There were several astrophysicists at the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy and Physics Department who I’ve met with to talk about SETI. All of them, to my knowledge, came and went over time.
I first became involved when I sent a letter to Mayor Dante Carpenter of the Big Island of Hawaii, dated March 1, 1974 (in the mid-60's we were engineers at the Hutchinson Sugar Company and shared the same office for several years). I had just returned from an American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in San Francisco, and listened to the presentation by Barney Oliver and Jack Billingham on Project Cyclops. They had proposed spending $5 billion (later expanded to $10 billion) over the next 15 years just to listen to the Universe. Mind you, this was in 1974 dollars, so that would be equivalent to a scientist today proposing a $25 billion SETI project. I wrote to Mayor Carpenter to meet with Jack Billingham, who was into snorkeling in Hawaii, for the Big Island surely had some worthwhile sites, both snorkeling and a possible location for Project Cyclops.
Like most things I have proposed over time, nothing happened. But, as reported earlier, I did join the Billingham group at the Ames Research Center two summers later to test out some of my ideas. Thus, it was in 1976 when I first advised NASA on my plan to cost-effectively detect an extrasolar planet using Townes’ laser light theory. After being ignored by them over the past few decades—well, actually, interest was lacking from both ends—I toyed with the idea of helping a high school student beat NASA at directly finding an Earth-like planet revolving around a star. I never found time to do this, but was partly daunted by a fear that the concept made no real sense.
But on the Big Island, detection potential was rapidly expanding. William Myron Keck was a self-educated oil worker who founded Superior Oil Company and became very, very rich through drilling and offshore exploits in the field. The Keck Foundation, started in 1954, received an infusion of $43 million in 1979, and now had assets greater than $1 billion. A sum of $144 million went to the California Institute of Technology and partners to build the Keck Telescope and Observatory on Mauna Kea. More than ten years ago I remember driving one of his sons, who I believe was also called Bill, with his new second or third, wife, through a whiteout, a true blizzard, to inspect Keck I. At 13,796 feet (4205 meters), and all that snow, I was convinced that this was not a place I again wanted to visit.
In 2001, the W.M. Keck Observatory and NASA jointly announced their “outrigger” project to link Keck I and Keck II with six 1.8 meter (6 foot) new telescopes to provide sufficient resolution to detect these planets. Unfortunately, this came at a time when Hawaiians and environmentalists were in a strengthened mode, and thought that enough was enough. There were already too many telescopes on the mountain. If my street smart geothermal staff got derailed when environmentalists were weak, there was not much hope for the astrophysicists.
Yet, in 2005, NASA officially selected Mauna Kea for the Outrigger Telescope Project because no alternate site matched the scientific capability of Mauna Kea. There was some passing mention of the Wekiu bug, found nowhere else in the world. This insect, actually, is interesting, as its blood has an anti-freeze like substance. Well, Mauna Kea Anaina Hou (People who Pray for the Mountain), a local organization, was watching, and pointed out that:
o Mauna Kea is sacred to Native Hawaiians.
o The summit is home to divine deities, the meeting place of Earth Mother and Sky Father, and the temple of the Supreme Being.
o The cinder cone where the outrigger telescopes were scheduled to be built is where Lilinoe, the wife of the deity for fishermen, Kukahau’ula, was buried.
o The Hawaii State Historic Preservation Division is planning to propose that the entire summit be listed in the National Register as a historic district/cultural landscape.
o There are eleven indigenous anthropods living there, with, of course, the Wekiu Bug, a candidate for listing as an endangered species.
o The highest lake in the country, Lake Waiau, is located in this area.
o Mauna Kea is part of Hawaii’s ceded lands trust that belongs to the Hawaiians.
o In 1998, the Hawaii State Auditor issued a report criticizing the management of their mountain.
NASA did offer $1.86 million towards Native Hawaiian causes. A sum of $15 million to $20 million was spent to prepare the documentation.
In June of 2006, NASA announced that they were pulling out of the Outrigger Project, saving $50 million. That same month, acceding to a Natural Resource Defense Council’s suit, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper issued a temporary restraining order barring the use of any sonar in the annual rim of the Pacific naval exercise (Rimpac) around Hawaii, involving 19,000 servicemen, 35 surface ships, six submarines, and 160 aircraft and amphibious forces of the navy and coast guard from the U.S., Australia, Canada, Chile, Peru, Japan, UK, and Korea, severely compromising their activities.
So, the thought from the intelligentsia then was that Hawaii might well have eliminated itself from playing significant roles in the romance of space, defending freedom and developing renewable energy, all because environmental and cultural factions prevailed over technological progress. The irony is that much of this effort involved the research of clean energy technologies and high tech jobs for tomorrow. Well, there, too, is the evidence of a pod of 200 melonhead whales frightened into Hanalei Bay, Kauai in the 2004 Rimpac. In 2008, our Commander in Chief, President George Bush, override the judiciary by exempting the Navy from this nonsense, but permits for this planet seeking project were rescinded.
But, still alive is The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT--conceptualization above), ten times more powerful than any other, to watch planets orbit distant stars. They never learn. After an intensive review of all the usual suspects, surprise, surprise...Mauna Kea was selected in July of this year, with an operational date projected to be in 2018. While Hubble is still operating, who knows, it might not get a reboost, and TMT is almost a decade in the future, so perhaps a high school science fair project might still be a worthwhile endeavor.
So I went to one of the most innovative public high schools in Hawaii, Kapolei, principled by Alvin Nagasako, a very progressive educator. My primary purpose was to gain a sense of where the field was for my chapter on education. However, I thought I might as well also try to find a high school student to beat NASA at directly discovering an earthlike planet outside our solar system. The teacher coordinating science courses, it turned out, had a son, who already had directly found an extrasolar planet. He used a masking technique and actually succeeded. So much for trying to interest him in something as prosaic as an optical coherent technique for what he had already accomplished. I nevertheless introduced this student to my contact at the Institute of Astronomy, and waited to help. Nothing happened. The student has since graduated from high school and the astrophysicist has left Hawaii. I think I’ve heard this song before.
Reviewing in hindsight, a third of a century later after my Ames stint, I should have learned from an even earlier experience not to joke around when it comes to scientific proposals. In the early ‘70’s I submitted one to tap magma for geothermal power by leading off with a B.C. cartoon on power from volcanoes…and got thrown out for irreverence. The combination of PAT from La Mancha was not smart.
Thus, the field still is mostly confined to measuring star wobbles and finding giant sized (meaning no chance for life) planets. Notwithstanding TPF, NASA’s main-line detection architectures seem not to be close to directly measuring an Earth size planet and determining its atmosphere.
Execution of the recommendations I provided in my three-decade old NASA report, “To See the Impossible Dream: the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer,” remains tantalizingly in the future. If this book ever gets published, perhaps I will be contacted by some high school student [PTakahas@Hotmail.Com]…or NASA.
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