Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EszGIvRdgTE

Who is she? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Tarter

In her words: “We are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We – all of us – are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”

In my words:

Little is more difficult to truly understand than outer space. If black holes don’t make your head spin, dark matter certainly should. Their complexity, and the sheer magnitude of the forces that drive them make it difficult to achieve a meaningful understanding let alone a meaningful conversation.

That’s the challenge Jill Tarter faces, and that’s the challenge Jill Tarter handles handily. She makes space relevant, and she makes space understandable. She does this by presenting the exploration of space as a part of our evolution. Humanity, she says, is a story of ideas, of which the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a natural next step.

She uses a series of rhetorical devices to convey the realities of outer space. Perhaps the most touching of these is her presentation of her perspective on Earth’s place among the galaxies (at 1:10). “Every poem, ever laugh, every tear, they’ve all happened here, here, here, here. Perspective can be a very powerful thing, perspectives can change, perspectives can be altered.” The quote on its own does little justice to the simplicity and power of her words. Watch the video to really understand what she’s saying.

She states that, given the mind-bending number of stars in the universe, 10^22 to be specific, that it is probable that there is life somewhere else. Any other scientists may have considered 10^22 an adequate representation of the quantity of stars. Tarter illustrates this unimaginably high number of stars. She asks the audience to imagine that a stack of 10 trillion stars would reach 20 feet in the air. She then tells the audience that a stack of all stars would reach three times as far away as the moon. There are a few more examples of her ability to distill a complex issue to a couple of sentences in the key quotes.

And it doesn’t hurt that Tarter has some majestic phrasing thrown in (Earth is a “fragile island of life in a universe of possibilities”). Her wording brings a spirituality to the cold reaches of space. This kind of speaking requires careful writing and even some serious soul searching. This talk shows what happens when you identify the limitations of your subject matter, and address those head on.

Key Quotes:

“We are not the pinnacle of evolution. We are not the determined product of billions of years of evolutionary plotting and planning. We are one outcome of a continuing adaptational process. We are residents of one small planet in the corner of the milky way galaxy.”

“All of the concerted SETI efforts over the last 40 some years are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the oceans, and no one would decide that the ocean is without fish on the basis of one glass of water.”