I was lucky enough to get to chat with the author and science writer Sarah Scoles, whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, Wired, and the Washington Post, among others. Sarah, thank you for being here!
First, I have to boast that I’ve known Sarah for what I think is 10 years now. Our friendship got its start in the jungles of Puerto Rico at the Arecibo Observatory, the same spot where NASA’s first major SETI effort, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, began in 1992. Congress canceled that survey a year later but luckily they couldn’t put a stop to us.
We also met up more recently in West Virginia when I was running experiments at the 140-foot Green Bank Telescope where Sarah worked, a telescope which she describes in her book as “naval on the outside and steampunk on the inside”. Since astronomers are often short on funds, she let me stay with her at her farmhouse which just happened to be the “former bachelor pad” (as she calls it) of Frank Drake. Drake took the first step for modern SETI efforts by pointing a radio telescope at two stars similar to our Sun in 1960, an experiment known as Project Ozma. He is also well known for being the creator of the Drake Equation, an idea that is not so much a precise equation but an effort to break down into parts the odds us Earthlings would have to overcome in order to detect an extraterrestrial message.
So let’s talk about Making Contact …
EE: What do you find most inspiring about Jill Tarter? Of all the people you could have chosen to write about, what made you choose her?
SS: Well, first, Jill Tarter started her career in astronomy when there weren’t so many female scientists at all and so she faced a lot of obstacles like being rejected for scholarships that were meant only for men, having to do all of her homework by herself because she wasn’t allowed on the boys’ side of Cornell campus. But she kept at it anyway and she’s tried in the years since to make astronomy, and science in general, better places for women. I think that’s inspiring.
And then there’s of course her science. She’s dedicated her life to this question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ and that’s a pretty bold thing to do because we totally could be alone or we might never find out if we’re not. But I think it’s a really fundamental and really human question. And I first saw it played out when I watched the movie Contact, whose main character is partly based on Tarter. And that movie – and her character – taught me what radio astronomy was and that SETI was this actual scientific project that people were doing, and that there was this complicated woman at the head of it all. That really inspired me when I was young and I wanted to know what she and SETI were like in real life and not in a fictional movie or book.
EE: I imagine those reasons could be connected too. Jill Tarter was not afraid to be one of the few women in her science classes and so she was also not afraid to be asking tough questions that may not have an answer, like ‘are we alone?’
SS: Yeah I guess maybe once you learn to be one kind of outsider it’s not so hard to become another kind and just keep going.
EE: In the book, you explain in a very relatable way the techniques and telescopes used by SETI over the years to search for intelligent civilizations beyond Earth. You also discuss how the 50 years of SETI is an incredibly short time, cosmically speaking and that statistically, we might expect to wait 1000 years before finding anything. But how much of our search is hindered by our desire to focus mostly on other civilizations that resemble our own? Are our egos or, perhaps worse, a lack of imagination getting in the way?
SS: While I totally agree that it’s for lack of a better word “Earthist” to think that extraterrestrials live on planets like ours and communicate in the same ways as we do. The universe is a very large place and it’s very strange. Scientists often find things that surprise them and break “rules” that we thought were true about the universe. The way aliens are and the way they communicate could be one of those in terms of their biology, their methods of talking, or their habitats. But, I also think that if humans are going to do SETI we do have to start somewhere. We only have one example of life in the universe, and it’s right here on this planet with humans and elephants and hippopotami and everything else. We also only know of a few ways to communicate across thousands or millions of lightyears. So it makes sense to me to start with what we know and then expand on all that as we learn more about the universe and even about life on Earth. I’m going to steal a phrase that Jill says all the time which is: “We reserve the right to get smarter.” I think that that is a good way to think about it.
EE: Your narrative details a few instances when there was hope that a signal might have been extraterrestrial in origin, only to find out we had once again only detected evidence of ourselves. But for the most part, the ups and downs of SETI you describe have mainly to do with funding. At the start of your book, Jill Tarter links the importance of SETI to the importance of understanding our own origin story. However, you later describe how Representative Silvio Conte asked “can we afford curiosity?” when moving to cut Congressional support for SETI. What do you think is the main driver behind the fluctuating interest – and thus funding – in SETI?
SS: I think the reason SETI has faced so much political and financial opposition in its pretty short history is that it doesn’t have a definite payoff. We can all have our opinions about whether there is extraterrestrial intelligence, but no one actually knows if there’s anyone else out there and no one knows for sure at all how to find them if they are, and no one knows how long it might take, if it works at all. In the meantime, here on Earth, there’s things like war and racism and poverty and genocide, crumbling infrastructure, the erosion of democracy. The world just has a ton of problems and SETI doesn’t necessarily help solve those.
But I think there’s value in human curiosity and in thinking on timescales longer than our own lives which SETI requires. So there’s not necessarily immediate value in looking for aliens in the way that a politician or a funder might like, but I think there’s value in trying to answer these really big questions. How did life get here? Are we alone? Because we spend a lot of time thinking about very terrestrial things and doing all our everyday stuff like going to work, making dinner, playing with our kids, worrying about the world. I don’t think we should use SETI as an excuse not to worry about the world. I think the world deserves to be worried about. But it’s a good way to give perspective. I kind of think about it like going on a backpacking trip or a trip into the wilderness where you’re just surrounded by the wonder of nature. You still have to go back to work but your brain is in this reset spot when you go back and I think SETI can do that for people.
EE: Where does SETI stand now? Who are its biggest funders? Is it still mainly a labor of love born by radio astronomers and engineers?
SS: Well, I think SETI as a field is in a pretty good spot right now compared to where it’s been in the past. The SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array which is in really far northern California is in the process of getting an upgrade which has been mostly funded by a guy named Franklin Antonio from the company Qualcom. So now it should be able to detect fainter messages from ET.
Also recently, a very rich person named Yuri Milner started a totally new SETI program called Breakthrough Listen which mostly uses the Green Bank Telescope which you talked about already. And on top of those ongoing programs, scientists have also discovered thousands of exoplanets outside of our solar system just in the past few years. So SETI scientists can target those or other nearby solar systems that seem like good places for life in a really realistic and practical way that wasn’t possible before they knew about these other planets. So, on the whole, I think things are looking up for SETI.
EE: Well, I for one am eager to learn what SETI may discover in their search. Thank you so much for joining us, Sarah, and please check out Sarah’s book Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence available on Amazon. I want to end with the following quote which Sarah Scoles offers towards the start of Making Contact, a quote from her protagonist, Jill Tarter:
“I don’t expect extraterrestrial salvation. I don’t expect them to tell us how to solve our problems. But the very existence of such a civilization should motivate us to figure out a way to solve our own problems. It has the effect of trivializing the differences among Earthlings, differences that we’re willing to spill blood over.”
Now, that seems worth pursuing.
Until next time, this is Sabrina Stierwalt with Everyday Einstein’s Quick and Dirty Tips for helping you make sense of science. You can become a fan of Everyday Einstein on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I’m @QDTeinstein. If you have a question that you’d like to see on a future episode, send me an email at everydayeinstein@quickanddirtytips.com.
Image courtesy of shutterstock
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