Jill Tarter grew up an only child in New York City. A descendent of Ezra Cornell, the founder of the prestigious college, she applied for a scholarship specifically for family members, only to find it was available only to males. Proctor and Gamble then offered to pay her tutition, but nearly withdrew the scholarship when she decided to get married her junior year. The scholarship board feared a woman would never use her education if she got married.
Tarter perservered, and graduated Cornell as the only female among 300 men in her engineering class. At this point she declared engineering to be "boring" and went to UC Berkeley where she studied astrophysics and coined the term "brown dwarf," for stars whose interiors never get hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur.
Beginning in graduate school, Tarter became involved with projects like "Serendip," which piggy-backed on other astronomers' star-gazing, in the hopes of finding signs of extra-terrestials. Today, she is the director of the SETI program, which scans the skies all day long using radio telescopes like Arecibo (right) in search of a signal not of this world. Tarter stresses that SETI is really a misnomer. "We're not looking for intelligence per se, more like extraterrestial technology."
Many say that Jodie Foster's character in Contact was based on Tarter. All we know for sure is that there are many similarities.
"A fair answer," says Tarter, "is this: Carl wrote a book about a woman who does what I do. She's about my age. He and Annie [Druyan] met with me and talked to me when they were working on Contact. Basically, he did his homework. He understood the social, psychological and personal filters that a woman my age in science had to go through to get there."
Tarter has dreams of building bigger, better telescopes. One plan is to build 30 Arecibo-size scopes in China. An even more ambitious idea is Lunarecibo, a giant telescope on the dark side of the moon, completely free of Earth-born interference.
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