Rude Astronauts (25 page)

Since Ohio State has been recently “off the air” due to technical difficulties, Project META (short for Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay) may now be the only full-time monitor for ETs. The project is funded exclusively through private donations, mainly from the Planetary Society, the public space group co-founded by author-scientist Carl Sagan. With an annual budget of only about $25,000, META is a shoestring operation. The radiotelescope is a hand-me-down ex-NASA rig bought from Harvard University by the Planetary Society, while the nearby optical telescope is run by the Smithsonian Institution.

If SETI is existential science, then it’s only appropriate that Project META’s director, Paul Horowitz, is a professor of physics at Harvard University, the home of classic American existentialism. In his late 30s, occupying a hopelessly cluttered office near Harvard Yard, Horowitz is one of the generation of young research scientists who came bursting out of college campuses during the ’60s. He first became interested in SETI during his student days at Harvard, when his roommate took a course taught by Sagan when he was lecturing at the university.

Horowitz’s graduate work in astrophysics was paralleled by SETI research at the giant Arecibo radiotelescope in Puerto Rico and at Ames. As a professor of physics at Harvard, he helped start Project META, along with Sagan, under the auspices of the Planetary Society. If a legitimate radio signal from an extraterrestrial civilization is detected within our lifetime, it may possibly be Paul Horowitz who accomplishes the feat.

“I think it’s become a completely legitimate branch of science these days,” Horowitz says. “I think what has happened is that things have changed over the years. Things that people thought twenty-five years ago are no longer what people think in terms of the evolution of planetary systems and the beginnings of life.”

Astrophysicists now have a better grasp of how planets are formed and how life begins in primordial conditions, Horowitz notes; this in turn has increased their understanding of the potential for intelligent life in the universe. Another major change in SETI research has been the microelectronics revolution, making a search like Project META possible. “Progress there has been so rapid and astounding that it is now possible to analyze millions of channels simultaneously and really look for needles in haystacks, which really would have been far-fetched a generation ago,” Horowitz explains.

Indeed, public acceptance of SETI is remarkably high. “I think that, in terms of grassroots support, this is a project that can’t fail,” Horowitz says. “People love it. It doesn’t require special training in science to understand SETI.

“First of all, people understand that there could be other intelligent things out there,” he continues. “It’s in science fiction, in the culture, it’s been there for a long time. Everybody looks at the night sky and wonders what the heck’s going on. So what is it that’s so hard to explain? Just the details, like the frequency of the carrier wave or why we look at certain kinds of stars. The technical details are new to them.”

On the other hand, there are a number of popular misconceptions among the public about extraterrestrial intelligence. Horowitz has a small collection of supermarket tabloid headlines taped to his office wall, such as “Space Aliens Make Woman, 86, Pregnant.” Both he and Caruso note ruefully that Project META has attracted its share of the lunatic fringe, such as visits or phone calls from people who claim to be in telepathic contact with aliens. “If you really did a random sample of people in this country or anywhere and asked how many thought we had already made contact with extraterrestrials, I bet you’d get a pretty high percentage,” Horowitz says. “I bet twenty percent of the people in this country think that.”

Project META has its technical drawbacks as well. Its location is in a place with a rapidly increasing population, and as the population rises, so does the potential for radio interference from even household sources. Interference is particularly high when the telescope is pointed towards the southern horizon, for instance. Sometimes the telescope intercepts regular, repeating signals which turn out to be from manmade sources.

“It’s either equipment malfunction or interference in one form or another, and we’ve had a little bit of everything,” Horowitz says. “And every now and then you get something that looks just right, but it doesn’t repeat. Y’know, I can’t say anything about that, except that it looks right and it doesn’t repeat. You hope that any one of them is going to be the one that does repeat, but so far …”

It’s intriguing to speculate what would happen if a genuine, real McCoy LGM were intercepted by Project META. Joe Caruso would probably be the first person to know, finding the signal during his daily inspection of the computer. If an interesting signal were detected, he would notify Horowitz, who in turn would probably have the telescope kept at that declination for another day to see if the signal repeated. If the LGM did repeat for several days, Caruso and Horowitz would unpin the telescope and track it across the sky, following Earth’s rotation. If the signal were still there, Horowitz would notify another observatory elsewhere in the world and have its astronomers attempt to confirm the discovery, “because maybe it’s just those MIT boys out there in the woods with their little transmitters,” he laughs.

Although the event would be kept quiet until it was confirmed, Horowitz admits that the discovery would probably be leaked to the news media before a formal announcement could be made. “Although we wouldn’t be very good at keeping a lid on it, even less good would be a national observatory with a staff of 100, and these guys are telling their wives and their kids and their dogs and everybody knows about it, and it just leaks out. A kid makes a comment to a friend at school whose father is a journalist and that’s how the world will know of the First Contact.”

The major problem after initial detection will be in translating the message. It would probably not be in Morse code, English, or Mr. Spock’s Vulcan tongue, so decoding and deciphering the signal will take a very long time. Even then, Horowitz warns, pieces of the message may never be understood. All language is culturally based, and thus understanding the language of a completely alien culture will be difficult, if not impossible.

“Then you ask a more interesting question, ‘What effect does this have on the whole world?’” Horowitz says. “Do we immediately convert our swords into plowshares and grow wheat because now we realize that there’s a true religion and that the way to eternal nirvana and peace is there and will be explained in due course by these folks?”

He pauses and shrugs again. “You can believe that if you like … but if you want my opinion, it will have both short-term and long-term effects, but neither will be quite what we think. Short-term effect will be, ‘Wow, great news! Even better than last week’s great news!’ It’s on the front page of everything, and this will probably last longer than your average thing. Y’know, the radon scare lasted about three days, so this will last about a week, then it will degenerate to the fifth page of
The New York Times
.

“I think what will happen in the long term will be very interesting,” Horowitz continues. “I think it will soak into your consciousness … that things are forever different, that we’ve lost our unique position, that we know the answer to whether there’s other life, that we know the answer as to whether life can survive technology … You just don’t feel the same about your place in the universe, and the way you do your silly little things on Earth is affected by that.”

If Paul Horowitz is the avatar of Project META, then Joe Caruso is the sentry. How he came to be in the unique position of possibly being, one day, the first human to look at an alien signal, is a story of how a hobby turned into a profession.

Caruso had little more than a passing interest in astronomy until ten years ago, when he bought a little 60mm refractor telescope for fifty dollars at a flea market in his town in upstate New York. With no prior experience in star gazing and only a Golden Guide to astronomy to light his way, the junior college history teacher began looking at stars in his backyard at night. “I didn’t know right ascension, declination, nothing,” he says. “I just started finding my way around.”

Hooked on his new hobby, he joined amateur astronomer groups and participated in organized “watches” of stellar phenomena. As he continued his night work, he became aware of how little people knew about astronomy. “I would be out in my backyard with my little telescope, and people who were college educated would come up to me and say things to me like, ‘Y’know, I always wondered, like, what the differences between planets and stars are.’ It got me to wondering why people don’t know this. People who are college educated who don’t know the basic geography of the heavens.”

After instructing a course in astronomy at a small college and teaching history at the University of Hartford, Caruso went to Wesleyan College and earned a graduate degree in astronomy. Eventually he was hired by Paul Horowitz to be the curator of Project META. He couples this job with his observations at the Oak Ridge optical telescope down the road, and spends several days a week lecturing to the general public about astronomy and SETI. Although he works in a professional environment, Caruso still considers himself to be an amateur astronomer. He also still has the itch to teach and plans to eventually return to it.

“I’m really a telescope operator,” he says. “But there’s a need for this sort of thing. There’s a lot of unemployed astronomers. People say that this is the age of science, [but] there’s 20,000 astrologers in America and fewer than 2,000 astronomers … but there’s a lot of technical jobs in astronomy. Computer operators and programmers and telescope drivers and things like that, there’s quite a need for [them] in astronomy.”

Like Horowitz, Caruso finds that people are generally open-minded about the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence.

“What I find is that most people have a need to believe that it’s there, just on a gut level,” he says. “But it is kind of a strange job. It’s kind of hard, when you’re talking to people on the phone, to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I gotta get off the phone, I have to go see if the aliens have contacted us.’”

Joe Caruso is also an avid reader of science fiction. His favorite authors are the hard SF writers like Larry Niven who make plausible extrapolations about alien life. However, he believes that the chances of radio contact with an alien intelligence to be slim, at best. For one thing, Earth has been radio-visible—that is, detectable from deep space by humankind’s radio transmissions—for only about fifty years. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, this means an alien civilization looking for us would have to be within about fifty light-years of Earth, which is not a great distance on the galactic scale.

And that’s not the only thing which weighs the chances against first contact any time soon. “There is a basic assumption that SETI makes which is untestable,” Caruso says, “and we won’t know until it happens or doesn’t happen, and that is whether there is the need to try to communicate among other beings that we feel. Now, most people think this would be a good thing, or at least an interesting thing. We don’t know if aliens would feel like that. They may be brighter than us, but they don’t have that need to communicate with other beings. It would never occur to them to do that.”

On the other hand, Caruso recognizes that the implications of First Contact would be enormous. “It would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time, and that’s why it’s worth doing. People are always asking me, ‘What do you think the chances really are of this happening?’ And I tell them, ‘I think they’re very, very small … but I know what the chance is if you don’t look at all. It’s zero.’”

H
APGOOD, H.L (HAROLD LAPIERRE)
, Jr.—1911–1966; American pulp SF writer of the 1930s and 1940s. Although most of his short fiction is obscure today, Hapgood is best known (as Dr. H. LaPierre Hapgood) as the author of several allegedly non-fictional works on UFO contact, including
Abducted to Space
(1950) and
UFO!
(1952). These works were based on Hapgood’s claim that he was seized by aliens from space in 1948, which is widely regarded as a hoax.

—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Ursula May, editor (1981)

Lawrence R. Bolger; Professor of English, Minnesota State University, and science fiction historian:

Harry Hapgood.
(Sighs.)
It would figure that someone would want to interview me about Harry Hapgood, especially since the new collection of his work just came out. The field may not be able to get rid of him until someone digs up his coffin and hammers a stake in his heart …

Okay, since you’ve come all this way, I’ll tell you about H.L. Hapgood, Jr. But, to tell the truth, I’d just as soon leave the bastard in his literary grave.

There were pulp writers from the ’30s who managed to survive the times and outlast the pulps, to make the transition from pulp fiction to whatever passes as literature in this genre.

Jack Williamson, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury … those are some of the ones whose work eventually broke out of the pulp mold. They’re regarded as the great writers of the field and we still read their stories. They still find their audience. Their publishers keep their classics, like
City
and
The Humanoids
and
The Martian Chronicles
in print.

Those are the success stories. Yet for every Bradbury or Williamson, there’s a hundred other writers—some of them big names back then, you need to remember—who didn’t make it out of the pulp era. For one reason or another, their careers faded when the pulps died at the end of the ’40s. H. Bedford-Jones, Arthur K. Barnes, S.P. Meek … all obscure authors now. Just like H.L. Hapgood, Jr.

Not that they were necessarily bad writers, either. I mean, some of their stories are no more crap than a lot of the stuff that gets into print today. But when the field started to grow up, when John Campbell began to demand that his
Astounding
contributors deliver realistic SF or else … well, Harry was one of those writers who fell into the “or else” category.