Contact - Carl Sagan [20]
"But we've only been at it four and a half years. We've looked at less than a third of the northern sky. This is the first survey that can do the entire radio noise minimum at optimum bandpasses. Why would you want to stop now?"
"No, Ellie, this is endless. After a dozen years you'll find no sign of anything. You'll argue that another Argus facility has to be built at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia or Argentina to observe the southern sky. And when that fails, you'll talk about building some paraboloid with a free-flying feed in Earth orbit so you can get millimeter waves. You'll always be able to think of some kind of observation that hasn't been done. You'll always invent some explanation about why the extraterrestrials like to broadcast where we haven't looked."
"Oh, Dave, we've been through this a hundred times. If we fail, we learn something of the rarity of intelligent life-or at least intelligent life that thinks like we do and wants to communicate with backward civilizations like us. And if we succeed, we hit the cosmic jackpot. There's no greater discovery you can imagine."
"There are first-rate projects that aren't finding telescope time. There's work on quasar evolution, binary pulsars, the chromospheres of nearby stars, even those crazy interstellar proteins. These projects are waiting in line because this facility-by far the best phased array in the world-is being used almost entirely for SETI."
"Seventy-five percent for SETI, Dave, twenty-five percent for routine radio astronomy."
"Don't call it routine. We've got the opportunity to look back to the time that the galaxies were being formed, or maybe even earlier than that. We can examine the cores of giant molecular clouds and the black holes at the centers of galaxies. There's a revolution in astronomy about to happen, and you're standing in the way."
"Dave, try not to personalize this. Argus would never have been built if there wasn't public support for SETI. The idea for Argus isn't mine. You know they picked me as director when the last forty dishes were still under construction. The NSF is entirely behind-"
"Not entirely, and not if I have anything to say about it. This is grandstanding. This is pandering to UFO kooks and comic strips and weak-minded adolescents."
By now Drumlin was fairly shouting, and Ellie felt an irresistible temptation to tune him out. Because of the nature of her work an her comparative eminence, she was constantly thrown into situations where she was the only woman present, except for those serving coffee or making a stenotypic transcript. Despite what seemed like a lifetime of effort on her part, there was still a host of male scientists who only talked to each other, insisted on interrupting her, and ignored, when they could, what she had to say. Occasionally there were those like Drumlin who showed a positive antipathy. But at least he was treating her as he did many men. He was evenhanded in his outbursts, visiting them equally on scientists of both sexes. There were a rare few of her male colleagues who did not exhibit awkward personality changes in her presence. She ought to spend more time with them, she thought. People like Kenneth der Heer, the molecular biologist from the Salk Institute who had recently been appointed Presidential Science Adviser. And Peter Valerian, of course.
Drumlin's impatience with Argus, she knew, was shared by many astronomers. After the first two years a kind of melancholy had pervaded the facility. There were passionate debates in the commissary or during the long and undemanding watches about the intentions of the putative extraterrestrials. We could not guess how different from us they might be. It was hard enough to guess the intentions of our elected representatives in Washington. What would the intentions be of fundamentally different kinds of beings on physically different worlds