CHAPTER 4: SEEING THE LIGHT--SETI (Part 3)

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

Exoplanetary Search and SETI from the 80’s into the 21^st Century

You will note that I have added exoplanetary search to SETI. There is a reason for this.

In 1981, Senator Proxmire sponsored an amendment to eliminate SETI from NASA. One of my side efforts was, with others, and also the considerable personal suasion of Matsunaga with Proxmire, help Carl Sagan, a colleague of Frank Drake at Cornell, reinstate funding. The involved team set up that fateful meeting with Senator Proxmire, who was of the Dyson school of thought that it was a silly waste of government funds to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I had met Sagan when he served on a panel during my NASA Ames stopover, where he was in a group commenting on the first Viking photos to arrive fromMars. We were the first to see these photos, line by line, being posted unto the auditorium screen in Mountain View before they were released into TV land. 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.

The story has become almost legendary, as Carl Sagan was so successful in his conversation with Senator Proxmire that the following year Congress funded SETI at the level of $1.5 million. This support very slowly grew to a point in the early 1990’s when a ten year, $100 million program, was announced by NASA. A sum of $11-12 million was annually expended through three fiscal years in the early 90’s. The Search for Extraterrestrial Visitation (SETV) web page on “A Scientific Search for Visitation from Extraterrestrial Probes,” is 58 full pages long, with references, abstracts and a fair mix of both SETI and UFO related documents and articles. I should underscore, of course, that the two acronyms should not be confused to be themselves related. SETI is good science, while UFO’s belong in the realm of the twilight zone.

Then, Congress summarily terminated the program in 1992. Explained Stephen Garber of NASA:

On Columbus Day, 1992, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration formally initiated a radio astronomy program called SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Less than a year later, Congress abruptly canceled the program. Why? While there was and still is a debate over the likelihood of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life, virtually all informed parties agreed that the SETI program constituted worthwhile, valid science. Yet, fervor over the federal budget deficit, lack of support from other scientists and aerospace contractors and a significant history of unfounded associations with nonscientific elements combined with bad timing in the fall of 1993 to make the program an easy target to eliminate. Thus SETI was a relative anomaly in terms of a small, scientifically valid program that was canceled for political expediency.

Why did Congress kill SETI? Proxmire was no longer in the Senate. Neither was Matsunaga. The identified assassin was Senator Richard Bryan (D-Nevada), who largely avoided discussion with SETI researchers, and even NASA representatives, but it also was the combination of SETI being only a $12 million program, with no major aerospace contractors (this was an efficient effort where equipment was bootstrapped), in a field that bridged subject areas with no effective scientific constituency, with a high giggle (green men) factor, when there was a serious national budget deficit, and at a time when NASA was fighting bruising battles over much larger programs (SETI was one thousandth of the NASA budget). SETI also could only report on the fact that, after decades, it still had not even detected one small promising signal.

The private sector then stepped in to help. In a sense, if the foundation and industrial funding process works, the program will maintain some continuity without the vagaries of Congress. In one parting shot, SETI supporters remarked, “what can you expect from a deliberative body represented by one scientist and four undertakers?” This was true of the 103^rd Congress.

Thus, while NASA could continue with search for exoplanets and do astrobiology, it had to completely abandon SETI. NASA hosted two workshops during this period and published TOPS: Toward Other Planetary Systems, which is a good source for information on detecting exoplanets. Thus, I should again explain that, as it is today accepted that there are planets revolving around some stars, the next logical step is to find potential Earth-like planets, so that those microwave dishes can more efficiently detect intelligent signals. NASA is involved with the former, while being careful not to hint that the purpose is SETI-inspired.

The non-NASA SETI people in 1992 then went to the rich, corporations and foundations. The SETI Institute (SETII) itself had been formed in 1984, a year after original congressional funding, to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Today, in Mountain View, it employs 100 scientists, educators and support staff. There are two scientific leaders:

o Center for SETI Research, where the Bernard Oliver Chair is held by Jill Tarter, who is also the director, and

o Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, where the Carl Sagan Chair, originally held by Christopher Chyba, is now occupied by Scott Hubbard, past director of the Ames Research Center.

Thomas Pierson has served as Chief Executive Officer since the founding, and Frank Drake still serves on the Board of Trustees with emeritus status.

The primary effort of SETII has been Project Phoenix, which was begun in 1995 with private financing, but, equipment “borrowed” from NASA. Congress was cruel, but, either permissive or not too watchful.

Along the way came the 1997 movie Contact, from the book by Carl Sagan, starring Jodie Foster. All the elements were there: God, the afterlife, SETI, attack by religious terrorists. Sounds like Simple Solutions, Book 2. The film starts with the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico listening to space for signals. As is the tradition of SETI, funding was terminated. Jodie Foster sort of played Jill Tarter of SETII, plus there was a blind researcher, Kent Clark, who in real life was Kent Cullers, director of R&D for Project Phoenix. Measurement then shifted to the Very Large Array (photo below) in New Mexico, a more photogenic site representative of dish systems, where signals do arrive and get de-coded. The movie then jumps into the hyperspace of the improbable, but, in many ways, that’s part of why politicians are wary of SETI.

The Targeted Search System of NASA was upgraded in 2002 by SETII to the New Search System, based on a modular architecture and programmable integrated circuits—a bit quicker, with the same search power, but only 20% the room space. In addition to the Arecibo and Jodrell Bank (U.K.) observatories, the initial 42 dishes of the new Allen (financed by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame) Telescope Array, (photo abpve) located 290 miles northeast of San Francisco in Hat Creek, California, a radio-quiet zone, was added to the mix in 2007. Do you need an expensive 350 dish array, as has been brought to the hypothetical table by the Allen Array? If you can afford it, sure, as Paul Allen has committed $25 million to the effort.

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The Dow Jones Industrials reached a 14 month high, going up 127 to 10472, with world markets mostly also up. The DJI is now 60% higher than on March 9, when it hit a 12 year low. Gold also hit, yes, another all-time high, increasing $21/toz to $1200, while crude oil edged up to $78/barrel.

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Nida is still a typhoon at 75 MPH, but is expected to continue weakening, as it moves north, then northeast, away from Japan.

Hooray, the hurricane season is over in the East Pacific and Atlantic. You could, however, continue to see typhoons anytime in the West Pacific, plus, of course, the Indian Ocean. The season just started in the South Atlantic, but Cyclone (or, you can call it hurricane if you want) Catarina, at 100 MPH, struck Brazil in March of 2004. This is a rare occurrence, mostly due to wind shear.

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CHAPTER 4: SEEKING THE LIGHT—SETI (Part 9)

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

Are You Interested in Becoming a SETI Contributor?

There are various websites available for anyone interested in being part of the SETI program, for it has, in a way, sadly, but in other ways, gratifyingly, taken on a warm, fuzzy, peoples’ mission. Brochures can theoretically (my messages never received a response) be obtained by writing to join@setileague.org, and information at info@setileague.org. There is a membership fee of $50/year. Their Project Argus is a real time microwave SETI project linking 5,000 small radio telescopes from around the world to monitor the entire sky. You can participate by building your very own telescope for around a thousand dollars. There are only 121 currently operational.

There are (or were) four more microwave SETI projects: Project Beta (Planetary Society, Paul Horowitz), Project Phoenix (SETI Institute, Seth Shostak, info@SETI.org), SETI@home (UC Berkeley, et al, Dan Wertheimer, www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) and Southern SERENDIP (SETI Australia Centre, et al, Frank Stootman, F.Stootman@uws.edu.au). In particular, SETI@home is reportedly linked to 2 million computers from 225 countries, making it the world’s largest supercomputer. They all predict their chances of success as unknown. Project Phoenix, for example, announced in 2004 that no signals were detected.

There are more than 1500 members from 66 countries involved in SETI. Among some of the user group pages are from:

o SETI.Germany,

o Baha’i SETI,

o Let’s Kick Some Alien Butt Team,

o Yahoo SETI Club,

o AOL Beta Team,

o Team Truth Seeking,

o WeAreNotAlone Team,

o SETI@Taiwan,

o Very Big Ear Team, and

o SETI Turkey Team,

just a few of the hundred odd organizations dedicated to the sport.

Incidentally, if you are able to individually design, build and operate a system that actually receives an ETI signal, you will no doubt win a Nobel Prize. So what do you do if you score a hit? Read what The Planetary Society suggests, then consider the following:

o First, contact the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) operating out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. CBAT is the clearinghouse for new space discoveries and was created in Germany in the 1880’s, which eventually moved to Cambridge, and is currently directed by Daniel Green. You will be faced with at least a minor problem because no one has yet reported an ETI signal. You will thus need to hurdle some bureaucratic-computer interface hurdles. So, after the necessary interval of frustration, send an e-mail to cbat@cfa.harvard.edu to log your entry with all the relevant details. If you are absolutely sure of your luck, you can cc your local media.

o Then, contact your most trusted observatory to see if they can confirm your finding. However, telescope time is booked months in advance, so don’t hold your breath. At this point, if you truly detected something real and alien, turn on your television, for the world should already be stunned by news from CNN or Fox. But if not, yet, proceed.

o Re-check your information and, if still viable, try the International Telecommunication Union, which reports to the United Nations, and is headquartered in Geneva. The Secretary-General is Hamadoun Toure of Mali. Well, at least Wired magazine suggested this pathway. A phone number is 41 22 730 511, with itumail@itu.int for general inquiries. Lots of luck. Have you ever tried working with the UN on anything which has to be swiftly managed? However, Dr. Toure has a PhD from the University of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics of Moscow.

o Failing all the above, go to your favorite local TV station, or, better yet, talk them into coming over to film your monumental breakthrough, for you simply will have the greatest discovery of this millennium. If you’ve instead detected something not quite so epochal, well, that was in the spirit of this follow-up guide.

As you explore the field, though, as of today, NASA does not do SETI. Only private organizations do. Perhaps your effort should be focused on the Federal government, for, in consideration of the trillions to be spent on Afghanistan/Iraq and billions for farm payments to the dead, a few million, maybe even hundreds of millions, to develop the foundation that could be our lifeline to the future, certainly sounds like a cost-effective way to spend our precious tax dollars. Go lobby the U.S. Congress.

My next posting on SETI concludes this chapter. To follow will be The Golden Evolution on religion.

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Tropical Cyclone Laurence at 95 MPH should just about now be making landfall off the West Kimberley coastline of Australia:

There is also Tropical Cyclone Five in the Indian Ocean, now at 40 MPH, and loitering northeast of Mauritius, which, at this time, is not being threatened.

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Total number of site hits: 19,482

Number of countries: 126

Visitors this week: 505

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SIMPLE SOLUTIONS FOR HUMANITY'S MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS: #3 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

You ask, how can the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) be more important than the discovery of dark matter/energy or formulation of super symmetry or understanding time zero of the Big Bang?  Well, if science derived solutions to the latter three are attained, so what?  How will those monumental achievements materially aid humanity?

The beauty of SETI is that, according to Arthur C. Clarke (LIFE, September 1992):  extraterrestrials may be continuously broadcasting an easily decoded Encyclopedia Galactica for the benefit of their less advanced neighbors (like us, for our Sun has only been around for less than 5 billion years and other solar systems might well be 9 billion years older) and may contain answers to almost all the questions our philosophers and scientists have been asking for centuries, providing solutions to many of the practical problems that beset mankind.  Peace on Earth?  Fusion energy?  Cure for cancer?

Conversely, regarding space in general, it makes no sense at all to send humans to Mars, or any celestial body in our solar system.  What would they find?  Life?  Well, that would be nice to know, but so what?  Resources?  How would anything that weighty be transported profitably back to Earth?

The Apollo Project to the Moon was essential to help end the Cold War and there is some romance about space travel, where many extraterrestrial movies can become very popular.  But the reality is, what can we gain from such travel?  Cliff Singer (left) proposed an interstellar (meaning to another star) spacecraft using high velocity pellets at a price of roughly $10 trillion.  Click on The Challenge of Relativistic Spaceflight to read a summary of Singer's and other similar visions.  The bottom line is that it would take too long and cost too much if you can finance such a futile effort at all.

That leaves us with two ways to gain all that possible advanced knowledge that surely must be wafting about throughout our Universe.  One, wait for a friendly Unidentified Flying Object, also sometimes known as a Flying Saucer, to visit us.  That is commonplace in the media, but the reality is that the odds are infinitesimally low that this will, in fact, happen, at least in our lifetime.  I am a colleague of the late Ron Bracewell of Stanford, and his  contention that advanced intelligence could have sent probes to fertilize planets like Earth, creating first life here, has some validity.  However, if this actually happened, that was several billion years ago.

The other?  A successful Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.  A third of a century ago, in Project Cyclops, Barney Oliver and Jack Billingham, two people I got to know very well, proposed a $10 billion budget.  That would be closer to $60 billion today, and here is a comparison with some of our other major federal expenditures:

• F-35 Joint Strike Fighter:  $1.3 trillion, or $1,300 billion.  Set aside $60 billion for SETI and still spend $1.240 trillion for that lemon.
• The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost us $6 trillion.  That $60 billion for SETI is a one time cost, but if it takes $60 billion/year to accomplish the task, the program would run for 100 years.

Oliver and Billingham were opposite personalities.  Bernard Oliver (right) was a CalTech PhD in electrical engineering who, honestly, probably was most responsible for your iPhone, the original concept invented at Hewlett-Packard, than anyone else.  He was brilliant and commanding.  John Billingham was a decade older than me, a medical doctor from the British Royal Air Force, who came to America to work on the Mercury program, gravitated to NASA's Ames Research Center, and became director of the SETI Program Office.  He was urbane and creative.

I made my contribution in the mid-70's with the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (PAT), for I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center on a project to find an extrasolar planet, and you can read about my experience HERE.  At that time the overriding question was whether we were the only planets in the Universe.  Finally, the first exoplanet was confirmed almost two decades later.  

Now, there are nearly 2000 exoplanets in some process of confirmation.  My problem with the dominant strategy is that all the money is being spent trying to detect these planets using a technique called transit, where the very slight diminution of starlight is measured when that planet, by pure chance, traverses the star, which is all the Kepler Telescope does.  They are not able to determine the Earth-like quality, as my method could have.  In any case, some continuation of searching for exo-Earths can be supported, but when we found the first one, that confirmed we are not alone in the Universe, and should have given the green light to enter the next phase, which is to detect possible signals from space.  

To simplify my concept, place identical "telescopes" each at the top of Cerro Armazones (Chile) and Mauna Kea (Hawaii), with a third somewhere in Australia, and detect those discrete frequencies resulting from the lasing atmospheres of exoplanets.  You can't measure the reflected light from these bodies, for the star is too bright, but if you are searching for a specific frequency, you should be able to track the planet itself.  Now knowing the wavelengths, you can determine the atmospheric composition.  My proposal to further develop this Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer was ignored by NASA, mostly because they thought I was joking (possibly because I had the Man from La Mancha on the cover, with a subtitle:  To See the Impossible Dream), but perhaps because SETI scientists had selected the radio band, and purposefully set aside optical wavelengths, for you can more efficiently detect lower frequencies.  I was also told in 1976 that my $100 million proposal would not be able to compete with the Hubble Telescope, which was soon to be launched.  Well, it was not until 1990 that Hubble became operational and did find a few extrasolar planets, but only those that were much larger than Jupiter.  And the cost was about $2.5 billion.

Further, NASA seems only dedicated to improving the science to find exoplanets, and determine the various bio-options for life.  The highest priority should now be to search for signals.  NASA is reluctant to enter that field because of two Congressional actions.  In 1979 Senator William Proxmire gave them a Golden Fleece Award for SETI.  However, I was then working for Senator Spark Matsunaga (below, right), and he was able to arrange for a meeting of Carl Sagan with Senator Proxmire, who subsequently backed off his resistance.  

Tragically, in 1993 Senator Richard Bryan  personally killed the $12 million/year budget and barred NASA from doing any SETI research.  To quote from SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity, Stephen Garber of NASA explained what happened.

So before NASA can do anything, the U.S. Congress first needs to rescind the restrictive language, and more so, provide encouragement.  The military-industrial complex would not be particularly supportive, for they would rather become involved with billion dollar adventures in space.  SETI primarily needs land based antennas, but is unfortunately cost effective, meaning being too cheap for American industry.

In the meantime, the SETI Institute, founded in 1984, located in Palo Alto with 50 researchers, is faced with the grim task of groveling for private sector funding, and, let's face it, there is little sure profit to come from SETI.  Thus, like the Blue Revolution, the only hope is to gain the interest of mega-billionaires.  Thankfully, Paul Allen has contributed $30 million for his Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to detect signals from outer space.

Nearly 300 miles north of San Francisco is the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (64 miles east of Redding on 299 in Lassen National Park), where the 350 6-meter diameter dishes of ATA are under construction.  The first phase of 42 dishes became operational in 2007.  They've had some funding problems, but now seem on track to someday become fully functional.

Jill Tarter, holder of the Bernard Oliver Chair, and said to be model for Jodi Foster in CONTACT, is, appropriately enough, in charge.  Former University of Hawaii colleague, David Morrison, who reviewed my SETI chapter in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity, is director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

Europe recently entered the picture, as they have now built 21 LOFAR--the Low Frequency Array--stations, of the 48 anticipated, in the Netherlands, the UK, Frarnce, Germany and Swedan.  Here is one to the left.  This system is plumbing as low as 20 MHz, for the first time ever.

I'm afraid that these efforts reflect only one-tenth of 1% what Project Cyclops aspired to accomplish more than three decades ago.  We should be providing at least a thousand times more for what could well become the most consequential effort by humanity to leapfrog into the future.

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WE ARE NOT ALONE

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil      India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732        1185      246         82

July       5       251    3572          535       421       173

             7       993    5504        1312       479       192

           12       380    4118          659       500       108

           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107

           19       412    4606          715       675         85

           22     1205    7128        1293     1120        572

           26       450    4307         556       715        114
Aug      1    1462     6429       1191       765        193
            3       467     4430         514       514        213

            5     1362     6292       1394       849        345

          10       534     4813         593     1013        198
          12     1504     6556       1242       835        130
          16       522     4525         582       961        162
          18     1358     6312        1365    1089        282
          21     1170     6062        1031      953        225
          22       974     5349          823      918        144
          23       430     4247          495      846          72

          24       510     4356          679      854        100

          25     1290     5856        1215    1066        149

Summary:  

1. Well, back to an old normal, which is terrible.
2. While the USA had a new cases total yesterday of 40,098, India's new cases rose to 66,873.

Looks like The Donald will soon be firing himself, as the DNC drew more viewers than the RNC on day one.  Streaming numbers were not available, but no doubt Trump must be orchestrating to do something spectacular on Thursday night to reverse this embarrassment.

I skipped the RNC  and last night happened to view an obscure 16-minute documentary entitled John was Trying to Contact Aliens, which was just released.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers somehow found it earlier and provided a rating, giving it a 100% score!  I saw this production before viewing this result because, as some of you know, in the 1970's I spent some time at NASA's Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  Clearly, John Shepherd was totally out of his element and, alone, in attempting to communicate with ETs.  He tried for 30 years and did not succeed, but neither did Carl Sagan or the SETI Institute.  Is this a failure of science?  No, they were searching for the truth, and laying groundwork for others.  Someday, who knows.

Then I remembered reading a whole issue (33 pages) on WE ARE NOT ALONE in National Geographic.  However, I can't seem to find a way to send you to a link where you could read that article yourself.  So, this will become my focus of today.

To set the background, a quick history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI):

• 1896:  Nikola Tesla suggested that an extreme version of his wireless electrical transmission could be used to contact intelligent life on Mars.

• Early 1900/s:  Guglielmo Marconi (right), Lord Kelvin and David Peck Todd also speculated on how radio could be used for communication, for Marconi thought he had picked up potential signals from Mars.

• All this was taken quite seriously in those days, and from August 21-23 in 1924:

• Mars entered an opposition closer to Earth than at any time in the century, not to be reached for another 80 years.
• Radio silence day was promoted where there was no transmission for five minutes on the hour for 36 hours.
• The U.S. Naval Observatory was linked to a dirigible tuned to a wavelength of 8-9 km to listen to and translate these possible Martian signals.  Well...nothing.  

• Around 1950, in a casual conversation on this subject with Edward Teller and others walking to lunch, Enrico Fermi just remarked, But where is everybody?  This became known as the Fermi Paradox.
• 1955:  John Kraus described a scan of the cosmos, and a parabolic reflector was built at Ohio State University, called the Big Ear. 

• 1959:  a paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison suggested use of the microwave spectrum  and initial targets.  This is the date SETI people use as Year One.  We are thus into Year 62, or looking at this from another grammatical viewpoint, the field is 61 years old.

• 1960:  Frank Drake (right of Morrison) of Cornell performed the first modern SETI experiment, named Project Ozma, after the Queen of Oz in that book which became Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film, from where came Judy Garland's Somewhere Over the Rainbow, selected as the Song of the Century.  He found nothing.

• 1962:  the Soviet Union considered SETI a Cold War item, and Iosif Shklovskii wrote Universe, Life, Intelligence.
• 1966:  Carl Sagan had joined Drake at Cornell, and co-authored with Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe.

• 1971:  Bernard Oliver and Jack Billingham led a summer faculty workshop at the NASA Ames Research Center on Project Cyclops, with a price tag of $10 billion ($63 billion today)  for an array of reflectors.

• 1976:  Project Orion at Ames, also led by Oliver and Billingham, to design a system to detect extraterrestrial signals.  I was part of this group and one of the few allowed to pursue other options.

• 1977:  Ohio States's Big Ear recorded that famous WOW! signal from Sagittarius.  This remains as the most prominent "maybe" in history!
• 1978:  Senator William Proxmire selected NASA's SETI program for one of his Golden Fleece Awards.

• 1980:  Carl Sagan and others founded the U.S. Planetary Society for SETI studies, and, while on the staff of Senator Spark Matsunaga (who in 1986 published the Mars Project), I helped Sagan reach a compromise with Senator Proxmire for him not to not stand in the way of congressional funding for SETI, which was subsequently secured in 1982.

In short, the pathway to future SETI interaction:

• Are we the only solar system in the Universe?  At the time of the 1976 Project Orion, the answer was, we don't know.  The group developed a standard micro-wave interferometry system, while, with Charles Townes, I suggested using direct observations using optical peaks of monochromatic light representing the lasing frequency of atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide and methane.  The advantage we offered was that, not only would we SEE the planet, but the wavelength would provide further evidence of possible life.  NASA set aside our concept because they only wanted to focus on microwave detection, and could not afford any optical frequency proposals.  Ohio State was deleted for a similar reason.  Mind you, microwave signals travel further in space, and in the distances contemplated, do make more sense.

• When extrasolar planets are confirmed, find those optimal for possible life.
• Detected life itself will almost surely only be microbiological, so a next step would be to determine how best to receive and translate alien signals (like in the movie Contact), that is, the small number that somehow involve with intelligence, something that already began with Drake in 1960 and the Allen Telescope Array in 2007.

• Next, how to optimize two-way communication.  If life is as close as Proxima Centauri, it would take 8.4 years for us to send a response, then receive their answer.  Most of the promising sites are a lot further.  Sagittarius, for example, is 25,640 light years away, meaning a two-way communication time period of 51,280 years.  You know how long that is?  50,000 years ago, early versions of us were hunting wooly mammoths.
• Then, actual space travel, like Star Trek.

So with that introduction, back to National Geographic:

• The first extrasolar planet was found just about 20 years after our Project Orion, when in 1995 51 Pegasi b was discovered.  As of this moment, 4031 have been confirmed, mostly by the Kepler Space Telescope, which ran out of energy in 2018.  They actually scanned only a limited patch of 150,000 stars.  There could be 400 billion stars just in our Milky Way Galaxy.   This means that there are 100 billion stars where life could have originated, just in our galaxy.   Of course, there are around 100 billion galaxies, so imagine the odds of no life in all of the Universe.  These exoplanets were found using transit (that lucky accident when the planet passes across the star, where you can then detect a diminution of light) and indirect methods like wobbles.

• Anyway, the first question has been answered.  Yes, there are other planets beyond our solar system.
• Next, at a cost of $200 million, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which was launched in 2018, and will observe an area 400 times larger than Kepler.  Also uses the rather crude transiting method.  There is a goal of 13,000 exoplanets in two years.  You might say, why bother with more detections when enough have already been found?  The answer is, if we know where the potential earth-like bodies are, we can focus on the most promising ones for possible life.

• You might also ask, why don't we do this from our planet?  The Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea does, but the atmosphere (only 40% as much as at sea level--so breathing can be a problem for some, like me) kind of gets in the way.  So a tricky optical trick has been devised, called SCExAO (you don't want to know what this stands for) to take the twinkle out of stars.

• On hold is the $1.5 billion Thirty-Meter Telescope also on Mauna Kea, which as many know, has been stopped by local Hawaiians.  Has to do with something, apparently, more important than science.

• But isn't the European Union already building their larger $1.5 billion 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope on top of the Cerro Armazones in Chile?  Now just known as the E-ELT, first light is planned for 2025.  It's become a national pride thing.  Plus, astronomers like being able to permanently live only an hour drive to the future observatory, as would occur in Hawaii.  You can imagine the trek up to the Atacama Desert.  All in all, now, there might not ever be a TMT, especially as there will be this larger one anyway, and the Space Telescope is getting closer to launch.

• Which is a good a time as any to bring up the James Webb Space Telescope, which is only 6.5 meters.  Originally planned for launch in 2007 for half a billion dollars, the date is now late next year for....$10 billion, and counting.  A lot of money, you say?  When the U.S. Congress is debating about spending a next help package of from $1 trillion (or 1000 billion dollars) to $3 trillion, these are mere crumbs.

• Infra-red telescopes are gaining credibility to actually see extraterrestrial life (anything from a forest with a sign to an advanced civilization able to capture energy from space).  Probably two decades away, the talk is about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared space observatory currently only pegged at $4 billion.  

• Next I toss in the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission, or Starshade, a space telescope that will use spectrographs to study planetary atmospheres using starlight.  When?  Oh, 2035.  Cost?  Only a billion dollars.

• Square Kilometre Array, an international (14 countries, but not U.S.) project to be build receivers in Australia and South Africa, headquartered at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in Chesire, England, for initial observations in 2027, to collect the signals from thousands of small antennas to simulate a single giant radio telescope to answer the range of questions in cosmology. Cost, perhaps $2 billion.

• The latest rumor is that NASA, which was prohibited to spend money on SETI from 1992, is getting back into the game.
• You got to give the field a lot of credit for continuously justifying its existence with romance for outer space in light of wars, pandemics and other societal spending priorities.

• On the non-Federal front, the SETI Institute continues.  They're involved with the Allen Telescope Array.  Jill Tarter retired in 2012, and Seth Shostak is still there.  Frank Drake, now 90 years old, is on the advisory board.

• The current active field is dominated by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner:
• Named for Yuri Gargarin.
• Early investor in Facebook and Twitter.
• Worth $4 billion.
• Has committed $200 million to the Breakthrough initiatives.
• Why?  He was born in 1961, when he says, SETI began.  Then again, if you look above in the timeline, nothing happened in 1961.  SETI began in 1959.  However, no one tell him that.  He might drop out.

• Breakthrough Listen
• $100 million over a decade, through the SETI Research Center at Cal Berkeley
• Use radio wave observatories to listen to one million nearby stars and the centers of 100 galaxies

• Breakthrough Message
• Study the ethics of sending messages into deep space.
• $1 million prize pool to design a digital message to be transmitted to an extraterrestrial civilization

• Breakthrough Watch
• Search for breakthrough biosignatures with the European Very Large Telescope in Chile
• Identify earth-size exoplanets within 20 light years from Earth

• Breakthrough Starshot
• $100 million, co-funded by Mark Zuckerberg, but the actual project will end up costing up to $10 billion
• Send a swarm of probes to Alpha Centauri  at 20% the speed of light (to get there in 20 years)
• Flyby of Proxima Centauri b, an earth-sized exoplanet

• Breakthrough Enceladus
• Partner with NASA
• Astrobiology space probe to explore for the possibility of life on Saturn's moon, Enceladus

The Blue Revolution needs a Yuri Milner.  Next, Calvin without Hobbes:

Finally, Pearl's sunbursts are still blooming:

My anthurium patch is doing well:

Oh my, Hurricane Laura is now up to 140 MPH as a Category 4, and appears to be taking a path almost exactly as Marcos, to make landfall at the Texas/Louisiana border in the vicinity of Beaumont and Lake Charles.  At least Houston and New Orleans will not be directly impacted:

Potential storm flooding:

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