©copyright 1998 by Keith Cowing

She's Not Jodie Foster

Jill's day was pretty much eaten up by the German film crew - a really nice team who were ever so polite when it came to asking Jill if she'd get in front of the camera yet knowing all the time that Jill was equally eager to tell yet another viewing audience why this research is so important.

It is a shame that more scientists do not hone their public relations skills.

Jill Tarter is a rare type of scientist. Rare in that she not only knows her stuff but, in the tradition of her now departed friend and colleague Carl Sagan, she is a natural before the camera. No need to say "roll" - she is 'with it' the instant the camera is on and rattles off the SETI mantra without a pause. Second takes are not her fault.

After our jaunt in the diesel truck, we managed to grab some time in the hopelessly retro 60s-style lounge on the second floor of the dorm. Again, as you drink in the history of the place, you could almost hear SETI pioneers discussing the results of the very first sky searches and how to do it better next time. What would they think of the toys that are used today? Flash forward to now where today's quantum leap in observational technology becomes out-dated at an ever-increasing pace. Where will we be 10 years from now? Contact?

Jill deals with the Jodie Foster/Contact burden well. Despite some of the movie's pre-release media attention, Carl Sagan's original character Ellie Arroway only has some general similarities to Jill Tarter (female, astronomer). There are many other similarities between Jill Tarter and Ellie Arroway - but these similarities are common to a large group of SETI researchers and Astrobiologists: a child-like sense of wonder and a zeal to explore only thinly veiled by professional training with an added (and healthy) lack of patience for bureaucrats.

The fact that Congress, in its lack of imagination or historical perspective, killed government funding of SETI, is clearly bothersome to Jill. A trivial amount of funding and effort (when compared to what we as a culture waste on so many other things i.e. pizza and lottery tickets) could have societal and technological impacts far beyond anything in human history.

Then again, being free of the nonsense that goes with government funding also seems to be liberating - to both Jill, and her team. I found myself thinking "Gee, here they are, 3 years after the cessation of government funding, with a multi-million dollar endowment, running a rather robust SETI program on the cutting edge of technology, with zero government funding. Sure, it would be nice to get some tax dollars, but is it no longer necessary? Indeed, is it even desirable?"

Cosmic Silence

As I drove away from Green Bank, I saw the new Green Bank Telescope looming up out of the trees in my rear view mirror. I pulled off to the side of the road to get a final look. Additional dishes were now visible, forming a rather spread out version of the antenna farms I was so used to seeing at NASA installations. As I stood there, a nagging thought which had been circulating in my mind for the past day, finally burst forth: It is so quiet. So quiet in a place where people patiently listen to the sounds of the cosmos, hoping to hear a friendly whisper

There was something rather poignant about these large radio telescopes, each of which could detect - and carry on - a conversation with someone many light-years away. Given various calculations of the likelihood of intelligent, communicative civilizations out there, such as the Drake Equation, one could almost expect to hear a cacophony of voices crying out to be heard the moment you turned on the equipment - like listening to an AM radio while driving across Kansas late at night. Indeed, radio transmission from Earth now form an ever-expanding sphere more than 150 light years in diameter.

Why the silence then? It isn't as if we haven't been listening. As Enrico Fermi is supposed to have said back in 1950, "Where are they?" Are we listening to the wrong stuff? Not listening carefully enough? Or is this more an issue of adapting our activities to a timescale far greater in scope than anything we've previously tackled? Instead of framing our expectations around science fiction depictions where this could all happen tomorrow, perhaps we stop to look at the ancient Egyptians who managed to keep their culture thriving for several millennia.

When asked about the reports of putative fossils found in Martian meteorites, Carl Sagan said "profound claims require profound evidence". Although I would be hard pressed to come up with a means of measurement, perhaps the calculations regarding the prevalence of intelligent, communicating civilizations, ought to include another factor. As such, I would like to propose to add a corollary to Sagan's comment, and another factor for Drake's equation: profound discoveries require profound patience.

Once More Unto the Breech

It had to end eventually. No more than an hour or so after gazing back at the antennas in the mist, I was driving past strip malls which would inevitably lead to the suburbs of Washington DC. I suppose if I made this trip too often, the various high- and low-tech juxtapositions I had seen - and the wonderful ironies they revealed - would start to fade in their significance. It sure is nice out here - and I could easily get used to the pace of life.

Then again, sitting around waiting for ET to call, you certainly expose yourself to a high risk of monotony. Yet I can't imagine a more exciting way to be bored than waiting to become the first human in the history of humans to hear a message from someone out there who is not human. Indeed, there are people who have similarly spent their entire professional careers looking for evidence of intelligent life back in Washington....

Putting the trip into perspective

I run a number of websites which have managed to attract a readership spread out across the world. Several years ago, just after I had put my first, rather crude website online, one poking fun at the STS-69 Space Shuttle mission, I was startled by hearing a familiar noise at a strange time. It was around 3 am EST. The webserver I used at the time had a rather loud disk drive. Each time someone requested a page from the webserver, the computer would click and whir such that I could hear it in the next room. This particular night, the first day of the Shuttle mission, it woke me up. Why the sudden upsurge in access at 3 am I wondered?

It dawned on me a moment later. Europe. They were just getting to work and checking in to my website.

Over the next several days, I would watch the webserver's activity across the day as it waxed and waned - all driven by the spinning of this planet and where the sun shone - hence where humans were awake and websurfing. To have this device in my home, simultaneously connected to thousands of points all over the planet, serving up information on a spaceship orbiting the same planet, acting as a realtime indicator of human activity vis-a-vis the Earth's spin was, well .... I experienced multiple glimpses of what it was like to think on a planetary scale.

At one point while hanging around the control room for the 140 foot dish, I had to move out of the way of the German film crew's camera as they filmed Jill. Since things were a bit crowded, I found myself closely surrounded by racks of humming electronic gear - the innards of a device which was scanning the cosmos like a giant searchlight in reverse. I began to think back in time to one night at summer camp as an 11 year old when I pointed a flashlight at the sky and watched the beam seemingly converge upon some point far, far away. I had been thinking of a TV show I had seen where the host suggested that one or more of the photons leaving my flashlight could make their way to fall upon the surface of a planet orbiting another star - perhaps to the eye of a boy like me who was also looking up at the sky.

"The Take Home Message"

After going "off source" to see if the signals I had been receiving from life were indeed signals - and not just noise, some things became much more focused. The message I took home from West Virginia was one of fascination tempered by frustration. The fascinating aspects of the trip have already been covered. The frustrating aspects require some personal venting.

SETI is such a straightforward technical task with a disproportionately profound potential payback. Even the most exhaustive search could be done at a cost which is a fraction  of a fraction  of a fraction of the cost of the buildings our elected representatives regularly erect and then name after themselves. There is no shortage of politicans willing to line up to support projects which will appear in time for the next election - and also last for a century or more.

Nor is there a shortage of politicans eager to kill a project whose hardware isn't a prominent landmark or whose payback may well be decades away - especially one whose constituency just happens to live light years away and can't vote or make political contributions.

Just wait and see what happens when "Contact" does eventually happen. Just as was the case in the movie, politicans and bureaucrats will push to the head of the line to simultaneously take credit and try and steer events for their own purposes - this after killing all funding in the first place! Perhaps the Drake Equation needs another variable: self-interest.

Perhaps a privately funded SETI program is desirable after all. If for no other reason than being freed from the burden of government regulation and the uncertainty that goes with being linked to politcal moods.

Still, such a grand search for knowledge - and its preservation, once found - is something that great nations - and great civilizations - have always supported. And it was always done with tax dollars. Indeed, the most enduring of all ancient human public works projects (Stonehenge et al) were designed for looking at the stars - and passing this knowledge on to future generations.

A challenge

A new millenium is almost upon us. Everyone seems to be falling under the trendy spell of thinking in profound millenial terms. So be it. As my contribution to all the millenial hoopla, I want to know who will be the first politician of the new millenium, with an eye firmly affixed upon posterity, who will push for SETI funding. We can even name an antenna after them.

Just remember: you can still read inscriptions praising politicians on the tax-supported Pyramids many millenia after they were carved - and the Pyramids are very clearly oriented to the stars.