Are We Alone?

By Ross Andersen

There are two stories, both of great consequence, that Lee Billings tells in
his new book, the excellently titled Five Billion Years of Solitude. The
first concerns the recent discovery of planets circling distant stars, and our
ongoing struggle to find life on their surfaces. Billings takes us to the
cutting edge of this field, letting us share intimate moments with its most
accomplished scientists. We get a deep sense for the cosmic wonder of their
work, and the steep challenges they face in carrying it out.

If the book had no higher ambition than to be a richly reported, lyrical

meditation on the frontier of exoplanetology, it wouldnt disappoint. But
Billings goes further, putting that field's discoveries into context. He does
this by telling a second story, one that hits a bit closer to home: the story of
our planet, the only place known to support life. Billings takes us
from Earths violent formation, to the rise of life here, and onward, to the
events that will someday make this world uninhabitable. This deep history
shows us the incomparable splendor of planet earth, but it also illuminates
its limitsand reveals the high stakes that attend our search for new earths.

Last week, I reached out to Billings to see if we might discuss Five Billion
Years of Solitude over email. What follows is an edited transcript of our
exchange.

Tell me a little bit about how you first got interested in this subject.
Were you always into astronomy, or fascinated by the possibility of
finding extraterrestrial life, or did you find your way to this project
some other way?

The short answer is that Ive been interested in these topics for as long as I
can remember. The longer answer is that around the turn of the millennium
I started regularly seeing news stories about how astronomers were
discovering ever-larger numbers of exoplanets, and how sometime in the
next decade or so NASA and other space agencies would build and launch
space telescopes designed for the explicit purpose of seeking out Earth-like
worlds and the life they might harbor. That just seemed like such a cool,
wild idea. It was always in the back of my mind as a good story to research
and pursue when I was just starting out in science journalism.

The real turning point for me occurred in 2007, when a prescient

astrophysicist friend of mine gave me a simple exercise: Take the year-to-
year records for the smallest exoplanet, graph them over time, and draw a
trend line through the data. When I did that I was amazed by what I saw.
All the early exoplanets were big bloated balls of gas rather like Jupiter, but
later discoveries were often more diminutive, more Earth-like worlds. The
trend of the data suggested that by mid-2011, planet-hunters would have
found at least one Earth-sized planet. Astronomers were already talking
about the Kepler mission, and how it could find potentially habitable Earth-
like planets after it launched in 2009. A handful of other instruments and
telescopes were also in contention, so there was really a race going on to
find the first small, rocky worlds. I thought that was pretty exciting and
dramatic, so I started writing about it where and when I could.

In the meantime, NASAs push for big life-finding space telescopes was
already running into very serious trouble and major delays, and the
prognosis would only become more grim as the years went on. As I delved
deeper into the topic, I was struck by the notion that, soon, potentially
habitable planets would be piling up by the dozens, but without major shifts
in policy and funding we would have extremely limited abilities to
determine whether or not any of those worlds were actually habitable or
inhabited. That just didnt make any sense to me, and I started wondering
why nobody was really raising a fuss about it. It troubled me greatly that,
outside of a handful of astronomers, no one really seemed to care that an
opportunity to discover life beyond the solar system was slipping away. I
wanted to figure out how the state of play had changed so dramatically in
such a relatively short time, and, if I could, do my own small part to shift
things back on course. Thats basically how the book came to be.

This book is a kind of snapshot of where we are, technologically and

culturally, in our quest to find out whether there is life elsewhere in the
universe. While I was reading it, I couldnt help but wonder where you
think this question stacks up against the other big, primary intellectual
inquiries. Is this ultimate question right now? If not, what is?

The books central question isnt really whether or not life exists elsewhere
in the universe. If that was the central question, I wouldve included much
more detail about research into the origins of life, and about the prospects
for extraterrestrial life within our own solar system. Im inclined to believe
that life is an emergent cosmic phenomenon, something as inevitable in our
universe as the formation of stars and galaxies, and that perspective
certainly informs the book. So piling on pages and pages of detail and
debate about how life might emerge on a planet seemed to me a case of
missing the forest for the trees. The book is less about lifes origins and
more about what life does after it gets started on a planet like Earth.
Because, if you think about it, if life is so common throughout the universe,
you have to wonder why everything we see out there looks so dead. Id
guess its because most life is actually quite hard to detect over cosmic
distances, because it doesnt end up progressing to sentience and
technology. It doesnt end up building starships and interstellar beacons to
explore and communicate with the rest of the galaxy, at least not in any
obvious way we can easily see. Put another way, right now it looks like
most life out there doesnt do the things that we like to tell ourselves well
eventually do. Short of joining in the search myself or just writing
extremely speculative science fiction, it seems the only way to get at why
that might be is to take a long, hard look at our current situation on Earth in
light of recent discoveries about other planetary systems and our own
worlds deep past.

So the books real central question is what the future holds for life
particularly intelligent lifeon this small world orbiting a lonely star. We
already know that someday our Sun will cease to shine, bringing life on
Earth and in the solar system to an end. Can wewill weavoid this
dismal fate forecast for us by stellar astrophysics? No one really knows that
answer yet. And perhaps thats not an ultimate question in the big
universal scheme of things. But perhaps it is. I certainly think that, either
way, its of immense importance to everyone in the here and now on Earth.
The books core theme, if it can be said to have one, is that the question of
lifes future on (or off) this planet is not only worth asking, but also more
urgent than commonly believed.

One of the really striking things about this book is its unflinching tone.
Ive interviewed a fair number of astronomers, and I know how easy it
can be to slip into a romantic mode about it. The people and the
settings and the technology all lend themselves to triumphant
narratives, but you have stayed remarkably disciplined here. Rather
than retreating into overly optimistic futurism, the book really
captures just how heartbreaking it can be to talk to high-level
astronomers right now. It made me wonder what its been like for you
to spend so much time with these driven, idealistic people who are
being forced to kind of sit around and stew in deep curiosity while the
values of the culture at large catch up with them?

It was a trip, in the most arduous, elegiac, and mind-expanding sense of the
word. There was an otherworldly tinge to my visits with some of the
researchers I profiled that clashed in telling ways with everyday activities.
One minute theyd be talking about planetary carbon cycles or the long-
term evolution of the Sun or how to travel between the stars, and the next
theyd be stuck in traffic or doing laundry or peeing in the bushes next to a
hiking trail. One minute they would be keepers and seekers of a sort of
sacred, transcendent knowledge, and the next they would be just normal
human beings caught up in the daily grind and the messy details of life. I
should also note that this phenomenon isnt isolated to astronomers and
planet-hunters; its something that any scientist or engineer working at the
frontier of almost any field deals with on a regular basis.

And of course very few of these people are really lauded and richly
rewarded for their work in comparison to even C-list Hollywood
celebrities. For instance, look at the case of Jim Kasting, a quiet, thoughtful
Penn State geoscientist I profile in the book. Kasting basically figured out
how the cycling of carbon between a planets atmosphere, ocean, and crust
stabilizes the climate over geological timescales. In other words, he helped
show how and why Earth has managed for billions of years to be a
reasonably nice place to live. Insights from this carbon cycle are a big part
of how planet-hunters draw the boundaries for habitable zones around other
stars. And it turns out that this same carbon cycle, paired with the Suns
evolution, dictates how long our planet can support a robust biosphere
how long life can exist on Earth. So Kasting has sketched out some
canonical limits for life as we know it around stars, and he has also made a
scientifically robust forecast for the end of the world.

If thats not enough, hes also been an important figure in the quest to build
telescopes that could someday look for signs of life on faraway exoplanets.
Here is a man working on topics that have profound, fundamental
importance for every single living being on Earth and yet he toils away in
obscurity in a tiny little office. Essentially no one outside of the field knows
who he is, and even within the field he has limited power; he certainly isnt
able to pull any political or financial strings to help get his dreamed-for
telescopes built. His story is by no means unique; in fact, its the norm for
great scientists.

I think these sorts of jarring juxtapositions are important to acknowledge.

They help reveal the unthinking boosterism and naive idealism that all too
often passes as popular science communication today. Ill avoid naming
names, but I can pull up a web browser right now and visit dozens of high-
traffic blogs and even a lot of otherwise reputable mainstream media sites
and find news stories about how were on the cusp of achieving
immortality, or creating super-intelligent androids, or building a warp drive
or a space elevator or a grid-ready fusion reactor or a Mars colony or, you
know, a giant space telescope to locate and study exo-Earths.
Reading those sorts of stories, youd think all this stuff is really only a few
years away. Well, I hate to say it, but thats bullshit. Its revisionist futurism
that pretends humans cant massively fuck up, that the world never steps in
to spoil the best-laid plans. Throughout history, countless aspirations of
heartbreaking beauty and staggering genius have been torpedoed by all-too-
human foibles or by simple bad luck, and thats not going to change.
Maybe we will build super-intelligent machines or travel to the stars
someday, but even then well still have to do the dirty laundry.

In some sense, all that credulous coverage is great, because many of these
things are almost certainly within our reach, and its important to
communicate such wild possibilities to the public. But that coverage can
also be terribly damaging, because it usually glosses over the hellish
complexity and difficulty of the scientific research and technological
engineering and wonky public policy wrangling that is required to do these
grand, big, bold things. Most of all, it treats these things as guaranteed
successes and foregone conclusions rather than as vulnerable and flawed
human endeavors. It leads the public to expect amazing breakthroughs
without any actual major investment and hard work, and the end result is a
backlash of mass disillusionment and apathy when the jetpacks and robo-
butlers and teleporters dont suddenly materialize.

I think the public is actually eager to support the search for other Earth-like
planets. Its high time for us to find other Earths and study them for signs
of life. The problem is, all the breathless reporting seems to have given
most people mistaken assumptions that the search is much further along
than it really is, and that its continuance is assured.

Tell me about the title of this book, Five Billion Years of Solitude. My
understanding is that its a reference to the lifespan of complex life on
Earth, which began after the planet cooled and formed oceans 4 billion
years ago, and which will end a billion years from now, when
conditions here become too extreme for complex life. Are readers
meant to interpret that as a prediction about our species destiny? Do
you think we are bound to be alone for all of that time, or is it just a
warning as to what could happen if we proceed along our current
path?

Its an admonishment that, though we may in a sense have all the time in
the world, thats not actually forever. We may in fact have a rather slim
window of opportunity in which we can hope to secure our long-term,
enduring future.
Looking to the past, we know from dating various meteorites that the Earth
and the rest of our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. We
dont really know when exactly life got started, but its quite possible that
at least one terrestrial biosphere, more primitive and ancient than our own,
arose in the Earths first few hundred million years of existence, only to
perish in a spate of planet-sterilizing asteroid or comet impacts that seems
to have occurred between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago. Our planets record
of sedimentary rock begins after these great impacts tapered off, and its in
those nearly 4-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks that we find the earliest
hints of the biosphere that grew into the one we all remain a part of today.
Conversely, we dont find abundant evidence of complex, multicellular life
until approximately 550 million years ago.

What all that means is that life formed on Earth very rapidly, essentially as
soon as it could after the planet cooled from great impacts. Our planet has
been alive almost from the start. Yet for about 7/8ths of its history, the
Earth has basically been a single-celled world with no higher plants and
animals. The half-billion-year era of complex life we find ourselves in right
now is only a small part of the planets greater history, and it is also
fleeting.

Looking to the future, based on the work of Jim Kasting and others, we can
forecast that somewhere between five hundred million and perhaps a
billion years from now, the era of complex life will begin to fade. The
details are a bit complicated, but in essence by that time the Earths
atmosphere should be getting too hot and anemic to support oxygenic
photosynthesis, and this will lead to the collapse of the rich surface
biosphere of multicellular plants and animals.

This of course assumes that something truly cataclysmic doesnt happen in

the meantime, such as the Sun colliding with another star, or a rogue free-
floating planets passage through the solar system sending the Suns worlds
tumbling into orbital disarray. It also assumes that life itself doesnt possess
an infinite evolutionary capacity to adapt against ever-harsher
environmental conditions. I think these are both reasonable assumptions.

So you take the age of the Earthabout 4.5 billion yearsand you add the
most pessimistic forecast for complex lifes longevityabout 500 million
yearsand you arrive at this nice round number, five billion years. A
number suitable for a book title. Five Point Seven Five Billion Years of
Solitude doesnt have that same ring to it, does it? Now, microbial life will
probably persist on Earth for quite some time after the demise of plants and
animals, but it will still be doomed. The Sun gets brighter as it ages, and
that will eventually boil the oceans off into space. Then, near the end of its
life, the Sun will swell into a red giant star and scorch the Earth to slag.
Then our star will burn out. The end.

So where does the solitude part come in?

Based on all the evidence now available to us, it appears that in all 4.5
billion years of planetary history, the planet produced nothing else like us,
nothing else with the potential to escape the grim end of life on Earth.
Some of us could go to space. Some of us could, in principle, even escape
the solar system entirely, bound for parts unknownmaybe for habitable
planets orbiting other nearby stars. Who knows what wed find out there?
Maybe wed find someone else to talk to.

We only have these options by virtue of things like our large brains and our
opposable thumbs, our capacities for language and tool-making and
foresight that we have with great difficulty used to build a global
technological culture. We really owe our progress and our current state not
only to our biology, but also to our planetary resourcesto the fossil fuels
we burn, the ores we mine, the rich diversity of other species we exploit,
and so on. Were presently using most of those resources in very
unsustainable ways. Weve already plucked all the low-hanging fruit, and
much of what we are burning and mining and exploiting now is only
available to use through our already sophisticated technology.

So if we somehow drive ourselves extinct, if all our great edifices collapse,

I think it would be very difficult if not impossible for anything else to rise
up and rebuild to where we are now, even given a half-billion or a billion
years. People can and will disagree with me about that, but my position errs
on the side of caution, on the side that says humanitys present moment in
the Sun is too valuable to treat as something disposable. And we cant
count on help coming from anywhere else, from beneficent all-powerful
aliens swooping out of the sky to save us, or on messages of salvation
beamed from hyper-advanced civilizations on the other side of the galaxy.

Keep in mind that life on Earth isnt going to be getting easier throughout
all that future timeit will be getting harder, as the planet becomes less
and less conducive for complex life. So we may havewe may bethe
only chance available for life on Earth to somehow escape a final, ultimate
planetary and stellar death. If we dont do that, then the books title would
become a prophecy: After fading into oblivion, the sum total of lifes
history on Earth will only be billions of years of solitude.

It was interesting that you were able to find researchers that could
speak powerfully and knowledgeably to these two themes, the
unsustainability of our current relationship to the planet, and the
search for others that might harbor life. Has it been your experience
that most of the people working in this field draw on this broad
expertise, or did you hunt down the best of them?

Not to be overly romantic, but I do think its true that spending lots of time
stargazing or studying planetary climates or searching for habitable
exoplanets will change anybody. Your view of nature and your place within
it changes. Looking out at the night sky, you might feel small and
insignificant, but then looking back from our present moment through the
eons of lifes evolution here on Earth, you might justifiably feel youre a
part of the most meaningful thing in the known universe, something that
could be the source of significance for countless past and future events.

No two people deal with those perspective shifts in exactly the same way,
and I dont actually see a strong correlation between being able to wax
poetic about them and being a truly great scientist. Some get awestruck and
aspirational, some get apathetic and bleak. Others just think there are more
productive things to discuss. There are plenty of eminent astronomers who
find exoplanets really fascinating, but who arent very interested in
questions of life and habitability. If you try to ask them about that stuff, you
probably wont get much more than shrugs and monosyllabic answers. Ask
them instead about the celestial mechanics of planetary migration, or what
the distribution of planetary system architectures are telling us about how
planets form, and theyll talk your ear off.

Which is all to say that while the books main characters are certainly
among the very best at what they do, the elite group of scientists from
which they are drawn is quite a bit larger. In the books acknowledgements,
for instance, I list about 75 additional researchers I talked with whose
valuable insights arent directly mentioned or quoted. And even that list is
incomplete. Over the years, I easily talked to more than a hundred experts
for this book, and yet I can reel off name after notable name of those who,
for one reason or another, I wasnt able to chat with. That fact alone is a
powerful testament to just how robust and expansive the field has become
there are so many Very Important People working in exoplanets and
astrobiology right now that meaningfully talking with all of them about
their work surpasses the capacity of any one person or project.

In that sense, its really an amazing and entirely unprecedented time to be

alive if youre interested in the question of life beyond Earth. Right now is
one of those strange moments where you have a singular confluence of
brilliant minds and breakthrough observations that will become legendary
in the history of science. Its a bit like the formation of quantum theory in
the 1920syou had gatherings like the Fifth Solvay Conference in
Brussels, where Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie,
Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and
other giants of physics all came together to discuss unsolved problems and
what it all meant. The events of that time and those meetings still echo
through modern physics, and they have seeped deep into our culture.

Id argue exoplanetology as an interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry is

in a similar place today as quantum theory was in the early 20th century. In
the book Ive tried to capture some of the associated intellectual debates
and personal clashes that Ive been privileged to witness, because I suspect
they will prove to be of considerable historic interest.

Your book closes on a moving portrait of one of the most compelling

figures in this field, Sara Seager, the MIT professor who has just won a
MacArthur Grant for her work on exoplanets. Was there a point in
your research when you realized that her story distilled the essence of
this larger scientific moment?

In hindsight, its all quite clear: Seager began her career at Harvard,
working in cosmology, studying the physics behind recombination, a
cosmic moment less than a million years after the Big Bang when the
primordial plasma that filled the universe cooled and condensed into
hydrogen atoms. When the first exoplanets were discovered in the mid-
1990s, though, she switched to studying them, anticipating that
exoplanetology would soon become the hottest, fastest growing field in
astronomy. It was a risky move, because at the time not everyone agreed
those planets were real; she didnt even have her PhD yet, and many of her
peers and colleagues thought she was making a huge mistake.

But she proved them wrong. With her advisor, Dimitar Sasselov, she
hammered out some very important theoretical models and observational
techniques that were then used to study that first wave of discovered
exoplanets. She never really looked back or second-guessed herself after
those initial successes, and just kept relentlessly pushing toward over-the-
horizon goals like looking for smaller, more Earth-like planets and finding
ways to study them for signs of life. Its my sense that Seager is one of
those rare individuals for whom the impossible is just a provocation. She
has immense drive and discipline, and when someone tells her she cant do
something, its like pouring gasoline on a fire.

In her shift away from cosmology, in her refusal to be intimidated by

naysayers or cowed by great difficulties, in her steadfast pursuit of
impossible dreams, she really embodies the ethos of the exoplanet
revolution now sweeping through space science. Im not the only one who
saw that about Seagera lot of people have seen it, I think, and in seeing it
they all thought the same thing: She might be the one who really makes this
happen, the person who leads the charge and gets the light of other living
worlds and proves for the first time in history that humanity is not alone.

I had been talking to Sara periodically about her exoplanetology work since
2007, but the recognition that she was a microcosm of the field at large
didnt really begin to dawn on me until 2011, when we met for lunch at a
science conference in Washington, DC. Over lunch she revealed to me
some profoundly difficult events shed been struggling with in her personal
life, events that form a key part of her story in the book. Suddenly the
individual I was sharing a meal with was no longer an all-knowing, nigh-
invincible scientific demigoddessshe was a fragile and conflicted and
scared wife and mother, all too human in her vulnerability and sorrow.
Some of her dreams had been shattered forever. Over the course of our
subsequent interviews and interactions, I watched as Sara slowly picked up
the pieces she could and rebuilt herself, stronger and even more driven than
before.

That sudden individual shift from unstoppable and triumphant to mournful

and mortal reminded me of the large-scale changes I had witnessed as I
researched the book, as ambitious government plans to build big, billion-
dollar space telescopes to find habitable planets and extrasolar life were
delayed, defunded, or entirely cancelled. Those plans were scuttled for
complex reasons, few of which had anything at all to do with astronomy. I
think they are indicative and symptomatic of our modern societys broader
struggle to come together to achieve great, enduring feats.

Right now the planet hunters (and the rest of the astronomy community)
are still struggling to pick up the pieces, to rebuild themselves and regain
momentum and a bit of the luster that has been lost. Theyre still trying to
find a sustainable future for themselves, and I think Sara is playing an
important role in that debate by exploring possible alternatives to the
standard, federally-funded way of doing big science.