by Hope Jahren
Friendless for most of her childhood, Seager eventually forged her way to her own vision of the good life. She found and married a quiet man named Mike Wevrick, whom she met on a ski trip with her canoe club. He had seen something in her that nobody other than her father fully saw; he saw her as special as well as strange. Later she graduated from Harvard, an early expert in exoplanets. (51 Pegasi b was discovered just when she was searching for a thesis topic. “I was born at the perfect time,” she says.) She and Wevrick had Max and Alex; Seager was hired by MIT, and she and Wevrick and the boys moved into a pretty yellow Victorian in Concord, Massachusetts. She took the train to work. Wevrick, a freelance editor, managed just about everything that didn’t involve the search for intelligent life in the universe. Seager never shopped for groceries or cooked or pumped gas. All she had to do was find another Earth.
Then, in the fall of 2009, Wevrick got a stomachache that drove him to bed. They figured it was the flu. Wevrick didn’t have the flu but a rare cancer of the small intestine. They were told that the initial prospects were good, and he fought the cancer sufferer’s systematic fight. But while laws govern astrophysics, cancer is an anarchist. About a year after Wevrick’s diagnosis, he and Seager went cross-country skiing, and he couldn’t keep up. A few more terrible months passed, and he began writing out a methodical three-page list, practical advice for Seager after his death. It wasn’t a love letter; it was an instruction manual for life on Earth. By June 2011 he was 47 and in home hospice. Seager asked him how to get the roof rack that carried his canoes off the car. “It’s too complicated to explain,” Wevrick said. That July he died.
The first couple of months after Wevrick’s death were weird. Seager felt a surprising sense of relief from the uncertainties of sickness, a kind of liberation. She didn’t care about conventions like money, which she had never needed to manage, and she took the boys on some epic trips. There are pictures of them smiling together in the deserts of New Mexico, on mountaintops in Hawaii. Then one day she went into Boston for a haircut, got turned around, and accidentally walked into a lawyer’s office next to the salon. Seager ended up talking to a woman inside. That woman was also a widow, and she told Seager that there would be a moment, as inevitable as death itself, when her feelings of release would be replaced by the more lasting aimlessness of the lost. Seager walked back outside, and just like that the world came out from under her feet. She fell into an impossible blackness.
Later that winter she took the boys sledding at the big hill in Concord. Two other women and their children were there. Seager stared at them coldly. They were smiling and carefree with their perfect, blissful lives. Seager felt ugly and ruined next to them. Then Alex, who was six at the time, had a meltdown. He sprawled himself across the hill so that the other children couldn’t go down it. The two other mothers tried to get him to move. “He has a problem,” Seager told them. They continued to try to shift him.
“HE HAS A PROBLEM,” Seager said. “MY HUSBAND DIED.”
“Mine too,” one of the other women said. That was Melissa. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Seager was invited to her first gathering of the widows.
Today Melissa says she could detect the telltale “flintiness” of the recently bereaved the moment she saw Seager on the hill. Now there were six widows united in Concord, each middle-aged, each in a different stage of grief, drawn together by the peculiar pull of the unlucky. Three had been widowed by cancer, two by accidents—bicycling and hiking—and one by suicide. Melissa’s husband was four years gone, Seager’s seven months.
Widowhood was like a new universe for Seager to explore. She had never understood many social norms. The celebration of birthdays, for instance. “I just don’t see the point,” she says. “Why would I want to celebrate my birthday? Why on earth would I even care?” She had also drawn a hard line against Christmas and its myths. “I never wanted my kids to believe in Santa.” After Wevrick’s death she became even more of a satellite, developing a deeper intolerance for life’s ordinary concerns.
Making dinner seemed an insurmountable chore, the routine of school lunches a form of torture. The roof needed to be replaced, and she didn’t have the faintest idea how to get it fixed. She wasn’t sure how to swipe credit cards. If the answers to her questions weren’t somewhere on Wevrick’s three wrinkled sheets of paper, it could feel as though they were locked in a safe.
There was a pendant light in her front hall, where the boys would fight with their toy light-sabers, and sometimes they would hit the light with their wild swings. Seager decided that either the light or one of the boys was going to end up damaged. She asked the widows how to do electrical work—“I have to parcel out things with logic and evidence,” she says—got out the ladder, and took down the light, carefully wrapping black tape around the ends of the bare wires that now poked through the hole in the ceiling. She remembers thinking that her removing that light all by herself represented the height of her new accomplishment. She felt so reduced. She felt so gigantic.
For all of her real and perceived strangeness, the most unusual thing about Seager is her blindness to her greatest gift. She is more than aware of her preternatural mathematical abilities, her possession of a rare mind that can see numbers and their functions as clearly as the rest of us see colors and shapes. “I’m good at that stuff,” she says with her brand of factual certainty that is sometimes confused with arrogance. She knows she is unusually capable of turning abstract concepts into things that can be packed into a case. What she doesn’t always see is her knack for connection between places, if not always people, the unconventional grace she possesses when it comes to closing unfathomable distances.
Seager has lined the hallway outside her office with a series of magical travel posters put out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Each gives a glimpse of the alien worlds that, in part because of her, we now know exist. There’s a poster for Kepler-16b, an exoplanet that orbits a pair of stars, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine. Kepler-186f is depicted with red grass and red leaves on its trees, because its star is cooler and redder than the sun, which might influence photosynthesis in foliage-altering ways. There’s even one for PSO J318.5-22, a rogue planet that doesn’t orbit a star but instead wanders across the galaxy, cast in perpetual darkness, swept by rain of molten iron.
After the discovery of Proxima Centauri b, Seager wrote a galactic postcard from it for the website Quartz. She closed her eyes and imagined a world 25 trillion miles away. “For the average earthling,” she wrote, “visiting this planet might not be much fun.” She saw a planet perhaps a third larger than Earth, with an orbit of only 11 days. Given its proximity to its small, red star, she suggested that the ultraviolet radiation on Proxima Centauri b is probably intense but the light Martian-dim. She also deduced that Proxima Centauri b is “tidally locked.” Like the moon’s relationship to Earth, one side of the planet always faces its star, which is always in the same place in its sky. Parts of Proxima Centauri b are cast in perpetual sunrise or sunset. One side is always in darkness.
At first after Wevrick’s death Seager thought about abandoning her work, because she was having such a hard time with her responsibilities at home. Her dean talked her out of quitting, giving her financial support to hire caregivers for the boys and urging her to redouble her efforts. “I had worked so hard,” she says. “I had all the years I called the lost years with Mike when I ignored him. We had little tiny kids. I was working all the time, exhausted all the time. But I was like, We’ll have money someday. We’ll have time someday.”
She paused. Her face was blank, emotionless. “Now I’ll cry.” Seconds later tears spilled out of her eyes, and her voice modulated. “I wanted to make it up to him, and I never did.”
Seager has always found comfort and perhaps even solace in her work, in her search for another and maybe better version of our world. In her mourning, each discovery represented one more avenue of escape. In the spring of 2013 she was given responsibi
lity for the starshade. That July she met a tall, fast-walking man named Charles Darrow.
Darrow, who is now 53, was an amateur astronomer and the president of the Toronto branch of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and at the last minute he decided to go to the society’s annual meeting in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Darrow was on his way out of a profoundly unhappy marriage; he worked for his family business, an engine-parts wholesaler. He needed a break, and he pointed his car north. “I wanted to be alone,” he says. At a reception on the Friday evening, Darrow noticed a hazel-eyed woman staring at him from across the room. “I thought she was looking at someone behind me,” he says. Then he went into the lecture hall, and the same woman was that night’s keynote speaker. She talked about exoplanets. The next day, lunch was in a university cafeteria. The woman was in the salad line ahead of him, and she turned around. Darrow mustered up his courage and invited Sara Seager to join him. “I knew about five minutes into the conversation that my life was going to change,” he says.
Seager was taken with Darrow the night she saw him in Thunder Bay. She had been struck by the contrast between the whiteness of his shirt and his tanned summer skin. But she didn’t have the same certainty that possessed him at their lunch the next day. She wasn’t sure how to develop a relationship across the 549 miles between her home in Concord and his home outside Toronto. She thought they might never cross paths again.
They might not have, except Darrow resolved during his drive back home that he had to call her. He picked up the phone five times but always hung up before she answered. On the sixth he spoke to her, beginning a long correspondence, emails and conversations over Skype. Darrow and Seager talked every way but face-to-face. They fell in love remotely. “I had to follow my heart,” Darrow says. “I decided that I wasn’t going to die unhappy.”
Melissa, meanwhile, told Seager that if she could close the gap between here and a planet like Kepler-186f—a journey that would take us 500 light-years to complete—then the 549 miles between Concord and Toronto shouldn’t seem like such an insurmountable gulf. By her usual measures, he was right next door.
Seager and Darrow married in April 2015. In different ways, each had rescued the other. Seager was the cataclysm that allowed Darrow to make every correction. He divorced, left his family business, and moved into a pretty yellow Victorian in Concord. The two boys started calling him Dad. For Seager, Darrow was a second chance to know love, even deeper than the one she had known, because it seemed so improbable in her sadness. “I feel so lucky to have found him,” Seager says. “What are the chances?”
Adapting to his new life hasn’t always been easy for Darrow. He is determined, as he puts it, “to make Sara the happiest woman in the multiverse.” He cooks dinner; he helps take care of the boys; he maintains the house; he walks with Seager to the train station every morning, and he picks her up every night. He has chosen to take care of the mundane so that she can devote herself to the extraordinary. But he banged his head more than once on Wevrick’s canoe, which still hung from the back of the garage.
Not long ago Darrow was looking for the right ways to assert his presence, to make a claim to a house that didn’t always feel like his. The wires dangling from the front hall ceiling bothered him. They looked bad and seemed dangerous. A few months after his arrival in Concord, he took his opening. He carved out some of the plaster, installed a plastic box, ran the wires through it, and hooked up a new fixture, flush-mounted, so that the boys wouldn’t hit it during their duels.
Darrow climbed down from the ladder and flicked the switch.
The morning after she forgot her phone, Seager woke up and decided, just like that, to skip the commute. With the house to herself, she tried to make coffee. She left out part of the machine, and after some terrible noises the pot was bone-dry. She sat down at her kitchen table with her empty mug and began talking about hundreds of billions of galaxies and their hundreds of billions of stars. Tens of billions of habitable planets, far more of them than there are people on Earth. There has to be other life somewhere out there. We can’t be that special.
“It would be arrogant to think so,” Seager said. But in her lifetime, after the WFIRST telescope rockets into orbit, and maybe her starshade follows it—she puts the chances of success at 85 percent—she will have time to explore only the nearest hundred stars or so. A hundred stars out of all those lights in the sky, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
Will one of them have a small, rocky planet like Earth? Probably. Will one of those small, rocky planets have liquid water on it? Possibly. Will the planet sustain life? Now the odds tilt. Now they are working against her, and she knows it. Now they’re maybe one in a million that she’ll find what she’s looking for.
She did some private math. “I believe,” she said.
Seager’s discovery will be fate-altering if it comes, but it will also be quiet, a few pixels on a screen. It will obey the laws of physics. It will be a probability equation: What are the chances? We won’t discover that there is life on other planets the way we’ve been taught that we’ll learn. There won’t be some great mother ship descending from the sky over Johannesburg or a bizarre lightning storm that monsters will ride to New Jersey. What Seager will have is a photograph from a space telescope of a distant solar system, with its star eclipsed by her starshade, and with a familiar blue dot some safe and survivable distance away from it. That’s all the evidence she will have that we’re not alone, and that will be all the evidence she will need. Her proof of life will be a small light where there wasn’t one before.
KATHRYN JOYCE
Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream
FROM Huffington Post Highline/The Nation Institute Investigative Fund
On an early Friday morning in late June 2006, Cheyenne Szydlo, a 33-year-old Arizona wildlife biologist with fiery red hair, drove to the Grand Canyon’s South Rim to meet the river guide who would be taking her along the 280 miles of the Colorado River that coursed a mile below. She was excited. Everyone in her field wanted to work at the Grand Canyon, and after several years of unsuccessful applications, Szydlo had recently been offered a seasonal position in one of the National Park Service’s science divisions. She’d quit another job in order to accept, certain her chance wouldn’t come again.
The Grand Canyon is a mecca of biological diversity, home to species that grow nowhere else on Earth. But after a dam was built upstream 60 years ago, changes in the Colorado’s flow have enabled the rise of invasive species and displaced numerous forms of wildlife. Szydlo’s task was to hunt for the southwestern willow flycatcher, a tiny endangered songbird that historically had nested on the river but hadn’t been seen in three years. Her supervisor believed the bird was locally extinct, but Szydlo was determined to find it. The June expedition—a nine-day journey through the canyon on a 20-foot motorboat operated by a boatman named Dave Loeffler—would be her last chance that summer. When Szydlo asked a coworker what Loeffler was like, the reply was cryptic: “You’ll see.”
Szydlo, who’d studied marine biology in Australia and coral reefs in French Polynesia, was drawn to the adventurous nature of the work. “From my earliest memories,” she told me, “there was never any place that felt safer or happier to me than the outdoors.” On the morning of the trip, she arrived at the boat shop early. She assumed they’d leave at once, to make the most of the day. Instead, she said, Loeffler took her to a coworker’s house, and for an hour and a half she sat uncomfortably as Loeffler told his friend about the battery-powered blender he’d packed to make “the best margaritas on the river.”
They set out from Lees Ferry in Marble Canyon, the otherworldly antechamber to “the Grand.” From there the river winds through towering, striated red cliffs and balancing rock formations, under the Navajo Bridge, and, at around mile 60, into the Grand Canyon itself. The views are stupefying, the waters turquoise, and the disconnection almost total—a moonscape beyond cell-phone reception. For many people it’s a spiritual exp
erience.
It’s also an intimate one. Travelers eat and sleep together, and due to the lack of cover must often bathe and go to the bathroom in full view, using portable metal ammo cans outfitted with toilet seats. Commercial river guides often say that no one can claim their privacy on the river, so fellow passengers should offer it instead.
In Szydlo’s recounting of the trip, Loeffler didn’t adhere to this code. When she bent to move provisions or tie up the boat, he commented on a logo on the back of her utility skirt. He asked frank questions about her sex life and referred to Szydlo as “hot sexy biologist.” That June the temperatures at the bottom of the canyon reached 109 degrees, and when Szydlo scorched her skin on a metal storage box, Loeffler said she had a hot ass. He adjusted her bra strap when it slipped, and one chilly night invited her to sleep in the boat with him if she was cold. When they stopped to take a picture at a particularly scenic spot, he suggested that she pose naked. He told her that another female Park Services staffer would be hiking in to meet them at the halfway point and that he hoped they would have “a three-way.” Szydlo told me she laughed uncomfortably and spoke often of her boyfriend and their plans to get married.
By the third day of the trip, it seemed to Szydlo that Loeffler was getting increasingly frustrated. They stopped at a confluence where the Colorado meets a tributary and forms a short tumble of rapids gentle enough for boaters to swim through with a life jacket. Szydlo pulled on her preserver, but Loeffler insisted she didn’t need one. When she entered the river without it, the water sucked her under. She somersaulted through the rapids “like I was in a washing machine,” she recalled. She thought she was going to drown. Then the rapids spat her out into a calm, shallow pool. She came up gasping and choking to the sound of Loeffler’s laughter, and thought to herself, “I’m in deep shit.”