Ten Things I Believe

In 2017 I caught up with Jill Tarter, the astronomer and professional alien hunter who co-founded SETI in the 1980s and who Jodie Foster played in the (slightly fictionalised) film Contact. We spoke about things big and small, and then I edited that chat down into this here first-person interview.

Put your foot down

Growing up, my dad was my entire universe. He was an outdoorsman, so I grew up hunting, fishing and camping. Then when I was about eight, my mother had a conversation with him and he subsequently told me I needed to learn how to do ‘girl things’. He couldn’t have said anything that would have made me angrier. After I pulled out the tears he finally said, “Look, if you’re willing to work hard, you can do whatever you want.” So I stamped my foot down and said, “I’m going to be an engineer.” I didn’t even know what an engineer was; I just knew my father had friends who were engineers, and all of those engineers were male.

‘Carpe diem’ is a hard lesson

A couple of years later my father died. I had told him I was going to be an engineer, so goddammit I was going to be an engineer. I wanted to make him proud. This is actually not an unusual experience for women my age who went into male-dominated fields. Years later, I met with a group of freshly minted female Ph.D.s. We tried to work out why we had all made it through the pipeline when so many other women had leaked out. It turned out a large percentage of us had lost our fathers when we were young. So, at an early age we’d been forced to learn what I call the ‘Carpe Diem’ lesson – to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves, because they might not be there tomorrow. It’s a terrible way to have to learn, but it’s effective.

The new shamans

It was only after I received my engineering degree that I realised I didn’t want to become as boring as my engineering professors. So I began exploring fields that asked more interesting questions. I learnt how to program early desktop computers, and was asked to work on a project processing data that radio astronomers were collecting from their 85-foot telescopes. I thought, Wow. For millennia, humans had been asking priests and shamans what to believe about life beyond Earth. And for millennia we got answers that were wrapped up in the belief systems of the time. Now with the advent of computers and radio telescopes, we suddenly had the tools to find out what the answer really is. I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting. That’s how I began working on SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We don’t yet know how to detect intelligent life at a distance, so we use technology as a proxy: radio signals nature can’t produce, or bright pulses of light that are so short nature can’t produce them.

Don’t ask permission

After I got my engineering degree I went to graduate school in astronomy. On my first day, the department chairman told me and the two other female students we were lucky so many smart men had been drafted for Vietnam – the implication being there was a place for us. I was so flabbergasted I didn’t know what to say. It was old-school, and not a lot of fun. I did have a role model, though: Admiral Grace Hopper, who was an early computer programmer. She was famous for saying it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. I liked that idea. If there’s something you want to pursue, you should just do it, because there will always be people telling you you can’t.

We are all stardust

When I co-founded the SETI Institute in the 1980s, we had no idea whether other stars had planets. Now we know that planets are the rule rather than the exception. Another game-changer has been the discovery of ‘extremophiles’. We used to think life could only exist in a very small range of conditions, but that’s gone out the window with the discovery that life exists in almost every possible environment on the Earth. The universe looks a lot more habitable now than when I started out. This shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, there is an intimate connection between us and the cosmos. The primary ingredients for life as we know it were cooked up in the massive stars that blew up billions of years ago. We are all made out of stardust.

No time to chat

The point of SETI isn’t to chat with aliens. Let’s say we receive a message today. It might have taken 100,000 years for it to have crossed the galaxy. So a snappy two-way conversation – “Hi, how are you?” “I’m fine, how are you?” – is probably not on the cards. A better model might be to think about the fruitful conversations we have today with the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. They stored information they could transfer forward in time. There’s a great deal we can learn from ancient cultures, even though we can’t ask any questions in return.

Listen to the dial tone

Whether we’d even be able to understand the signal is another question. For years we thought any alien message would be based on mathematics, because maths is the universal language of technology. However, after talking with neuroscientists and philosophers, we now think our maths mightn’t be so absolute after all – that it is likely shaped by the structure of our brains. But if we do detect a signal, even if we can’t decipher it – even if it’s just a cosmic dial tone – we would still learn something incredible: that it’s possible for us to have a long future. Receiving a message would mean that technologies, on average, survive for long enough to line up not just in three-dimensional space – close enough for us to find them – but in the fourth dimension, time. That would show us we have a chance to survive the technological adolescence we find ourselves in.

Intelligence is kind

At the moment, SETI’s task is to look for evidence of alien life, not to try and make contact with aliens. In the future, when we have stabilised into a long-lived civilisation, I think we should look at sending signals to try and make contact. Some people argue we shouldn’t do this now, and I agree with them. But I also have to point out that the horse has already left the barn. We’ve been leaking signals for about 80 years now. Also, the argument against transmitting is that if aliens are advanced enough to come here, they would be advanced enough to conquer us. But if a civilisation is old enough to be that advanced, there’s a good chance they’ve outgrown their aggression. Studies show that we are kinder and gentler today than we have ever been in history. That should fill us with hope.

An interstellar committment

The reason we should send signals in the future and not now is that we are still a very young civilisation. We are good at making two-year plans, but if you’re serious about transmitting signals to other possible civilisations, we need to be working in 10,000-year plans. Even the modest goal of listening for messages requires a long-term view. You don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Today is the day I’m going to find a signal.” You have to wake up and say, “Today I am going to figure out how to search better than I did yesterday.” You have to be gratified by incremental improvements, by innovation. I can’t say I’m going to get a signal in my lifetime. But I can say that in my lifetime I’m going to come up with a stable funding formula for SETI, so this activity can go on for generations. That’s an achievable goal, and it’s what the field needs.

The cosmic perspective

The inspiring thing about SETI is how it expands your perspective. It holds a mirror up to the planet and shows us we are all the same. The first thing you say about yourself on your social media profiles should be the fact that you’re an Earthling, because at its most fundamental level, that’s what you are. If there is a signal out there, it’s not coming to America; it’s the property of all humankind. For this reason, SETI requires us to work as one. And if we can use SETI to organise globally, we’ll be building scaffolding that we can use to deal with other problems that don’t respect national boundaries, such as climate change, food security, and income inequalities. An astronomer named Caleb Scharf put it powerfully. He said, “On a finite world, a cosmic perspective isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.” The cosmic perspective allows us to step back and see ourselves as part of a larger picture, and find the solutions we need to survive.

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This interview was published in Smith Journal vol. 25