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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MY LIFE REFLECTIONS

This blog site has been posting daily now for 18 years.

• Has been visited by 221 countries, and the reason why this is more than the 193 countries in the United Nations is that there are entities like Antarctica, and smaller territories that have their own domain.
• Not sure when I first reached 1 million total visitors, but I do know that for the first 15 years or so the average viewers/day was around 500, so I would guess that this site took around 7 years to hit one million.  Now up past 6 million total.
• However, during the past two days, the number of visitors reached 147,720 and 123,579, so for reasons I can't explain this site went viral.  

For long-time readers, I have tended to focus on certain topics on a given week day.

• Sunday:  spiritual, religion, reflection on life, etc.
• Monday: global topics, with some thoughts about what is to come during this week.
• Tuesday:  nostalgic, linking with the past, etc.
• Wednesday:  sci-tech and the future.
• Thursday:  health, nutrition, and the like.
• Friday:  thoughts on the coming weekend.
• Saturday:  entertainment, sports, etc.

After being away on a trip for 50 days, I feel reflective and returned with a higher appreciation for my life.

• I am 85, still travel a lot, golf on occasion, try to walk as much possible, and have found my final cocoon, which is 15 Craigside (the greenish one to the left), a seniors' community located in Honolulu, where I was born.  Having moved here 12 years ago from 2101 Craigside (the tall brown one) a condo, where I lived in a fabulous penthouse for 32 years, this means I've been on this same corner of Nuuanu Avenue now for 44 years.
• 
  I've now been retired from the University of Hawaii for 27 years.
• I joined the engineering faculty 54 years ago in 1972, which means I worked as a professor and administrator for 27 years.  
• I still maintain an office on the Manoa Campus, so have not totally escaped from academia.
• Just before leaving on my trip, I had a chance to sit next to Dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology, Skip Fletcher, and caught up with news of our school.
• As Director Emeritus, I also have free parking on campus.

Was born and grew up in Kakaako, Honolulu, Hawaii.  

• Never left the state until I went away to Stanford University.  At graduation in 1962, my closest classmates mostly joined the first year of JFKs Peace Corps, something I was not all that enthused about, but compromised by returning home to help the sugar industry survive.

• 
  Spent seven years in the toughest job I've ever had in sugar plantations on the Big Island and Kauai.  While at the Kilauea Sugar Company, an old man mentioned that he knew my grandfather, who was buried up on a hill above the town.  After I retired, I made a thorough roots search and learned that he was from Utashinai, Japan, was sent to the USA for some advanced schooling, stopped by Kauai to build the first hydroelectric facility on the island, but just before it was commissioned in 1906, fell at the site and died at the age of 33.  Somehow, had gotten married, and my father was born.  I visited the hydro plant a hundred years after it was built, and was still pumping out around 3 MW of electricity.
• 
  The oldest company in Hawaii, C. Brewer, decided to send me to graduate school in 1979, but only to Louisiana State University, which had the sole sugar program in the world.  I worked out an arrangement to stay for a PhD in biochemical engineering, and the next section reports on my academic life.

Reflecting on my period of campus activity:

• Joined as an assistant professor of Engineering in 1972, and around the time of the first energy crisis in 1973, my primary research topic was in geothermal engineering.
• I then became part of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute when it was created in 1974.

• 
  Google AI reports that I worked with a Nobel Laureate one summer.

Patrick Takahashi spent a summer at the NASA Ames Research Center working on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in 1976. During this assignment, he helped advance a concept to directly detect extrasolar planets based on suggestions by physicist Charles Townes. [1]

• 
  As my PhD dissertation research involved designing a tunable laser before one could be built, I spent two summers on laser fusion.  Again from Google AI.

Patrick Takahashi spent two summer assignments working on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shortly after completing an assignment at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1976.[1]

• 
  At the end of my second stint at Livermore, I was asked to join the staff of U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC.
• Was the Senate staffer linking with the House to pass the wind energy budget.  House lead Tom Gray went on to become president of the American Wind Energy Association
• Drafted the first Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion R&D legislation,
• Drafted the first Senate Hydrogen R&D legislation, which on to become the Matsunaga Hydrogen Act.
• Was also the Senate staff lead for the Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Act.

I then returned to the University of Hawaii in 1982.

• Became director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) in 1983.
• That same year, Dean of Engineering Paul Yuen and I created the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR).  Budgeting difficulties at the University of Hawaii convinced us to make PICHTR a not-for-profit organization in 1985, with an off-campus office.  Still active, 43 years after formation.

• 
  HNEI became the leading renewable resources organization in the Pacific, and served as the Department of Energy's Hydrogen Research and Training Center with the Florida Solar Energy Center, Department Interior's Mineral Research Center with the University of Mississippi and National Science Foundation's Marine Bioproducts Research Center.
• During my final decade of activity at the University of Hawaii, State Senator Richard Matsuura and I created a Blue Revolution program.  He had previously worked for Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution.

I retired at the end of 1999 and, as great as my life was during my 27 years with the University of Hawaii, the past 27 years of retirement have been better.

• Wrote three books.
• Went around the world almost ten times.
• Started this blog site in 2008.

• 
  Wrote more than a hundred articles for the Huffington Post.  Among the more interesting ones were:
• Geoengineering of Climate Change
• What About Hydrogen?
• Why Do We Spend So Much on National Security?
• The Dawn of the Blue Revolution
• The Ultimate Ocean Ranch
• Is There An Option More Promising Than The Plug-In Electric Vehicle?
• America, Don't Copy...Build Something Better
• The Blue Revolution
• Extraterrestrial Intelligence?
• What Is The Best Biofuel?
• The Carbon Dioxide Credit Program?
• The Future of Sustainable Aviation
• The 10% Solution to Peace
• The Sustainable Expo for 2020
• The Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami:  The Aftermath
• Star Power for Humanity

In case you were interested, Dara of Bulgaria won the Eurovision Song Contest singing Bangaranga.

To close, I took a walk this morning to the roof of 15 Craigside, plus some other photos of future activities here.  A beautiful day in Honolulu.

Violet playing the piano.

Paper carps are flown in Japan and Hawaii for Boys day.

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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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