First, a few pandemic graphics from the  New York Times  this morning: Also: The federal government is likely to approve   the next generation of booster shots — designed to be even more effective against the latest variants — in coming days. Within a week or two, these new shots will probably be available to Americans 12 and older. Tomorrow I'll focus on, next to death, the most concerning COVID-19 worry:  LONG-HAUL. Today is Wednesday science day, so I start with a  Time   magazine recently published article,   Trees Are the Secret Weapon of America's Historic Climate Bill : Trees and forests are the key to natural carbon removal. An average tree will capture 1200 pounds of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. Together, trees and forests capture and store 17% of the USA's carbon dioxide. The Nature Conservancy found potential to increase tree-based carbon capture across American by nearly half if we reforest 133 million acres of ecologically suitable land to grow more than

Today I reach back to three postings, the first a dozen years ago, 23 May 2010: A HALF A CENTURY SEARCHING FOR ALIEN SIGNALS Why this topic?  Perhaps some stimulation sparked by the James Webb Space Telescope, which  has begun a search for extraterrestrial intelligence  (SETI).  Just another in my primary quests seeking ultimate answers on topics like peace ( The 10% Solution ), energy ( Starpower for Humanity ) and Planet Earth ( Geoengineering for Climate Change ).  Yesterday set the stage for this future with  The Three Grand Miracles .   My professional career was dedicated to those above interest areas. For SETI, it all began with an  assignment at NASA's Ames Research Center  in 1976.  Answering the question of  Are We Alone?  to the potential of receiving  The Encyclopedia Galactica  from superior space civilizations fascinated my imagination. In many ways that first paper on SETI by Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi in 1959 set the stage for what we have today.  My firs

My posting today is all about those three grand miracles that led to us,  Homo sapiens  today.   You either believe in religious creationism or science, for how we humans came to be.  This posting will focus on the latter. The history of guessing the age of Planet Earth and the Universe  goes back to the beginning of our species, and in the early 18th century, was only speculated to be on the order of millions of years old. The first scientific theories began to appear around the time of the U.S. Civil War. Until as recently as 1999, astronomers thought the age of our universe was between 7 and 20 billion years old In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was expanding.  So the thinking was, if space is expanding, what if we trace backwards to the beginning.   It was a Catholic priest and Belgian cosmologist,  Georges Lemaitre , who in 1931 published an original paper on this subject. But  Miracle #1, the Big Bang , was coined in 1949 by a British astrophysicist who in time beca