MY LIFE: Part 3a

But I'll start with the New York Knicks.  According to the New York Times, the Knicks gave their city something new, IMPOSSIBLE JOY. 

It is different because New York’s mass unifying events tend to imply unbearable tragedy: 9/11, Sandy, Covid.

Their best player, Jalen Brunson, was small (for basketball), underestimated (by his last team), conditioned (by his father, a former Knick) to know that winning here would mean more than winning anywhere else.

This place has cheated bankruptcy, built (and rebuilt) towers, raised Jay-Z and J. Lo and J-Seinfeld. It has been told to drop dead and refused. It has elected a billionaire and a socialist and a Bill de Blasio. It has processed Donald Trump as a 20-something curiosity, a chattering pooh-bah, a steak salesman, a defendant and a president whose attendance in Game 3 had Knicks maniacs of all political persuasions wondering about an executive curse.

Then from Sports Illustrated:

Some of the greatest athletes in sports history have worn New York uniforms. Names like Namath, Messier and Jeter. Taylor, Frazier and Rivera. Now, Brunson. Only three players—Bob Pettit, Michael Jordan and Giannis Antetokounmpo—had scored 45 points or more in a Finals closeout game. Brunson made it four. He kept New York in it in the first half, scoring 16 of the Knicks’ 37 points. He had 14 points in the third quarter. He had 15 in the fourth. San Antonio threw everything at Brunson. Size, length, athleticism. Nothing worked. “Unreal,” said Mitchell Robinson. “Literally, unreal.”

The World Cup continues today with four games:

Ah, the frustration about the Iran War.  The memorandum of understanding to talk about possible peace was to be signed today, but Israel went ahead and bombed Beirut.  Yet, there might still be a virtual (meaning electronically) signing today.  

However, the UFC Freedom 250 fight card at the White House is a definite GO.

• Begins at 8PM EDT.
• Seven matches.  Click on this for details.
• Unfortunately, you most likely won't be able to watch it, for it will only be streamed on Paramount+.  Why?  Read this.
• I live at 15 Craigside, and our building provides free subscription to this channel.  Will I watch it?  Maybe.  Or maybe not.  Why?  Knowledgeable fans have indicated that the card is underwhelming.  
• 
  Who will attend?
• 4,300 seats, with 1,200 reserved for active-duty military members.
• Celebrities include Tom Brady, Adam Sandler, The Rock Johnson, Jason Statham, Guy Ritchie and Jered Leto.

• 
  Will they have an 80-candle birthday cake for President Trump?
• Here is one Happy 80th Birthday tribute.
• Trump himself shared on his Truth Social account a one-minute clip leading to his 80th birthday.
• I read that the weather will be threatening, with possible lightning.

The story of My Life began on 31May2026 after I realized that, after the age of 5, my life could be represented by three periods of 27 years:  education, work and retirement.

• The average person spends the first 25 years as a baby and going to school, the next 40 years working and the final phase in retirement, generally only lasting for a decade or so.

• 
  I've been incredibly lucky, for, when I was born in 1940, my life expectancy was 61.4 years.  I'm soon to be 86, so that is nearly a quarter century after my supposed demise.  The life expectancy of a person born today depends on where you are born and gender.
• Japan 85.1 years, but 88.2 if female and 82.1 male.
• Globally, 71.2 years for males and 76.4 years for females.
• Born in Africa, 61.5 years for males and 65.5 years for females.  
• Another way of looking at this is that the U.S. life expectancies in 1940 were similar to what is so for Africa today.
• Chad and Lesotho on this continent have the lowest life expectancy at 53.
• 
  Japan does not have the highest life expectancy today:
• Monaco, around 88.
• San Marino, close to 86.
• Hong Kong, 85.8.
• According to this source, the USA has a life expectancy of 77.4 years, the 49th highest in the world.

• 
  So thus far:
• Part 1a:  Took me from the age of 5 to 18, when I went away to college.
• Part 1b:  Began with my first job, with the Hawaiian sugar industry, but I count as an educational experience, because it built character, then graduate school leading to a PhD in Biochemical Engineering, completing my educational phase.

• 
  Part 2a:  My early life in the College of Engineering, where I taught and conducted research.  The First Energy Crisis arrived shifting my interest into renewable energy, and I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

• 
  Part 2b:  Further teaching, then my experience at the Lawrence Livermore National Experience on Laser Fusion, followed by three years working for Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC, creation of the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, establishment of national centers at the Hawaii Natural Institute in Hydrogen, Seabed Minerals and Marine Bioproducts.  Much of this led to development of the Blue Revolution.

So today, Part 3 of My Life, my retirement period, now in year 27.  Let's see now, if I live a fourth 27-year period, that will bring me up to 108, a not impossible, but highly improbable prospect.  But who knows, maybe there will be final post-retirement posting in 27 years.

To begin retirement, the year is 1999, I had been working at the University of Hawaii for 27 years.  I was 59 years old.  Why would I retire?  I was in good health, loved my job, and the administration and my staff wanted me to continue on.

• 
  My wife and I decided that this was a good time to try something else, and retirement was that best option.
• We were somewhat worried about our coming financial status with no job, but it turned out not to be a problem.

• 
  We had paid off the mortgage for our two-floor penthouse at 2101 Craigside, and had no serious bills.
• Life went well, to us, better than our work years.
• Took a few trips.
• She spent time with her friends on handicrafts.  
• 
  I initially joined two golf courses as a member.  One in particular, the Koolau Golf Club, had a reputation as the HARDEST golf course in the world.
• I usually played by myself here.
• Walked, carrying my bag and clubs.
• Golfers were mostly financially secure, so used the most expensive golf balls.
• I remember taking a friend from Japan and his father out.  They each lost ten balls....on the first hole.
• I lost a lot too, but carried a shopping bag with me and knew where others lost balls.  Found so many that I had a large waste bin with maybe a thousand balls.
• 
  I took another colleague from Japan, who headed the Kansai fishermen's group that got $2 billion from the Japanese government to allow build two runways into Osaka Bay.  
• He got a hole in one.
• Put me on their board with a monthly stipend, which went on for a decade.
• In other words, life was grand.

• 
  The University of Hawaii allowed me to maintain an office after retirement.  27 years, and I'm still there on the Manoa Campus.  Did not do much for the first few years, even though I was provided a pretty good monthly stipend to counsel other faculty members.  No one came in to see me, so I did not do much except mostly lunch and beer in my room.  Here is a video of my office on campus.

• 
  I remember, in particular, a journey I took in 2005 or so. 

I embarked on an $18,000 (just expenses) trip in October and November of 2005 to Reunion Island, located in the Indian Ocean, then going on to Paris, Oslo, Bergen and London. The expense was high because there were some paid upgraded segments. This was certainly in the top 10 of worst and best trips, showing enormous promise for future interaction (see The Free Hydrogen Age and the Blue Revolution in Book 1). Mauritius was a late add-on, and a pleasant one.  They are my hope for the Blue Revolution.

• 
  Fully paid by a source I don't today remember.
• Went to Le Reunion to give a keynote address at an energy conference.
• Don't want to go back there again.
• When I arrived, I was warned about their mosquitos and Chikungunya.
• Terrible virus, for people get debilitated and die.
• Today there is an outbreak with 47,500 cases.
• Mosquitos in town, but not at elevation.
• Read this posting for details.

• 
  In day 3 of the conference, attendees were told to meet at 8AM to go on an overnight trip.
• Told to bring a gallon water.
• People had hiking boots.  I wore slippers.
• We were to hike through a jungle to a solar energy site, and stay overnight.
• Mosquitos were prevalent, and they gave each of us some spray to minimize bites.
• Also provided a loaf of French bread with some cheese, which would be all we'd consume for the trip.
• I feigned a heavy cough and talked them into sending me to a fabulous French hotel at top of their only mountain to avoid the town mosquitos.  They agreed.
• Great food and no mosquitos.  Stayed up there for three more days, and they sent someone to pick me up and take me back because I was an important guest.
• 
  On the final day I gave my lecture.
• A group from Mauritius was there, and they liked my Blue Revolution concept, something that had some potential for them.
• They asked if I could come to their island for a few days to provide advice and give the same talk.

• 
  While Le Reunion is a mess (drugs, crime, mosquitos), Mauritius is heaven.  I have had plans to return, for they sent a group once to Honolulu to talk about the Blue Revolution, and someday I will go back.
• Read this posting about my experience in Mauritius.
• To continue:

The flight from Mauritius to Paris was, courtesy of Arjoon Suddhoo, in First Class, and wonderful. However, I soon noted that virtually every notable location we flew over started with an M: Mauritius, Madagascar, Mombasa, Mogadishu, Misratah, Mediterranean Sea (and several other seas, which, when you approach Italy, become Mer, for Sea), between Marseille and Monaco, at which point I began to get worried. I still had that M Curse in my mind. Clearly, this was a clue that the plane would be hijacked and flown to Munich, or, more probably, Moscow. However, as we approached Paris, riots were still going on, and the city was, indeed, burning. The civil unrest was worrisome, so I immediately transferred planes at Charles De Gaulle for Oslo.

• 
  From Oslo, I went to Bergen for a special summit involving Chile, Norway, Japan the the USA, where we created the Bergen Declaration for Next Generation Fisheries.
• Then on to London.

There have been other experiences in third chapter of my life in episodes to come.

-

Part 2: EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY

My series on evolution began last Sunday with THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION.  But before I get into Humanity, some speculations on the future of the Iran War:  I asked Google AI:

• 
  How long do you think the Iran War will last?
• Not much of a response:  The duration of the war will largely depend on the success of these targeted strikes, Iran's ability to resist, and the willingness of all sides to seek.
• Repeated what has been mentioned in the past:
• President Donald Trump expects the war to last 4 to 5 weeks.
• Israel thinks this will go on for months.
• Iran wants a slow, protracted war of attrition.
• In other words, who really knows how long the Iran War will last.
• 
  The weekend price of WTI crude oil is $99.30/barrel and Brent crude at $103.89/barrel.  Google AI:  what do you think the price of oil will be early this coming week and into the future?

• Bullish Pressure: Continued military activity near Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz is keeping supply restricted.
• Price Targets:
  • Brent: Expected to trend toward $106+ if disruptions persist.
  • WTI: Likely to test the $100 level again as traders re-enter long positions.
• Risk Factors: High volatility is expected at the Monday open; some analysts suggest a "higher-end scenario" where prices could test $120–$150 if the conflict escalates further this month. 

• 
  Now in the third week of the war, there appears to be no significant well-organized Iranian sleeper cell activity in the USA, so the primary inconvenience now has to do with the world economy, affected by the price of petroleum.  The stoppage of oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz is at the heart of this problem.  When will oil tankers safely pass through?
• President Trump, after insulting our allies with his tariffs and other nonsense is now demanding countries to assist with ship escorts in the Strait.
• Yes, all their economies are hurting, so they no doubt will come.  But they are doing so with some reluctance, and countries like France, the UK, Japan, South Korea and China are now only considering sending ships.  My guess is that they will, but it will take a week for a Japanese war ship to get to the Strait.
• Thus, nothing much will happen at least till the end of the March, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright.  That is more than 2 weeks away.
• 
  
  
• Finally, my posting yesterday was just a prediction:  THE USA WILL INVADE KHARG ISLAND.
• How likely is this happen?  Well, In a 1988 interview, Trump indicated that if Iran tries to make us looking like a bunch of fools, I would go and and take Kharg Island.
• Here is Time magazine's view on this matter.

Now, on to my posting of this Sunday.  As in the evolution of the universe, the creation and rise of humanity has a biblical story and a scientific one.  First, the Google AI version of traditional religion:

• Special Creation (Genesis): The Book of Genesis, shared by Jews and Christians, tells that God created the world in six days. On the sixth day, God formed man (Adam) from the "dust of the ground" and breathed life into him. Eve was later formed from Adam's rib to be his companion.

• Cyclic Creation: Hinduism does not have one single creation story. It typically teaches that the universe is cyclically created, destroyed, and recreated over vast periods (kalpas).  Interestingly enough, evolution is involved, from turtle to boar to a man-lion to human forms.
• Buddhism: Buddhism does not rely on a creator deity, and therefore, it does not hold a central religious story about the creation of humanity. It tends to focus on the interconnectedness of all life and the continuous cycle of life and death (samsara).

The Biblical version is that God created the universe roughly 6000 years ago.  First, light on Day 1; the sky and dividing waters on Day 2; land and vegetation on Day 3; sun, moon and stars on Day 4; sea creatures and birds on Day 5; land animals and Humanity on Day 6; then he rested on Day 7.  Sort of like me.  I exercise from Monday through Saturday, and do nothing physical on Sunday.

To begin the scientific discussion, Google AI's version of how the universe was created is a scientific marvel of creativity and science:

• Began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang.  No sense of what was there before time zero.
• Note that this was not an explosion, as such.
• Rather, there came an expansion of space itself.
• The process created time, matter and energy.
• Yes, not much more evidence than God saying, Let there be light.
• As cooling began to occur, some energy was transformed into protons and neutrons, eventually forming hydrogen and helium.

• 
  In 1929, Edwin Hubble observed that galaxies were moving away from Planet Earth, suggesting that they all started from a single starting point.
• Gravity then drew these molecules to form stars and galaxies.
• Our Milky Way Galaxy began to form around 13 billion year ago, less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe.
• Around 11 billion years ago, our Milky Way was struck by another galaxy.
• Our Sun formed around 4.6 billion years ago, and our solar system began to develop shortly after.
• Earth came 4.54 billion years ago, with liquid water only 200 million years later.

• 
  Evidence suggests that life first appeared at least 3.7 billion years ago, with some speculations indicating perhaps as long 4.28 billion years ago.  These were self-replicating molecules.
• The earliest life might have been biotic life in Canadian hydrothermal vents or Western Australia zircons.  These ancestors are known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA.
• Clearer evidence traces to stromatolite fossils in Greenland graphite 3.7 billion years ago and Australia stromatolite fossils 3.5 billion years ago.
• The Great Oxygenation Event was triggered by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria 2.4 billion years ago.
• 
  Abiogenesis is the precise mechanism of how life first formed, that crucial transition from simple organic chemistry to self-replicating complex molecular systems.
• Many scientist believe that life was created when phosphate groups, ribose sugar and nitrogenous bases randomly linked to form nucleotides, which then linked to form self-replicating RNA strands.

• 
  Where?  Probably at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
• Similarly, the terrestrial option would be at volcanic hot springs or geysers, where wet-dry cycles could build complex molecules.

• 
  Another possibility was in the atmosphere.  In 1952 the Miller-Urey experiment passed electrical sparks (or the equivalent of lightning) in a container of methane, ammonia and water vapor (early Earth atmosphere), and formed amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
• Recent (2026) abiogenesis experiments have made significant breakthroughs by demonstrating microlightning in water drops to create amino acids.  Other researchers successfully linked amino acids to RNA.  Watch this video.
• 
  Panspermia, or extraterrestrial seeding.
• Comets or meteorites could have delivered complex molecules to Earth.
• Then, of course, there are some who subscribe to the extraterrestrial, or flying saucer, option.  
• This line of reasoning is generally derided by the scientific community.

• 
  Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in the 5th century BC, suggested so.
• Svante Arrhenium (of Greenhouse Gas fame) first coined the term, panspermia.
• Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, suggested that life was deliberately seeded on Earth by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.  Just a thought.  No evidence.
• 
  Ronald Bracewell (1921-2007), Lewis Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, dabbled in this field.
• From 1959 to 1961, when I was a student there, he constructed a 32-dish radio telescope west of the main Stanford campus in 1961.
• Then, when I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center in the mid-1970s on a topic dealing with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, he was a guest speaker who suggested panspermia.  I had longer follow-up discussions with him on this topic in subsequent years.
• Anyway, there is much we don't know about  how life originally began.  It will be some time into the future when scientists will actually develop a mechanism to create and nurture life.
• There is a consensus that the first life form was bacteria, emerging 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.  Soon came archaea.  The three domains of life are these two and eukaryota.

• 
  We are eukaryotes, appearing anywhere from 1.6 to 2.3 billion years ago.
• The first animal appeared in the ocean as long as 800 million years ago.
• Invertebrates first transitioned to land around 500 million years ago, and first vertebrates at least 370 years ago, with dinosaurs coming in the Triassic Period, as long as 245 million years ago.
• 75% of animal life died off 66 million years when an asteroid crashed into our planet and caused a global mass extinction.
• 
  The "easy" part of science is tracing evolution from 6 to 9 million years ago, when we began to spin off from chimpanzees and bonobos, initiating a phase of early hominids, for paleoanthropologists have found skeletal remains to speculate how this occurred.

• Homo sapiens, us, finally prevailed:

Tools were used maybe 2 million years ago, and fire at least a million years ago.  So from 10,000 years ago, we developed farming, cities, came the pyramids of Egypt, Athenian Democracy, Jesus Christ, Industrial Revolution, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the end of the Cold War and what we are today in 2026.

So here is the total evolution chart from bacteria to humans.

Or like this:

The future?  To come.

-