But my life’s work had entered a holding pattern. Like hundreds of my fellow researchers, I was waiting for data—real-world data from real worlds, out there. Humanity had taken its first step toward discovering whether the cosmos was breathing. But that step stalled in midair.
The Kepler scope succeeded beyond all our dreams. It filled space with new planets everywhere it looked. Thousands of its candidate worlds were waiting to be confirmed, without enough researchers to confirm them. We knew now that Earths were common. There were more of them than I’d dared hope, and closer by.
Yet Kepler never saw a single planet straight on. It cast a wide net, watching for the faintest imaginable dimming of suns many parsecs away, and it gathered that light with a precision of a couple of dozen parts per million. Infinitesimal dips in the brightness of stars betrayed invisible planets passing in front of them. It still stupefies me: like seeing a moth crawl across a streetlight from thirty thousand miles away.
But Kepler couldn’t give me what I wanted: to know, beyond all doubt, that one other world out there was alive. I don’t know why it meant so much to me, when it left so many people cold. Not even my wife really cared all that much one way or the other. Robbie did.
To know for certain whether a planet breathed, we needed direct infrared images fine enough to yield detailed spectral fingerprints of their atmospheres. We had the power to get them. For longer than Robin had been alive—longer than Aly and I were together—I’d been one of many researchers planning a space-based telescope that could populate my every model and decide forever whether the universe was barren or alive. The craft we were backing was a hundred times more powerful than Hubble. It made our best existing telescopes look like old men with dark glasses and service dogs.
It was also a wild fling of cash and effort that made no practical difference in the world. It wouldn’t enrich the future or cure a single disease or protect anyone from the rising flood of our own craziness. It would simply answer the thing we humans had been asking since we came down from the trees: Was the mind of God inclined toward life, or did we Earthlings have no business being here?
That night, a powwow gathered across the continent, from Boston to San Francisco Bay. Congress was threatening to cut the funding for our Earthlike Planet Seeker. My colleagues had assembled a hasty quorum—a hive-mind, ad-hoc defense of our life work. We teleconferenced—two dozen video windows and as many audio channels, drifting in and out of sync. As each speaker had their say, my screen filled with the face of the frail craft that spoke the words. The man with food stains all over his shirt who couldn’t look even a webcam in the eye. The man who peppered every sentence with “in fact.” The woman who had practiced nursing for years before becoming one of this world’s great planet-hunters. The man who lost his child to an IED in Afghanistan. The man who, like me, started binge-drinking at fourteen, but, unlike me, could not rein it in these days.
—Don’t forget. Congress has twice threatened to pull the plug on the NextGen.
—The NextGen is the damn problem! It has been bleeding the budget dry for decades.
The NextGen Space Telescope was a sore spot with my people. The flagship instrument was now a dozen years late and four billion dollars over budget. We all wanted it, of course. But it was more about cosmology than planet-hunting. And it stole cash from all other projects.
—There couldn’t be a worse time to pursue the Seeker. Did you see the President’s tweet?
We’d all seen it, of course. But the brilliant observer who also happened to be addicted to ethanol felt the need to post it to the text window:
Why are we pouring ever more money into a BOTTOMLESS PIT that will never return a SINGLE CENT on investment??? So-called “Science” should stop inventing facts and charging them to the American People!!
—He’s playing to the xenophobes and isolationists. All the Innies.
—The Innies have Washington’s ear. The country is bored with astronomy.
—Then we Outies need to go to Washington and make the case again.
My heart sank as my people made a battle plan. I didn’t have another hour to spare for any other cause than the one that was taking all my time. And it wasn’t clear to me that a trip to Washington would do a thing. The Seeker was just another proxy battle in the endless American civil war. Our side claimed the discovery of Earths would increase humanity’s collective wisdom and empathy. The President’s men said that wisdom and empathy were collectivist plots to crash our standard of living.