Outgoing Director Jill Tarter on the Future of SETI

A single antenna at the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico.

jimwmurphy

May 22, 2012 12:00 PM Text Size: A . A . A

Why retire as director now?

The impetus was this really disastrous last year where we had to put the telescopes in hibernation for a number of months until we could find a new partner to operate the array. This just highlighted how fragile the funding for the Allen Telescope Array and SETI research really is. It's time for me to deliver on a promise, which is by the end of my career to establish a stable funding source for SETI research.

Do you think the search for extraterrestrial life should be a privately or publicly funded effort?

Both, and it should be globally funded, because this isn't a question only Americans have asked themselves. Humans have asked this question as they've looked at the sky forever, across the globe.

Is SETI getting any federal funding right now?

There are small bits of federal funding for individual researchers or to build a single instrument, but there's no systemic program support. The problem, as we've certainly seen in the past, is that federal funding is annual, and it can be turned on and off. At the SETI institute, we're particularly concerned about the disproportionate cuts in the planetary science budget that were proposed this year for NASA. What I'm really talking about is a stable source of funding, and I think that should come from as many different sources and as many different places in the world as we can.

Has there been a general shift away from funding exploratory science?

We've seen that in all realms, including industry. On the other hand, we are investing in exploration: The Large Hadron Collider has just turned on again for the summer run, and that's exploration writ large and expensively. We're investing in a very large telescope for astronomy, the James Webb Space Telescope. It's unfortunate we don't seem to be able to invest at the same time in a number of smaller items. One telescope is the 900-pound gorilla and it's making it harder to do other exploratory things we've done in the past.

Is there a role in this kind of research for amateur astronomers?

Yes, we've just launched a citizen-science project that we've called SETILive. We're trying to do two things: One, look at parts of the spectrum that we currently ignore because there are too many signals there of our own making, and see if citizen scientists can help us characterize those parts of the spectrum and tease out signals that actually might be coming from a distant technology. And goal number two is to get people actively involved in thinking about SETI. Because if we can get people to understand that they are all Earthlings on one planet in a much larger cosmos, and they are all the same when compared with another intelligent species somewhere else, then perhaps this activity can help to trivialize the differences among humans that we're willing to shed blood over today.

How has SETI's strategy changed over the decades?

SETI started out as radio searches, and today we do both radio searches and optical searches. We're looking in both cases for engineered signals: In the radio, we're looking for frequency compression?signals that occur at only one wavelength, because we can do that with technology and nature can't. And in the optical, we're looking for time compression?bright optical flashes that last only a billionth of a second. Again, we can do that with technology, like lasers, and Mother Nature can't. We want to do more: Take optical into the infrared, take our search for radio signals and begin looking for broader-band, information-rich signals that can still be distinguished from astrophysics.

But the real thing that's changed recently is where we point our telescopes, because now we have this huge wonderful repertoire of exoplanets. In the past, we only knew about stars, and we picked stars that were old enough and had enough metals around that they could maybe have rocky planets. Now we're looking at where we know there are planetary systems.

Absolutely. I think Kepler helps to legitimize SETI in the sense that people now get it. Oh, yeah, there are lots of planets?maybe this means the probability that there is other life and other technologies out there is really greater than we once thought.

Would you like to see a telescope that can look for biosignatures?

That's a great project to be working on. It's kind of stalled right now. In some sense, we need to wait until Kepler weighs in with information about how frequently planets of a particular size occur around stars of a particular spectral type?that will tell us how big we need to build the telescope to look for biosignatures. If, in fact, there are rocky planets in the habitable zone of almost every star, then you can build a smaller telescope because you don't need to interrogate so many stars to find a planet that might have life. If, on the other hand, it turns out that the habitable planets are few and far between, then you're going to have to build a bigger telescope.

But we ought to be working on what constitutes a smoking gun biosignature because that's hard. It's hard to come up with something that cannot be produced abiologically in any other fashion.

How does the search for earthly extremophiles intersect with the search for life in outer space?

The story that it's telling us is the amount of habitable real estate out there might be a lot greater than we once thought. When we were saying, for there to be life, temperature has to be between the boiling and freezing points of water, it has to have a neutral Ph, the radiation environment has to be benign, and there has to be one gravity, we were making a list of requirements that really did reflect where humans were comfortable. Now we're finally giving microbes the respect they deserve. We've known for a while that we're just one small twig on an evolutionary tree, but our ego hasn't really allowed us to integrate that. Now, with our understanding of how adaptable life really is, we're beginning to have a broader appreciation of what life could be on other worlds. And I suspect that in reality, biology on another planet given different conditions, might be even more extraordinary than what we've experienced here on this planet.

Do you have a gut feeling for what form that life will take?

No, I think nature's got a better imagination. Our science fiction writers have been doing this for a century or more; they've come up with some very interesting ideas. One of my favorites is Fred Hoyle's black cloud. Can we, in fact, have a dispersed plasma intelligence? We'll see. That's one of the problems in this area of science: We're working from what we know. And we don't always realize the biases that we're internalizing.

That's one of the nice things about the way we're now doing SETI. When you point a radio telescope in a particular direction, you see the whole planetary system. You're not just pointing at the one or two planets that Kepler or one of the ground-based systems has found. If, indeed, technological life exists on something other than a rocky planet in the habitable zone, we'll have an opportunity to find it.

Do you think it's inevitable we'll find life in space?

We don't know. But it's a legitimate question and we can approach it a number of different ways: There's certainly robotic and eventually human exploration of our own solar system, and then remote sensing of the universe around us. We can say that over the past couple of decades, extremophiles and exoplanets have made the universe appear perhaps more biofriendly?but that doesn't mean that it is.

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