Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

The deepest-freeze years of the Cold War were not a good time for America’s Youth--as we were collectively known--to look about us and think hopefully of the future of humankind. For that, we had to look upward, into the night sky, to the stars, where new incarnations of iron men in wooden ships rode steel and fire into the stratosphere, bearing the banner of the wonder and rigor of science.

Some evenings, we would lie on the damp summertime grass and mark the fixed stars and track the bright orbiting metal bits that Our Side or Their Side had put aloft. It was so clean up there, unencumbered by the muddles and meannesses below, where little black girls got blown up at church by bombs, and where a president and a peacemaker got blown to kingdom come by guns.

A thousand miles from me, Sallie Baliunas was gazing at the sky, at library books about the sky and at the walls of her bedroom. It had been her brother’s room when her parents papered it with 1950s boys’ wallpaper--planets, spacemen and rocket ships. But when Baliunas’ sister was born, her brother took Sallie’s smaller, lavender-walled room, and Sallie and the baby got the spacemen. Later, when the family moved and painted over the wallpaper for the next owner, Sallie cried.

Nothing now enthralls us as that adventure once did. Now we get up early to watch funerals, not space launches--endings, not beginnings. The public’s preferred stargazing is in the funny pages, listed under Gemini and Capricorn.

Yet the wonder that filled a young girl’s eyes and mind then is still there for the woman who is now deputy director of the Mt. Wilson Institute.

Below Mt. Wilson’s 5,800-foot summit is the world’s carnival city, its gaudy amusements, fake urbanities and film fantasists. This high-set place--this is the Poets’ Corner of astronomy. What was found here was as great a leap as the one from the Ptolemaic world, with the Earth at the center of the solar system, to the Copernican one, with the sun in center place.

It was here that the age of the universe was revealed, and its endless expansion; here the nature of sunspots, the lives and deaths of stars and the unimaginably incandescent moment that created the universe. The names of the men who discovered that are still taped to their lockers; the skeletons of their experiments still stand.

Of course, there were men in those sky ships; NASA didn’t take girls. Baliunas tried--grounded before she got started. But academia “tolerated” women, and she took herself to Villanova University, studying astrophysics and theology--a natural pairing for “they become unified in cosmology, both study the same thing, the origins of the universe. At some point they must merge. If there is one truth, it has to incorporate everything.”

Her master’s and her PhD in astrophysics were earned at Harvard, where she is on staff. Nothing, not NASA’s reputation tanking in the 1980s nor Congress shutting off the science cash spigot, has dimmed her curiosity: Are we alone? How did life begin on Earth? What did the sun have to do with it, and what can we learn from other sun-like stars that might also have planets?

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First, Mt. Wilson was the mecca of astronomy, and then it was its Edsel. The brilliant lights that made Hollywood’s fortune glared too brightly for science, and money and research went elsewhere. Then, what revived Mt. Wilson’s fortunes was what impeded L.A.’s. That natural inversion layer that has trapped smoke and fog and automobile farts for centuries has also blessed Mt. Wilson with “the seeing”--the matchless, only truly motionless atmosphere in North America.

Recent “adaptive optics” have meant that bright lights don’t matter, telescope size doesn’t matter--only “the seeing.” And with flexible optics compensating for atmospheric distortion, Mt. Wilson is no longer quaint. It is cutting edge, a very hot property indeed, rendering images--a boot print on the moon--as sharp as if the telescope in the seven-story dome was out in space, instead of up in the San Gabriels.

From Harvard and up close, with data that her junior scientists collect and what she finds on her own, Baliunas has tracked sunspot activity on other stars to compare to ours and their influences on climate. What similar stars did several centuries ago, our sun can also be expected to do. Indeed, half the time of the big Hooker telescope at the privately funded observatory is spent looking for projects bearing on the search for planets, and thus, implicitly, evidence of life.

The universe is 15 billion years old, the solar system not even 5 billion. Compared to the universe, our sun is at the same stage of age and development that the earth was when worms were its highest life form. We, says Baliunas, are the earthworms of the universe. Maybe there are older and higher life forms out there somewhere. The matter of extraterrestrial intelligence has become both goofier and more serious in the latter decades. The questions she hears are smarter, and science takes them seriously.

Baliunas’ 20 years of work on “The Hill” are not even a tick on the cosmic clock--and only a small sweep of human time. At 3 in the morning, she can still feel the ghosts, still sense all the eyes that have peered through the 80-year-old Hooker telescope and imagine what generations of astronomers will yet see--here where humankind’s place may be fixed, its curiosity gratified, its questions answered, whether we like the answers or not.