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Star search >> The director of the SETI Institute discusses life, the universe, and humanity’s little place therein by PATRICK LEJTENYI
Jill Tarter: It’s the oldest unanswered question that humans have posed. Every civilization throughout at least recorded history always wondered, “Is anyone else out there? Are we alone? What’s our place in the universe?” This is an opportunity for the very first time for scientists and engineers to get involved. We’ve been asking for millennia for priests and philosophers to answer this question, and the answer you get always depended on whatever belief system was in play. Rules change. Now we have the opportunity to use some tools that allow us to attempt to answer the question experimentally. M:
Do priests and philosophers still have a place when searching for ET
life or placing it in any context? JT:
Priests and philosophers have a perfectly appropriate place in dealing
with belief systems. And scientists and engineers are in a better position
to deal with the observational evidence independent of what they personally
believe. M:
In October 1993, Congress cut your funding. Has funding been a problem
for this project?
The global search JT: As is
all SETI around the world. There isn’t any government funding anywhere
in the world. M: How many
countries are involved in this? JT: There’s
searches going on in England, the U.S., Australia, Japan, Argentina,
and a series of searches by individuals with essentially backyard dishes.
And I know they’re in 19 different countries—this is an amateur
project called the SETI League. And of course there’s SETI@home,
which has been the most successful experiment in distributive computing
ever. I think they’ve racked up something like 226 countries now. M: Do you
think SETI@home has given a more democratic feeling towards the search? JT: [Laughs]
Well, it has encouraged people to get involved, and what’s terrific
is the number of people who have decided they want to get involved. M: What
does that say to you? JT: It says
something that I’ve always thought, which is SETI is very important
to people, not just to scientists, not just to engineers, but to people.
This is an important question, it’s not just me telling you it’s
an important question. It fundamentally is. M: Are we
sending any of our own signals out to actively try to contact other
civilizations? JT: Not on purpose. What we’re doing is leaking. Those TV and radio transmitters are really blasting out noise. Not all of the signals that we generate end up being captured by antennas on Earth. So we are filling space with a spherical bubble of our own technological noise, and it gets bigger one light year every year. So if you consider that broadcast commercial television started in the U.S. around 1940, it means that for the last 62 years, we’ve been generating this noise. The edge of that is now 62 light years away from Earth, and there are hundreds and hundreds of stars in the range of that.
Maturity helps M: This
all reminds me of that movie Contact. Do you think that was an accurate
look at how we’d react? JT: Oh,
I think it’s a good guess. M: Do you
think people would freak out if they found out we weren’t alone?
JT: I honestly
don’t know. We can pretty much rule out this panic notion. There’s
nowhere to run. But what we haven’t been able to do is make a very
good assessment globally. We’ve been looking at First World countries
with [chuckling] mostly white male colleagues, so I don’t know
what someone in Sri Lanka would feel like, or someone in Beijing, or
the African savanna, but it’s a question we should continue to
try to ask and find out, if only so that we can be pro-active, and try
to make an eventual discovery to have as positive and beneficial an
effect as we possibly can. M: Do you
have any idea what any kind of alien would be like? JT: I honestly
don’t know. But I don’t subscribe to the aggressive theory
simply because anyone that we’re going to detect with our emergent
and infantile technology, which is really where we are, is going to
have to be, in all probability, a lot older than we are, and has sorted
out their aggression problems. If indeed the rule in the universe is,
as soon as you develop the technology, you use it to destroy yourself
and your planet, civilizations never get to be old, and then we won’t
find anything.
It’s a
big universe M: Right
now, you’re developing the Allen Telescope Array, which should
be operational by 2005. Can you explain what that is? JT: The
ATA is 350 dishes that are six metres in diameter, made by a guy who
normally makes TV backyard satellites. So he made a bigger mould across.
It takes all of a minute once you get the aluminium sheets on the mould
to make the dish, and it’s cheap because it’s an existing
technology. It’s an improvement
because first, I get the telescope 24-7. It’s a dedicated array.
I can do SETI all the time. Second, I get to look at multiple stars
simultaneously. When I use Arecibo, it’s as if I’m looking
through a tiny little straw at the sky. It’s one star at a time.
Now, I’ve got not a 300-metre telescope, I’ve got an array
of six-metre telescopes. What happens when I point that array at the
sky? It doesn’t look at a tiny little beam, it looks at something
that’s five or six times the size of the full moon. Within that
field of view, I’ll have a lot of different stars, so that in effect
I’m building one of these straws, and putting one on that star,
and another one on that star, and another one on that star. If I could
afford it, I could observe 12 stars within that large field of view
simultaneously. M: After
40 years of searching for extra-terrestrial life, what, if anything,
have we learned? JT: You’ll
get a different answer depending on who you ask. I would say that we’ve
learned that every stellar system doesn’t house a technological
civilization. What we have truly learned is that the cosmic haystack
that we’re trying to search through is really enormous, and we
haven’t, even with 40 years of attempts, begun to scratch the surface.
There’s just an awful lot left to do. M: Do you
ever get people coming up to you and saying, you know, “What are
you doing?” JT: Oh yeah. M: Do your
friends and family ever think you’re weird? JT: Well,
yeah. But it’s the kind of subject about which no one has no opinion.
Some people are adamantly opposed to it for philosophical or religious
reasons, but most people that I meet, though there’s a filter there,
are very much in favour of it. It’s a great hook for education,
for getting kids turned on to science or astronomy or astrophysics in
general. Kids are fascinated by it. At least the kids in the past two
decades have been. :
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Jill
Tarter, with her Ph.D in Astronomy from UC Berkeley and her brainy job
as director of the SETI Institute, has been involved in the search for
extra-terrestrial intelligence since her grad student days, and will
be the first to tell you that it’s a long, hard investigation.
Having had its funding cut off by U.S. Congress in October 1993, SETI
is nevertheless moving on to bigger and better projects, thanks to Tarter
and her small crew’s ability to generate interest and money worldwide.