As a little girl, Jill Tarter took nighttime walks on the beach with her father, who taught her the map of the sky. She remembers looking up at the stars, thinking that somewhere out in the universe, the tiny points of starlight she saw were burning bright as someone else's sun.
More than five decades later, Tarter is the director of research at SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Mountain View, California. SETI scientists use a complex network of telescopes and computers to scan the skies for radio signals elsewhere in the universe, hoping to detect signs of intelligent life-forms.
When you're on a plane, what do you say when your seatmate asks what you do?
I try not to tell people because usually it's so unexpected and fundamentally interesting that they will want to talk the whole time. Everyone has an opinion. Either they are persuaded from personal or religious beliefs that alien life is impossible, or they figure, "Oh, yeah, this makes total sense; we should do this. And by the way, aren't aliens already here?"
Do you think stories of alien visitation could be true?
I don't have any proof. There's no evidence that would
convince me as a scientist.
An article in Nature suggested that radio waves may not be the best medium for communication. Why not send physical objects or packages of information into space?
The premise behind sending objects—that it isn't important to exchange information quickly—might not be valid. Also, there is an enormous amount of redundancy that you would have to build into that system. You couldn't just send one rock into space, you'd have to send millions.
Have you ever thought you'd detected the signal?
We have had a couple of close calls. It is hard to describe what an adrenaline rush that is. In 1998, we detected a signal that was clearly artificial. We looked at it and the signal always went away when we pointed away and it came back when we pointed the telescope back. I thought we should write a computer program to compare the signal to all the other signals, to see if we'd seen this signal before. I was so excited that I misread the results. It turned out to be the SOHO spacecraft, which is in orbit around the sun.
Have you planned how you'll tell the world if the moment comes?
Yeah, we have. We are prepared for a press conference. We have the standard forms that astronomers fill out when something that might be short-lived happens so other observers can confirm it. So if it is a hoax, maybe somebody can help us. We want to have as much data available as possible.
The headlines on newspapers would be enormous.
But unless the information is very easy to understand, it could quickly fade to the back page. They may send us music or morse code—something we can understand instantly. But it is much more likely that we will receive a signal with qualifications and caveats. We are pretty convinced that people won't panic. Where are you going to run to?
In your mind's eye, what do these beings look like?
We only have one example of biology and that is the way it looks here. There is a bias toward bilateral symmetry. Also, most creatures do not walk on their brains. If it is a radio or optical signal that is transmitted, we are probably talking about a creature on the scale of a meter in size, rather than a micron. That is simply because to transmit enough energy you need big devices.
Outside the office, have you ever thought you saw evidence of aliens?
I have seen a UFO. My husband and I are both pilots. Once, we were flying at night. It was cloudier than we realized.
Suddenly, at the 2 o'clock position, there was a bright light. Our first thought was, "That's the headlight of an airplane coming straight at us." So we called up air traffic control. They said, "We have nothing on our radar."
It was very bright, and for a few minutes, my husband and I were saying, "You do see that, right? We are seeing a UFO—isn't this amazing?" And then the clouds parted a little bit more and we came to realize that we were seeing a full moon, obscured by the clouds, poking through a hole.
People see all kinds of things all the time. What people don't understand is that the brain doesn't just see something. It interprets what it sees. The planet Venus is the most often reported UFO. Even though I know that is a fact, it still didn't prepare me for this event.
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