The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017

by Hope Jahren

  Other sail-related decisions remain. The sail could attach to the chip with cables, or the chip could be mounted on the sail. The sail might spin, allowing it to stay centered on the light beamer. After the initial acceleration, the sail could fold up like an umbrella, making it less vulnerable during the journey. And once it got to Alpha Centauri, it could unfold and adjust its curvature to act like a telescope mirror or an antenna to send the chip’s messages back to Earth. “It sounds like a lot of work,” Landis says, “but we’ve solved hard problems before.”

  Yet all these challenges are still easier than those of the light beamer that will push the sail. The only way Starshot could reach a good fraction of light speed is with an unusually powerful 100-gigawatt laser. The Department of Defense has produced lasers more powerful, says Robert Peterkin, chief scientist at the Directed Energy Directorate at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, but they shine for only billionths or trillionths of a second. The Starshot light beamer would have to stay on each sail for minutes. To reach this kind of power for that long, small fiber lasers can be grouped into an array and phased together so that all their light combines into one coherent beam. The Defense Department has also built phased array lasers, but theirs include 21 lasers in an array no more than 30 centimeters across, Peterkin says, which achieves a few tens of kilowatts. The Starshot light beamer would have to include 100 million such kilowatt-scale lasers, and the array would spread a kilometer on each side. “How beyond the state of the art is that?” Peterkin says.

  “And it all gets worse and worse,” he adds. The 100 million little lasers would be deflected by the normal turbulence of the atmosphere, each one in its own way. In the end the light beamer would need to bring them all to a single focus 60,000 kilometers up on a four-square-meter sail. “At the moment,” says Robert Fugate, a retired scientist at the Directed Energy Directorate who is on the committee, drily, “phasing 100 million lasers through atmospheric turbulence on a meter-class target 60 megameters away has my attention.” The light could miss the sail completely or more likely hit it unevenly so parts of the sail would be pushed harder, causing it to tumble, spin, or slip off the beam.

  Again, the Starshot team has a potential solution but one that comes with its own set of problems. A technology called adaptive optics, already used by large telescopes, cancels out the distortion created by the atmosphere’s turbulence with a flexible mirror that creates an equal and opposite distortion. But this technology would need major adaptations to work for Starshot. In the case of the beamer, instead of an adjustable mirror, scientists would have to minutely adjust each laser fiber to make the atmospheric correction. Current adaptive optics on telescopes can resolve at best a point 30 milliarcseconds across (a measure of an object’s angular size on the sky). Starshot would need to focus the beamer within 0.3 milliarcsecond across—something that has never been done before.

  And even if all these disparate and challenging technologies could be built, they must still work together as a single system, which for the Starshot managers is like creating a puzzle with pieces whose shapes evolve or do not yet exist. Worden calls the process “the art of a long-term hard-research program.” The system has “no single design yet,” says Kevin Parkin of Parkin Research, a systems engineer who is on the committee. The plan for the first five years, Klupar says, is to “harvest the technologies”—that is, with the guidance of the relevant experts on the committee, the team members will carry out small-scale experiments and make mathematical models. They began in the winter of 2015–2016 by scoping out existing technologies and requesting proposals for not-yet-developed technologies; in spring 2017 they intend to award small contracts of several hundred thousand to $1.5 million each. Prototypes would come next, and, assuming their success, construction of the laser and sail could begin in the early 2030s, with launch in the mid-2040s. By that time Starshot will likely have cost billions of dollars and, with any luck, have collected collaborators in governments, labs, and space agencies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. “I will make the case, and I hope more people will join,” Milner says. “It has to be global,” he adds, citing the reasonable national security concerns of an enormous laser installation. “If you start something like this in secrecy, there will be many more question marks. It’s important to announce intentions openly.”

  Starward, Ho!

  Given all these hurdles, what are the odds of success? Technologically savvy people not connected to Starshot estimate they are small; several people told me flatly, “They’re not going to Alpha Centauri.” David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says the project will ultimately be so expensive that “it may amount to convincing the U.S. population to put 5 percent of the national budget—the same fraction as the Apollo program—into it.”

  Those connected with Starshot think the odds are better but are pragmatic. “We can certainly use lasers to send craft to Alpha Centauri,” says Greg Matloff of the New York City College of Technology, a member of the committee. “Whether we can get them there over the next 20 years, I don’t know.” Harvard’s Manchester says, “Within 50 years the odds are pretty good; in a century, 100 percent.” Worden thinks their approach is purposefully meas-ured, “and maybe in five years we’ll find we can’t do it.” Milner sees his job on Starshot, besides funding it, as keeping it practical and grounded. “If it takes more than a generation,” he says, “we shouldn’t work on that project.”

  Until late last August I thought Dyson was right; the Starshot technology was intriguing, but Alpha Centauri was silly. The star is a binary system (Alpha Centauri A and B), and both stars are sunlike, neither one unusual. Astronomers’ understanding of such stars, Charbonneau says, “is pretty good,” and although comparing their flares and magnetic fields with our sun’s might be useful, “what we’d learn about stellar physics by going there isn’t worth the investment.”

  Now that astronomers know Alpha Centauri’s neighbor has a planet, the science case is more promising. The star, Proxima Centauri, is a tad nearer to Earth and is a red dwarf, the most common kind of star. The planet, Proxima Centauri b, is at a distance from its star that could make it habitable. When the discovery was announced, the Starshot team celebrated over dinner. Would members consider changing the project’s target? “Sure,” Milner says. “We have plenty of time to decide.” The laser array should have enough flexibility in pointing that it could “accommodate the difference, about two degrees,” Fugate says.

  Ultimately the Breakthrough Initiatives’ general goal is to find all the planets in the solar neighborhood, Klupar says, and Proxima Centauri b might be just the first. “I feel like an entomologist who picks up one rock, finds a bug, then thinks every rock after that will have a bug under it too,” he says. “It’s not true, but it’s encouraging somehow.”

  Of course, even the presence of Proxima Centauri b still does not make Starshot slam-dunk science. The chip could take images, maybe look at the planet’s magnetic field, perhaps sample the atmosphere—but it would do this all on the fly in minutes. Given the time to launch and the eventual price, says Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel, “we could build a 12- to 15-meter optical telescope in space, look at the planet for months, and get much more information than a rapid flyby could.”

  But billionaires are free to invest in whatever they wish, and kindred souls are free to join them in that wish. Furthermore, even those who question Starshot’s scientific value often support it anyway, because in developing the technology, its engineers will almost certainly come up with something interesting. “They won’t solve all the problems, but they’ll solve one or two,” Spergel says. And an inventive solution to just one difficult problem “would be a great success.” Plus, even if Starshot does not succeed, missions capitalizing on the technologies it develops could reach some important destinations both within and beyond our solar system.

  Milner’s own fondness for the project stems from his hope that it can unite the world’s human
s in a sense of being one planet and one species. “In the past six years I’ve spent 50 percent of my time on the road, a lot of time in Asia and Europe,” he says. “I realized that global consensus is difficult but not impossible.” That theme fits with the other Breakthrough Initiatives, which chiefly want to find aliens to talk to, and with Milner’s considerable investments in the Internet and social media, which have changed the nature of conversation and community. But in the end, even he acknowledges that wanting to go to a star is inexplicable. “If you keep asking me why, eventually I’ll say I don’t know. I just think it’s important.”

  Almost everyone I asked said the same: they cannot explain it to someone who does not already understand—they just want to go. James Gunn, emeritus professor in Princeton’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences, who thinks Starshot’s chances of success are slim and who dismissed the scientific motivations, still says, “I’m rational about most things, but I’m not particularly rational about the far reach of humanity. I dreamed of going to the stars since I was a kid.” Many of the advisory committee said the same thing. “It is just so cool,” Landis says, echoing the exact words of other members.

  The contradictions inherent in such dreams are perhaps best expressed by Freeman Dyson. Starshot’s laser-driven sail with its chip makes sense, he says, and those behind the project are smart and “quite sensible.” But he thinks they should stop trying to go to Alpha or Proxima Centauri and focus on exploring the solar system, where StarChips could be driven by more feasible, less powerful lasers and travel at lower speeds. “Exploring is something humans are designed for,” he says. “It’s something we’re very good at.” He thinks “automatic machines” should explore the universe—that there is no scientific justification for sending people. And then, being Dyson and unpredictable, he adds, “On the other hand, I still would love to go.”

  AZEEN GHORAYSHI

  He Fell in Love with His Grad Student—Then Fired Her for It

  FROM BuzzFeed News

  Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student.

  The university investigation, which concluded in September, found that Ott violated the school’s harassment policies with both women. Ott, a 38-year-old rising star who had been granted tenure the year before, was placed on nine months of unpaid leave. During that time he is barred from campus, his communication with most of his postdoctoral fellows will be monitored, and, with the exception of a single graduate student, he is not allowed to have contact with any other students. Before returning he must undergo what a school official calls “rehabilitative” training.

  The sanctions were imposed quietly, but after an inquiry from BuzzFeed News about Ott’s case, the university’s president and provost emailed a statement to the entire university on January 4.

  “There was unambiguous gender-based harassment of both graduate students by the faculty member,” the statement said. It also noted that the faculty member—who was not named—had appealed the sanctions against him, but the university denied his request.

  Ott declined to address most questions about his case, telling BuzzFeed News he was “constrained from commenting on the situation at this time.” But he challenged the idea that he was responsible for anyone’s firing.

  “At Caltech graduate students are not ‘fired’ by the decision of a single faculty member,” he wrote in an email this week. “When problems with students arise, multiple faculty get involved and a solution is found that ensures the graduate student is not harmed.”

  Now the two women who filed the harassment complaint—the graduate students Io Kleiser, whom he fell in love with, and Sarah Gossan, whom he confessed his feelings to—have shared their stories with BuzzFeed News. They said they were disappointed that instead of terminating Ott’s employment, Caltech chose to take a rehabilitative approach and will allow Ott to continue to work with students.

  “Because Christian still has a place at Caltech, I feel that I don’t,” Kleiser, who left the university in January, told BuzzFeed News. (Kleiser will finish her research at the University of California, Berkeley but will still receive her doctorate degree from Caltech.) “If they retain Christian and keep a place for him, then they may be inadvertently telling many students that those students do not have a place at Caltech.”

  Interviews with a dozen of Ott’s current and former colleagues, as well as more than 1,000 pages of correspondence between Ott and the two complainants that were submitted to the investigators, suggest that Ott struggled not only with romantic feelings for his student but with forging appropriate professional relationships with some of the people he advised.

  Speaking on behalf of the university, Fiona Harrison, chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, told BuzzFeed News that the sanctions were appropriately severe. Ott committed “gender-based harassment and discrimination, and we have zero tolerance for that here at Caltech,” she said. “I think our actions actually demonstrate that.”

  Ott’s case coincides with high-profile incidents of sexual harassment in university science departments. In October, BuzzFeed News revealed that Berkeley had found that the famous astronomer Geoff Marcy had sexually harassed students. And on Tuesday, during a speech on sexism and science on the House floor, congresswoman Jackie Speier of California revealed that a 2004 report from the University of Arizona found that the astronomer Tim Slater had violated sexual harassment policies.

  “Science students go to college to study astronomy, chemistry, or physics, not their professors’ sex lives,” Speier told BuzzFeed News by email. “Sexual harassment in science is pervasive,” she said, and “the culture needs to change if we want women in this country to reach their full potential as scientists.”

  Unlike Berkeley, which did not punish Marcy, Caltech has been applauded by some observers for imposing sanctions against Ott. But others question why, despite warning signs, no action was taken until Gossan came forward last June.

  “He’s obviously a talented researcher, but that’s not all that his job entails,” said Joan Schmelz, who until recently led the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy. “In his current state, should he be advising students and postdocs? I think no.”

  Io Kleiser came to Caltech to work with Ott in 2012, when she was 22, to study supernovae, the rare astronomical explosions that happen in the final stages of a massive star’s life.

  Halfway through the year Kleiser was taking a full load of classes as well as doing research with Ott, who uses supercomputers to model the mysterious explosions. She struggled with the workload. “I was just trying to keep my head above water,” she said.

  Ott began messaging her late at night online, where they talked about their shared insecurities about work. Sometimes their chats were casual; he’d recommend that she read Charles Bukowski or listen to Leonard Cohen. But other times he’d ask her why she wasn’t devoting more time to research, questioning her motivations and time management. “It saddens me that research is coming last,” he wrote one night in May 2013.

  “Not only was he being demanding in terms of my time,” Kleiser said, “but he was questioning my commitment to the work, and telling me about how it was making him feel, really from an emotional angle.”

  In fall 2013, Kleiser went to the incoming executive officer for astronomy, Sterl Phinney, to tell him that she was struggling to work well with her adviser. Within a few weeks, Kleiser said, Ott asked her to meet.

  Over coffees at a Peet’s just off campus, Kleiser recalled, Ott broke the news that he no longer wanted to work with her, meaning she would have to find another adviser to finish her graduate studies. The change totally upended her research plans, but she
said she didn’t really understand why he was firing her. He mentioned an email that she had not responded to a few weeks earlier, she recalled, and said he “couldn’t emotionally deal with” her anymore. She had no idea that he had any romantic feelings for her. She just thought she had failed at her job.

  Five days later, around 1 a.m., Ott messaged her online. “Of all my students I cared most about you and I failed in the worst way,” Ott typed. “My problem is that I don’t want to be in a power position, but I factually am.”

  Around the same time Ott began chatting online with another of his female graduate students, 23-year-old Sarah Gossan, to confide in her about the situation with Kleiser. One evening Ott asked Gossan to switch from chat to Skype. “I can’t even write this stuff down,” he typed.

  On Skype a few minutes later, according to Gossan, Ott confessed to being in love with Kleiser. “The reason he had fired her was because he was concerned she was using her sexual influence over him to not do any work,” Gossan told BuzzFeed News.

  Over the next year and a half, Ott continued to message Gossan online, sometimes late at night or while he was inebriated. He talked to her about not being able to let go of his feelings for Kleiser, whom he was still repeatedly reaching out to by chat and email. He also discussed his previous relationships and past emotional involvement with students.

  Gossan was often sympathetic to Ott, and opened up to him about her own struggles with anxiety, bulimia, and her boyfriend.

  “I am just so happy that I have a female grad student who is actually sane and I can talk to,” Ott wrote to her in January 2014.

  “Do you think I am a shady person because I let myself be emotionally involved with my student?” he asked her later that month. “I think I may actually be prone to this sort of thing.”