeed and find solutions, that’s going to be benefit life on Earth.”

  And that’s the reason DARPA funded 100YSS—a reason that’s also right in its slogan: Pathway to the stars; footprints on Earth. People are more motivated to build, say, better batteries for spaceships than they are for soldiers, but the batteries can, indeed, power both vessels. A self-sustaining life-support system could save (to give the archetypal example) starving children in Africa, isolate the source of some blood-curdling new epidemic, or keep people alive on a spaceship. And DARPA might care some about that, or the fact that such a system would make an excellent field hospital. As their original goal states, their real aim is to acquire technology they can use to defend and surprise “the enemy.”

  Like with radio astronomy and SETI, there has always been an uncomfortable relationship between space exploration and the military. In the early to mid 20th century, many great American physicists got their starts working on the Manhattan atomic bomb project. We only went to the moon so the Soviets wouldn’t put boots on its ground before us. NASA has top-secret security clearance departments, housed in buildings with fake, bricked-over windows.

  Science doesn’t get very much money; F57s do. Any time scientists can do work for war departments, science benefits, monetarily. But the relationship does seem a bit uncomfortable given that DARPA began in an effort to make a giant leap over Soviet space travel, while a mission to a different solar system would almost have to be an international project. No single country—not even the United States or China—has the money or resources to go it alone. And, besides, once the colonists left, other countries probably wouldn’t be too pleased that English speakers were the only ambassadors to Gliese-166b. It wouldn’t be very Earthling of us.

  Finally, at the conference, Jemison walks toward the front of the room. She puts her fingers on Tarter’s shoulder as she passes, and their cape-like cardigans brush against each other.

  “Hi,” they say.

  Jemison continues up to the podium to begin the conference and introduce the first session: about a NASA brainstorming retreat, where rocket scientists got together to discuss the feasibility of long-term interstellar travel. It is a report on a brainstorm at a conference that is also a brainstorm. Throughout the whole panel, Tarter seems to be composing emails and paying only scant attention. But at the end of this panel—and nearly every other panel—she raises her hand and asks a straight-on question.

  “And what actual, tangible results has the agency gotten from this meeting?” she asks the NASA scientist.

  She probably asks others this question as she asks it of herself all the time. She has worked for more than four decades on a project that some believe to be silly and others to be futile, wasteful, hubristic, or any of a whole host of other adjectives. And she has not been able to find any evidence to answer the questi
on that she set out to answer: are we alone?

  Those words rattle around in her head. And after forty-plus years of study, she’s less certain about the answer than she was when she was a kid standing on a beach, looking up at a star and imagining someone looking back, catching her eye across the cosmos. After all, that catch hasn’t come.

  Tarter sometimes expresses disappointment—in herself, in the endeavor—for this inconclusiveness. At the end of the phone call with the three generations of exoplanet astronomers, I ask if there’s anything I missed—about Tarter, about planets, about the universe—that they would like to say. Batalha jumps in to express solidarity with the non-conclusion of the conclusion of Tarter’s career: their fields—SETI, astrobiology, exoplanet science—require generations of work. All of science does, really. Big discoveries are rare, coming decades or centuries after people start wondering and doing the work that scaffolds them, shores them up, sets them up to succeed. But without that initial wondering, and those first small steps, no one would make giant leaps at all. “Jill has had this really luminous career doing SETI,” says Batalha. “But at the end of the day, she retired and hadn’t found anything. And I’m guessing that might be my fate as well, in terms of finding [microbial] life. I might live to see that day, or I might not.”

  To be an astronomer at all is to be zen about that: about cosmic time and about how you are a cog in the big machine of science, whose gears began turning long before you and will continue to turn long after you. Sometimes those gears grind to a result because of your cog, and sometimes your cog is just there to keep the gears going.

  All astronomers have days when they’re good at being zen, and days when they feel hopeless about and powerless before the uncaring bigness and seeming incomprehensibility of the universe. Tarter has had more of the latter recently.

  Batalha recalls a Kepler meeting, as the project’s prime data collection time was ending, in 2012. She was sitting next to Tarter, who, at a certain point, looked down at the table and near-whispered, to no one but herself, “We didn’t find anything.”

  Batalha turned her head to look at Tarter, struck by the depth of emotion. “That feeling—it was just so tangible,” she says. “She announced her retirement two weeks later. Clearly, she knew that she was on the verge of retiring. She was expressing that feeling of all those years of work not realizing that goal.”

  She pauses, perhaps to feel that feeling again for a second, taking it on like Jonas in The Giver. And then she continues, reaching back toward the peace of a cosmic perspective, where an individual and her lifetime are just blips. “But that’s how science works,” Batalha says. “It is what it is.”

  Turnbull chimes in, on the call, to say she had a similar experience at Tarter’s retirement party. She was catching up with Tarter’s long-time administrative assistant and unflagging companion, Chris Neller. Jill, Neller told her, feels like a total failure and that everything she did was for nothing.

  “And I just thought, ‘How could she really?’” says Turnbull. “Because it never even occurred to me, because of the enormous impact that Jill has had—and that thanks to her we are all continuing to have—on the world, just simply by existing and being in the scientific community and pushing the frontiers in every direction.”

  And then Turnbull points out something about Tarter that’s not true of most scientists in most fields: “She’s not replaceable,” she says. “Many things would not be the way they are if not for the work that she did, and the career she had.”

  For decades, Tarter was the one who championed the search, through its death, into its resurrection, as it rode the roller coaster of its modern incarnation. She had the support of her colleagues, but she was the keystone in their arch: without her, it would have collapsed. Sure, someone would have eventually picked up the rubble and rebuilt. But because of Tarter, no one had to.

  Her perseverance reminds me of one scene in Contact, when Ellie Arroway’s nemesis and former advisor David Drumlin shows up at the Arecibo telescope. He’s shutting her SETI program down, he says, the surface of the radio dish looming over him.

  “I know you can’t see it now, but I’m doing you a favor,” he says. He’s protecting her from her own inclinations. “You’re far too promising a scientist to be wasting your gifts on this nonsense,” he says.

  Arroway’s nostrils go wide with indignation. “Look, I don’t consider what could potentially be the most important discovery of the human race nonsense, okay?” she says. “There’s 400 billion stars—”

  “And only two probabilities,” Drumlin interrupts. “One, there is intelligent life out there, but it’s so far away you’ll never contact it in your lifetime, and two—two—there’s nothing out there but noble gases and carbon compounds, and you’re wasting your time. In the meantime, you won’t be published, you won’t be taken seriously, and your career will be over before it’s begun.”

  “So what?” says Arroway. ”It’s my life!”

  So what? Tarter’s actions have conveyed. It’s my life.

  In Tarter’s nonfictional life, she was published. She was, and still is, taken seriously. Her career was not over until she decided it was. She may not have unearthed an extraterrestrial civilization or made the most important discovery of the human race, as Arroway did. But she helped SETI survive, and she helped others think bigger, be better, and stay stubborn. And if humans ever do find out we’re not alone, we will all be tipping our hats—or whatever people wear on their heads in 2050 or 2500 or whenever the metaphorical phone may ring—to Tarter, for keeping the search alive, for keeping that unanswered question lodged in our brain folds.

  No, we didn’t find anything. But the attempts mean something.

  In Tarter’s office is, among her many treasures, a piece of collage art. It depicts an ATA antenna in its Hat Creek habitat. The artist, Inger Friis, created the collage in her late 90s, having recently learned that form after decades of Chinese finger painting. Spinal cancer had caused problems that prevented standing at an easel perfecting hues for hours on end as she had in her youth, so she learned to work sitting down with just fingers and fingernails. And after she mastered that, and before she turned 100, she decided to try something new. For her, it was never too late.

  Tarter met Friis after her husband, Harald—a famous radio engineer—passed away and donated part of his estate to the SETI Institute. While talking to Friis about that transaction, Tarter learned that all of Friis’s finger art was hiding under her bed in a Palo Alto retirement home.

  Tarter hated the thought of a life’s work languishing in dusty darkness. And so she asked Friis if they could exhibit the work at the institute. Not long after the initial call, Friis’s art stood on easels in those halls, next to posters about Martian craters and dolphin communication.

  Tarter and Friis became close, talking long after the paintings left the institute walls and found new homes. Their discussions often drifted toward aging and dying—because Friis was probably dying, because Tarter has always wanted to know what her own future will look like. “How does it feel?” Tarter asked.

  “You lose a piece of yourself every day,” Friis told her. “That’s the process.”

  But works of art—like scientific contributions, and social ones—leave permanent marks on the world’s surface. Fossils, big or little, that indicate to Earth’s future inhabitants We were here.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Jill’s parents, Betty and Dick. Images courtesy of Jill Tarter.

  Early on—there was balance: dresses and fish. Images courtesy of Jill Tarter.

  Once Jill learned to braid her own hair, fishing, camping, hunting and building camp sites dominated. Images courtesy of Jill Tarter.

  Learning to use the 300-foot telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, with Jeff Cuzzi (1976). Images courtesy of Jill Tarter.

  Learning to use the 300-foot telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, with Jeff Cuzzi (1976). Images courtesy of Jil
l Tarter.

  NASA SETI Science Working Group (1984). Images courtesy of Jill Tarter.

  Leading the Microwave Observing Project Team (1989): Dan Werthimer, Ed Olsen, John Dreher, Peter Backus, and Jill Tarter. Images courtesy of Jill Tarter.

  Third U.S.-U.S.S.R. SETI Decennial Meeting (1991). Image courtesy of Seth Shostak.

  First light at Parkes Observatory (1995). Image courtesy of Jane Jordan.

  The Parkes Observatory. Image courtesy of CSIRO/John Sarkissian.

  The Mopra radio telescope. Image courtesy of CSIRO/ATNF.

  The 140-foot dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI/NSF.

  The dishes at the Georgia Tech’s Woodbury Research facility. Images courtesy of SETI League.

  The student-built feed at Woodbury. Images courtesy of SETI League.

  The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory. Image courtesy of Jodrell Bank.

  The Arecibo Observatory. Image courtesy of NAIC/NSF.

  Astronomers don’t get to experience this perspective. Le Monde had to take out a one-day, multi-million dollar insurance policy so that Jill could climb the towers with photographer Louis Psihoyos. Images courtesy of Louie Psihoyos.

  Inside the control room, the work was far more mundane—just baby-sitting the software intelligence with Jane Jordan to make sure it was doing the right thing. Images courtesy of Louie Psihoyos.