As Natalie Batalha searches for life outside our solar system, the celebrated astrophysicist and her colleagues often gather around the whiteboard in her UC Santa Cruz office. It’s reminiscent of the cinematic chalkboards used by genius scientists in movies like “Oppenheimer,” filled with symbols and equations representing breakthroughs in physics and the understanding of the universe — even of life itself. Batalha’s whiteboard is filled with jottings, notes for a proposal to observe several