Astronomer Jill Tarter grew up taking apart and reassembling her father’s radios. She is the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI Research — California’s institute of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — and the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the iconic 1997 film Contact, adapted from Carl Sagan’s novel of the same title. The recipient of two public service medals from NASA and the TED Prize, among ample other accolades, Tarter has spent nearly forty years searching the cosmos for alien life and advocating for the importance of that inquiry.

In this short video from NOVA, Tarter recounts how Sagan and Ann Druyan contacted her about the novel and explores the broader question of why the search for extraterrestrial life matters — and matters enormously:

In the book The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well (public library) — which also gave us this fascinating read on why emotional recall is the secret to better memory — Tarter speaks to the importance of playing the long game in the search for extraterrestrial life:

I don’t get out of bed every morning thinking, “Will I find extraterrestrial intelligence today?” But I do think every day, “How can I improve the search?” Fifty years of silence doesn’t mean SETI is a failure; it means we’re just getting started. We may not succeed tomorrow or next year or next decade or even next century, but a critical part of our job is passing on what we’ve learned to the future generations of cosmic scientists.

What a wonderful disposition toward life, extraterrestrial or earthly — to think how much more we could achieve and with what greater ease we could live if we only applied this to our everyday lives, from the search for love to the conquest of a project.