Tuning In On Another World?

When you want to know how things are going in the race to contact other civilizations in distant solar systems, you go to a two-story wooden house on a back street in Pasadena.

This is the headquarters of Planetary Society, a 10-year-old grass-roots group and the world’s most tireless promoter of the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” (SETI). Thanks to the 120,000-member organization, the search is moving into high gear these days.

A Planetary Society-sponsored project in Massachusetts has already been scanning the sky with a radiotelescope for seven years, listening simultaneously to 8 million radio frequencies for signals that might jump unnaturally out of the cosmic roar. (So far, just static.)

Now the organization is initiating a similar project in Argentina, scheduled to get started on Columbus Day of this year.

Moving the search to the Southern Hemisphere brings the crowded “fat part” of the galaxy into range, more than doubling the number of possible targets, says Thomas McDonough, coordinator of SETI (pronounced settee ) projects for the society.

“If you think of the galaxy as a big fried egg, the yolk is the galactic center,” he explains. “It can’t be seen very well from the Northern Hemisphere.”

Is there intelligent life out there somewhere? Members of the organization eagerly await the evidence. When the signal comes, says McDonough, it will be “the greatest long-distance call in history.”

Esoteric pursuits like SETI, combining the latest technology with the vision of a science fiction fantasist, are the Planetary Society’s reason for being, administrators say. Space scientists Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman formed the group in late 1979, after a decade of NASA budget cuts and what they perceived as a lack of vision in the federal government’s space program.

The society has been pressing for, among other things, a joint United States-Soviet manned mission to Mars and more unmanned flyby planetary explorations like the Voyager mission.

“This is a no-nonsense office,” says Friedman, the society’s executive director, leaning back and resting his sneakered feet on an empty chair. “There’s not a lot of protocol.”

In other words, if the government shilly-shallies, the Planetary Society is ready to do it itself. That has meant, for example, starting its own SETI program (partially funded by movie director Steven Spielberg) and becoming the first private group to join the Soviet Union in a space experiment. The society has agreed to participate with the Russians in an unmanned exploration of Mars in 1994, spending $450,000 to develop a snake-like specimen-gatherer that will dangle from an experimental balloon.

“We couldn’t wait around for NASA to get their act together,” Friedman says.

Friedman and his staff, an informal bunch who love to party, operate at a hectic pace in an ambience of controlled clutter. In the hallways of the society’s building, you’re liable to trip over a three-dimensional model of a rocky Martian canyon, Valles Marinaris, used by Sagan in his PBS series “The Cosmos,” or an artist’s rendering of a receiver picking up Earth signals in a distant galaxy.

The building is a turn-of-the-century Greene & Greene gem, complete with cobblestone columns, leaded glass, a carved fireplace and, in the finance office, a secret compartment behind the paneling. “It might have been used to store the silverware, or maybe booze was kept there during Prohibition,” says Susan Lendroth, communications manager.

But the furniture is of the thrift store variety. “It’s potluck,” says Lendroth, looking at a conference table surrounded by mismatched chairs. “You try to avoid the chair that’s too low or the one with the broken back. We have better things to do with our money than to buy sets of uniform chairs.”

“It’s not a slick-page, glossy organization,” concedes co-founder Bruce Murray, a Caltech professor and former head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Director of Development Tim Lynch says the dues-paying membership, about 100,000 in the United States, breaks down into roughly equal numbers of “space and astronomy buffs,” people who are generally interested in science and science fiction fans. “Probably no more than 10% of the members are Ph.Ds or working scientists,” he says.

Because of the inherent mysteriousness of the society’s field of study, it attracts more than its share of flaky callers and correspondence, staff members say. Charlene Anderson, editor of the society’s magazine The Planetary Report, says she gets frequent letters from people who claim to have disproved relativity or who know where “the aliens” are.

Some staff members jokingly joined the recent debate about a “face” on a hill that appeared in aerial photographs of Mars during the Viking mission. One supermarket tabloid solemnly reported that image, apparently the result of erosion, was a representation of Pee Wee Herman.

“I think it looks more like Elvis,” Lynch says.

Friedman, a former rocket engineer at JPL, runs an admittedly loose shop. There’s not a tie-and-jacket in sight. Before having his picture taken, Friedman disappears for a few minutes, then marches out to the front porch in a rarely-used lime green sports jacket, as the clerical staff titters appreciatively.

“The only way you can be loose and successful is if you have good people,” Friedman says.

The Planetary Society’s staff of 25 full-time and part-time employees and its cadre of scientists/volunteers are deadly serious about their work. SETI, for example, is not just a fanciful search for “E.T.” but a possible source of wisdom and knowledge that could change human history, says McDonough, an astrophysicist, Caltech lecturer and author.

“The civilization we make contact with could be much older than ours,” says McDonough, 44, an intense man with a gray-flecked beard. “It may have solved all the problems that are vexing us today.”

McDonough, who has been rejected three times for the United States astronaut program, spent part of his childhood in White Sands, N.M., where his father was an Army fire control officer on the missile testing range. “Every now and then, they’d let us out of school to watch one of the missiles go up,” he says.

Thus, at a time when space travel was considered “a lot of Buck Rogers nonsense,” he was getting his first taste for the extraterrestrial unknown. “It was more a matter of atmosphere than education,” says McDonough, who as a teen-ager got hooked on science fiction books and movies. He has since written several science fiction novels of his own, including his current 22nd-Century epic “The Architects of Hyperspace.”

McDonough thinks that someday--he hopes in his lifetime--one of the SETI radiotelescopes will pick up a “weird” signal, something that can’t be explained as a natural phenomenon.

“Next, every possible telescope will be trained (on the signal’s source),” he says. “Radiotelescopes, optical telescopes, infrared telescopes. They’ll all be studying it as intensively as anything has been studied in the history of Earth.”

If it turns out to be a message from another civilization with a yen for interstellar communication, he says, the next step will be to try to decipher television or radio broadcasts similar to those emanating from our own broadcast studios. Old broadcasts of “Wheel of Fortune” or “Dallas” are speeding through space at the speed of light, McDonough says, and parallel signals could be speeding toward us from other planets.

“I suspect it’ll be some kind of three-dimensional television,” he says. “Two-dimensional television is a product of our primitive 20th-Century technology.”

Using an equation that factors in such elements as the probable number of stars with planets, the probable number of planets suitable for life and the likelihood of a distant civilization’s wanting to communicate with Earth, McDonough figures there are probably 4,000 worlds out there “waiting for us to detect them.”

The discovery of other civilizations in outer space could have profound effects on the human race, McDonough says. For one thing, its members are unlikely to appear human. “Our appearance is a result of a series of accidents,” McDonough says. “If something hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might have looked into the bathroom mirror this morning and seen a reptilian smile.”

A glimpse of non-human beings, probably more technologically advanced than we are, could prompt a wave of fraternal human sympathy, he suggests. “The differences between Armenians and Azerbaijanis can be utterly insignificant when compared to the difference between you and some reptilian creature,” he says.

Skeptics have doubts about the premises of SETI. Earth could be a unique planet, they say, with plenty of water, an extraordinarily moderate climate and a captured moon, which prompted the tidal pools in which life began.

One of the illustrations in McDonough’s book “The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence” is a cartoon showing two planets conversing in space. “The oxygen is just a symptom,” confides a ringed planet to a nonplussed Earth. “You’ve got some kind of parasites on you.”

McDonough acknowledges that life on Earth could be an aberration--a fluke unlikely to be repeated elsewhere in the Universe. But there’s no way of saying for sure without testing the opposing theories, he says, “The way to attack the problem is to go out and look.”