MY LIFE: Part 2a

 But first, some news of the day.

• President Donald Trump seems to be losing control on all fronts.  
• Yesterday, the House adopted an Iran War resolution (which therefore does not mean all that much) to rein in Trump.
• Congress and the courts have forced Trump to pull back the $1.8 billion fund to compensate his allies.
• The Epstein files continue to lurk.

• 
  The New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA finals, 105-95.
• Haven't said much about Major League Baseball, which is about 38% into the season, with almost four months left.  From Google AI, the top pitchers are:

Cristopher Sánchez (Phillies): Leads the majors with a microscopic ERA among qualified starters. He made national headlines by racking up an incredible scoreless-innings streak, showcasing devastating command with his changeup. [1, 2]

Jacob Misiorowski (Brewers): The "The Miz" has been utterly electric, leading all of baseball in total strikeouts and routinely lighting up the radar gun with the hardest-throwing velocity in MLB history. [1, 2]

Cam Schlittler (Yankees): Emerged as the undisputed ace of the Yankees' rotation, placing near the top in ERA, FIP, and Pitching Run Value while pounding the zone with elite fastball shapes. [1, 2, 3]

Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers): Continues his two-way dominance, combining a historically low ERA and WHIP while limiting opponents to one of the lowest batting averages against in the sport. [1, 2]

• Top hitters:  Yordan Alvarez of Houston and Ben Rice of the Yankees.  Fewer home runs this year, with Kyle Schwarber  of Philadelphia in the lead with 23.
• Top teams:

Atlanta Braves (42-20): Currently holding the best record in baseball and leading the NL East.

Los Angeles Dodgers (40-22) A perennial powerhouse, consistently hovering at the top of the NL West.

Milwaukee Brewers (37-22): Surging into the top three with an elite pitching staff, they comfortably lead the NL Central. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• My two head-to-head fantasy baseball teams are undefeated and leading their league of 10.  My two Roto teams are at #3 and #4, so not doing well.

If you keep track of these things, I changed my posting of two days ago from MY LIFE: Part 2, to Part 1b.  This is because Part 2, today, reports on my second 27-year period, and Part 3 will complete this series.  So on to my second 27-year period, which began when I started my career at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus in 1972.

• 
  I arrived as an assistant professor, and was assigned to teach Fortran IV programming.
• Never took the course, but I had come from LSU, where Paul Murrill and Cecil Smith were members of the chemical engineering faculty, and were already famous for their 1968 textbook on this subject.
• As I walked to the auditorium to meet with my 100 or so (class range from freshmen to graduate students) for my first attempt at teaching, I was still trying to decide whether to tell them I did not know the subject, or wing it as an "expert."

• 
  Chose to play professor, and when a question came up for which I did not know the answer, indicated in response that I did not want to confuse the class with that detail and to wait until I get to the subject.
• At the end of the course, streams of students came to my office to tell me what a great course this was.
• This never happened again, for all the other courses I taught were on topics where I was an expert.  

• 
  There is something important about this experience to make better teachers, but I never  was able to fine tune my lectures because the First Energy Crisis came in my second year of teaching, and I turned my focus into the research of renewable energy, was sent to work in the U.S. Senate for three years, and became an administrator.

• 
  In the mid-70s, I served as one of the reservoir engineers for the Hawaii Geothermal Project, and we succeeded in finding a site in Puna, where we drilled a hole:
• Went down to a depth of 6450 feet (more than a mile) and found a production site with a temperature of 676 F, the hottest geothermal well in the world.
• Built a 3 megawatt demonstration plant, and fed electricity into the Big Island grid from 1981 to 1989.
• I created a program to utilize the deep ocean fluids for various applications, sort of similar to what we were doing on the other side of island with deep ocean water at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii.

• 
  This success led to the development of Puna Geothermal Venture, now producing 38 MW of firm power, about 20% of the electric capacity of the Big Island.
• One important point about this option is that the electricity is baseload, available all the time, for both wind energy and solar power depend on the availability of winds and the sun. 
• 
  Soon after that First Energy Crisis of 1973, oil prices quadrupled from $3/barrel to $12/barrel.  There was a further leap to $34/barrel after the second Energy Crisis in 1979.
• This jump triggered inflation, shortages and rationing of gasoline.
• Created was the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, which became the premiere research organization for renewable energy in the Pacific.

• 
  In parallel with the above, I could still spend my summers doing whatever I wanted.
• In 1974, James Dator and I joined a group of faculty members from California to run a summer public education program sponsored by NASA entitled Earth 2020--Visions for Our Children's Children, the first part was my idea, while the theme was contributed by the wife of Hans Mark, then director of the NASA Ames Research Center, the sponsoring organization.

• 
  That experience led to my being invited in 1976 by that NASA Center to be part of a 20-professor team from across the nation on one of the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiatives, Project Orion, to detect an extrasolar planet (or exoplanet), that is, a planet revolving around another star, spearheaded by Barney Oliver and Jack Billingham. The first question asked of Cornell Professor Frank Drake was: “Extraterrestrial intelligence?  How do you know there are even other planets outside our solar system?” So the faculty group was tasked to design a system to accomplish this feat. Why me? Well, I had an idea on how to do this, plus I long harbored visions that the cure for cancer and the solution to world peace might be beaming unto Planet Earth from advanced civilizations.
• 
  Nobel Laureate Charles Townes had just come to the University of California at Berkeley, and had published a paper hinting that the potential for life on exoplanets could be determined by laser spiked starlight providing up to ten magnitudes of greater brilliance than the light that could be seen from telescopes.  

• 
  My contribution was to use a tunable laser as a key part of the system.
• Our report to NASA was called, To See the Impossible Dream:  the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (with an acronym of PAT), with a Man from La Mancha symbol on the cover, with a quote from Miguel de Cervantes:

                              To Man, the Don Quixote of the Universe,

                              May he succeed in his impossible dream.

• 
  However, the policy of NASA in those days, to today, was to only utilize the microwave portion of the spectrum to search for alien signals.  Ours was direct and optical. 
• Here is one of my postings from seven years ago providing more details of this effort.
• We could have detected a planet orbiting a star in two years, or in the 1970s.
• 
  Turned out that it was two decades years later, when extrasolar planet 51 Pegasi b was found by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, and they won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Now, 6,298 exoplanets have been discovered across 4,700 different solar systems in the Universe.

Something tells me that Part 2 will have several postings, for I went on to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work on laser fusion, the U.S. Senate, where I wrote the original legislation for hydrogen, my return to the University of Hawaii to help create the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, my 15-year period as director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and formative period for the Blue Revolution.

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I'M BACK...AND SO IS PEAK OIL

After thinking it over, I decided to continue into the Year 2020.  I've long wanted to live into this year of perfect vision.  Long meaning as far back as 45 years ago:

As an assistant professor of engineering, I then teamed with the resident futurist at the University of Hawaii, James Dator, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, on “Earth 2020: Visions for Our Children’s Children,” where in the summer of ‘74 we brought to Hawaii noted lecturers of national stature in topics related to Planet Earth, the environment and space, and weekly filled a two thousand seat auditorium. We also conducted a workshop for forty or so secondary and university faculty. 

Having been thusly enlightened with this course, many of them went on to become principals, a university president, a provost, and elected public officials. Professor Dator later gained fame as Secretary General, then President, of the World Futures Study Federation. Identical summer workshops were held at San Jose State University and San Diego State University, with the advanced planning final report prepared by faculty from all three workshops. There was also a lot of cross-fertilization with the leaders of Project Cyclops. The information and curricula we generated became the standard instructional tools for a large number of teachers in Hawaii and California in the growing field of environmental consciousness. Remember, this was more than a third of a century ago.

That quote came from Chapter 4 of Simple Solutions for Humanity, written a dozen years ago.  I went on in 1975 to spend the next summer at the Ames Research Center on a project related to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  

From my posting of 20 November 2013:

Jim and I are close colleagues and we first worked together nearly 40 years ago on a NASA educational project called "Earth 2020:  Visions for Our Children's Children."  I came up with Earth 2020 and the wife of the director the Ames Research Center contributed the theme.  Anyway, in 1974 I was a new Assistant Professor of Engineering on the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii, while Jim was already a respected Futurist and lead for this course.

That above article followed an interview I had with Henry Curtis, still Executive Director of Life of the Land, where Jim pounced on my attitude regarding Global Warming and Peak Oil, where he emphatically stated that both are real and serious, and that I was encouraging false hope by suggesting solutions.  You can read all the below by clicking on Curtis' Ililani posting on this subject.  He even used my photo from this masthead.  Specifically, my response to Jim's critique was:

I could provide counterpoints to much of Jim's concerns, for he must have uncharacteristically missed some of my purposeful shadings, but, we've (specifically, Jim 

and Pat) been going in tiny and large circles 

around these issues for decades, and, while he, 

and many other colleagues, too, seem to feel that 

our primary task should be to educate the public 

to better accommodate and appreciate these 

coming lifestyle paradigm shifts from almost 

certain doomsday of some sorts, the fact of the 

matter is that the USA has prevailed as the only 

supreme power on Planet Earth, and will continue 

to stumble along as #1 for the next century at 

least, while much of the populated world more 

and more will most probably suffer. While I'm 

not exactly holding my breath for any 

monumental breakthroughs to occur in my 

lifetime--perhaps our country can eventually get our 

act together, the equivalent of an Andromeda 

strain might wipe out 80% of of us, maybe fusion 

will actually work, or the Blue Revolution will serve 

to minimize the transition agony while we over 

time drop to a more sustainable world population of 

a billion or two. If smarter people than me, Sagan 

and Drake, for example, can fashion their dreams 

and lifetime careers on the possibility of useful 

incoming signals from extraterrestrials--as I too, by 

the way, dabbled in at NASA's Ames Research Center

--I would rate some of these above delirious transpirations as less fanciful. It's really unfair to call 

my efforts at finding solutions an exercise in 

spreading false hopes. At least I'm trying as best I 

can, And, yes, I remain hopeful.

This, further, is too cruel for me to even repeat, but...WHAT HAPPENED TO PEAK OIL?  Sure, that article is from Forbes, but the business-financial world is not always wrong.  Mind you, I continue to pontificate on the value of sustainability, but much in life has to do with timing, and humanity has been gifted by the ingenuity of technological advancements.  

Granted, all the while continuing to emit too much carbon dioxide, but the feared economic crunch hasn't happened yet.  However, the IEA last year reported in their World Energy Outlook that PEAK OIL IS HERE, and that there will be an OIL CRUNCH by 2023.  So here we will go again.  What's particularly scary about this warning is that the IEA has historically been pro-industry and anti-renewable energy.

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WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR INTO 2020

The end of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS FOR PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY will come in the Year 2020.  I've always wanted to live into that year because 42 years ago James Dator and I co-hosted a NASA program in Hawaii entitled:

     EARTH 2020:  Visions for Our Children's Children

Consider that it took me 21 years from birth to college graduation.  Now, go back to birth and another college graduation.  That's the time length of 42 years.

For the rest of this year I'll return to the roots of this blog site and mostly post on energy and the environment:

• A Grand Overview of Energy
• The State of World Energy Today
• Black Energy:  Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Fission

• Green Energy
• Biomass and Biofuels
• Geothermal
• Wind Energy
• Solar Energy
• Ocean Energy
• The Hydrogen Economy
• Fusion

• Global Climate Warming will be controlled with an effective Carbon Tax
• The Venus Syndrome
• The Blue Revolution
• Earth 2060:  A Grand Vision for Our Children's Children.

Think the Year 2060 is too far into the future?  That is only 42 years away, just where I was way back in 1976 for Earth 2020.  Just living until the Year 2020 was then a wishful dream.  Well, frighteningly enough, I'm almost there.

Mind you, on most Sundays I'll continue to explore the matter of Religion versus Science.  No  doubt Donald Trump will also deserve a posting or two.  I won't totally ignore high and low cuisine.  I will spend some time in the Orient, and, if things work out, a wine tour of Europe.

But 56 years ago my life with energy began as a biomass engineer in the Hawaiian sugar industry.  I know of no one else who has devoted a whole life to the full spectrum of renewable energy and sustainable environment, encompassing experience in academia, industry and government, writing the original legislation for hydrogen and ocean thermal energy conversion while with the U.S. Senate, and continuing to press forth with the Blue Revolution and the Hydrogen Economy.

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THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

Let us dream a bit.  Say clues on how to attain world peace, or control fusion or verify that there is no omnipresent God, and much more, are streaming in from outer space.  How can we intercept those signals?

Some might say, we already have that pipeline.  You can pray and gain the counsel of a Supreme Being.  We can debate this point forever, but for the purpose of this discussion, let us, for now, lay this option aside.

There could well be the fantasy of Isaac Asimov's (left) Encyclopedia Galactica beaming in.  Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Drake have also made reference to this ultimate source of knowledge accumulated by intelligent life through the 13,8 billion years of our Universe.  A narrow version of this information base was detected and deciphered by Jodi Foster, playing Jill Tarter, known as Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Ann Arroway, in the 1997 movie Contact.  

This effort is called the Search Exterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.  I provided a history in Chapter 4 of my SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity:

• 700 BC:  Aryabhata in India visualized heliocentricism
• 400 BC:  Metrodurus of Chio wrote, to suppose that Earth is the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to believe that in an entire filed sown with millet, only one grain will grow.
• 1600:  Monk Giordano Bruno (right) was burned at the stake for suggesting that there might be an infinite number of suns with inhabited planets.
• 1728:  Alexander Pope surmised in his Essay to Man that there are aliens.
• 1834:  Alexander Copland published The Existence of Other Worlds:  Peopled with Living and Intelligent Beings. You can purchase this book from Amazon for, I think, 524 pounds.
• In the early 1900's Marconi (yes, that Marconi) that unusual radio signals were coming from Mars, while Einstein thought that light rays might be more controllable as a method of extraterrestrial communication.

Then from 1959 came a series of advancements from Cornell University:

• Frank Drake initiated Project Ozma to search Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani and used the Green Bank observatory in West Virginia.

• In parallel (apparently these were unrelated projects), Philip Morrison (left) and Gioseppe Cocconi (right) wrote about searching for extraterrestrial radio waves.

• Four years junior to Drake, Carl Sagan had in 1968 moved from Harvard to Cornell, of all the things, because Harvard denied him tenure for self-promoting scientific advocacy.  While a graduate student at the University Chicago he wrote a paper on the origin of life with Nobel Laureate Harold Urey, who, a decade later sent a letter to Harvard recommending against tenure for Sagan.   Geez, I wonder what happened there.  Sagan, of course, became the voice and face of space. 

In 1964 the Soviet Union initiated Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (also the title of a 2011 book), taking the effort from detection to responding.  This started rather embarrassingly, for they actually thought quasars were sending them info.  Later, recovering from this misstep, in 1974, in the heat of the Cold War, the USSR Academy of Sciences endorsed the effort, worried about the Americans gaining a Cold War advantage.

1974 was also the year of Earth 2020:  Visions for Our Children's Children, a public education program funded by NASA's Ames Research Center.  James Dator, who led this effort on the Manoa Campus went on to become president of World Futures Study Federation, while continuing to teach political science at the University of Hawaii, and still does.  I was a co-leader and retired more than 15 years ago.  Anyway, I was given an opportunity to get together with John Billingham (who worked at Ames) and Bernard Oliver (an executive at nearby Hewlett-Packard), who in 1972 had co-authored a $10 billion proposal through Project Cyclops to pick up TV and radio signals from neighboring stars.  Jack was the really nice PR guy, while Barney was all brains and intensity.   Photos of both in later life, Jack to the left:

In 1976 I was invited by Jack and Barney (I knew them well by then) to join 19 university faculty to spend the summer at Ames, located nearby the Stanford Campus.  The question then was:  Are we the only solar system in the Universe?  So, in Project Orion, we were assigned the task to design an instrument that could detect the first extrasolar planet.  Most of the professors combined their efforts for an interferometric device, but a few others were allowed to do whatever they pleased.  Charles Townes (left) and I came up with PAT (Planetary Abstracting Telescope).  Read about my 1976 adventure by clicking on PAT.

To comprehend the immensity of the concept, consider that:

• One astronomical unit, the AU, is 93 million miles, the distance of Earth to the Sun.
• One light year is the distance light travels in one year, and just under 6 trillion miles, or about 63,226 AUs.
• Our closest neighbor is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years away, where, if Voyager 1 traveling at 38,610 is heading that way, should get there in around the year 70,000 AD.

So nothing much happened until 1981 when Carl Sagan, who I had met at Ames, came by the U.S. Senate, and I helped arrange for him to meet with Senator William Proxmire.  This interaction led to the first SETI funding from Congress.  Read the details.  The SETI Institute was formed in 1984  Two decades after that first fateful Senate meeting, Congress killed SETI.  Again, read the details.  The SETI Institute moved on with private funding.  They do have 50 researchers, and their largest project is the Allen Telescope Array (right), mostly funded by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, who has contributed more than $30 million.  Suffering from bumps and bruises, the ATA has not detected anything.

More recently, Russian billionaire, Yuri Milner, long ago a theoretical physicist, pledged at least $100 million over the next decade to ramp up efforts to detect extraterrestrial life.  To be called Breakthrough Listen, how's this for optimism, as the aim is communication rather than search, for upcoming:  $1 million to anyone who can create a message to return the call.    That's Stephen Hawking with Milner at the announcement.  Government seems unwilling to take this step, so we now have a society beholden to the very rich, or royalty, same as Europe eons ago and China way before that.

Interestingly enough, when Supervolcano Toba (of course, from Indonesia) exploded 70,000 years ago, so much ash was emitted into the atmosphere that our Sun was dimmed for 6 years, with the speculating that humanity dropped to a population of 40 breeding pairs.  That was controversial, of course, but did you know that:  add up the weight of all the large animals that ever walked the earth (dinosaurs species, elephants, cattle, etc.), there has been 100 times more human biomass than any other form, and our population is growing.  

The problem is that these numbers keep changing.  Consider ants. My lanai is a good example, revealing  that there are more ants than us:  probably a million trillion of them.  They outnumber us 143 million to one.  However, an ant is about a millionth the weight of a human, so we are very close having the same total biomass.  So that might make termites, larger and 27 times more prevalent than ants round the globe, the animal with the most weight.  But this goes back to species:  4000 for termites and 12,000 kinds of ants.  Thus, we humans are only made up of Homo sapiens, so we do dominate as a specie.  Mind you, there are a thousand times more plant biomass than animal (yes, an ant is an animal, as are all insects).  Finally, more bacterial biomass than plants and animals combined.  Yet, there might be a billion types of bacteria, so humans still dominate.

Wait a minute, what has all that got to do with SETI?  Ants appeared on our planet a hundred million years before most dinosaurs.  Bacteria first developed almost 3 billion years ago.  Neither one has gained any significant intelligence.  It took an evolutionary path to get to the present Homo sapiens level of intelligence.  Planet Earth is only a little more than 4.5 billion years old.  There could well be alien civilizations more than 9 billion years older than us.  It is a bit disconcerting that an entity so much older and probably wiser has not yet found us.  But that absence could well be the bottom line to the fate of SETI.  Perhaps the Universe is too large and intelligent life so rare that any advanced community is doomed to evolve in isolation.  SETI hopes to disprove this type of negative thinking.

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Hurricane Hilda has suddenly because a monster, at 135 MPH, and is expected to follow the path of Guillermo...hopefully:

The problem is conflicting computer models:

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