Sounds of Silence : Outer space: A small group of scientists is turning a technological ear heavenward in a search for other intelligent life in the universe.
It’s not easy listening to the universe. For one thing, there’s the problem of office space.
Consider Kent Cullers, for instance.
A big, paper-stuffed box labeled “Ice-Packed Sweet Corn” offers cardboard evidence of his latest office move at NASA’s Ames Research Center here. Still stored away, too, is a special “camera” that allows Cullers to read on the tip of a finger--one letter at a time--projections of documents, equations and other data unavailable in Braille or via his talking computer.
Cullers, a blind, 40-year-old radio astronomer, belongs to a small band of scientists who cling to an idea, even as they wander like bureaucratic nomads, pushed from one gray office to another at Ames by projects with more money, more people and more clout in the hierarchies of government.
Existing tenaciously on the fringes of federal funding, these scientists want to look for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, an exploration generically tagged the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.
As a group they are at the center of a web of hopes, dreams, unfettered speculation, calculated guesses, philosophy and hard science that has become a world of its own.
“SETI is a community, especially around here,” said Cullers the other day, sitting in the family heirloom rocker that holds pride of place--just barely--in his office. “There are enough of us to be a community. It’s always been rather like a family enterprise. We’re probably the biggest concentration of SETI scientists right here (at Ames).”
Some 40 scientists work full-time or part-time on SETI at Ames. Another two dozen spend at least some of their time on the NASA project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Cullers’ colleague Jill Tarter noted, “We’ve already had a couple of sociologists who have interviewed us and worked with us and studied us as a case history of a new science getting started.” She paused before adding, “It’s a little weird.”
But the network extends wider than just the scientists who are involved, Tarter said. “There is a SETI culture. We have people who are constantly writing for information. We give lots of public, general information talks and they’re always jammed. And it’s not just in California, it’s all over the country.”
The basic idea for SETI has been around at least since the turn of the century: It may be possible to detect radio signals from another civilization.
The argument is that radio signals are by far the easiest method of interstellar communication and, therefore, the most likely to be used by advanced alien civilizations, if they exist.
In fact, limited, privately funded radio telescope searches for coded messages have been carried out in the past. All were unsuccessful or produced puzzling, indecipherable results. Other such private ventures are planned or being conducted, including one by the Pasadena-based Planetary Society.
But Cullers and Tarter are part of what would the largest, widest-ranging search yet, a two-pronged NASA survey that would target about 800 individual stars within 80 light years or about 480 trillion miles of Earth, plus sweep portions of the galaxy for the coded signals many believe are out there.
The “targeted” search would be conducted by the scientists at Ames while the “sky survey” is the work of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
If all goes as planned--a very big if at this point, listening would start on Columbus Day, 1992, the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, and continue until the turn of the century.
At the moment, scientists at Ames and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are building the sensitive signal-processing receivers and computers that will be hooked to large radio telescopes.
The computers will scan microwave radio frequencies--a relatively noise-free part of the radio spectrum--for signals that might be artificial. Machines will do most of the work, alerting controllers only when a signal passes tests that screen out the more obvious forms of random noise.
Even so, the system’s operators are likely to be alerted many times before they may find “the fingerprint of E.T.,” said Cullers, whose job title is “signal detection team leader.”
Cullers elaborated on the routine that may be followed if an apparently legitimate signal is detected.
“If, first of all, something’s gotten through the original net and they’ve looked it up in the (radio) interference catalogue and it’s not any known source and they’ve moved the telescope around and they notice that when the telescope is off source the signal goes away . . . then, all of us will be brought in to determine what the source is.”
Scientists would gather in a room here that is only beginning to fill with the electronic gadgetry that will help sift the inscrutable noise of the cosmos. With the dry humor that marks many of the scientists here, the room has been named the User Operations Facility, a play on a set of ubiquitous and infamous initials--UFO.
But no one knows what to expect.
“As to what the signal is going to say, or what the aliens are going to look like, it could be anything from the ‘encyclopedia galactica’ to a missionary message, to a piece of propaganda,” said Cullers. “The one thing I am certain of is that when we get the message I will be surprised.”
But everybody will want to be there.
“I’ve made people around here promise that if they get a signal and I’m alive, they’re going to let me know right away,” said Charles Seeger, 77, who devoted 14 years to SETI before going into semi-retirement two years ago.
Seeger is a sort of oral historian of the program, a walking compendium of successes and setbacks such as the death 10 years ago of a NASA administrator, Tim Mutch, whose clout and support seemed to guarantee funding for the SETI project.
“He fell off the side of Mt. Everest,” Seeger said. “He broke his leg in fall and the people with him stashed him in a shelter and went to get more help. They came back the next day and he wasn’t there. Nobody knows what happened. We had to start from ground zero again. That’s one of our legends.”
To an outsider, SETI, at least at Ames, is a subculture of blinding contrasts, a mixture of sublime goals and mundane details, of reaching for the stars and fighting for the next buck, of staving off the demands of children and jotting down one more thought at the end of the day.
“After a while, you take it in your stride and it becomes amusing,” commented John Billingham, acting chief of NASA’s SETI office, as he ate a sandwich at his desk. His office was in a much greater state of clutter than was Cullers from unfinished moving. In fact, Billingham hardly seemed to have unpacked at all.
“You take these initial wrenching steps,” Billingham added, “from dealing with fine details bureaucratic rules and regulations, to the other side of the coin, which is appearing at major scientific meetings and giving papers on the discovery and how to conduct searches, and the significance, the reasons we’re really doing it.”
Even the most exotic goals have their routine, it seems.
“Here, I work pretty much a standard eight-hour day except for the fact that I don’t go to lunch,” Cullers explained. “Then, typically, I will go home and work a little bit in the evenings because it’s exciting work. I’m always getting ideas, I’ve always got to jot down just one more thing. Then I get up at about 4:30 in the morning, and before my children get up and chaos reigns supreme, I usually get in three hours or so of work in the morning.”
The search for intelligent life in the cosmos is not an idea universally respected. Detractors have argued, plausibly, that there is little chance life exists elsewhere. Others maintain that civilizations on different solar systems have nothing to say to each other.
More concretely, two weeks ago, the House of Representatives voted to kill all $6.1 million in 1991 funding for the NASA project, a blow overshadowed by the grounding of the Space Shuttle fleet and the debacle over the Hubble space telescope.
Compared with the billions spent for the shuttle and the space telescope, SETI funds are minuscule, supporters say. Over the life of the project, total cost has been estimated at $100 million. SETI scientists hope that friends in the Senate such as Jake Garn, the Utah Republican, will restore at least some of the money to next year’s federal budget.
When they voted to kill funding, congressmen seemed to feel the project was that rare political commodity--something small and odd enough to be safely ridiculed.
“The thing that happens is that (SETI) subculture, unfortunately, gets mixed up in many peoples minds with other subcultures like UFOS and astrology and spoon-bending,” said Billingham. “So we like to maintain a polite distance.”
Nonetheless, the Congressional Record shows that congressmen had a good time reading UFO stories from supermarket tabloids into the record, despite the decades of protestation by Billingham and others.
Moreover, Rep. Ronald Machtley, (R-R.I.) suggested that “if there is such a super intelligent form of life out there, might it be easier just to listen and let them call us?”
That is exactly what the SETI scientists want to do.
Radio astronomer Michael J. Klein, manager of the SETI program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, expressed a thought voiced by many other scientists when he decried the cutoff of funds.
“We don’t have a bunch of people here moving money around through savings and loans trying to make a quick buck,” he said, referring to the wheeling and dealing that have left many of the country’s savings institutions bankrupt and made them the target of massive federal monetary intervention amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. “Yet we get treated worse than the people who have really ripped the public off with this whole savings and loan bailout.”
Despite the misunderstandings of their work, SETI scientists have persisted, they said, because they are driven by an idea that is irresistibly compelling.
While they admit that it may not be the most important scientific work of the day, it is a concept so riveting that some have been searching--or trying to search or thinking about searching--for decades.
Finding an alien civilization “would be most exciting discovery of all for our civilization,” said Billingham, a British-born physician who once specialized in space medicine.
He is an old hand among SETI professionals. He began the SETI project at Ames more than 20 years ago and has been a key person in keeping the sputtering project alive.
“The basic arguments says that civilizations are widespread in the galaxy and the universe,” he said, describing the underpinnings of his profession. “These arguments cannot be disproved but they can be proved. There are two ways of proving them. One is to go after detection of a signal with an active search, and the other, of course, is by serendipity. It’s our opinion that learning it by accident is a very small possibility.”
Klein noted that there is growing evidence--such as the likelihood of other planets around other stars--that at least indirectly support the notion of life beyond the solar system.
“Earth doesn’t seem to be some unique thing which just happened miraculously out here,” he said. “It seems to be something that could happen many times in the galaxy. We still don’t know how life starts and maybe it is miraculous but I don’t believe it is miraculous in one place.”
Seeger agreed, saying: “So far every process that we’ve found working on Earth that we could test in the rest of the galaxy, the rest of the universe, we’ve found to operate there. There’s something about our knowledge of the way life started like a flash after the Earth congealed and the way it developed . . . it looks like a basic process.”
Klein has a hard-nosed attitude about the search that gives short shrift to mysticism or other less-than-concrete motivations.
“I guess what appeals to me is the actual microwave search--not all this stuff about the role of the human in the universe,” he said. “I think in contrast to that we have here in the microwave observing project, at least technologically, something we do understand. We know how to communicate across interstellar distances. It may not be the best way. It may not be the correct way that others might have chosen. But, by God, we know it’ll work. . . . Let’s pick up this rock and see if we can hammer something with it.”
But even true believers in the arguments that drive the SETI radio search concede their chances of discovering a signal are small.
“I expect to be successful at that search,” Tarter said. “Whether that is sufficient to produce a signal, that is another question. I think anybody who is working on this project has a very good concept of just how enormous, how vast, this search that we’re starting really is. We hope to be successful in our lifetimes but understand that maybe it’s going to be our children that succeed in detecting the signal.”
Whatever the chances of locating another civilization, the scientists seem driven by the chance to do something that has never been done on such a scale before.
“It will be exciting when we’re on the air, oh, my goodness,” said Seeger. “It’s a very tough job in the sense that you can’t just grab some apparatus, work for a year and get a yea or nay answer. . . . It’s literally fishing with the best technology we have at hand now in almost infinite space.”
Because of its uncertain nature, Seeger believes that the search for other civilizations is best handled by mature scientists who have had achievements in other fields.
“No sane person graduating from college should commit himself to this indefinite future, because what the hell is he going to be able to say he achieved?” Seeger said.
Beyond the low chances for success, there are other pitfalls the SETI scientists acknowledge. Perhaps the biggest one is that they may have pursued their intricate chains of logic and technology to a dead end.
“That’s the scary thing. Human beings have an amazing ability to form patterns and data when there is no pattern or to get answers out of no information at all,” said Cullers. “We are operating in the absence of data. The only data we have is the single example of us here on Earth and we don’t know if we’re the most typical thing in the universe or an absolutely astonishing, nearly miraculous event. Now my physical intuition says that we’re typical and there are lots of other civilizations out there just like us. Well, that physical intuition and a dollar might get you a cup of coffee.”
It gets even worse the longer the search goes on, Cullers said. “If I turn on my (radio) telescope, and for years on end see nothing except for random noise, is that because the search is hard or is that because my methods for looking are no good?”
But if a signal is detected within the lifetimes of SETI scientists, Tarter believes the rewards will be enormous. “The detection of another civilization, a signal from such, would make us have to instantly accept the fact that the differences among peoples on Earth are trivial compared to the difference with this other completely alien civilization. We’d have to finally adopt a global scale as the proper scale for managing of human affairs.”
As project scientist at SETI, one of Tarter’s recent jobs has been helping develop a “post-detection protocol” that would take the task of alien detection from science to diplomacy.
“Literally we spend a lot of time saying to people, ‘OK, what if, this is real, now what?’ ” Tarter explained. “We’re now beginning to think about the next step--who will speak for Earth and what will we say? That’s something that I have no training for. It’s not what I went to graduate school for.”
Despite her lack of preparation for establishing relations with nonhuman intelligence, Tarter commented, “I have to say, emphatically, that I really do have the best job in the whole world. . . . There’s nobody who has no opinion at all about extraterrestrial life and that’s pretty amazing.”
At a guess, Cullers thinks a successful SETI search might take a thousand years.
With a laugh he launched into his favorite analogy about the search for alien intelligence. It is, he said, like searching a sandpile for a grain of gold--a sandpile the size of a football field and 10 stories tall. Previous searches have explored at most five to 10 grains of sand, he said.
Then he wound up with what seemed to be a well-practiced, rhetorically polished conclusion, one forged from his decade of living with the uncertainties of the universe.
“By the time we are finished, we may examine an entire thimbleful of sand,” he said. “Why am I ecstatic about that? Because it will be the first systematic attempt to look at the frequencies and stars in our galaxy to see what’s there. And if there’s one grain of gold in a thousand or even a million, we’re likely to find it. If it’s one in a billion, we’re going to have to look harder.”
PAYING FOR SETI
The House of Representatives voted two weeks ago to kill all $6.1 million in 1991 funding for NASA’s SETI project. Compared to the billions spent on the Space Shuttle and Hubble telescope, the SETI funds are minuscule, supporters say, adding they hope the Senate will restore at least some SETI aid in next year’s federal budget.
