For almost three decades, Jill Tarter was the person most likely to know if we’d made contact with an alien civilisation. As director of SETI from 1984 to 2012, Tarter was at the head of an organisation tasked with searching the cosmos for any signs that life on Earth is not a complete anomaly.

And we’re still searching. On three occasions during her career, Tarter thought she had made contact. But the readings turned out to be misleading. Her vast experience in one of humanity’s most profound and potentially endless quests gives her a unique outlook on our place in the universe and the future for the human race.

Tarter, now aged 73 but still very much involved in the field of astronomy, spoke to WIRED about algorithmic accountability, how science can rise to meet our greatest challenges and the importance of our continued search for alien life.


Jill Tarter on why science must reach out beyond academia

We need to be telling stories. We need to be telling stories in a way that the public can relate to. I think we need to be telling some of the positive stories that go along with meeting challenges associated with global climate change. Part of the push-back, I think, is that everything is doom and gloom. People who very seldom come up for air don’t want to just hear negative things.

On what she’d say to Donald Trump

I’d say to him that this planet, the whole planet, faces challenges that individual nations are not going to be able to solve on their own and he had better back off on this ‘Make America great again’ thing. Let’s think about making life on this planet great for as many people as we can.

On the accountability of algorithms

These are algorithms that no one sees and there’s no accountability. At the same moment we are having enormous amounts of success in deep learning, but when you build these neural networks they are essentially a black box. They’re very, very hard to understand and it’s equally hard to understand what biases you’ve built in. So I get nervous when we rush to adopt what we’ve created and say, “This is wonderful”, and we use it here, we use it there.

I’ve heard someone talking about using machine learning to make hiring decisions. The idea was that you build in all the rules that you’d like and then you remove bias from the process by letting the machine do it. But the problem is that the biases have been built in and you can’t shine a light on them. You get yourself into more trouble.


On making science matter to everyone

Science is about what we don’t know, science is about solving puzzles, science is a privilege, and science is something we all need. It has been the most successful of human endeavours, since the dark ages. It’s appalling to think of what it would have been like before science began to change how we lived our lives, before science began to help us live beyond our child-bearing years and to attack disease. That’s the thing that I’m always impressed with, that people who can say, “I don’t believe in science”, and “Science is doing all the wrong things and causing all these problems”, and yet they’re alive and their health is much better than previous generations because of science. I can’t understand how communities which have suffered these large increases in incidents of disease because of loss of herd immunity with the anti-vaccination, why they don’t suddenly say, “Oh, now I get it”.

On finding extraterrestrial life

There’s always a caveat with Mars that the life we find there might be related to us, but assuming that it’s a second genesis then that number two is all-important. If we’ve had two independent origins of life in this one tiny solar system then it’s going to be ubiquitous. Mars is a special case because early in the history of the formation of the planetary system Mars, Earth, Venus, all swapped rocks and therefore they could have swapped microbes within those rocks and if there’s life on Mars we could be related to them or we could be Martians.

I often start public talks by saying, “I’m here on a mission to change your point of view”, because you have to see the challenges that we’re all facing as a global issue, we’re not going to solve it nationally. A signal, if it ever arrives from an extraterrestrial, intelligent civilisation isn’t coming to the United States, it’s coming to planet Earth. Caleb Scharf, who’s the chairman at the Astrobiology Department at Columbia has a wonderful saying, “On a finite world, a cosmic perspective is not a luxury, it’s a necessity”, and once we saw the 1968 Earthrise image that Bill Anders took... if that doesn’t wake you up to say, “This is one world and look how fragile it is”, I don’t know what will.