If and when we find alien life, what will it look like? Will it be carbon-based? Humanoid? Might it inhabit another dimension? Or is it already right here on Earth?
The growing number of people who openly ponder these questions, professionally or in their spare time, are a category of being unto themselves. Some monitor the heavens for signs of life beyond our solar system; others collect and dissect reports of flying saucers and the like.
With public interest in all things celestial at a high, stoked by congressional hearings on UFOs and Elon Musk’s promises to colonize Mars, hundreds of researchers and enthusiasts descended recently on the Bay Area, long a place where real science and fringe science comfortably coexist.
First came a 40th anniversary party for the SETI Institute, short for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Drinks flowed, sequins glittered, and laughter rang out Nov. 20 at the swanky lodge of Menlo Park’s Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club.
Standing out in the crowd of exoplanet researchers and astrobiologists was Joe Davis, the first person to store information in the genetic code of a microbe.
Unlike the other gentlemen in attendance, he was not wearing a suit jacket or bowtie but a scally cap, Carhartt overalls, and an aluminum prosthetic leg of his own design. A long, braided beard added to his pirate mystique, as did his explanation for the lost limb: An alligator got him. How, exactly?
“I kissed her on the lips,” Davis said, eyes sparkling, while a millennial acolyte rolled him a cigarette of fine artisanal tobacco. (Though he just finished a round of chemotherapy for bladder cancer, Davis remains a smoker.) Young artists and researchers orbited him throughout the night, perhaps hoping his genius might rub off.
The celebration featured an award honoring Jill Tarter, one of SETI’s founding members and a legend in the fields of astrobiology and space engineering. Tarter was doing SETI research for NASA until the 1980s, when a few senators yanked the funding and she split off with a colleague to form the SETI Institute. The nonprofit, which is based in Mountain View, still gets about two-thirds of its funding through NASA.
Today, the institute works on Mars missions, asteroid geology, expanding humankind’s understanding of the requisite conditions for life, and more. It recently began a collaborative project with Nvidia, streaming sensor data from SETI instruments to artificial intelligence processors in real time. Tarter, 80, is confident that humans will discover life beyond Earth, lamenting only that she might not be around to witness it.
Jodie Foster, who played a character inspired by Tarter in the 1997 movie “Contact,” was one of a handful of celebrities who recorded video messages to congratulate her on the accolade. Another was Brian May, astrophysicist and guitarist in Queen (also an avid defender of the English hedgehog population).
Davis presented a barnacle-encrusted glass bottle to Bill Diamond — SETI’s executive director, who glittered in an emerald sequined jacket — as a birthday present to the institute. The bottle, Davis explained, contained a message SETI had sent into space from Puerto Rico’s Arecibo telescope. He left it in the Atlantic Ocean for six months before retrieving it, and some guests interpreted this as a statement: It’s gonna be a long time before anybody hears your transmission, the sea grime seemed to say.
The gesture was in character. Davis, an artist-in-residence at Harvard’s famous Church Lab, has been experimenting for decades with space, time, DNA, and interplanetary communication. As described in the New Yorker, Davis found the world’s oldest species of apple tree in Kazakhstan and sought to encode its genome with the English Wikipedia, creating a “tree of knowledge.” He transmitted vaginal contractions into space from an MIT observatory in 1986, just before figuring out how to store information in DNA.
“Art is like quantum physics: It has to describe the whole world,” Davis said.
“The rocks in the beach hold the record of a planet we wouldn’t recognize,” he added, looking deep into my eyes. “The shadow of a cloud leaves a permanent mark on the stone.”
These days, he’s working on meteorites, but he can’t really say too much about that to the press. You understand.
Geobiologist Dave Andersen called in from Antarctica, where he was searching a frozen lake for multibillion-year-old molecules. Andersen’s research, Diamond explained, can serve as a model for scientists seeking monomolecular life in outer space.
“We’re separated by thousands of miles,” Andersen said, bundled up beneath the midnight sun, “but we’re united in our vision, that search for the unknown.”
Extra, crypto, or inter
I found myself at another alien-focused gathering just three days later, this time in San Francisco. More than 500 flying saucer enthusiasts packed into the sold-out Gateway Pavilion at Fort Mason Center to hear researchers discuss UFOs, or, as they prefer to call them, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), at the Sol Foundation’s Sol Symposium.
While SETI looks for life in the far reaches of the galaxy, the Sol Foundation tries to explain flying objects closer to home.
Dr. Garry Nolan, a cancer biologist who has turned his attention to UAPs over the last decade, acknowledged that some people’s interest in flying saucers is motivated by faith, fantasy, or desire — I want to believe. He said he’s more interested in serious science.
“I don’t need to believe anything,” Nolan said in a greenroom offstage. “I want to know something. But my beliefs can drive my hypotheses.”
Nolan said researchers in his field face stigma from the broader scientific community and even from more established ET organizations like the SETI Institute. (Diamond had chuckled when I asked him about UFOs.)
“If there’s nothing here, why is the government spending so much time and energy pushing back on it?” Nolan asked. He predicted the stigma would not subside until more data come out. In the meantime, he’s trying to teach the UAP community how to think like scientists — and how to be taken seriously.
Sol Symposium attendees traveled from other states and countries to hear Nolan and other UAP big names speak. Retired sales manager John Eckersley, who flew in from Ontario, Canada, said he had studied UAPs for most of his life but kept it a secret — even from his wife and children — until 2017. Matt Ready, a public hospital commissioner in Washington state, is pursuing a master’s degree in extraterrestrial studies from an online university. He says the program should really be called “history of UFOlogy,” since we don’t know for sure who’s behind the aircraft.
“They could be cryptoterrestrial or interdimensional,” he said. “Or time travelers.”
Andres Shirm, who makes a living playing in a black metal band and rapping as SickTanicK, traveled from Albuquerque for the event. Shirm appeared in an episode of the Discovery channel show “Alien Encounters,” in which he recounted a UFO sighting in the California desert.
Back at the SETI Institute party, Diamond said one big question is whether civilization can survive long enough to produce the technology to find alien life. Diamond was unsure, he said, whether that could happen before climate change “resets” humanity.
Even so, he remains hopeful.
“The most remarkable thing we may discover about life,” Diamond said, “is that it’s not remarkable at all.”