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Authors: Lee Billings
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stuck in the solar system,” I said, thinking of distant days when the swollen red Sun would sterilize Earth. “This is it?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Drake somberly replied. “You have to admit, though, that it’s pretty good while it lasts.”
Drake ate the last of his cashews, picked up his can of Coca-Cola, and tilted its lip to clink against the neck of my beer bottle. We drank to L and to all those who sought to make it a larger number.
A Fractured Empire
W hen Project Ozma was unveiled in 1960, it created a deep rift among astronomers. Some loved the idea of scouring the skies for other galactic civilizations, while others thought it the worst form of pseudoscience. In SETI’s defense, Otto Struve drafted an influential letter circulated among the upper echelons of the global astronomy community.
In the letter, Struve emphasized that planets were probably common around other stars, and that, while the likelihood of life or intelligence emerging on any particular world was unknown, “an intrinsically improbable single event may become highly probable if the number of events is very great. . . . There is every reason to believe that the Ozmaexperiment will ultimately yield positive results when the accessible sample of solar-type stars is sufficiently large.” Humanity, he reasoned, could no longer consider itself alone and anonymous on the cosmic stage.
Astronomy was at a turning point, Struve wrote. The Space Age had thrust the field into “a state of turbulence, uncertainty, and chaotic expansion unknown in the history of mankind,” one increasingly funded by massive government coffers. Astronomers could capitalize on that newfound abundance by embracing the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, mustering a new age of discovery rivaling that of the Enlightenment. Or, they could just muddle along pursuing nothing but the status quo, leaving a less impressive record for future historians, one defined “by the team work of many competent but not especially brilliant scientists, by the evident confusion of ideas, by the competitive aspects of our research and its political overtones.” The truth, as it so often turns out, would lie somewhere in between.
Struve’s admonishment was on my mind when, a few days before my meeting with Drake, I attended a gathering of scientists and journalists 125 miles north of Santa Cruz, at the Marconi Conference Center in Tomales Bay. Built in 1913 by the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, the Center had in a previous life been the world’s first trans-Pacific receiving station, though it now served as the site of an annual interdisciplinary conference held by the University of California, Berkeley’s Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. It was a warm sunny Saturday afternoon, with small boats and Jet Skis dotting the narrow bay’s emerald waters, but the conference-goers were all sitting in a stuffy, darkened room, spellbound by a tall, smartly dressed man, thin and angular, with dark hair, wide green eyes, and a hawkish nose. He was talking excitedly, occasionally stammering in his rushing words, making gangling gesticulations in front of PowerPoint slides on a projector. He was Greg Laughlin, the forty-four-year-old astrophysicist and professor at UC Santa Cruz.
“I took this picture from my front door using an off-the-shelffive-megapixel camera,” Laughlin said, pointing to what looked like a lump of pale Legos against a deep blue background. “That’s Venus, zoomed in so that the individual pixels are visible. It’s emblematic of the situation we’re now in with exoplanets, in that we can see there’s some structure there, it’s mysterious, and we want to know more. It’s also emblematic in that most of the things we’re trying to understand about worlds orbiting other stars, we’ve already been through with planets in our own solar system.”
Venus was also symbolic of Laughlin’s early scientific beginnings. His
“Yeah, I think so,” Drake somberly replied. “You have to admit, though, that it’s pretty good while it lasts.”
Drake ate the last of his cashews, picked up his can of Coca-Cola, and tilted its lip to clink against the neck of my beer bottle. We drank to L and to all those who sought to make it a larger number.
A Fractured Empire
W hen Project Ozma was unveiled in 1960, it created a deep rift among astronomers. Some loved the idea of scouring the skies for other galactic civilizations, while others thought it the worst form of pseudoscience. In SETI’s defense, Otto Struve drafted an influential letter circulated among the upper echelons of the global astronomy community.
In the letter, Struve emphasized that planets were probably common around other stars, and that, while the likelihood of life or intelligence emerging on any particular world was unknown, “an intrinsically improbable single event may become highly probable if the number of events is very great. . . . There is every reason to believe that the Ozmaexperiment will ultimately yield positive results when the accessible sample of solar-type stars is sufficiently large.” Humanity, he reasoned, could no longer consider itself alone and anonymous on the cosmic stage.
Astronomy was at a turning point, Struve wrote. The Space Age had thrust the field into “a state of turbulence, uncertainty, and chaotic expansion unknown in the history of mankind,” one increasingly funded by massive government coffers. Astronomers could capitalize on that newfound abundance by embracing the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, mustering a new age of discovery rivaling that of the Enlightenment. Or, they could just muddle along pursuing nothing but the status quo, leaving a less impressive record for future historians, one defined “by the team work of many competent but not especially brilliant scientists, by the evident confusion of ideas, by the competitive aspects of our research and its political overtones.” The truth, as it so often turns out, would lie somewhere in between.
Struve’s admonishment was on my mind when, a few days before my meeting with Drake, I attended a gathering of scientists and journalists 125 miles north of Santa Cruz, at the Marconi Conference Center in Tomales Bay. Built in 1913 by the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, the Center had in a previous life been the world’s first trans-Pacific receiving station, though it now served as the site of an annual interdisciplinary conference held by the University of California, Berkeley’s Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. It was a warm sunny Saturday afternoon, with small boats and Jet Skis dotting the narrow bay’s emerald waters, but the conference-goers were all sitting in a stuffy, darkened room, spellbound by a tall, smartly dressed man, thin and angular, with dark hair, wide green eyes, and a hawkish nose. He was talking excitedly, occasionally stammering in his rushing words, making gangling gesticulations in front of PowerPoint slides on a projector. He was Greg Laughlin, the forty-four-year-old astrophysicist and professor at UC Santa Cruz.
“I took this picture from my front door using an off-the-shelffive-megapixel camera,” Laughlin said, pointing to what looked like a lump of pale Legos against a deep blue background. “That’s Venus, zoomed in so that the individual pixels are visible. It’s emblematic of the situation we’re now in with exoplanets, in that we can see there’s some structure there, it’s mysterious, and we want to know more. It’s also emblematic in that most of the things we’re trying to understand about worlds orbiting other stars, we’ve already been through with planets in our own solar system.”
Venus was also symbolic of Laughlin’s early scientific beginnings. His
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