A BETTER WAY TO SEARCH FOR EXTRASOLAR PLANETS

Forty three years ago I used a tunable dye laser to catalyze/sterilize E. coli for my PhD Dissertation.  Three years later I worked for the NASA Ames Research Center on a project to design instruments to detect extrasolar planets.

Unfortunately, they had only a microwave interferometer in mind and passed on a concept I had advanced with Charles Townes (left, with his maser, and  right, my tunable laser) of the University of California at Berkeley to use the optical spectrum to not only find planets around other starts, but, as importantly, determine the atmospheric composition.  I again bring this subject up because last week Charles Townes passed away, and, coincidentally, a University of Hawaii researcher reported the day following that he had found three earth-like planets.  You will better understand my exasperation about this field after I provide some details.

This will be one of my more arcane and scientific postings ever, but I feel compelled to first point out that NASA astrophysicists and their kind are realistic about funding and their mission.  They feel uncomfortable and avoid any relationship with the looney tunes associated with flying saucers.  Similarly, their budgets are tiny, and the notion of trillion dollar Man on Mars efforts are beyond the pale.  Thus, while Carl Sagan's CONTACT (this is the entire 4 hr 39 minute audio book read by Jodie Foster) might be supportable, anything like Instellar and Star Wars are equally unrealistic, for while, yes, there are possible wormholes and so forth, the energy and technology required are beyond comprehension.

In some ways I was there at the beginning of the search for extrasolar planets (let me just called this SFEP) in the early 1970's.  Of course the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began earlier in 1959 with the paper by Philip Morrison (right) and Giuseppe Cocconi, suggesting the microwave spectrum where signals might well be coming in from advanced civilians.  Cornell's Frank Drake actually performed Project Ozma (from Wizard of Oz--the field tends to get fanciful) in 1960 using a radio telescope in West Virginia to examine Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, selecting 1.420 gigahertz as the frequency of opportunity, known as the water  hole, near where the hydrogen and hydroxyl  radicals have spectral lines (hint:  hydrogen plus hydroxyl equal water).  Of course he failed, but that is an entirely different pathway to actually doing something real.

Drake's (left) contention in those days was that it will be difficult to convince anyone to spend any money on SETI if our solar system had the only planets in the Universe.  So we needed to find a planet, call it an exoplanet or extrasolar planet, orbiting around any star somewhere in outer space.  Thus, NASA brought to the Ames Research Center in the Summer of 1976 20 faculty members from across the nation to design that first instrument to find that potential exoplanet.

For the reason that this group was headed by Jack Billingham and Barney Oliver (above in later life), who had previously run Project Cyclops, our team was commanded to design a microwave interferometer, which I didn't think was the ideal "telescope" for this particular application.  So they allowed me to find another option.  It was a grand summer of living in a Stanford married student apartment across the street from my freshman dormitory, golfing at the Palo Alto Muni, taking a wine-tasting course at night, watching the 1976 Olympics emanating from Montreal and, by the way, traipsing around northern California collecting info and talking to experts about an innovative way to find the first extrasolar planet.

I had just read a Science article by Charles Townes that planetary atmospheres lased.  He was already a hero of mine for he had won a Nobel Prize in 1964 and with his brother in law, Arthur Schawlow, who had come to Stanford University when I was junior there, had invented the laser, the instrument I used to conduct my PhD research.  So off I drove to Berkeley to meet with Professor Townes, who concurred with me that it might be possible to track the specific wavelengths of lasing extrasolar planets--we should be able to track planets circling stars at various discrete frequencies dependent on the atmospheric composition--thus also determining the life quality potential.  He said he would work with me on this project.  This a photo of Townes (above on the left) and Schawlow latter in life.  Alas, NASA ignored all our proposals, with a statement that the Hubble Telescope would soon fly to accomplish this task.

However, it took another 14 years for the Hubble to attain orbit in 1990 and the first confirmation of an extrasolar planet did not come until 1992.  But what confounds me is that NASA took a brute force technic called transit.  There are various ways to do this, some a lot more elegant.  All the Hubble did was watch stars that changed light intensity because a planet was reducing the light on passage across the star.  That's it.  The good news is that it has probably three more years of life yet.  While you keep seeing a tab of $1.5 billion, $10 billion is closer to the truth as the money spent on Hubble.

Even worse, in my mind, is that the replacement, the Kepler Telescope, only costing $600 million, which became operational in 2009, also used transit, a clearly obsolete technique.  Kepler lost its second gear in May of 2013, but some ingenious effort by scientists from the Ames Research Center has allowed the spacecraft to function for a short while longer.   I hate to say even worse, but the next telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, said to be a 2017 launch, will also use transit, but at least will only cost of $200 million.  Feel free to multiply that figure by any number from two to ten.  

But, ah, then, the biggie in 2018, the $8.9 billion (no, make that $10 billion+, for expenses reached $8.8 billion two years ago) James Webb Space Telescope with also a special spectrometer that should be able to analyze planetary atmospheres.  You know, this sounds suspiciously like the Townes-Takahashi Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer.  But ah, no, because the Webb will only be able to do this for Jupiter-sized planets.  Then why bother???  And that cost was estimated in 2011.

The progress of SFEP:

Have you been counting the dollars?  Don't think NASA has been sleeping, for there are on drawing boards WFIRST, SALSO, OpTIIX and more.  Read the article.  These are mere billion dollar projects, but the James Webb only had a cost of $2.6 billion in 2009 and has jumped to past $10 billion today.  Hubble?  Original cost, $400 million.  Today? $10 billion.

Thus far, from zero in 1976 to zero in 1991 to perhaps 2000 exoplanet confirmations today, there must be ten times that number in the process being identified.  But NASA missed the point.  Frank Drake just wanted one to justify funding for SETI.  Sure, we need be more certain about where to look in the future for Earth-sized potential, but some reasonable logic can be used to argue that there must be intelligent life out there, many far more sophisticated than ours, having had a several billion year head start.

Above are the types of stars being explored.  While we are small compared to the really large ones, our Sun is, actually, brighter than 95% of all the stars.  Those M-types, the smallest, less than half our mass, make up 75% of all the stars up there.

So, to summarize, there are 100 octillion stars in our Universe, that's one followed by 29 zeros, and, perhaps 1 with 24 zeros planets. Something wrong with the logic here, for that means only one planet per 10,000 stars, but these come from two points of view.  Anyway, that's a whole lot of space, so let us for now limit our search just to our Milky Way Galaxy--remember, light takes 100,000 years just to cross from one end to the other--where one estimate is that we have about ten trillion planets.  Could Earth have been the only planet to gain intelligent life?

Which leads me to the article mentioned in the first paragraph about UH astronomer Andrew Howard, quoted to have discovered:

Three Earth-size planets — one possibly with liquid water on its surface — have been found around a distant star with help from the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea.

What great astrophysics right?  Well, the science used to suggest water was an observance that one of these three is 1.5 the size of Earth, and occupies the so-called "Goldilocks Zone," where water could exist.  Did they detect water?  Nope, the star, EPIC 201, is 150 light years away.  This means that if there is life there, and we make contact, each call will involve a 300 year + wait.  Three hundred years ago was 1715.  George Washington, our first president, was not born until 1732,  The transit technique of course only provides the rough size and location of an extrasolar planet, not the atmosphere.  But the jaded would remark, so what, Planet Earth did it already.

The odds are overwhelming that gazillions of exoplanets have the potential for life-supporting ecosystems.  And many of them could be at least 8 billion years older than us.  Let's get on with capturing extraterrestrial intelligence messages.  Simple step one:  remove the congressional language preventing NASA from doing any SETI work.  Simple step two:  give a billion dollars a year each to NASA and the SETI Institute to re-initiate the effort suggested in CONTACT.

In a decade--after expending $20 billion, less than what has thus far been consumed with current-transit-connected telescopic attempts--review the reality of SETI.  If the weight of science leans in the direction of the Fermi Paradox or the Proxmire Golden Fleece Award, than abandon the effort for another century or millennium.  While the visions of an Encyclopedia Galactica streaming past Planet Earth to provide magical solutions for our needs are enticing, it is possible that we are the only semi-intelligent life in our Universe.

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ON HEAVEN, THE DEATH OF MUSIC, AIR NUTS AND MORE

This is a watershed week for Planet Earth and Humanity.  I will finally, this week, report on the solution to death.  Mind you, I haven't written it yet, and have little clue at this point as to any kind of simple solution.  Two weeks ago I touched on Heaven as a prelude.  Today, a few updates on recent postings:

Yesterday, I identified the three first party songs of all-time (you can read it at the end of this article).  At the extreme other end of the happiness spectrum, it was today, in 1957, that "The night music died."  On a flight from Fargo, ND to Moorehead, Minnesota, a plane carrying Charles Holly, Jiles Richardson and Richard Valenzuela crashed.  Gone were 22-year old Buddy Holly, 28-year old Big Bopper and 17-year old Ritchie Valens.  Valens already had three hits:  La Bamba, Donna (tribute to his high school sweetheart) and Come on Let's Go, and he wrote the latter two.  Holly had a lot more hits, including That'll Be the Day, Peggy Sue and Maybe Baby, all which  he wrote.  The Big Bopper is known for Chantilly Lace, a song he wrote.

• The perpetrator of the Air Nuts scandel, Cho Hyun-ah, could well today be sentenced to three years in jail.  There is something about South Korea.  They nail people at the top.  It was two decades ago that I had dinner with former president, Chun Doo-hwan, and a few weeks later he was sentenced to death.  He was later pardoned.

• About those "disturbing" NCAA allegations condemning the University of Hawaii basketball team I reported on two days ago.  Here is a more recent newspaper quote:  The most flagrant: Assistant coach Brandyn Akana providing former star forward Isaac Fotu with an iPad,  NCAA schools across the country must be convulsed with disbelief and giggles.  If that is THE WORST example of cheating, there must be copious tears of laughter emanating from those school that find a legal way to provide cars, payments to families and other more flagrant examples of allowable crimes tolerated by the NCAA.  School districts around the country are doing everything possible to provide an iPad to every student.  Boy, are their athletes in trouble!!!  Yes, it was supremely dumb for Coach Akana to not find a safer way to allow Fotu to pass his courses.  But Akana probably was not aware that you can't give any athlete any technological edge to compete in the classroom.  I find this all so amazing.  Something horrible has become of what is right and sensible.

While I continue to work on my death/Heaven revelation, tomorrow I will provide an update on #3, SETI.  But before the week is over, my ultimate posting on death and Heaven.

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THE FIRST PARTY SONGS IN AMERICA

Let's begin Monday with Wooly Booly and  Louie Louie.  Why?  First, it's Monday, but second, these are my picks as the  two first indulgent party songs, ever, with The Charleston.  Mind you, your party song depends on when you went to college, or whatever, but there probably was an original some time in the past that started this all.  We are not talking about tea parties and one-year old birthday celebrations.  Associated with party songs is the voluminous imbibition of ethanol, fun, release of inhibitions and the like.

I scanned through popular American songs of the 1600's into the early 1900's and could not find anything particularly meritorious.  Beer Barrel Polka came from Europe, and in 1927.  How many of you realize that while the lyrics for  our National Anthem was written by Francis Scott Key, the music is an old English drinking song:  The Anacreon Song.  So  how sensible that we show patriotism with a drinking song.  Somehow, though, the Star-Spangled Banner does not quite evoke the right spirits.

One tally had That's Amore, Come Fly With Me and Jailhouse Rock as the best party songs of the 50's.  Those are not party songs, and Elvis, Bill Haley and Chuck Berry just did not have that killer entry.  Goldbass had Glenn Miller's Elmer's Tune as #1 in the 40's.  Huh?  Couldn't find a party list for the 30's, but DigitilDreamDoor had Miller's In the Mood, Kate Smith's God Bless America (the original movie version, with Ronald Reagan--and has now become the 7th inning song of choice) and Judy Garland's Over the Rainbow (America's #1 song) as tops in the 30's.  No great party song there, although In the Mood is worthy, especially this enhanced HD version.  But The Charleston dominated in the 20's and is right up there with the two above.

So to recap:

• The Charleston, named after the city of Charleston, was created in 1923 from the Broadway show Running Wild, and this was the dance craze of the middle twenties, still performed today.  It was all black at the beginning.  Nobody really danced to WB and LL, you just got drunk and passed out, which is what many great parties are about.  Most forget that Prohibition (total ban on alcoholic beverages) began in 1920 and was not repealed until 1933, so there couldn't have been too many wild parties during that decade.  That's Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston in Paris

• Louie Louie was written by Richard Berry in 1955, and I remember the version by Berry and The Pharaohs in my late 50's Stanford parties.  The Kingsmen released the more popular version in 1963, possibly gaining notoriety because the FBI actually conducted an investigation into alleged pornography.  They were an all-white garage band from Portland, Oregon, and began gaining fame in 1962 in their neighborhood through this song.  They took a chance by being provided one take on their recording for $36, where embarrassing mistakes were obvious, and singer Jack Ely (second from left below) was wearing braces, slurring the words into a microphone hanging from the ceiling.  Ely's baffling attempt was one reason the FBI intruded.  Everything went wrong, but that is what some of you still hear on the radio.  They never really got any royalties until they won a lawsuit in 1998 and over time has had 23 different members.  Original Mike Mitchell (second from right) still leads the group, now 54 years old.

• Wooly Booly (note the two girls just standing like palm trees) was released by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs in 1965 and named Billboard's #1 song that year.  These Pharaohs were not the same as the group with Richard Berry.  Wooly Booly was the name of Sam's cat.  There is a Tex-Mex flavor from the beginning, and, as in Louie Louie, the lyrics are hard to understand, resulting in radio station bans across the country, which only insured for their lifetime popularity.  All three original takes went well.  'Li'l Red Riding Hood was another top hit for the group.  Best as I can tell, they're still touring.

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THE RISE OF RAINBOW ATHLETICS

Here were my title choices:

• THE HORRID STATE OF RAINBOW ATHLETICS
• THE RISE OF RAINBOW ATHLETICS

The first option was current and true.  We are now at such a distressing and disturbing nadir, that it can only get better.  Well, not true, but hopefully so.  But my whole life has been built on overcoming one in a million hurdles, and my greatest achievements have come when all looked hopeless.

So why not, too, the University of Hawaii, an organization I joined in 1972, and 43 years later still maintain a full office on the Manoa Campus?  When you are at these depths, the timing is optimal to make a miracle recovery.  All it will take is one spark, equivalent to the Big Bang.

But let's start with University of Hawaii basketball.  Yesterday they got hit with seven severe infractions.  Frankly, the media and everyone are making this announcement as the equivalent of Ebola.  It's not that bad and  we have already fired the coaches, lost our best senior who went European-pro and best freshman recruit transferred.  Even the athletic director resigned.  An incredible plus is that the temporary coach and ragtag team are doing okay.  Yes, there will be a sanction or two, like losing a couple more players, and recruiting will be impossible for the next few years.  But the whole effort to gain nationwide excellence will take a decade anyway, and today is when this should all begin.

Football?  Not unlike the Titanic.  Not the film, but the original ship itself.   Two years ago we almost went winless, losing the first eleven games, and, maybe because I actually went to the final game against Army, my first in a decade, we won, 49-42.  This coming fall, we start with away games at Ohio State (only the #1 team in the nation) and Wisconsin.  How scheduling dumb is that?

It was  a little more than 60 years ago when the University of Hawaii football team edged the Honolulu high school all stars.  Then, in came the University of Nebraska, as a tune up for its upcoming Orange Bowl game.  Score?  50-0. Ah, Hawaii lost.  The following year, 1955, Hawaii traveled to Nebraska.  Game time temperatures went up to 95 F, with a 26 MPH wind.  Twenty-two players suited up for the game, eight went both ways and played every minute.  Charley Araki (below photo, second from the left, with Walter Nozoe, also one of my golfing friends, third from the left, who graduated in 1954), someone I golf with, was one of them.  They lost both their quarterbacks from injuries.  Final score?  6-0, Hawaii won, and outgained Nebraska 318 yards to 219 yards.  Said Hawaii Coach Hank Vasconcellos: 

There’s no question that Nebraska is superior. We won through courage and sheer guts. 

Here are a few of them today:

So how do we begin this resurrection?  One way not to do it is begin a traditional search for another athletic director, which is exactly what they are now doing.  Again, how dumb can you get?  Here is the only strategy that should work:

• Arrangements can surely be made for President David Lassner to spend a night on Lanai, and intermediates should be able to arrange a dinner with Larry Ellison, who owns the island and much on it.
• At some ideal moment, Lassner asks Ellison:  You know a lot of people, can you recommend someone who we might recruit as our next athletic director?
• Don't ask for a penny.  Pay for the dinner if possible.
• Come home.

Pick that person as AD and who knows what could happen.  If not for Phil Knight, the University of Oregon would just be another university, same for T. Boone Pickens and Oklahoma State.  On the Forbes billionaire list:

• T. Boone Pickens, dropped off the list and was last listed at a worth of $950,000.
• #35  Phil Knight, $22 billion.
• #3  Larry Ellison, $52 billion.

Speaking of non-smartness, there is the Professional Golfers Association.  They have been bought out by major economic forces.  At one time there was that wonderful Phoenix Open, with stands cheering and jeering just like at a football game.  Now it is known as the Waste Management Phoenix Open, which concludes today.  Secondly, these tournamenents are restricted.  Call it the Phoenix WM.  Love those talking trash cans, but the name has got to change.  Beginning this coming week, the Farmers Insurance Open.  Go back to San Diego Torrey Pines something, and they will double the view.

Remember the Bob Hope Classic?  That was last week:  The Humana Challenge, associated with the Clinton Foundation.  Okay, I appreciate that Hope is long dead and the five-day event is now four and long gone from Doral, plus Bill Clinton is famous.  But The Masters is still called The Masters.  The Open Championship at St. Andrews this year is still The Open Championship.  Incidentally, all golf courses should add cheering/jeering sections, with cheerleaders. Well, then, again, maybe not.

Good sunset last night, with an almost green flash:

I also have a fabulous and functional basil bowl, and you can't really appreciate how large the leaves are, but the second photo indicates 4 inches...and some are longer:

Over the past two weeks I've picked off at least 20 leaves, and you really can't tell if anything has been harvested.

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