A Rip in the Fabric of Interstellar Dreams

The road to Arecibo Observatory in northwestern Puerto Rico winds upward through farms and rainforest. Chickens run across the road. Then, suddenly, you reach the top: a fence, guards and gleaming white buildings and towers, as if you had stumbled into the lair of a James Bond supervillain.

Hanging in the sky like a skeletal flying saucer, suspended by cables from three mountaintop towers, is a giant triangular structure of girders. Five hundred vertiginous feet below, nestled in a sinkhole valley, is an aluminum dish 1,000 feet wide — an antenna to catch radio waves from the cosmos or to beam them out.

In early August, hearts sank throughout the universe when news surfaced that a falling cable had ripped a 100-foot-long gash in that antenna, temporarily putting it out of commission. For more than half a century, the Arecibo telescope has been one of the great icons of interstellar longing.

Built in 1963, it served as the flagship for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, the optimistic quest for radio signals from alien civilizations. In 1974, astronomers sent their own message out into the void, toward a cluster of stars known as Messier 13. (Travel time is 25,000 years, so we should not expect a reply for at least 50,000.)