First Contact (24 page)

The countdown was set to begin at Shin-ya Narusawa's mission control room at the Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in southern Japan. Nobody was going out into space; no spacecraft were being sent into orbit. But it was a noteworthy night because another nation was joining the improbable yet increasingly sophisticated search for extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy.

Jumping up to suddenly rigid attention, Narusawa called out “T minus ten.” The assembled reporters and camera crews jumped up too and surged toward him.

Narusawa, the chief researcher of the observatory in the hills northwest of Osaka, had eyes red with fatigue, but his smile radiated triumph. For more than two years he had been preparing and organizing for this moment and now it was about to begin: Japan's first coordinated, all-country observation of a single star system that might, just might, be home to intelligent beings sending signals out into space. Narusawa said he wasn't 100 percent sure of this, but it might be the first large-scale, simultaneous SETI observation of its kind in the world.

“T minus eight minutes,” he called out. The star system that the thirty radio and optical telescopes were focused on was one recommended two decades earlier by none other than Carl Sagan and Harvard University's Paul Horowitz, then and now a leading proponent of the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, or SETI. As a young man, Narusawa was enamored and inspired by Sagan and his work—he read the book
Cosmos
at least five times—and now he was about to launch his own major SETI observation based on guidance from the masters. Their “Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay,” or META, spectrum analyzer had a capacity of 8.4 million channels and the ability to use Doppler shift to distinguish between terrestrial and possible extraterrestrial samples. The project, begun in 1985, was led by Horowitz with the help of the nonprofit Planetary Society and with financial support from movie director Steven Spielberg.

Getting to countdown had not been easy. The day before, Narusawa had explained with evident emotion that the observation would be named “Sazanka,” after a light purple shrub flower that comes out in the fall, the rainy season around the observatory in Sayo. He chose Sazanka because, in Japan, the plant represents the ideal of “never giving up”—a designation earned by the way that the flower survives the cold, even after snowfalls. The choice also carried a small, inside joke: The rainy season is the high time for
sazanka
, when it flourishes, but is a low time for the observatory because the clouds make it much more difficult to get a good night's observation. Several banners with images of the
sazanka
were hung around the control room, and one perfect flower was placed in a small glass vase near Narusawa's chair. All around him was the message: “Never give up.” Given both the difficulty he had experienced devising and planning the effort, to say nothing of the needle-in-a-haystack chance that he would succeed where no other SETI observation had for fifty years, the
sazanka
seemed an apt symbol of encouragement.

“T minus six minutes,” he proclaimed. Narusawa had begun his optical SETI observations in 2005, after reading that Horowitz himself had begun a program using an optical telescope for SETI purposes, rather than the traditional radio telescopes used since the beginning of the SETI effort in 1960. The Nishi-Harima telescope that Narusawa controls is the largest optical telescope in Japan, and he was looking for an exciting and unique additional use for it after it came on line six years earlier. Optical SETI
looks for nanosecond flares or lasers coming from a distant star system, just as the far more widespread radio SETI listens for radio messages or bursts that intelligent creatures might be sending. Optical SETI had long been seen in the field as useless because neither it nor laser technology was sufficiently refined. But now it is.

Narusawa, briefly seated, jumped up again and declared: “T minus four.” Playing in his mind at that moment was one of those long-ago, formative moments of his life. He was watching live on television an early Apollo moon walk; or, rather, a series of goofy Apollo moon jumps since the astronaut's movements looked to him exactly like a kangaroo hopping. He was beyond delighted—he was inspired and decided then and there to study astronomy and learn about the universe. If his memory is correct, the forty-four-year-old Narusawa was then four or five.

“T minus two,” he called. Nishi-Harima is on a mountaintop, or perhaps more accurately a hilltop, outside the town of Sayo and quite far from the major cities of Japan. So the fact that six television stations and several newspapers had sent reporters out to record the event showed a not insignificant interest. As in the United States, curiosity (and skepticism) about advanced extraterrestrial life is always present, if not terribly sophisticated. It's more the stuff of science fiction, comics, and horror films than of real science in the public mind. But Narusawa is one of many trying to change that. He believes that searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life is science at its best, science “serving humanity” in the way it should but often does not. In addition to the high-mindedness, he also knows searching for ET can be popular, can engage the public if done with the right pizzazz. Narusawa has some of the showman in him, and he's not shy about it. He would like to be Japan's Carl Sagan.

“T minus one.” Over the whole length of Japan, some thirty observatories, university telescopes, and amateur sky watchers were set to turn on their machines, having set them to the precise coordinates Narusawa had ordered: a star system in the constellation Cassiopeia, just where Horowitz and Sagan had proposed years before, and where a Japanese radio
astronomy colleague, Mitsumi Fujishita of Tokai University, had detected an unusual and unexplained blip in his monitoring four years before.

“Start observations,” Narusawa finally declared. He was speaking, of course, to the assembled journalists (and for that last order he was actually speaking in Japanese). The other astronomers couldn't see or hear him, but on their own knew the big moment had arrived. Thirty monitoring points began to simultaneously look at and listen to the exact same spot in space, hoping to detect some signal—a burst of light, a radio signal—that could only be made by intelligent life. They would all continue for two full nights, weather and clouds permitting.

Scanning for extraterrestrial communication is for the very patient and the very determined—the
sazanka
of astronomers. Narusawa would not have any results for months, and ultimately they would not find any sign of ET life. Millions of similar hours have been spent by SETI scientists and advocates around the world—most of them in the United States—and so far no radio blip or laser burst has been confirmed. Nonetheless, SETI observations have been spreading around the world. South Korea, Italy, Argentina, and Australia also have operating SETI programs, and American institutions including Harvard and Princeton have geared up substantially as well, along with the now-flourishing SETI Institute in California.

There's a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with any perceived breakthrough on the horizon, although the technology to hear or see communications from distant planets is in fact advancing and expanding rapidly. It's rather a function of the near certainty that no intelligent life exists in our solar system except on Earth. There may well be microbial, bacterial life to be found on Mars, Europa, Enceladus or Titan, a second genesis that would strongly suggest life, even complex life, in the universe is a commonplace. But if the explorations of the modern space age have shown anything for sure, it's that conditions for the evolution of what we understand to be intelligent life do not exist elsewhere in the solar system. The planets and moons are either too hot, too cold, too dry, or made up primarily of gas.

So if scientists are ever going to make contact with the intelligent life many of them are convinced is out there, it will have to happen via interstellar communication, since earthlings are not going to reach the warp speeds necessary to reach other galaxies anytime soon. The nearest star to our own is Alpha Centauri at 4.3 light-years away, and the nearest one with an identified terrestrial exoplanet is Gliese 581, at about 20 light-years away. That's about 704,952,200,808,876 miles.

This may seem like an enormous, almost certainly impossible wall to climb. But for astronomers familiar with the vastness of the universe, the minuscule size of our own world, solar system and even Milky Way galaxy, the improbability lies elsewhere. To them, it defies scientific logic to think there isn't other intelligent life out there. So for Shin-ya Narusawa and scores of others around the world, the vanishingly small chance of detecting and confirming a signal from a distant civilization is science at its most exciting—it's a wide-open field, it's challenging on many technical levels, it remains unconventional and even controversial, and it holds the promise, however faint, of someday making what would be the biggest scientific discovery of all time. Substantially larger telescopes are being planned and constructed and the logic of Moore's law, which says the speed of top-notch computers will double every eighteen months or so, offers hope for a much faster and better read of the mountains of data produced by the science instruments attached to those telescopes.

SETI, or in this case OSETI for its optical version, makes additional sense in Japan because of the way telescopes are perceived and paid for. Narusawa's Nishi-Harima observatory is the center of a large, hilly park that includes ball fields, hiking trails, and guesthouses, and was funded largely by the Hyogo prefecture. Astronomy is certainly science, but it's also part of “culture and recreation” as far as Japanese policy makers are concerned. The instruments, including the $40 million Nayuta telescope, always reserve time for local people to come in and look at the nighttime sky. “In Japan, our telescopes are all open to the regular people, and when they come in we want to know what are their big interests in astronomy. The top
two are these: Is there an end, a border, to the universe? And is there life, especially intelligent life, anywhere other than Earth? So OSETI is what people want.” Narusawa said his goal, his dream, was conducting observations with SETI programs in the United States. And not quite a year later, after Narusawa had presented his Sazanka data at a large, annual astrobiology meeting in Texas, SETI officials agreed to joint American-Japanese observations. Those soon grew to include observatories from thirteen nations on five continents, and a “Project Dorothy” global SETI took place in late 2010, with Nishi-Harima as headquarters. Narusawa was beside himself.

The United States is where SETI was born and where it now—despite decades of skepticism—flourishes. The Japanese team showed impressive coordination, technology, and determination, but they were pretty much groping in the dark. That's a higher-tech but nonetheless similar place to where SETI pioneer Frank Drake was in 1960 when he first aimed the newly inaugurated antenna of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, at two relatively nearby star systems, and set about listening for messages. His project Ozma (named after Princess Ozma of Oz) lasted but two months and ended without any contact. But that hardly mattered; a dream was born.

Almost a half century after Drake began his work, the conceptual and technological offspring of Ozma in America are busy listening for that same fleeting signal. Laid out across a high valley between California's 14,000-foot Mount Shasta and 10,000-foot Mount Lassen, forty-two radio dishes with enclosed antennas stand sentinel and collect data in a systematic way hardly imaginable when SETI began. (This is quite literally true: Drake says the array now works at a level of effectiveness something like 100 trillion times greater than what he had in Green Bank.) A late fall snowstorm was moving into the Hat Creek area when I arrived, and the radio dishes were groaning and grinding in the wind—a perfect Earthly backdrop for an otherworldly venture. But until the winds reach a sustained 30 miles per
hour they continue their job—a sometimes targeted, sometimes full-sky, systematic, and nonstop effort to hear radio communications from afar. The telescopes in operation, the biggest radio telescope array in the world, increase by a factor of at least 100 the ability of SETI searchers to find the kind of “transient” radio signals they're looking for in the sky. But it's what SETI hopes is only a beginning. Plans for an enlarged Allen Telescope Array at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory call for 350 radio antennas and ever-faster computing power, a concentration of dishes and Moore's law upgrades that will increase the ability to detect and make sense of radio signals by a factor of 1,000.

The array is set in a leveled field surrounded by lava beds, red fir, and snowcapped mountains, and redolent with the sweet smell of sage even as the snow was falling. Most of the near neighbors walk on four legs. The area, and especially Shasta, looms large in many New Age spiritual tales, and has been considered a sacred spot to native inhabitants going back many centuries. The area has also long been known for reports of Sasquatch or Bigfoot sightings—all part of a worldview the SETI folks are careful to keep far removed from their endeavor. Most of the actual data monitoring and analysis is done far from the field, where astronomers (and their graduate students) receive the data coming into Hat Creek via computer and do their work.

It was only when the strong gusts calmed a bit that I could tell that the wind had camouflaged the sound of the programmed, periodic movements of the twenty-foot-diameter dishes. With a choreography both graceful and surreal—elephants dancing ballet—they moved in pairs or groups to aim at a different star or whole other galaxy. This morning's mission was to focus on 100 of the 500-plus extrasolar planets discovered in the past fifteen years. It would be the first SETI endeavor of its kind, but followed the logic that animates astronomy (and much of science). A discovery rearranges the scientific furniture, and then researchers in related fields start using the new reality for their own purposes.