WE ARE NOT ALONE

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil      India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732        1185      246         82

July       5       251    3572          535       421       173

             7       993    5504        1312       479       192

           12       380    4118          659       500       108

           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107

           19       412    4606          715       675         85

           22     1205    7128        1293     1120        572

           26       450    4307         556       715        114
Aug      1    1462     6429       1191       765        193
            3       467     4430         514       514        213

            5     1362     6292       1394       849        345

          10       534     4813         593     1013        198
          12     1504     6556       1242       835        130
          16       522     4525         582       961        162
          18     1358     6312        1365    1089        282
          21     1170     6062        1031      953        225
          22       974     5349          823      918        144
          23       430     4247          495      846          72

          24       510     4356          679      854        100

          25     1290     5856        1215    1066        149

Summary:  

1. Well, back to an old normal, which is terrible.
2. While the USA had a new cases total yesterday of 40,098, India's new cases rose to 66,873.

Looks like The Donald will soon be firing himself, as the DNC drew more viewers than the RNC on day one.  Streaming numbers were not available, but no doubt Trump must be orchestrating to do something spectacular on Thursday night to reverse this embarrassment.

I skipped the RNC  and last night happened to view an obscure 16-minute documentary entitled John was Trying to Contact Aliens, which was just released.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers somehow found it earlier and provided a rating, giving it a 100% score!  I saw this production before viewing this result because, as some of you know, in the 1970's I spent some time at NASA's Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  Clearly, John Shepherd was totally out of his element and, alone, in attempting to communicate with ETs.  He tried for 30 years and did not succeed, but neither did Carl Sagan or the SETI Institute.  Is this a failure of science?  No, they were searching for the truth, and laying groundwork for others.  Someday, who knows.

Then I remembered reading a whole issue (33 pages) on WE ARE NOT ALONE in National Geographic.  However, I can't seem to find a way to send you to a link where you could read that article yourself.  So, this will become my focus of today.

To set the background, a quick history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI):

• 1896:  Nikola Tesla suggested that an extreme version of his wireless electrical transmission could be used to contact intelligent life on Mars.

• Early 1900/s:  Guglielmo Marconi (right), Lord Kelvin and David Peck Todd also speculated on how radio could be used for communication, for Marconi thought he had picked up potential signals from Mars.

• All this was taken quite seriously in those days, and from August 21-23 in 1924:

• Mars entered an opposition closer to Earth than at any time in the century, not to be reached for another 80 years.
• Radio silence day was promoted where there was no transmission for five minutes on the hour for 36 hours.
• The U.S. Naval Observatory was linked to a dirigible tuned to a wavelength of 8-9 km to listen to and translate these possible Martian signals.  Well...nothing.  

• Around 1950, in a casual conversation on this subject with Edward Teller and others walking to lunch, Enrico Fermi just remarked, But where is everybody?  This became known as the Fermi Paradox.
• 1955:  John Kraus described a scan of the cosmos, and a parabolic reflector was built at Ohio State University, called the Big Ear. 

• 1959:  a paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison suggested use of the microwave spectrum  and initial targets.  This is the date SETI people use as Year One.  We are thus into Year 62, or looking at this from another grammatical viewpoint, the field is 61 years old.

• 1960:  Frank Drake (right of Morrison) of Cornell performed the first modern SETI experiment, named Project Ozma, after the Queen of Oz in that book which became Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film, from where came Judy Garland's Somewhere Over the Rainbow, selected as the Song of the Century.  He found nothing.

• 1962:  the Soviet Union considered SETI a Cold War item, and Iosif Shklovskii wrote Universe, Life, Intelligence.
• 1966:  Carl Sagan had joined Drake at Cornell, and co-authored with Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe.

• 1971:  Bernard Oliver and Jack Billingham led a summer faculty workshop at the NASA Ames Research Center on Project Cyclops, with a price tag of $10 billion ($63 billion today)  for an array of reflectors.

• 1976:  Project Orion at Ames, also led by Oliver and Billingham, to design a system to detect extraterrestrial signals.  I was part of this group and one of the few allowed to pursue other options.

• 1977:  Ohio States's Big Ear recorded that famous WOW! signal from Sagittarius.  This remains as the most prominent "maybe" in history!
• 1978:  Senator William Proxmire selected NASA's SETI program for one of his Golden Fleece Awards.

• 1980:  Carl Sagan and others founded the U.S. Planetary Society for SETI studies, and, while on the staff of Senator Spark Matsunaga (who in 1986 published the Mars Project), I helped Sagan reach a compromise with Senator Proxmire for him not to not stand in the way of congressional funding for SETI, which was subsequently secured in 1982.

In short, the pathway to future SETI interaction:

• Are we the only solar system in the Universe?  At the time of the 1976 Project Orion, the answer was, we don't know.  The group developed a standard micro-wave interferometry system, while, with Charles Townes, I suggested using direct observations using optical peaks of monochromatic light representing the lasing frequency of atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide and methane.  The advantage we offered was that, not only would we SEE the planet, but the wavelength would provide further evidence of possible life.  NASA set aside our concept because they only wanted to focus on microwave detection, and could not afford any optical frequency proposals.  Ohio State was deleted for a similar reason.  Mind you, microwave signals travel further in space, and in the distances contemplated, do make more sense.

• When extrasolar planets are confirmed, find those optimal for possible life.
• Detected life itself will almost surely only be microbiological, so a next step would be to determine how best to receive and translate alien signals (like in the movie Contact), that is, the small number that somehow involve with intelligence, something that already began with Drake in 1960 and the Allen Telescope Array in 2007.

• Next, how to optimize two-way communication.  If life is as close as Proxima Centauri, it would take 8.4 years for us to send a response, then receive their answer.  Most of the promising sites are a lot further.  Sagittarius, for example, is 25,640 light years away, meaning a two-way communication time period of 51,280 years.  You know how long that is?  50,000 years ago, early versions of us were hunting wooly mammoths.
• Then, actual space travel, like Star Trek.

So with that introduction, back to National Geographic:

• The first extrasolar planet was found just about 20 years after our Project Orion, when in 1995 51 Pegasi b was discovered.  As of this moment, 4031 have been confirmed, mostly by the Kepler Space Telescope, which ran out of energy in 2018.  They actually scanned only a limited patch of 150,000 stars.  There could be 400 billion stars just in our Milky Way Galaxy.   This means that there are 100 billion stars where life could have originated, just in our galaxy.   Of course, there are around 100 billion galaxies, so imagine the odds of no life in all of the Universe.  These exoplanets were found using transit (that lucky accident when the planet passes across the star, where you can then detect a diminution of light) and indirect methods like wobbles.

• Anyway, the first question has been answered.  Yes, there are other planets beyond our solar system.
• Next, at a cost of $200 million, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which was launched in 2018, and will observe an area 400 times larger than Kepler.  Also uses the rather crude transiting method.  There is a goal of 13,000 exoplanets in two years.  You might say, why bother with more detections when enough have already been found?  The answer is, if we know where the potential earth-like bodies are, we can focus on the most promising ones for possible life.

• You might also ask, why don't we do this from our planet?  The Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea does, but the atmosphere (only 40% as much as at sea level--so breathing can be a problem for some, like me) kind of gets in the way.  So a tricky optical trick has been devised, called SCExAO (you don't want to know what this stands for) to take the twinkle out of stars.

• On hold is the $1.5 billion Thirty-Meter Telescope also on Mauna Kea, which as many know, has been stopped by local Hawaiians.  Has to do with something, apparently, more important than science.

• But isn't the European Union already building their larger $1.5 billion 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope on top of the Cerro Armazones in Chile?  Now just known as the E-ELT, first light is planned for 2025.  It's become a national pride thing.  Plus, astronomers like being able to permanently live only an hour drive to the future observatory, as would occur in Hawaii.  You can imagine the trek up to the Atacama Desert.  All in all, now, there might not ever be a TMT, especially as there will be this larger one anyway, and the Space Telescope is getting closer to launch.

• Which is a good a time as any to bring up the James Webb Space Telescope, which is only 6.5 meters.  Originally planned for launch in 2007 for half a billion dollars, the date is now late next year for....$10 billion, and counting.  A lot of money, you say?  When the U.S. Congress is debating about spending a next help package of from $1 trillion (or 1000 billion dollars) to $3 trillion, these are mere crumbs.

• Infra-red telescopes are gaining credibility to actually see extraterrestrial life (anything from a forest with a sign to an advanced civilization able to capture energy from space).  Probably two decades away, the talk is about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared space observatory currently only pegged at $4 billion.  

• Next I toss in the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission, or Starshade, a space telescope that will use spectrographs to study planetary atmospheres using starlight.  When?  Oh, 2035.  Cost?  Only a billion dollars.

• Square Kilometre Array, an international (14 countries, but not U.S.) project to be build receivers in Australia and South Africa, headquartered at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in Chesire, England, for initial observations in 2027, to collect the signals from thousands of small antennas to simulate a single giant radio telescope to answer the range of questions in cosmology. Cost, perhaps $2 billion.

• The latest rumor is that NASA, which was prohibited to spend money on SETI from 1992, is getting back into the game.
• You got to give the field a lot of credit for continuously justifying its existence with romance for outer space in light of wars, pandemics and other societal spending priorities.

• On the non-Federal front, the SETI Institute continues.  They're involved with the Allen Telescope Array.  Jill Tarter retired in 2012, and Seth Shostak is still there.  Frank Drake, now 90 years old, is on the advisory board.

• The current active field is dominated by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner:
• Named for Yuri Gargarin.
• Early investor in Facebook and Twitter.
• Worth $4 billion.
• Has committed $200 million to the Breakthrough initiatives.
• Why?  He was born in 1961, when he says, SETI began.  Then again, if you look above in the timeline, nothing happened in 1961.  SETI began in 1959.  However, no one tell him that.  He might drop out.

• Breakthrough Listen
• $100 million over a decade, through the SETI Research Center at Cal Berkeley
• Use radio wave observatories to listen to one million nearby stars and the centers of 100 galaxies

• Breakthrough Message
• Study the ethics of sending messages into deep space.
• $1 million prize pool to design a digital message to be transmitted to an extraterrestrial civilization

• Breakthrough Watch
• Search for breakthrough biosignatures with the European Very Large Telescope in Chile
• Identify earth-size exoplanets within 20 light years from Earth

• Breakthrough Starshot
• $100 million, co-funded by Mark Zuckerberg, but the actual project will end up costing up to $10 billion
• Send a swarm of probes to Alpha Centauri  at 20% the speed of light (to get there in 20 years)
• Flyby of Proxima Centauri b, an earth-sized exoplanet

• Breakthrough Enceladus
• Partner with NASA
• Astrobiology space probe to explore for the possibility of life on Saturn's moon, Enceladus

The Blue Revolution needs a Yuri Milner.  Next, Calvin without Hobbes:

Finally, Pearl's sunbursts are still blooming:

My anthurium patch is doing well:

Oh my, Hurricane Laura is now up to 140 MPH as a Category 4, and appears to be taking a path almost exactly as Marcos, to make landfall at the Texas/Louisiana border in the vicinity of Beaumont and Lake Charles.  At least Houston and New Orleans will not be directly impacted:

Potential storm flooding:

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