Is there anybody out there?
Scientists believe there could be 10,000 civilisations in our galaxy and millions are being spent trying to find them
the sunday times uk
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(Christopher Lamarca/Redus for The Sunday Times Magazine)
The Allen Telescope Array in California. These dishes are being used for radio observations of our galaxy and beyond, and could detect signals from alien civilisations
This is not just another interview.
In another world we were lovers. I was Palmer Joss, she was Ellie Arroway.
Tarter has the air of a priestess. She wears a large elaborate satin jacket and some very chunky bling. Perhaps I am overwrought, but behind her desk, she seems to hover. She knows nothing of our other life together. I feel a pang of loss. You see, years ago, I dodged into a West End cinema to see Contact, starring Jodie Foster. And there I was, her lover.
Foster played a scientist, Arroway (aka Tarter), seeking signs of alien life. Matthew McConaughey (aka Joss, aka me) plays a spiritual type who derides her faith in science. The arguments he used were used in a book I’d written. Since the film was written by the astronomer Carl Sagan, who had just spent three pages of his book Pale Blue Dot attacking my book — very respectfully — I was pretty sure that was me up there.
What is definitely true is that Ellie Arroway was based on Jill Tarter, astronomer and director of the Center for Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research. Here she is, the world’s leading alien hunter, in an anonymous office suite in Mountain View, California.
“If you sit and listen to me for an hour,” she is saying, “and you take the concept seriously that there might be independently evolved intelligence out there, then you’ve got to change your perspective, open up your mind and see that the differences among humans are trivial.”
It all began when, in 1956, a 26-year-old scientist named Frank Drake pointed a 25ft radio telescope at the Pleiades star cluster, 440 light years from Earth. He saw two spikes on the read-out that shouldn’t have been there.
“It was a wow moment,” Drake, now a large, grandfatherly, pleasantly ironic individual, tells me. “I remember feeling a very strange emotion… it was the feeling, ‘Wow, this looks like an intelligent signal, there’s the evidence.’ The whole world is going to change.”
The whole world did change, not because we had made contact — the spikes were a false alarm — but because Drake had glimpsed one sensational use of the new technology of radio telescopy. We could hunt ET.
“Humanity had crossed the threshold,” says Drake. “We had radio sensitivity to detect civilisations no more advanced than we were. No extreme technology was required.”
Four years later, exactly 50 years ago, Drake, taking only $2,000 off the taxpayer, launched Project Ozma which scanned two stars for intelligent signals. It was the start of Seti, though the Seti Institute itself was not to be founded for another 25 years.
In 1971 Nasa came up with Project Cyclops. Created by John Billingham, an ex-RAF officer, this called for a vast network of huge radio telescopes designed to look for life up to 1,000 light years from Earth. It was impossibly costly, but it fell on Jill Tarter’s desk. She was enthralled, and Cyclops became the blueprint for the institute.
From the start, Seti has been dogged by derision. Ozma was done quietly and cheaply because no respectable scientist would go near it. The business had been discredited by the UFO mania that had swept America and the world after the second world war. Everybody was seeing flying saucers and speculating about a saucer crash that left alien corpses at Roswell in New Mexico. This inspired the television series The X-Files and countless other fictions. In the film Independence Day, we and the American president get to see the corpses in question for the first time.
Then there was guilt. Fears of new human technologies and environmental catastrophe turned the aliens into angry, judgmental figures. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the best of the alien movies of the 1950s, we are judged by a giant, metal robot with eyes that kill.
The mythology entered all of us. While researching my book about this culture, Aliens: Why They Are Here, I had myself hypnotised and immediately saw a flying saucer. I don’t believe in such things for a moment, but they were there, inside me.
The power of this mythology was such that, for a while, the authorities had to take it seriously. Then things got even loopier in the 1960s with reports of alien abductions — usually involving some nasty (or perhaps nice) sexual element. The myth of the alien anal probe was born. Respectable interest in aliens dwindled rapidly.
Derision was almost to destroy the entire project in the 1990s. Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada — known around the Seti Institute as Darth Vader — discovered Nasa was funding the institute with taxpayers’ money and successfully put a stop to it.
It survived through private funding. Now, though no LGM (Little Green Man) has been detected, the whole project is suddenly very respectable. And, in fact, though they don’t say so, Nasa is pouring more money than ever into Seti-ish projects and the institute. Last year they handed more than $13.1m in grants to Seti scientists.
The road to respectability was paved by Drake. Soon after Ozma, he came up with the Drake Equation, a way of calculating the number of intelligent civilisations in the Milky Way, our galaxy. To solve the equation most of the terms have to be guessed. But making, he says, reasonable assumptions, Drake reckons there are 10,000 alien civilisations in our galaxy.
“I’m not being super-pessimistic or super-optimistic when I say that.”
Unfortunately, 50 years on and in spite of the odd wow moment, Seti has found none of them.
In the institute the equation is everywhere — on T-shirts, posters and even on a plaque at reception. It ties together everything they do, which means not just scanning the skies but investigating Mars and meteors, planets and protozoa.
Only a small proportion of this place is actually devoted to Seti proper, the rest is a specialist science operation. But everything feeds into the equation. And all the other projects bring in money in the form of research grants, primarily from the nearby Nasa Ames Research Center.
The equation seems to say life is out there, probably in abundance, that the Milky Way is more like a cocktail party than a desert. So where the hell are they all?
The scientist Enrico Fermi once said that if we hadn’t heard from the aliens, they weren’t there. The universe is so old — 13.7 billion years — that a single intelligence would have had time to colonise the galaxy. At the institute they step round this. Nobody here doubts there is life out there. “I bet everybody a couple of Starbucks that we’ll find ET within a couple of dozen years,” says the gleeful and buoyant Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the institute.
“I cannot imagine a scenario in which life on Earth is unique,” says Mark Showalter, expert on planetary rings and discoverer of three new moons and three new rings, principal investigator.
All say the real miracle would not be ET but the complete absence of intelligent life. “If there are aliens out there,” says Shostak, “that’s miraculous; if there aren’t, that’s a miracle.”
No aliens would mean that in our entire galaxy — 100,000 light years across (for perspective, the moon is 1.3 light seconds from Earth), 1,000 light years thick, 100 billion stars, countless planets — and in the entire universe, 170 billion galaxies, 14 billion years old, humans were a one-off. Would that make us feel special or lonely? It should certainly make us feel weird.
We may never know one way or another. Numbers, space, time and satellite television are against us. Even if there are 10,000 civilisations in the galaxy, that’s only one for every 10m stars. And even if they’ve sent us a message, radio waves travel at the speed of light, so it could take thousands of years to reach us and thousands of years for us to reply.
We have had, say, 60 years of high-powered TV broadcasts. These waves travel out into space at the speed of light. So we now have an expanding shell of intelligent (well, sort of) signals extending only 60 light years from Earth. But we also have nuclear weapons and global warming, which could end our civilisation tomorrow. We would only have been a detectable species for a few decades. If other civilisations have the same kind of problems, they might blink on and off unnoticed.
Satellite TV is the real killer. This uses very low power and is beamed at the Earth’s surface. There is no leakage into space. In addition, all our other new technologies — mobile phones, the internet — are equally low-powered and locally-directed. “Fifty years from now,” says Drake in a rare moment of gloom, “we will become invisible.”
Seti’s Doug Vakoch, who rejoices in the glorious title of Director of Interstellar Message Composition, thinks it’s time we started sending our own messages rather than just relying on old TV like I Love Lucy (first episode October 1951, which means Lucy should be approaching V452 Vulpeculae — a binary star in the constellation of the Fox — about now).
“As we look forward to the next 50 years of Seti,” says Vakoch, “we should be thinking about alternative strategies and start transmitting messages. Doing those things takes generations and it would be nice to start now.”
The trouble is: what do we say? Obviously nothing too provoking — they might get angry. Seth Shostak argues we should say everything and let the aliens work it out. “My suggestion is that we just take the Google servers and send the whole internet. People say there’d be a lot of pornography, but that’s human too!”
Vakoch, a psychologist, recoils. “I find that so ugly. I think it reflects our fixation on information and quantity. I think we want much more pared-down, maybe much more elegant selection.”
Vakoch also disagrees with the physicists and astronomers about simply sending our science. Their science may be different. Also we should try to give, not just receive. “We shouldn’t always take these decisions for the benefit of mankind. We should think of how it might benefit another civilisation. We are always planning for the fact that they will transmit for our benefit. We should take a more cosmocentric perspective.”
There are two further downers for Seti fans. First, we may not only be looking in the wrong place at the wrong time, we may also be looking for the wrong thing. ET may not use radio, he may use lasers or some other technology. The institute does some limited searches for laser signals but, overwhelmingly, the assumption is radio.
And, finally on the downside, ET may not want to talk. He is almost certain to be thousands or millions of years ahead of us technologically and, even if he does find us, he may decide we’re too boring, petty and self-destructive to bother with. That’s what I would think if I were him.
All of which may seem hugely dispiriting for Seti fans, but now for the upside. “The reception of a signal would, first, be fantastically good news for our species. We have only just started to signal our presence to the universe. Any received signal would necessarily be from a civilisation that had lasted far longer than ours. So it would mean that technology doesn’t necessarily destroy the species.
“We are the youngest species that can play in this game,” says Jill Tarter. “The real message would be that the detection of the signal means that we can survive long into the future.”
Secondly, if we find one other intelligent civilisation then it means there are millions more. At the moment we have a sample of one — us — and we could, conceivably, be a fantastically improbable accident. But, if we find just one ET, it means intelligent life is much more probable.
In fact, as the physicist Paul Davies points out in his superb new book, The Eerie Silence, published to mark the 50th anniversary of Seti, we don’t need to look at space to find out if we are alone; we just need to look closely at Earth.
The tenacity of life on our planet has convinced some scientists that it began more than once. For the first 700m years or so of its existence, the Earth kept being sterilised by cataclysmic meteor bombardments. Once this stopped, our ancestors got going remarkably quickly — in 100m years or less. This suggests they had plenty of time to get going earlier in between bombardments. If any of these earlier life forms survived, or if they left any traces, we could find them now.
“If life started more than once on Earth,” says Davies, “we could be virtually certain that the universe is teeming with it.”
Two of Seti’s Nasa-sponsored sidelines may one day provide the decisive evidence. One is the work they do on Mars. If life started there, could that mean a Second Genesis? Not necessarily; Mars and Earth swap rocks all the time, so life could have got transferred.
Life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, would be a different matter. Cynthia Phillips is another Seti scientist. Europa is her life. She is in the institute’s Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe. This does not look for smart aliens. “We’re looking for stupid life,” says Phillips, “I’d be happy with a little microbe somewhere.”
Europa could be full of life. It is entirely covered with ice. But, because of friction resulting from the gravitational pull of Jupiter, the moon is heated slightly, so, below the ice, the water is liquid. After Mars, this dark ocean is the most likely site for life in our solar system. More to the point, we do not swap rocks with Europa, so life there would, indeed, be a Second Genesis.
But the two big discoveries that have really made Seti much more defensible scientifically are extremophiles and exoplanets.
Extremophiles are creatures like deinococcus radiodurans, a bug that survives in nuclear reactors, or endoliths that eat rocks or hyperthermophiles that survive in super-hot deep-ocean vents. Their very existence — unknown a few years ago — shows that life can survive in many more places then we used to think. Exoplanets are simply planets outside our solar system. These were assumed to exist, but one was not actually detected until 1995. Now we are finding hundreds more.
These discoveries mean that Seti-ish work — anything that contributes to the solution of the Drake Equation — is now commonplace around the world. A new field of astrobiology, the speculative study of life beyond Earth, has sprung up and the exoplanets are being investigated by Nasa’s Kepler mission, launched last year. It is finding new planets already.
Meanwhile, the institute has a big new toy. Three hundred miles north of Mountain View is the Allen Telescope Array. Financed by the Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, it will be, when completed, a network of 350 radio telescopes that will be dedicated almost solely to looking for ET.
What if it finds something? Funding would cease to be a problem. We’d need bigger telescopes to tease out the information content of any signal. Every country in the world would want a piece of this action.
“It would be like giving the Neanderthals the keys to the Library of Congress,” says Shostak.
They all get excited when they talk about it. Shostak tells me of the wow moment in 1997 when, for hours, they were convinced they had a signal. Nobody went to sleep, the institute was suffused with hope and expectation. The New York Times was on the line, waiting. It turned out to be the download signal of a European satellite.
But, rationally, there must be the fear that it’s all a waste of time. Paul Davies concludes his book by saying it probably is.
“I would not be very surprised if the solar system contains the only life in the observable universe. I arrive at this dismal conclusion because I see so many contingent features involved in the origin and evolution of life.”
So why, down at Mountain View, are they so convinced? Well, in the end, they just are.
I ask Drake if it’s all some kind of substitute religion. “Religious? No. People wonder about that. A lot of people accuse Seti of being a religious replacement for the traditional god.
It’s a common accusation that is not true.
I don’t know any Seti person looking to Seti to provide them with a more believable god. It’s just not in the game.”
But, if not God then it’s geography. The Seti Institute is at the heart of Silicon Valley, southeast of San Francisco. The Valley is not just Nasa Ames, it’s Apple and Google and countless other high-IQ operations. Seti is part of the local culture that believes technology and nothing else is the future.
It is also in California, the end of America’s western trek, the point at which anything further west becomes east. “When you get to California,” says Shostak, “the only way to look is up.”
Man found in America something — in F Scott Fitzgerald’s words — “commensurate with his capacity for wonder”. Having exhausted that, they look up to find another America in the sky.
Finally, America is the only country apart from, weirdly, Italy, to have a Seti programme. During the cold war the Soviets did Seti, but the Russians don’t. The Japanese think about it and, on and off, the Australians do it. But really it’s only the Italians and the Americans.
“I guess it’s all about American heroes,” says Shostak. “American heroes are the guys who walked across mountains and could survive. They’re not the intellectuals. The American hero takes a long shot that he thinks just might pay off.”
That, in a nutshell, is Seti, a long shot that just might pay off, an American dream that, like so many others, has infected the world. A dream of not being alone, of being known by the other, of escaping from the mess of the human world.
That, in the end, is what happens to Ellie Arroway, aka Jill Tarter, in Contact. But then she returns to Earth and nobody believes her.
Mohammed Abbasi 
Life of a Star: 12 billion years in 6 minutes
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