A cosmic perspective with Jill Tarter of SETI

Jill Tarter thinks that Craig Venter and Daniel Cohen may not have been bold enough when they declared in 2004 that the 21st Century would be the century of biology.

The SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter spoke recently at the Rose
City Astronomers in Portland, Oregon.
(Photo: Greg Scheiderer)

“I think the 21st Century is going to be the century of biology on Earth—and beyond,” Tarter declared during a talk at last month’s meeting of the Rose City Astronomers in Portland, Oregon. Tarter, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and former director of the Center for SETI Research, thinks there are many ways we might find extraterrestrial intelligence. We might discover it through biomarkers or even artifacts in our own solar system. We could assay the atmospheres of exoplanets looking for biosignatures. We could spot alien “work product” such as structures or signs of engineering. We might even export it, traveling to the Moon, Mars, or even other star systems.

“I think life beyond Earth is a good bet in this 21st Century,” Tarter said, “and when you begin to think about that kind of thing, you really have to reorient your point of view, your perspective. You have to start talking about here and now in a different way, a much bigger point of view, a cosmic perspective.”

Tarter feels that our perspective has changed much since the advent of the space age. Photographs like the Apollo 8 Earthrise or “selfies” by Voyager and Cassini have helped make that happen. We’ve also looked far into the past in viewing distant galaxies.

In the time we’ve been involved in SETI, Tarter says there have been two gamechangers: extremeophiles and exoplanets.

Photos from Space, such as Earthrise by astronaut Willam
Anders from Apollo 8, have changed our global perspective.
(Photo: NASA)

“Extremeophiles are life as we did not know it until a just few decades ago,” she said, “thriving in places that we once thought completely hostile to life, and they are now illuminating the amazing possibilities for life on our own planet by suggesting more potentially habitable real estate within our solar system and out into the cosmos.”

Similarly, this discovery of thousands of exoplanets has given us more places to look for life.

“Today we know that there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way, and that’s a fundamental change in our perspective,” Tarter said. “When I was a student we knew of nine planets—then lost one!—and didn’t know whether planets would be plentiful around other stars.”

“There is more potentially habitable real estate out there than we ever imagined,” she added, stressing the potential. “We have no idea whether any of it is, in fact, inhabited, but that’s what this century is going to tell us.”

Tarter noted that a big assumption of SETI is that since our technology is visible from a distance, that alien technology might be as well. So we’re looking for something engineered, not a natural occurrence of astrophysics.

“Whether or not SETI succeeds with its optical, infrared, radio searches for signals is going to depend on the longevity of technologies,” Tarter explained, “because unless technologies, on average, last for a long time, there are never going to be two technologies close enough in space to detect one another and coeval in time—lined up at the same time in this ten billion year history of the Milky Way galaxy.”

Tarter said that, in 50 years of SETI, we’ve searched an amount of the cosmos that compares to a 12-ounce glass of water out of the total of Earth’s oceans, so it’s not so surprising that we haven’t yet caught a fish. She adds we’ve been limited by our technology.

“We are beginning to build tools that are commensurate with the vast size of this search, and we understand that the ocean is vast and we are still very, very motivated to go and find what might be out there,” Tarter said. The Allen Telescope Array is a big part of that; you can follow the search at setiquest. There are dozens of other instruments that may provide data to help with SETI, and more than a half-dozen on the drawing boards for the next decade or so.

“This is a hard job,” Tarter said. “This is a lot of very difficult technology to get this job done.”

“Whether or not SETI succeeds in the near term, it has another job to do,” Tarter concluded.  “Whether or not it ever finds a signal, it has another job to do. And that is holding up a mirror to all of us on this planet and showing us that in that mirror, when compared to something else out there, we are all the same. Talking about SETI, thinking about SETI, listening to talks about SETI, helps to transfer and to encourage this cosmic perspective. It helps to trivialize the differences among us.”
Tarter encouraged everyone to go home and set their descriptions on their social media profiles to “Earthling,” and to start thinking and acting from that perspective.

“SETI is a very good exercise at working globally to solve a problem,” she said, “and there are many problems that we are going to have to solve quickly in the near term, and do so as a global community.”