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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HOW MANY PLANETS ARE THERE IN THE UNIVERSE?

Nearly forty years ago, I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center to work on the search for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system).  To quote from one of my Huffington Post articles more than six years ago:

In Chapter 4 of Simple Solutions for Humanity, I relate my experiences in this field, starting with Project Cyclops, and also Orion, a short stint I had at NASA's Ames Research Center. The question then was, are the planets in our solar system the only ones in the universe? I interacted then with Barney Oliver, Jack Billingham and Carl Sagan, and actually proposed a project to detect earth-sized planets. The concept rested on the principle that for life to occur, there needs to be an atmosphere, and starlight (sunlight) causes population inversion (a condition which induces lasing), meaning that spikes of monochromatic light can be detected, both proving that a planet exists and providing the gas composition. I took cues from Charles Townes, who had just moved from MIT to Cal-Berkeley and wrote on this subject in Science. NASA tossed my proposal aside and remarked that the Hubble Telescope would soon fly and will then accomplish this task. Well, earth-sized extrasolar planets are beyond the capability of Hubble.

So four decades later, where are we with respect to extrasolar planets (same as exoplanets)?  

• Scientists have now found 2001 planets in 1267 star systems.
• However, the Hubble (that's astronomer Edwin Hubble) Telescope finally was able to detect one almost a quarter century after I left NASA.  The first truly reliable observation came two decades after my proposal, although there is some growing support for the very first coming in 1988, an effort that did not use any Hubble data.

• The Kepler (Johannes Kepler to the right) Space Observatory, launched around the time I published that HuffPo mentioned above, has found more than half of these planets.  However, the method used depends on planets diminishing the brilliance of the star during transit, so the concept is incredibly crude and works only because there are so many stars out there.
• As starlight can be billions of times more brilliant than planetlight, only supermassive planets (larger than Jupiter) can be detected with current direct measurement techniques.
• There is an assortment of techniques, but the transiting method of Kepler and the indirect analysis coming from star wobbles (that is, if a planet is revolving around a star, the shift in position of the star is mathematically modeled to predict that there must be a planet or two or more involved) are most favored.

Is space exploration a waste of money compared to our need for global climate change remediation, migrant support, war, education and so on?  Well, here are two analyses:

GDP in 2004	Percent spent on space
USA	11.8 trillion	0.14%
Europe	11.7 trillion	0.03% (not inc. individual agencies)
Japan	3.7 trillion	0.05%
China	7.3 trillion	0.02%
Russia	1.4 trillion	0.06%
India	3.3 trillion	0.03%

It's also interesting to work out how much is spent per person:

	Population	Space spending per person in 2005
USA	0.3 billion	$54
Europe	0.6 billion	$5.80 (not inc. indiv agencies)
Japan	0.1 billion	$18
China	1.3 billion	92c
Russia	0.1 billion	$9
India	1.1 billion	82c

In any progressive society, some small sum should be set aside for activities supporting art, basic science and a range of exploratory endeavors.  Looking at the larger picture, the world spends one-hundredth of 5 percent, or 0.05%, of the global domestic product on space exploration.  However, this includes Mars-related expenditures, which, to me, are grossly unnecessary, for there is no reason at this time to go to the Red Planet.  A millennium from now, or later, maybe, but not now.  Worse, in the USA, Congress about a quarter century ago passed some legislation that PROHIBITS the expenditure of the Federal budget on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which was somewhat relaxed in 2003.  

In any case, while I continue to harbor a sour grapes attitude that NASA ignored my proposal to track extrasolar planet orbits utilizing the simple fact that planetary atmospheres emanate very fine wavelengths (that is, they lase) representing the gaseous composition--which would have accomplished this task sooner and cheaper, plus with the knowledge of the atmospheric composition--times have changed, for now know there are exoplanets, so the focus should shift to actually SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE.  

Until only around two decades ago, we thought there were only nine (and actually 8, for Pluto is now a plotoid) planets.  Now that we know, by extrapolation, there are probably a septillion or quadrillion (they both can be used for 10 to the 24th power) planets in our Universe, let us proceed towards something like what Carl Sagan and Jodie Foster produced in CONTACT:

Are the clues for eternal peace, fusion power and the Encyclopedia Galactica streaming in from civilizations billions of year ahead of us?

As it remains useful to pinpoint planets ideal for potential intelligent life, for "listening" would thus be more efficient, we have an opportunity to learn about the state-of-the-science through a public presentation:

At 7:30PM on Wednesday, 2 December 2015 at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus Art Auditorium, you can interact with four of the top scholars in exoplanets:

• Andrew Howard:  Institute for Astonomy, University of Hawaii
• Nader Haghighipour:  Instute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
• Paul Kalas:  Adjunct Professor of Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley
• Josh Winn:  Associate Professor of Physics, MIT

All the above is free if you come by bus or avoid parking on campus, for you will then be charged $6.

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KEPLER HAS DIED: BUT IT WAS NEVER NECESSARY ANYWAY

I have worked for NASA, and specifically at the Ames Research Center, on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).  In the 1970's one telling question was why bother with SETI when science had not yet confirmed even one planet outside our solar system.  So in 1976 NASA created Project Orion and brought together 19 faculty members from throughout the Nation to devise methods for detecting extrasolar planets.  Most the group worked together to design an interferometric system to indirectly find extrasolar planets.  I was given an opportunity to develop a direct method, called the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (or PAT).  Click here for the full details.  I have thus followed this effort now for nearly 40 years.

I have been critical of the NASA extrasolar planetary search:

  1.  First, yes, sour grapes, but NASA ignored my proposal, deciding that the microwave band (wavelength from one mm to one meter--between infrared and radio waves) was the means by which aliens would communicate with us, and irrationally eliminated efforts at optical (visible spectrum, 390 to 700 nanometers, or violet to red) search frequencies:

for finding extrasolar planets.  They are unrelated.  Let me here editorialize that the choice of only measuring star wobbles or lucking out at seeing a diminution of light if a planet passes across a star (the Kepler method) was incredibly elementary.  The technique I advocated, through the guidance of  1974 Nobel Laureate Charles Townes (left), was a lot more sophisticated, based on planetary atmospheres lasing, resulting in discrete frequency peaks which could be detected and tracked in spite of the starlight.  Also, these frequencies would determine the atmospheric composition.  I had recently obtained a PhD, with my dissertation focused on tunable lasers, so I was well-programmed to explore this field.  I remain confounded that both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) continue to base their searches on wobbles and transits.

  2.  In 2006, the ESA sent COROT (above) into space to search for extrasolar planets.  It succeeded.  Thus, I wondered why three years later the USA had to spend so much money on another spacecraft to do the same thing.  True, COROT suffered a computer failure late last year, but it was at the end of it's lifespan anyway.

  3.   In the early 70's, the extrasolar planet total was maybe one, perhaps something around Barnard's Star. Peter van de Kamp kept analyzing wobbles since 1938 for a quarter century, but, embarrassingly, was proven wrong, and key in this investigation was George Gatewood, who was an advisor for Project Orion.  Today, however, let us declare victory, for astroscience has found almost a thousand extrasolar planets. Kepler (right), though, has reported alone discovering 2700 extrasolar planets, so something is awry here.  These findings were used by the Center for Astrophysics to determine that there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets just in our own Milky Way.  Then, there are at least 100 billion galaxies, so there no doubt there are a lot of Earths in the Goldilocks Zone in our Universe.  But is there any extraterrestrial life?

  4.  Oh yes, I did not quite say, yet, but Kepler,   NASA's extrasolar planet seeking spacecraft, is crippled, and probaly will die.  Technically, two of four reaction wheels (left) seized. The spacecraft is located too far away to fix.  The budget was $600 million.  However, the spacecraft successfully completed its primary 3 1/2 year mission.  NASA has the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or Tess) planned for 2017.  But why?  What is to gain from finding another few billion more Earth-sized planets?  Let the European Space Agency send out GAIA later this year, then maybe even Darwin, a Rube Goldberg-like space system, and possibly PLATO in 2018, all to find extrasolar planets.  The mission has been accomplished.  We now know there are trillions of planets out there.  Let's get on with the real Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  Where is Jodie Foster anyway?

I've never meet her, but Foster portrayed Jill Tarter, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute in Palo Alto.  Give her a lot more money.  I did work with Barney Oliver on the Orion Project.  He was a commanding figure.

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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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