THE PALE BLUE DOT

We've all met famous people in our life.  For many, a movie or rock star is memorable.  I'm not into that, but the closest for me was when Nancy Sinatra and Tommy Sands swam in our backyard in Kilauea, Kauai.  Princess Diana and her entourage sat right above our box for a stage show in the West End.  Looked like the crowd below was waving, in that British way, to us, so we waved back.  The electricity of the moment when she got into her limousine is unforgettable.

My famous people are scientists.  I worked for Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and saw him twice in Honolulu.  He had come over to tout the potential of placing wind energy conversion devices at the top of the Koolau mountain range, for which which he was disparaged, and met a group of us at the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii.  He worked on the Manhattan Project, which led to him later building a Hydrogen Bomb.

The second encounter was for breakfast at the Hyatt Waikiki.  I had known someone named Momoko Ito/Izu (and, incidentally, her son Joi (left) was involved in helping invent weblog and himself had quite a life--and her daughter Mimi got a Harvard education topped with a Stanford PhD) since my days in the U.S. Senate, where my "buddy" was Senator Scoop Jackson, chairman of the Energy and Natural Committees.  Senator Matsunaga was many times absent for these sessions, and some of them determined key legislation, like initiating the oil shale development program and forming the Energy Mobilization Board (note that this was just after the second energy crisis in 1979), which essentially created the national renewable energy program.  Jackson and I were not social friends.  We had worked out a system where he looked at my right thumb.  If up, then his proxy was of Matsunaga voting for the issue  Down, then not.  While Democrats in the Senate then had the controlling votes, many of these measures were split almost 50-50, so my thumb regularly determined the outcome.

But back to Teller and Momoko.  She invited me because her company, Stanford Ovshinsky's ECD (he invented the first thin film solar PV system and the nickel-hydride battery--on the left next to Momoko), wanted the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb to join their board.  She thought I knew him well.  Well, that was not exactly so.  So she comes down to the table, for breakfast, dressed in an evening gown and pearls.  The discussion was fascinating.  I mostly listened.  I wished I had recorded it.  Teller could not be convinced, but she later became president of Ovshinsky's company, then Sharp Electronics, the only female in Japan to run such a corporation.  In her days there Sharp made the best large screen TV sets, and she gave me one.  Today the Sharp Aquos is manufactured in China.

I first met Carl Sagan (wrote this ten years ago, so it is now 45 years ago):

Many of us are intrigued by the Universe.  I even once worked for NASA on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and on 20July1976, 35 years ago, was in a group that first saw the image of Mars, line by line, at the Ames Research Center, before it was released to the public.

Carl Sagan was with us and I quote from 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.

I got to chat with him:

This experience at Ames served as the link to help Carl Sagan gain the first congressional funding for his effort to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) funding, for:

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.

For in 1979:

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, and he was able to arrange for a meeting of Carl Sagan with Senator Proxmire, who subsequently backed off his resistance.  

Matsunaga had a high interest in space, for in 1986 he published The Mars Project, with the Forward by Arthur C. Clarke.  Of course Sparky hardly did anything, for it was ghost-written by Harvey Meyerson, and much of that effort occurred in the office we shared.

All the above was inspired by a video I today received of Carl Sagan articulating on The Pale Blue Dot, in a way only he can:

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