Jill Tarter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, one of the radio telescopes she has used in her hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence.
ASTROBIOLOGY Hunting aliens Ramin Skibba enjoys a profile of the woman heading the search for life off Earth.
s a child in the 1950s, Jill Tarter it: “The Universe is a unknown — that determine the abundance would gaze at the stars and wonder, pretty big place. If it’s of communicative, intelligent life in the “Are we alone?” That monumental just us, seems like an Milky Way. They are: how often life-friendly Aquestion has driven the astronomer’s lifelong awful waste of space.” stars form in the Galaxy; what fraction of quest to find alien life in the Milky Way. Of course, cultural those stars host planets; what fraction of In Making Contact, science writer Sarah references to life on planets could host life; what fraction of those Scoles interweaves a profile of Tarter with other planets date back actually develop life; what fraction of those the tumultuous, decades-long history of the far beyond even the life forms develop intelligence; what fraction SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, oeuvre of Jules Verne of them learn and choose to communicate where Tarter holds the Bernard M. Oliver Making Contact: and H. G. Wells (see across interstellar distances; and how long chair. Scoles argues that, without Tarter, tele Jill Tarter and S. J. James Nature 537, those communicative civilizations. COLL./GETTY HARPER/THE LIFE IMAGES ACEY scopes and observing programmes focused the Search for 162–164; 2016). But The first four factors became the focus Extraterrestrial on SETI (the search for extraterrestrial Intelligence the modern concept of of astrobiology, now a mainstream field intelligence), such as the Allen Telescope SARAH SCOLES SETI arguably began (although Scoles explores it only in her Array and Breakthrough Listen, might not Pegasus: 2017. in 1959, when physi- penultimate chapter). SETI’s purview is the be around today. Yet hers may be a quixotic cists Giuseppe Coc- last three. Oddly, given their close connec- mission, having failed to receive a single coni and Philip Morrison argued in Nature tion, a divide persists between SETI scien- definitive signal so far. that long-wavelength, low-energy radio waves tists and astrobiologists. And Scoles describes The book’s title references Carl Sagan’s could be used to communicate over long dis- the astronomy community as “antagonistic” best-selling 1985 novel, Contact (Simon tances, potentially between stars (Nature 184, towards SETI; however, most astronomers & Schuster), adapted into the 1997 film 844–846; 1959). A year later, they met up with seem not to think about it much, probably directed by Robert Zemeckis. In them, other leading scientists, including astronomer because its scientists are still few and the astronomer Ellie Frank Drake and a young Sagan, at the US timescale of the search is indeterminate. NATURE.COM Arroway, partly based National Radio Astronomy Observatory in That it could take centuries to find alien For more on science on Tarter, succeeds in Green Bank, West Virginia (see F. Kaplan intelligence created another problem for in culture see: finding an alien sig- Nature 461, 345–346; 2009). Tarter and her colleagues: funding. Scoles nature.com/ nal. Scoles, inspired by Drake formulated a famous equation describes how they repeatedly scrambled booksandarts Contact, quotes from describing seven factors — their sizes for federal support for the SETI Institute
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BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT
and their telescope array at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory northeast of San Fran- cisco, California; in the mid-1990s, they Books in brief lost it at the hands of resistant Congress members, especially Democratic Sena- Mass tor Richard Bryan of Nevada. This only Jim Baggott Oxford University Press (2017) strengthened Tarter’s resolve as she pitched How did our understanding of mass evolve from the geometric to the heads of private companies, includ- atoms of ancient Greece to the quantum ghostliness of today? Jim ing Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard. Baggott ingeniously contextualizes that eventful science history. Funding from commercial entities presents He evokes successive world views as crucibles for the evolving its own ethical questions, including potential theories of geniuses, from atomist Leucippus through Enlightenment conflicts of interest, a lack of oversight and a revolutionaries such as Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, John Wheeler dependence on benefactors’ caprices. These and fellow architects of the twentieth-century watershed. Today, the resonate even more today, with the likes of fundamental structure of physical reality remains elusive — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Planetary Resources but that, Baggott argues, is what the thrill of the chase is all about. and many other for-profit organizations get- ting involved in space exploration. Tarter has faced a further challenge: gender. The Evolution of Imagination She was regularly the only woman in the Stephen T. Asma University of Chicago Press (2017) room, and senior men often dismissed her or From testing a theory to playing bebop, improvisation is the fount took credit for her ideas. Science and engi- of creativity — it’s even the primal driver in our natural history. neering colleagues “told Jill she wasn’t going So argues philosopher and jazz musician Stephen Asma, who to make it because she was a woman”, astrono- draws on neuroscience and animal behaviour for this intriguing, mer Dan Werthimer once said. Probably she if occasionally chewy, foray into human evolution. Looking at has also had to contend with ‘unconscious improvisation from pre-linguistic expression (such as dance) to bias’, in which both men and women tend to storytelling, Asma explores how we actively engage the imagination hire and promote male scientists rather than to create our own ‘virtual realities’ and to build just societies, as well women with the same qualifications. Scoles as to foster the adaptability we need to negotiate life’s changes. only touches on these persistent hurdles, which are now being addressed, belatedly, by the astronomy community (see M. Urry The Ends of the World Nature 528, 471–473; 2015). Peter Brannen Ecco (2017) Scoles concludes with a provocative In the middle of Earth’s ‘sixth mass extinction’, we might recall philosophical discussion of SETI, includ- that the other five were no picnic, science journalist Peter Brannen ing the question of broadcasting messages reminds us. He goes on the road and into deep time with geologists to aliens. Luminaries such as scientist and and palaeontologists to examine what we know of these cataclysms, science-fiction writer David Brin are worried which played out from 444 million to 65 million years ago. That that, as Scoles puts it, “ET will blast us with long, piecemeal goodbye to creatures such as the killer placoderm lasers and steal all our precious metals”. Dunkleosteus and the giant sloth — wiped out by ice, lava flows or Stephen Hawking has expressed similar con- asteroid impacts — drives home how thin the “glaze of interesting cerns. Tarter disagrees, yet believes that METI chemistry” on the third rock from the Sun really is. (messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence) should develop a consensus-based inter national process — broader than the handful The Seabird’s Cry of people who put together the golden records Adam Nicolson William Collins (2017) sent on the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977 — Albatross, kittiwake, gannet: the extraordinary physiology and to decide whether and what to send. It could navigational capacity of seabirds have inspired scientists and poets be a simple repeated radar blast or a more for centuries. Yet their numbers have crashed by 70% over the past complex message combined with Rosetta 60 years. In this lyrical and assured scientific study, Adam Nicolson Stone-like translation instructions. captures the worlds of 10 species on the wing, from a fulmar’s Scoles’s conversational style and cultural 6,280-kilometre ocean journey — an astounding feat of memory references (for example, to the much-debated and fine-tuned adaptation — to a shearwater sniffing out krill by the chromatic puzzle of the ‘blue and black dress’; dimethyl sulfide they emit. A hymn to the great edge-dwellers that see Nature 519, 6; 2015) will appeal to the are also “the barometer of whole oceans”. readers of Wired magazine, to which she con- tributes. Making Contact is more biography than science history, but it’s no hagiography. The Plant Messiah Tarter emerges as both heroic and all too Carlos Magdalena Viking (2017) human. To paraphrase the poet Robert This full-throttle memoir by tropical horticulturalist Carlos Magdalena Browning, humanity’s reach must exceed its is a window on the exploits that underpin the Royal Botanic Gardens, grasp, or what are the heavens for? ■ Kew — overseer of the largest wild-plant seed bank in the world. Magdalena specializes in plants on the brink of extinction, and his Ramin Skibba is an astrophysicist quests for (and repatriation of) species such as the café marron turned science writer based in San Diego, (Ramosmania rodriguesii), native to the Indian Ocean island of California. Rodrigues, reveal the rare mix of zeal and patience needed to hunt e-mail: [email protected] vanishing plants and coax their seeds into germinating. Barbara Kiser
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