The Searchers: NASA Scientists Who Might Find Alien Life in Our Lifetime
This is part 5 of my series on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis.
Here’s something wild: we are probably going to find evidence of life on another planet within the next 25 years. Not “maybe someday.” Within our lifetimes. And the people doing that work are government scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working in boring beige buildings near Pasadena, California, spending your tax dollars to answer one of the oldest questions in human history.
Dave Eggers visited JPL for this chapter and came back with something that reads less like a policy essay and more like a visit to the most interesting place on Earth.
The Lab That Doesn’t Get Enough Credit
JPL gets called “Disneyland for nerds,” and honestly, that’s underselling it. This is the place that built Explorer 1, America’s first satellite. They built the Mars Opportunity rover. They helped build the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, left our solar system entirely in 2012 and is still sending back data from 15 billion miles away.
And here’s the thing: no billionaire funds this work. There’s no profit in it. It exists because the government decided that figuring out how the universe was made and whether we’re alone in it is worth doing. If NASA and JPL weren’t doing it, nobody would.
The scientists at JPL are working on something called starlight suppression, which is exactly what it sounds like. Stars are so bright that planets near them are invisible, the way you can’t see a candle next to a floodlight. The coronagraph is a device that blocks out the star’s light so you can see what’s near it. Eggers gives a great hands-on demo of this: put a lamp on your desk, stick a Post-it note on the wall behind it, turn the lamp on. The Post-it vanishes. Now block the lamp with your hand. There it is. That’s the basic idea.
Vanessa Bailey Found a Planet
The person Eggers focuses on most is Vanessa Bailey, an astrophysicist who grew up in rural South Dakota watching PBS documentaries because her town didn’t have cable. Dark skies, PBS Nova, a dad who taught biology, a small telescope in the backyard. That’s her origin story.
She went on to get her PhD at the University of Arizona, spent more than a hundred nights at the telescope, and one night actually saw an exoplanet, only the 15th ever directly imaged at that point. Not inferred, not calculated from a dip in starlight. Actually seen.
Her reaction? She didn’t believe it. “I was incredulous that it was real,” she says. There are false positives. You have to do months of follow-up to confirm it’s actually a planet and not a background star doing something weird. She did the work, confirmed it, and the planet got named HD 106906 b.
She got a write-up in the student newspaper. No celebration. No Science magazine cover. Just: okay, confirmed, moving on. That’s the culture there.
But here’s the problem with Bailey’s discovery: the planet she found was the wrong kind. Jupiter-sized, way too far from its star, definitely not hosting life. It turns out the planets easiest to find are also the least likely to matter. The planets in the Goldilocks zone, close enough to a star to potentially support life, are nearly impossible to see because the star’s light drowns everything out. That’s what the coronagraph on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is trying to fix.
The Starshade, Which Should Be in a Movie
So here’s what happened when Eggers met Nick Siegler, the chief technologist for NASA’s exoplanet program. Siegler is loud, fast-talking, and the complete opposite of every other scientist Eggers meets that day. He takes Eggers on a golf cart ride up to a warehouse at the top of the campus to show him something called the Starshade.
Imagine a giant gold flower, 60 meters across, folded up like origami, launched into space, and then unfurled between a telescope and a distant star. It would travel out 50,000 to 95,000 kilometers ahead of the telescope, position itself with one-meter precision, and block the star’s light so the telescope could see the planets nearby.
It’s genuinely beautiful, both as an engineering concept and visually. Eggers describes it as “far and away the most beautiful spacecraft ever devised by NASA or JPL.” Siegler tried to get it into the Brad Pitt movie Ad Astra and failed. That’s a loss.
For now, the coronagraph is getting the funding and will go up on the Roman telescope. The Starshade is on ice. But it could still fly on the Habitable Worlds Observatory, NASA’s next big flagship telescope planned for the 2030s.
The Woman the Telescope Is Named After
One of the best parts of this chapter is the detour into Nancy Grace Roman. Born in 1925, she knew she wanted to be an astronomer at age 13. Her guidance counselor told her to study Latin instead. She ignored him. Swarthmore College discouraged her from getting a degree in astronomy. She did it anyway. Chicago denied her tenure because she was a woman. She moved on.
In 1959, NASA was brand new and someone asked her if she knew anyone who could build a space-based astronomy program. She nominated herself. Six months later she was NASA’s first chief of astronomy. She spent years pushing for a space telescope, survived budget fights and politics, and her work eventually led to Hubble, though she was long retired by the time it launched.
As early as 1959, she had proposed that a space telescope could detect planets around other stars and even suggested using a coronagraph to do it. That’s 60-plus years of her idea slowly becoming reality.
She died in 2018, at 93. The Roman Space Telescope is named for her, though typically, she wouldn’t have wanted the attention.
“Existential Humility”
At the end of the chapter, Eggers follows up with Siegler and Bailey after his visit. Siegler finds a crayon drawing he did at age 10 of an Apollo rocket. He says NASA is really in “the inspiration business,” which sounds like corporate speak but coming from him feels genuine.
Bailey’s response is better. She says she recently heard the phrase “existential humility” and liked it. We are this complex life form that has evolved over billions of years to the point where we can even ask whether we’re alone. And if we found out we’re not, that would be “humbling in the most wonderful possible way.”
And that’s why it matters. Not just as a scientific milestone. But as a reminder that we are small, the universe is vast, and there is something genuinely generous about a government spending money to find that out.
No one at JPL Eggers talked to wanted credit for any of it. They kept pointing at each other, at the teams, at the predecessors. Vanessa Bailey found only the 15th exoplanet ever directly imaged and shrugged it off as a team effort. That’s either a beautiful culture or the most disciplined collective humility Eggers has ever witnessed. Probably both.
Book: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis | ISBN: 9798217047802
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