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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CHAPTER 4: SEEKING THE LIGHT—SETI (Part 2)

The following continues the serialization of Chapter 4 on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) from SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity:

SETI in the 70’s

In 1971, Bernard Oliver of Hewlett-Packard and John Billingham of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center (ARC) conducted a summer workshop, and the group picked 1.42 GHz, the spectral line caused by interstellar hydrogen, and 1.66 GHz, caused by hydroxyl ions, called the “Water Hole,” as the ideal portion of space to conduct the search. For one, water symbolized life, and two, that band was relatively quiet. There is now that transitional link, for Book 1 featured a chapter reporting on hydrogen. Maybe there is something about hydrogen that goes beyond mere future sustainable utility.

In 1972, Oliver and Billingham authored a NASA study proposing an array of one thousand 100-meter telescopic dishes to pick up television and radio signals from neighboring stars. Project Cyclops was projected to cost $10 billion (which is $50 billion in 2009 dollars), but was never seriously considered. At this point in history, the U.S. Congress was not aware, or cared, that NASA was doing SETI work.

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.

Having thus been exposed to the SETI field, in 1976 I joined 19 other university faculty members from across the nation at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, on Project Orion, to detect an extrasolar planet (or exoplanet, used interchangeably), that is, a planet revolving around another star, spearheaded, of course, by Oliver and 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.

Originally, in the mid 1800’s, stars were classified by hotness (Class I for white and blue, down to Class IV for red and Class V). Early in the 1900’s, the Harvard classification was adopted, ranking stars by luminosity—O, B, A, F, G, K, and M—Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.

F and G type suns seem best suited for planets. Our Sun is in the latter category, and the guess is that there is a 7% chance for a solar system, while the former is 1.3 to 1.5 solar masses, with a 10% chance of planets. Planets do not form in binary star systems, and have a higher probability of creation in galactic arms where heavy elements are located. There is a 20-30% chance towards the external portion of a galaxy, where we are located.

How does a planet form? Well, more and more, astronomers are seeing disks surrounding stars. Very simply, the dust agglomerates into planets. Thus, first find a planet, any planet. Then, find planets where life is possible. These sites should be:

o older than 3 billion years;

o with a star smaller than 1.5 times our Sun mass;

o having a stable location between galaxy spiral arms; and

o in a solar system which is singular, that is, without a binary star.

While most of the team went on to design an interferometric system to indirectly do the job, a few of us were allowed to pursue other directions. Indirect means to measure something else. That is, as you can’t see that extrasolar planet, the starlight being so intense relative to the reflection from the planet, measure the orbit wobble of the star, with the pattern mathematically being fitted for possible planets. Direct means somehow block out the starlight and see that extrasolar planet, or, better yet, actually measure and track something, anything, from the planet itself. I was the only one to take this latter option, for I like to see what I’m doing, and the optical spectrum was my choice.

That same previously mentioned (in Chapter 2) Charles Townes, who had won the Nobel Prize for the laser, and who will later be mentioned in Chapter 10 for being awarded the 2005 Templeton Prize (generally given to a noted scientist who has religious predilections), happened to just arrive at the University of California Berkeley from the Massachusetts Institute Technology in 1976, and had published a paper speculating that planetary atmospheres lased (that is, flashed a well-defined color like in a typical laser, representing the gaseous molecule undergoing this phenomenon).

As an aside, there is something karmic coupling the afterlife with SETI, as Science Digest, in its October 1985 issue on “The 20 Greatest Unanswered Questions of Science,” featured on its front cover, English-born and Princeton professor Freeman Dyson, the 2002 Templeton Prize awardee. Dyson was asked the question, “Are We Alone in the Universe?” He responded, “engaging in mathematical calculations on the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is not a worthwhile exercise. The universe may be crawling with life. The answer is: Wait and see.” Dyson had previously worked on a different Orion Project, but that was around 1960, and it had to do with using nuclear pulse propulsion for space-flight.

Anyway, returning to the discussion, a Jupiter-size planet cannot be seen revolving around a typical Sun-size star tens of light years away because the starlight is so much brighter by 5 to 10 orders of magnitude (meaning 10 to that power, or in the inverse, the light from an extrasolar planet is from 1/100,000 to 1/10,000,000,000, or one ten billionth that of the star). However, if the planetary atmosphere lased, then these spiked discrete frequencies, first, might well be detectable because you would know exactly which monochromatic colors to check (the lasing frequency of those gases that would be found in planetary atmospheres), thus, also, this would accordingly give the atmospheric composition. Conversely, if no lasing is detected, then that planet has no atmosphere, and can summarily be deleted from future consideration regarding the potential for harboring life. My PhD dissertation experience, which included building a tunable laser before you could purchase one, provided this spark of imagination. I went to see Professor Townes, and he graciously provided encouragement.

My final report to NASA was called “To See the Impossible Dream: the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (note the acronym, PAT),” with a Man from La Mancha symbol on the cover. I of course quoted Miguel de Cervantes:

To Man, the Don Quixote of the universe

May he succeed in his impossible dream.

At first I thought David Black, the NASA coordinator, reacted to my paper as being some kind of joke, but I now understand that optical searches were not company policy. That is, as it makes a lot more technical sense to measure the microwave spectrum for actual alien signals, NASA seemed wedded to focusing only on that particular technology, even for detecting extrasolar planets. Why microwave? These signals can travel further in space (less degradation) than optical ones.

Anyway, Black surmised that the Hubble Telescope would be soon to fly and find such exoplanets. Hubble was actually deployed 14 years later, and only in 2008 (32 years later) detected a planet orbiting a star. This telescope was serviced one final time later in 2009 for operation until 2013, when the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be launched. Without an orbit reboost, the Hubble could plunge to Earth sometime soon after 2019. In any case, the prevailing convention then, as now, was to explore and receive the microwave band, so anything resembling optical searches did not meet the accepted requirements.

Either way, there is a timing concern, as, more and more, new commercial communications satellites will cloud the radio spectrum, especially in the range of the most promising detection channels. Thus, SETI will soon need to move into outer space if the focus is to continue traditional interferometry measurement techniques on Earth.

Two final bits about the ‘70’s, in 1975, the U.S. Congress published “The Possibility of Intelligent Life Elsewhere in the Universe.” In 1978, Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) selected NASA’s SETI program for one of his famous Golden Fleece Awards. The following year found me in Washington, D.C. as U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga’s Special Assistant on Energy. Little did I know that while helping to solve our second energy crisis, one of my more interesting tasks would be related to SETI.

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At one point today, the Dow Jones Industrials dipped more than 100 points. However, the DJI ended down only 17 at 10,434, while world markets were also mostly lower. Gold continued to set world records, jumping $9/toz to $1169. Crude oil is now around $77/barrel.

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Tropical Typhoon Nida, at 115 MPH, was at first heading in the general direction of Guam, located 200 miles away, but now looks to move towards southern Japan, perhaps in a week. There is a tropical depression now affecting Mindanao (southern Philippine island). Tropical Cyclone Bongani, at 40 MPH, is moving west, just north of Madagascar.

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TRANSITIONS: Part 10--Lawrence Livermore and Ames Research Center

At the University of Hawaii, which is similar to most universities, faculty members of departments only get paid for nine months, with this sum divided by twelve for your salary.  You can be satisfied with this amount, or, as is more probable, you scramble to try to get some type of paying job for two to three months.  While this opportunity to do whatever you want is one of the benefits of the position, the economic reality generally drives you to optimize your opportunities.

My 1976 position at NASA's Ames Research Laboratory was earned in 1974 when the resident futurist at the University of Hawaii, James Dator (right), and I were selected to run a summer workshop funded by NASA for mostly high school faculty.  Similar workshops were held at San Jose State University and San Diego State University.  

A group of faculty met to plan for the program, and I suggested a title:  Earth 2020.  The sub-title, "Visions for our Children's Children," came from the wife of the Director of the Ames Research Center, Hans Mark (left, who went on to become President of the University of Texas).  This leadership team from the three universities was not only paid, but we were provided an attractive mandate to save planet earth, and were able to use a competitive process to select the very best teachers, some who later became legislators, university administrators and a president of a local university.  With the generous NASA funds, we then found the top ecological scholars of the those days to come to each university to give a public lecture at each city and work with the teachers to prepare curricula.  We were able to attend national and global conferences to personally contact them.  Among the lecturers were Garrett Hardin (right, Tragedy of the Commons), Tom McCall (Governor of Oregon) and people with similar credentials.  The Neil Blaisdell Concert Hall experienced capacity crowds for these talks in the Summer of '76.

That effort linked me with the Ames leadership, primarily Jack Billingham (right) and Barney Oliver (of Hewlett-Packard), who previously led "The Next Billion Years," preparing a grand plan to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence with Project Cyclops.  I was thus chosen to participate in a faculty summer workshop on The Orion Project at the Ames Research Center.  In many ways, we were challenged to do what the film Contact did twenty years later in 1997.  That film clip (click on it!!!) still gives me goose bumps.

1800 planets have now been found, but this was 1976, and the key question was:  Are we the only solar system in the Universe?  The first exoplanet was not confirmed until a dozen years later.  Thus, 25 engineering and science professors were tasked to design an instrument to detect an extrasolar planet using interferometry in the microwave.  A couple of us were given the chance to do something else more creative, so I devised a technique to directly measure this distant planet using a the optical spectrum, while measuring the atmospheric composition.

Over the years I've had perhaps a dozen postings on this subject, and in every one I've excoriated NASA for picking the wrong technique.  Someday, some high school student (this graphic to the right is merely a bunch of visualizations by middle school students) will use my principles and detect an Earth-sized planet around a star capable of supporting life.  Oh, my technique is also a lot cheaper.  What especially  galls me is that the next couple of billion dollars plus efforts of NASA will continue to knock their heads with indirect wobble and chancy transit schemes to find what we already know.  Almost forty years ago I proposed a direct method to also provide the atmospheric composition of extrasolar planets.

On 20July1976, when Viking I sent the first photo of Mars back to Earth, we were in the Ames theater with Carl Sagan to be the first to view, line by line, this potentially monumental shot.  What we initially saw...

...and to quote from Chapter 4 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity:

Who knows, maybe fuzzy Green Ladies could have shown up. I still remember Sagan pontificating as to why the color of Mars had a salmon-tinge, and commented so in fine scientific detail…except, well into his elocution, a technician sheepishly commented, “Dr. Sagan, we haven’t yet applied the correction filters.” That’s the only time I saw Sagan visibly embarrassed. It turned out that the addition of the filters did not change the salmon hue.

Five years later, when I was working the U.S. Senate, Sagan came to the U.S. Senate to seek funding for SETI.  Unfortunately, Senator William Proxmire had in 1979 given this NASA program a Golden Fleece Award.  So I arranged for Senator Matsunaga to meet with Proxmire, which worked, for he agreed not to stand in the way of the first budget for this effort.

Well, SETI funding came to an abrupt end in 1994, and private funds thereafter supported the SETI Institute:

So was this effort wasted?  Well, I still think it's a lot more sensible to spend hundreds of millions on SETI studies than tens of billions on various space hardware.  The numbers are overwhelming that alien life must exist somewhere up there, and the benefit of seeking signals for what could be the solution for peace or the Encyclopedia Galactica is worth a justifiable sum.  I see no value today in sending Man to Mars, or even back to the Moon.  The Cold War is over.  NASA is essentially obsolete, but the science must continue.

My assignments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNR) derived from my PhD dissertation on tunable lasers.  My expertise was sufficient for LLNR to hire me for two summers.  Basically, the lab was transitioning away from magnetic confinement (which is the principle driving ITER in France today) to inertial confinement, or laser fusion.  

The incident I most remember had to do with an innocuous lecture on what I don't remember being  held next to another meeting chaired by Edward Teller on nuclear warheads.  I had Q-clearance, which allowed me some liberties, but many gatherings at Livermore required a higher clearance.  The checking process was lax, and I mistakenly entered the wrong room which was darkened, so the only thing you really saw was Teller doing all the talking.  Just a few minutes into this, it occurred to me that I did not belong.  So, do I carefully walk out, explaining my error, or do I hang around until the end and hope there is no exit check.  I had no idea what Teller was talking about anyway.  Turns out that people just walked out at the end.

Otherwise, I most remember Watergate on TV, the fact that I lived next to Wente Brothers, attending a concert by Patti Page, picking Bing Cherries, golfing at a temperature of 113 F and forays into San Francisco.  I also determined that the laser for laser fusion was not even close to being known, so felt that this energy option was beyond my lifetime.  More than a third of century later, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore did extract more energy than was absorbed the fuel:

But if net positive means that the energy output divided by energy input is more than 1.0, this success cited above only resulted in a gain of 0.0077.  Anyway, as disappointing as laser fusion has been, While NIF only cost $3.5 billion, that other option, ITER...

will run past $20 billion and won't even attempt deuterium-tritium fusion until 2027.

So did I waste my time with SETI and laser fusion?  I asked myself a long time ago, what were the most promising future technological pathways for society.  While my involvement might have been premature,  I still believe SETI and laser fusion, or STARPOWER, were areas where my education and interest were best suited to make a contribution for Planet Earth and Humanity.

Next, after returning to the University of Hawaii after these summer experiences, my next transition is to the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C., where I helped pass the original legislation on wind power, ocean thermal energy conversion and hydrogen.

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Hey, it's not hurricane season yet, but Amanda is in the East Pacific at 75 MPH, and will strengthen into a Category 3.  Yikes.  That's an ominous development so early.

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