Bewilderment

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THE REVIEW PANEL MET in the Rayburn House Office Building, across the street from the Capitol. Robin dawdled, agog with patriotism. I tugged at him to get us to the appointed spot on time. The room was cavernous, wood-paneled, and draped with flags. Long, tiered ranks of leather-padded chairs faced a raised platform with a heavy wooden table measured out by nameplates and plastic water bottles. In the back were side tables full of coffee and nibbles.

We were late getting through security and arrived in a room filled with colleagues from around the country. A couple of them remembered Robin from when he gate-crashed the teleconference. More than a few teased Robin or asked if he was presenting. I bet I could convince them, he said.

The meeting started. I sat Robbie next to me. “Settle in, bud. Lunch is a long way off.” He held up his sketchbook, his pastels, and a graphic novel about a boy who learns how to breathe underwater. He was fully provisioned.

The dais filled with politicians who looked like yesterday’s America. They called on a NASA engineer to start things off with the latest plan for the Planet Seeker. It would settle in somewhere near the orbit of Jupiter before deploying its massive, self-assembling mirror. Then a second instrument, the Occulter, flying several thousand miles away, would position itself in the precise spot to blot out the light from individual stars so our Seeker could see their planets. The engineer demonstrated. “Like holding up your hand to block a flashlight, so you can see who’s holding it.”

Even to me, it sounded crazy. The first question came from the representative of a district in West Texas. His drawl sounded sculpted for public consumption. “So you’re saying the Seeker part alone will be every bit as complex as the NextGen telescope, even before adding in the flying lampshade? And we can’t even get the damn NextGen off the ground!” The engineer demurred, but the congressman rode over him. “The NextGen is decades overdue and billions over budget. How are you possibly going to make something twice as complicated work for the amount you’re asking?”

The questions went downhill from there. Two more engineers tried to undo the damage and restore confidence. One of them pretty much imploded. The morning threatened to end before it began. Robbie had worked away for hours, barely fidgeting. Honestly, I forgot he was there. When we surfaced for lunch, he was holding up a painted page for my approval: another planet, as if seen through the Seeker, its disk swirling with the turbulent blue-green-white whose only possible cause was life.

The image was brilliant. I wanted to work it into my slide deck. We had an hour. First I steered us through the line for the catered box lunches. There were ones marked Vegan and ones marked Altairian. “You’re supposed to laugh,” I told my son.

I’m too Sirius.

“I see you’ve read the Astronomer’s Joke Book.”

I got a Big Bang out of it.

We holed up in a corner. While Robbie ate, I laid his lush painting on the floor, snapped it with my phone, mailed a copy through the air to my laptop computer, cropped and edited, then inserted it at the end of the virtual carousel I would project to a room full of people that afternoon. None of the science fiction I grew up on could have predicted such magic.

After lunch came several scientists whose work required something like the Seeker. I spoke third. I reached the stand just as the room was sliding into blood-sugar doldrums. I talked about how no other method could match direct optical imaging for finding life. I showed our best existing photo of an exoplanet—little more than a grayish blur. Even that was impressive, given that my graduate thesis advisor once assured me we’d never live to see one.

My next slide was a bit of theater: a best-guess digital simulation of what that planet would look like through the occulted eyes of the Seeker. The room gasped, as if Congress said Let There be Light and the universe obliged. I pointed out that a picture that good, with all its data, could reveal whether the planet was inhabited. I finished by showing Robbie’s painting while quoting Sagan: We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.

Then I braced for less-than-courageous questions. The rep from West Texas came out shooting. “Can your atmospheric models tell the difference between a world with interesting life and a world that’s nothing but germs?”

I said that a distant planet filled with bacteria would rival the most interesting thing ever discovered.

“Could you tell if a planet had intelligent life?”

I tried, in twenty seconds, to say how that might be done.

“And what are the odds of that?”

I wanted to hedge, but it wouldn’t have helped. “No one thinks that is especially likely.”

Disappointment everywhere. Another congressman asked, “Can you do your work with the NextGen, if it ever launches?”

I explained why even that magnificent instrument wasn’t enough to peer directly at atmospheres. A superannuated congressman from Montana lumped the two telescopes together. “What if all these pricey toys tell us that the most interesting beings in the entire universe could have put their billions of dollars to better use right here, on the most interesting planet anywhere?”

I knew then why these men wanted to kill this project. The cost overruns were just an excuse. The country’s ruling party would have opposed the Seeker even if it were free. Finding other Earths was a globalist plot deserving the Tower of Babel treatment. If we academic elites found that life arose all over, it wouldn’t say much for humanity’s Special Relationship with God.

I stepped down from the podium feeling like shit. Weaving my way back to my seat through a narrowing iris of light-headedness, I heard my son exclaim, Dad! That was great! I hid my face from him.

Afterward, we lingered in the hall outside the hearing room. I postmortemed the battlefield with my colleagues. Some were still sanguine. Others had abandoned hope. A terse alpha from Berkeley suggested I might have done better with more statistics and less child art. But one of this world’s great planet hunters fussed over Robbie until he reddened. “You’re so beautiful!” she told him. And to me: “You’re lucky. I can’t understand why my boys love Star Wars more than they love the stars.”