NASA Search For Extraterrestrials Faces Uncertain Funding Future

It sits nestled in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget, drawing a scant one-tenth of 1 percent of the $15 billion total, yet the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is singled out on an almost annual basis for congressional flagellation. And this year is no exception--even as NASA gears up for the October inception of a 10-year effort to tune in radio signals from advanced alien civilizations. The problem for SETI, congressional staffers say, is the "giggle factor." They say it's easy for representatives to get their names in print by taking cheap shots at the program, linking it with a search for little green men and flying saucers. In fact, that was exactly the approach used by Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.) when he successfully engineered the elimination of funding for SETI, via a recently passed House authorization bill for fiscal year 1993. "This is a program that the Associated Press described as a search for space aliens," Duncan told the House on April 29. "With our nation in such financial straits as at present, I find it incredible that we are continuing on with this program, this ridiculous luxury." Apparently, many members of Congress agreed with Duncan's assessment of SETI and voted in favor of his amendment to zero out the proposed $13.5 million in FY 1993 funding for the undertaking, while retaining the space station Freedom project, estimated to cost $30 billion to build, launch, and assemble. And with the Senate Commerce Committee voting on June 16 to eliminate SETI funding, the effort may be dead. Many scientists inside and outside NASA are convinced that intelligent life exists and can be discovered by the radio signals they broadcast. Others, including prominent biologists and astronomers, say the SETI project is doomed to fail, either because it will be difficult to pick up radio signals from trillions of miles away or simply because there is no intelligent life out there in the universe. John Billingham, a physician and life scientist who is chief of SETI operations at the NASA Ames Research Center, near Mountain View, Calif., says, "I don't think [Duncan] or his staffers are aware of the amount of intensive effort and support for SETI." Billingham says that congressional representatives often deride the project but usually drop their opposition when they learn more about the serious science behind it and the support of noted scientists such as astronomers John Bahcall, president of the American Astronomical Society, and Carl Sagan. Billingham also points out that the National Academy of Sciences in its 1991 assessment of future directions for astronomy called SETI "a significant scientific enterprise." Billingham says that there have been 60 separate searches for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations over the last 30 years; Soviet scientists have been looking for light-based signals. NASA's project, which has cost $36 million to date, will start listening to the cosmos on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the New World and will be far more powerful than the former shoestring operations. There are two components to the NASA search. Using existing radio telescopes in the U.S. and abroad, the Targeted Search will examine nearly 800 sun-like stars that are within 80 light years of Earth, restricting itself to the 1,000 to 3,000 MHz microwave band, considered the most likely range for interstellar communication. The Sky Survey will search the entire sky with less sensitivity between 1,000 and 10,000 MHz, with a frequency resolution of 30 Hz. Billingham says that this survey could intercept signals that have leaked out, much as our television and radio signals currently leak out, or it might pick up deliberate transmissions beamed directly at our solar system. Thomas McDonough, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, coordinates a small-scale, SETI-like project for the Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, Calif. He says he would be "very disappointed" if the NASA search comes up empty-handed. "We'll be covering the sky in a way that it's never been covered before. So, if there is a civilization out there, I think there's a good chance of finding it," he says. And answering critics, he says, "If SETI is successful, it will be enormously beneficial to the human race. It will be revolutionary to know for certain that there's another civilization out there." The Planetary Society project is scanning the 1420 MHz and 1700 MHz "magic frequencies," which show the least amount of background noise and would be the best place for an extraterrestrial civilization to deliberately transmit a radio beacon across the void. Yet another search, independent of NASA's upcoming effort, is the SERENDIP III project at the University of California, Berkeley, headed by astronomer Stuart Bowyer. SERENDIP III researchers will be using the 1,000-foot-diameter radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to examine the radio band between 424 MHz and 436 MHz. Since this band is close to UHF-TV and cellular frequencies used on Earth, it could yield signals that have leaked from alien sources, according to Bowyer. The assumption behind all of these searches is, of course, that intelligent life is relatively abundant in the universe. SETI proponents say there are many stars in our own galaxy, and because some of the basic building blocks of life, such as carbon dioxide and ammonia, are commonly found in space, life must be abundant and much of it must be intelligent. It is this assumption and not the search strategy that raises some of the strongest objections to SETI. "I basically believe these searches are doomed to failure," says Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was involved in a 1972 SETI search that surveyed 600 nearby sunlike stars for signals at 1,420 MHz. He now says that he has become convinced that the evolution of life is an extremely rare event. Also, Zuckerman says, one of the signs astronomers use to detect planets orbiting stars is the presence of infrared radiation above background levels. If there were advanced civilizations out there, he believes, astronomers should surely have detected alterations in the infrared radiation, caused by exploitation of major energy sources. If advanced civilizations were out there, "the universe would look like a biological universe, where you'd see the hand of biology at work," he says. Ernst Mayr, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, writes that most SETI proponents are physical scientists, who fail to take into account the "incredible improbability of intelligent life ever having evolved, even on earth." He writes in Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 1985): "There were probably more than a billion species of animals on earth, belonging to millions of separate phyletic lines, all living on this planet earth which is hosptiable to intelligence, and yet only a single one of them succeeded in producing intelligence." He further writes, "The assumption that any intelligent extraterrestrial life must have the technology and mode of thinking of late twentieth century Man is unbelievably naive.... For all these reasons I conclude that the SETI program is a deplorable waste of taxpayers' money, money that could be spent far more usefully for other purposes." Among SETI supporters is evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who says, "I can present a good argument from `evolutionary theory' against the repetition of anything like a human body here; I cannot extend it to the general proposition that intelligence in some form might pervade the universe." Also among the doubters is University of Maryland physicist Robert Park, who is a spokesman for the American Physical Society. Park says that, despite earlier optimism, it now appears the rest of our solar system is virtually devoid of life, and that casts doubt on the belief that life is abundant in the universe. "I would be astounded if they found any extraterrestrial civilizations," he says. Whether SETI gets a chance to disprove its political and scientific critics will be decided this summer as Congress continues hammering out the FY 1993 budget. Congressional staffers and SETI proponents say there is always a chance that funding for the project will be restored at some point in the budget process. Others are not so optimistic--especially given the pounding the larger and costlier space station and superconducting supercollider projects are taking.

NASA Search For Extraterrestrials Faces Uncertain Funding Future

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