Waiting for Contact by Squeri Lawrence;

Author:Squeri, Lawrence;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2016-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

NASA’s SETI Workshops

Ohio State’s SETI search was grassroots initiative, the world’s first continuous SETI program, but Drake, Morrison, and Billingham had something grander in mind. “Big science” had defined their professional careers. Morrison had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II; Billingham was a NASA administrator during the glory days of the Apollo missions; in the late 1960s, Drake was directing the Arecibo Observatory. All three envisioned SETI as a major government project. Yet by 1975 the Project Cyclops fiasco was reducing SETI’s chances of NASA approval.

The time had come for Billingham to resell SETI within NASA. He realized that his first task was gaining “the support of the scientific community.” Without that, SETI was “dead in the water.” He assembled six SETI workshops, which Morrison consented to chair. Billingham later described these workshops as “the best decision” he “ever made.”39

The workshops met from January 1975 to June 1976 under the auspices of NASA’s Ames Research Center.40 Sixteen leading scientists, in tandem with NASA people from Ames, scientists from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and others from NASA headquarters, discussed SETI. Their favorable assessment was no surprise, for Billingham had stacked the deck with SETI backers. Morrison, Drake, Sagan, Oliver, Bracewell, Greenstein, and A. G. W. Cameron were among the sixteen scientists running workshops. Also participating was Joshua Lederberg (1925–2008), biologist and Nobel laureate in medicine. Lederberg was very much interested in possible alien life, even the lowliest bacteria. Another participant was Charles Townes, a veteran of the 1971 Byurakan II conference. The rest were mostly astronomy professors.

The workshops broke no new ground. Their purpose was to repeat and validate the SETI narrative, but NASA published their report, thereby adding government approval of sorts to the speculations of SETI true believers. As could be expected, the workshops pointed out that scientists could learn much from extraterrestrials. The workshops also took the long view. It assumed older extraterrestrial races had faced many travails similar to those of Earth’s twentieth century. With luck, the trajectories of older civilizations might give humanity deep insights into the direction of its own history, perhaps regarding the very meaning of the human journey, and whether and how evolution ends.

The workshops carefully projected a big-tent appeal. They noted that engineers and scientists would not be the sole beneficiaries of extraterrestrial knowledge. A wide range of professionals. “Anthropologists, artists, lawyers, politicians, philosophers, theologians”—in fact, “all thoughtful persons, whether specialists or not,” stood to gain.

The workshops defined SETI as a win-win undertaking, for even failed searches carry a positive outcome. A universe found empty of intelligent life would give humanity “a strengthened belief in [its] near uniqueness.” Besides, technology developed for SETI had other applications. As for potential dangers, SETI telescopes would listen but not transmit. Earth can choose to ignore an offensive message; the other civilization will never know of humanity’s existence. The dangers are few, but the benefits are many, the workshops declared.

As always, the bottom line was money. Would a SETI program be expensive? With NASA budget hawks in mind, the workshops’ answer was a simple no.

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