I have to admit I didn't like the movie Contact. Actually, I thought it was pretty bad. It's mostly that one line that ruins it for me: "No words...to describe it...they should have sent a poet," Jodie Foster gasps. Maybe they just should have sent a screenwriter to write some better lines. Contact had a very redeeming feature, however. It introduced me to Jill Tarter.
I started reading about SETI right after I finished rolling my eyes at Jodie Foster's breathless wonderment, and I was amazed to find out her character was based on a real scientist. And the more I read, the more I liked Dr. Tarter. What initially attracted me was her determination and dedication. I'd say she's looking for a needle in a haystack, but it's more like looking for a signal from a needle that may be millions of years old. And the haystack is all the hay on the planet. And maybe the needle is actually a pin or something totally different that you don't even know about yet. Basically, it could be really hard to find.
Our universe is so big that probability would seem to dictate that life has happened on more than one planet, but its size is what makes finding that life so difficult. A radio or light signature that would indicate an advanced civilization in our nearest neighboring galaxy would take millions of years to get here. So even if there's someone out there right now we may not know about them for a long, long time. Worse still, how do you decide where to start looking? Canvassing just the closest or the most likely stars takes years, and new galaxies are being discovered all the time. Dr. Tarter epitomizes the ferocious drive that makes a researcher successful.
It is not her focus alone that sets Dr. Tarter apart, however. In her speech at last year's TED Conference (below) she showed a grasp of her work's context that seriously impressed me. Even if SETI never finds a thing, she told the audience, it will be a success if it makes people realize how much humans have in common with one another and with other life on this planet. She wants us to see that our species is just one tiny branch on the genomic tree. We should be humbled by that fact, and for that reason we should respect each other and all other life. She may have an almost inhumanly singleminded devotion to finding something out there, but that hasn't stopped her from seeing what so many of us don't see on our planet.
I have to admit I didn't like the movie Contact. Actually, I thought it was pretty bad. It's mostly that one line that ruins it for me: "No words...to describe it...they should have sent a poet," Jodie Foster gasps. Maybe they just should have sent a screenwriter to write some better lines. Contact had a very redeeming feature, however. It introduced me to Jill Tarter.
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