A Life's Work

What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? Filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question. The subjects include Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute, who has been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1970s; David and Jared Milarch, co-founders of the Champion Tree Project, who clone old-growth trees to combat climate change; music archivist Robert Darden, who founded the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, an organization that preserves at-risk recordings from the black gospel music tradition; and Paolo Soleri, the architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet. We discover what inspired them to begin, what obstacles they face, what drives and sustains them, and how they measure success of an endeavor they will not live to see completed.