Are you out there, can you hear this? I was out there listening all the ti-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ime

When I was in grad school, one requirement was a class on research techniques—how to research and how to incorporate that into creative nonfiction, how to use the facts to make something more while still preserving, and communicating, the truth. 

The bulk of that semester was spent researching a topic of our choosing, and turning that work into a piece of writing. Part of my research was another class I took that semester, an undergrad class in the astronomy department: Exoplanets and Astrobiology.

The class listed calculus as a prerequisite. I emailed the professor, explaining my situation—I'm in the MFA program, I want to write about this, I took calculus in high school but none of it stuck, I'll take the class pass/fail—and, in an act of generosity that still hits me hard, he not only let me take the class but also wrote me my own short-answer problem sets to do when the rest of the class was doing calculus. (That the professor is also a writer himself probably helped.) I spent winter break refreshing my math so I'd at least be able to understand what he was talking about in lectures. I remember those lectures better than anything I wrote for the research seminar.

Later that spring, I got a small travel grant to fly to California for SETIcon, the SETI Institute's now-I-believe-defunct public conference. I spent a weekend somewhere outside San Francisco sitting with science journalists I knew from Twitter and listening to panels about the search for signs of life beyond Earth and deep into Earth's past. It was magical. I never figured out how to write about it. But I held onto it.

Now I've been freelance for about eight months. I recently described my m.o. to someone as "just being obsessed with weird things and then writing about them." This one's been with me for the six years since that research seminar, or the 28 or so years since my dad first sat me down in front of an episode of Star Trek. The seven years since I got a pulsar map tattoo on my leg, or the six years since I showed Frank Drake, co-designer of the Voyager Golden Record, that tattoo at SETIcon. (Then, he booted up his cellphone and took a picture.)

I'm writing a series for Medium's member content section about all of this now—the search for life, not my obsession with it; it's not that meta—and the second essay went up today. It's about SETI and Drake and Contact, what it means when we "listen" for alien signals, and what the fact that we search for them means. When I needed a title for the piece, I read through Dar Williams lyrics and Carl Sagan quotes. I chose the latter: Something Incredible Waiting to Be Known. 

It's weird to have something gestate for six years and then turn into essays on the internet, is I guess what I'm thinking about right now. But it feels good to think about something for so long, for it to be worth those years of thinking about it.