My older sister, Adrianna, and my mom came along with me to San Francisco. Our first day was entirely leisure, so we got to spend the day as tourists. On that day, I learned one of the most important lessons of the trip—that, although it was California, and it was summer, that San Francisco has been and will always be cold and windy. We also got lost, and learned that the iPhone is not to be trusted as the ultimate authority on walking directions. Finally, we ate dinner at a Thai restaurant and saw the city by night by riding on the San Francisco cable cars—then learned two more lessons. One was that you have to pay fare both ways on the cable cars. Luckily for us, the second lesson was that cable car operators are kinder than you think. Realizing that we hadn’t known beforehand that you had to pay, the driver let us get back on—standing room only, of course. So my daredevil older sister, Adrianna, got her dream of standing on the outside while the steep San Francisco streets whizzed by, and I just felt mildly sick.
I wasn’t that sorry to hear that the rest of the trip would be mainly work—actually, I was looking forward to it. I’d done some research beforehand on SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, and I thought that it was fairly interesting. One thing Wikipedia didn’t tell me is that Hat Creek (in Northern California) is HOT. I started to get worried when I went to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website (NOAA) to check the weather and they had a little burning sun icon with “hot” in all-caps. When NOAA uses the burning-sun icon and all-caps, you know that they really mean it. And they did. We had the air conditioning in full swing by the time we arrived. It didn’t help that I was wearing long, thick black pants either. As our tour guide, astronomer Garrett Keating, showed us around the facility, I was starting to wonder if there was a real creek nearby—it seemed like it would have evaporated already in the oven-like temperatures around me.
On a more positive note, the technology that SETI uses is truly interesting. I was able to see huge antennas move, see inside an anechoic chamber, and take a look at the “Ray of Death,” which looks like a giant bladed spear but is actually used to receive radio waves of different lengths, not to impale aliens. Although the telescopes look giant and invincible, they’re actually very sensitive pieces of equipment, so we had to get the cameras and microphones tested before using them, in case they caused any damage. As it happened, our wireless microphone was judged too powerful (rather ironic, I thought—such a tiny piece of equipment could hurt such giant telescopes!) and we had to use the one on the camera instead. Sometimes, such sacrifices have to be made in the name of science. :) The scientists at SETI have made a lot of sacrifices, and overcome many obstacles, themselves. Dr. Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research, who I interviewed for the program, has dedicated much of her life to the search. Growing up in the 1950s, there was not a whole lot of support for women in science. Although today she’s the recipient of a TED Prize and one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2008, Dr. Tarter had to work hard to get there—while taking engineering, she was the only woman in a class of 300 men.
I learned a great deal about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence through my online reporting. I can only hope that someday, we can definitively answer the question, “Are we alone?”
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