SETI Pioneer Jill Tarter Retires

ananyo writes "After 35 years, astronomer Jill Tarter is retiring from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) — a field she helped pioneer and popularize, most recently at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Tarter, who inspired the late Carl Sagan to create the fictional character Ellie Arroway, heroine of the book and movie Contact, says she will instead focus her efforts on what she calls 'the search for intelligent funding.'"

Comments

Search for intelligent funding?

[QQBoss]

That would be a first.

Re:Search for intelligent funding?

[MacTO]

The SETI Institute does solicit private funding. There also is nothing preventing private projects from popping up to monitor radio signals. Please inform yourself, rather than spewing inaccurate ideology.

Re:Search for intelligent funding?

[khallow]

No letting the free market fund this would be a first.

Already happened. The SETI Institute has been in the market for almost twenty years. The market may be far from "free" and I see that the Institute wouldn't spurn public funding, if it came their way. But the Institute has depended heavily on private funding and resources for almost 20 years. That's as free market as you're going to get in today's economic and political climate for research.

Re:Search for intelligent funding?

[MyLongNickName]

Ummmmm.... no. I am disappointed how many folks don't get "free markets". Market forces are powerful but they are motivated by profit. Nothing wrong with this, but as intelligent citizens, we need to understand how this works and their limitations.

One limitation is that if profit cannot be privatized, then there is little if any incentive for market dollars to pursue R&D or other activities. Where is the profit in finding ET? Even if you come up with an answer, then how do you limit the profit to those who make the discovery. You can't. So, market dollars will not pursue this project. This means you are looking for a benefactor or a government entity to fund this. There is nothing wrong with government funding of projects that the free market would not undertake... as long as there is a public good to the investment.

So, no, the free market is not a magic bullet to solve every problem.

Re:Search for intelligent funding?

[guttentag]

Where is the profit in finding ET? Even if you come up with an answer, then how do you limit the profit to those who make the discovery.

The people who first make contact can set up a theme park in Orlando that functions as a kind of extraterrestrial petting zoo. You charge people for admission, extra for activities like Pet-An-Alien, Ride-An-Alien, Family-Photo-With-An-Alien (with relevant props like laser guns, gold-pressed latinum, and oversized copies of To Serve Man). Sell freeze-dried ice cream in the gift shop and copies of the Beatles white album in the aliens' equivalent of an MP3, known as Ogg-Vorbis.

There are plenty of ways to profit off this! You just have to think like a corporation.

Results?

[mwvdlee]

Not limited to actually finding aliens but looking at everything coming out of SETI: What good has come out of SETI so far?

Re:Results?

[Thanshin]

Not limited to actually finding aliens but looking at everything coming out of SETI: What good has come out of SETI so far?

I don't think that's a valid argument.

Imagine a game that gives you a million times your bet once every thousand tries. It would be reasonable to play that game. Not winning any of the first hundred times wouldn't change the reasonability of playing that game.

Maybe you dont't value as high as I do the results of finding there's extraterrestrial intelligence. I do think it would change humanity in a fundamental way and it's such a big price that the current cost of trying is negligible.

Such a big price that if I were to define humanity's priorities, finding whether we're alone would probably fall in my top twenty.

Re:Results?

[qbast]

Well, the thing is that this is not a game that gives a million every thousand tries. Instead it will give a complete surprise - maybe a million bucks, maybe a bullet to the head. Why do you assume that result of finding aliens will be positive development? There are at least three possible scenarios with unknown probability of happening: 1) Welcome, lesser developed culture! Let us give you all our cool alien tech, cure cancer and end world hunger. 2) So you are humans? Nice, we don't really care. Go away and stop bothering us. Or maybe "Solaris" kind of contact. 3) Oh hello you poor defenseless bastards. We were just in a need of new food source/hunting ground/slave labour.

Re:Results?

[Thanshin]

Well, the thing is that this is not a game that gives a million every thousand tries. Instead it will give a complete surprise - maybe a million bucks, maybe a bullet to the head.

Why do you assume that result of finding aliens will be positive development? There are at least three possible scenarios with unknown probability of happening:
1) Welcome, lesser developed culture! Let us give you all our cool alien tech, cure cancer and end world hunger.
2) So you are humans? Nice, we don't really care. Go away and stop bothering us. Or maybe "Solaris" kind of contact.
3) Oh hello you poor defenseless bastards. We were just in a need of new food source/hunting ground/slave labour.

Why do you assume finding aliens is equal to revealing ourselves to them? Maybe we find them, study them and then decide to push a large meteorite in their general direction. Ignorance is not the solution to dangerous neighbours.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu

Re:Results?

[Rogerborg]

SETI helps our reach to exceed our grasp. What else are the heavens for?

Re:Results?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

What good has come out of SETI so far?

Millions of us in the gutter, looked up at the stars.

Re:Results?

[tgd]

Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.

The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.

Re:Results?

[codewarren]

We now know how not to find aliens. Sounds like a joke, but in all seriousness, we didn't know that before we tried and it's a very useful thing to know. This doesn't answer the question of whether aliens exist (a question that can never be definitively answered "no"), but it does answer the question of whether they're so ubiquitous that you can't help but detect them by trying.

Re:Results?

[qbast]

Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away.

Long way for us, yes. Which means we won't be able to do anything to them. Will opposite be true? Who knows.

Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way.

Right, I am sure everybody will immediately let go of their irrational thinking. Religions will adapt, as they always did to changes in man's understanding of the world.

But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.

The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.

And you seem to be sure that we know enough of physics to be decide what is 'safe' distance. At end of 19th century Lord Kelving proclaimed that physics is finished, we pretty much know how the world works and only some loose ends are left to be tied. Then we got relativistic and quantum theories. You are falling into the same trap.

Re:Results?

[Dusty101]

With all due respect, I would probably be able to plausibly argue as an astrophysicist (but not a SETI-affiliated one) that I do have "an appreciation of the scale of the universe, the limitations that Einsteinian physics places on communication and exploration of it, the incredible odds of finding coincidental intelligent life in close proximity to us on the kind of time scale and size scale of a 14 billion year old, 14 billion light year diameter universe". After 35 years in the field, Jill Tarter probably does, too.

Your position is not an unreasonable one to adopt, even if I think that characterizing SETI as "just a time sink for big children" is unfair, sounds fairly juvenile itself and makes your argument sound weaker than it actually is.

I personally feel, however, that while the SETI effort is like looking for a nearby needle in universe full of haystacks (and the SETI folk have never claimed otherwise), the cultural, philosophical and other implications of scoring an admittedly spectacularly unlikely "hit" are worth the relatively modest investment. A big chunk of SETI's money already comes from private donations these days, anyway, and a lot more public money has been wasted on totally pointless things totally lacking the world-changing implications of something like SETI.

And in the meantime, they've (at the very least) been able to do some interesting things in terms of radio telescope technology and other research, and inspired a bunch of kids and adults to think enthusiastically about science.

Re:Results?

[bledri]

... But some people never grow up. They never gain an appreciation of the scale of the universe, the limitations that Einsteinian physics places on communication and exploration of it, the incredible odds of finding coincidental intelligent life in close proximity to us on the kind of time scale and size scale of a 14 billion year old, 14 billion light year diameter universe. ...

You really think that SETI scientists, astronomers and astro physicists, don't understand the scale of the universe?

They don't realize the odds of finding that life at the EXACT RIGHT MOMENT when it happens to be using radio waves for communications. They have no appreciation of just how vast and empty the universe is, ...

Again, you don't think astronomers appreciate how vast and empty the universe is?

... how a probe that takes 9 years to get to Pluto would take over 100,000 years to get to even the next nearest solar system to us--a mere 4.2 light years away.

What does SETI, listening for signals, have to do with space travel?

They think you can just hop in the old Enterprise, say "Warp 9, Mr. Sulu" and find life everywhere out there. They're big children.

Who the hell are you talking about that thinks this?

And being a big child is fine, being a hopelessly unrealistic dreamer is fine. And if people want to be big kids on this issue and waste their time and money on it, more power to them. Just don't waste my tax dollars on them. And don't try to sell me on it as some sort of noble dream, when it's essentially just a time sink for big children.

Well, you're in luck. If you RTFA, you'd know that no federal funds have been used since 1993, so your $0.03/year is yours to keep and invest as you see fit (yes, that's a totally made up number that I pulled out of my ass.)

Re:Results?

[dudpixel]

Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.

The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.

Just putting it out there, but if one accepts that God created the "bigger world" and that the earth is just one part (and not necessarily among the first) of God's creative works, I dont see how your argument disproves this.

I'm not asking you to believe in a God at all, this is not the debate here. I'm just saying that your reasoning does not disprove anything.

The Bible accepts that there are lots of stars ("innumerable" if you will - "as the sand of the seashore" in number, to use the figure of speech). It held this view long before man invented the telescope (and thus discovered that we cannot possibly number them).

Again, all I'm saying is that such a discovery would not even disprove the Bible, let alone invalidate one's belief in a God.

Intelligent funding vs dumb funding

[Taco Cowboy]

The good astronomer has a point

There have been too many dumb funding which often end up wasting the precious financial resources that could have been used for something else

But then ... who's the ultimate judge in determining the level of "intelligence" of a given project?

My apologies to Jill Tarter ...

[MacTO]

I am fairly certain that a lot of good work has been done by the SETI Institute in terms of science (e.g. consistent monitoring of parts of the RF spectrum and identifying new sources) and engineering (e.g. signal processing and distributed computing). Of course, I would also love to find an extraterrestrial funding.

But the Intelligent Funding has never been with SETI. When SETI started, we did not even know if extrasolar planets existed. Smart money would say that they did, since the abundance of stars in our galaxy alone puts the odds in favour of there being an awful lot of planets out there, but we only had a rough idea of how planetary systems formed based upon a sample of one. That left major gaps in our knowledge, such as the probability of finding a planet around any given star and what the composition of those planets would be. Even our present knowledge of extrasolar planets is skewed because of observational limitations.

There remain many limitations to the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Searching for weak signals is challenging even if you knew what to look for and where to look. Because of that, I believe that the Intelligent Funding should be directed towards astronomical research that would lay down a foundation for a real SETI in the future. This would be things like finding and characterizing extrasolar planets, creating better models of star formation (particularly with respect to the protoplanetary disc), and getting a better handle on the chemistry of the objects that we are observing.

Intelligent spending

[Anonymous Coward]

I respect what Jill Tarter has helped accomplish in terms of constructing a (half-finished) radio telescope optimized for SETI, but overall I must say that the quest she had been entrusted with is in shambles - and her successor likely won't do much better. We're at a point in time in which both human and computer resources are more abundantly available on the internet than ever before. SETI Institute, on Jill Tarter's watch, has chosen to forego the opportunity to utilize these resources to vastly expand the amount of search space covered by the Allen Telescope Array, instead opting to keep the real-time data produced by the telescope under wraps and sharing it only with a few, select partners - presumably, to be able to keep the winnings to themselves, if they ever happen upon their big discovery. Is it really any wonder that such a self-interested and greedy scheme is struggling to find support from private benefactors?

Deniers

[InsertCleverUsername]

I am really looking forward to the day when SETI announces evidence of an intelligent signal from deep space. Not only will it be exciting to learn about out interstellar neighbors, it will be great fun watching young earth creationists develop wild and elaborate denials of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Let's have very thorough background screenings of stargate workers this time, please.

Re:Deniers

[crazyjj]

I am really looking forward to the day when SETI announces evidence of an intelligent signal from deep space.

You'll never see it.

It breaks my heart

[Grayhand]

In many ways she is SETI and she is definitely the soul of SETI. She isn't throwing in the towel but it still feels that way. It was sad Sagan didn't live to see first contact but to potentially stop looking during Miss Tarter's life makes me feel like it is truly hopeless. The science is there but the will as a society isn't. SETI could be funded for a 100 years for 1/10th of one percent of what we just spent banging our dicks on the table in Iraq and Afghanistan but it'll never happen. Having her retire so she can devote a 100% of her time to look for funding is a crime against science and a serious waste of creative talent. The movie Contact made an excellent point. Hollywood lately is spending more each year making aliens attack Earth films than SETI has spent in it's entire history. EACH YEAR! Most people think there has been a serious effort and they found nothing. What has been done to date is the equivalent of looking under one rock in a dry valley in Antarctica and declaring there is no life on Earth.