MY NEARLY HALF A CENTURY SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

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 first step:

In 1974 I participated in a NASA activity called Earth 2020, and became close friends of the leaders of another project entitled Project Cyclops, a $10 billion effort to conduct the search.  One of the first questions in the early days was:  Are there other planets in the Universe?  So in 1976 I joined 19 other faculty members at the NASA Ames Research Center, and while the others focused on an interferometric technique, I was allowed to find a more direct method.

The one major effort  since then was the Allen Telescope Array, mostly financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for about $25 million in 2007, now being managed by the Stanford Research Institute with the cooperation of the SETI Institute.

In 2015 Russian billionaire Yuri Milner provided most of the funding for various Breakthrough Prizes to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life and transmitting messages into space:

• Breakthrough Listen received $100 million and dedicated telescope time beginning in 2016 for a decade.

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  Breakthrough Message will study the ethics of sending messages into deep space.  There will be an open competition with a $1 million prize pool to design a digital message.
• To the right, Milner with wife Julie.

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  Breakthrough Starshot is another $100 million program, co-funded with Mark Zuckerberg, to develop a proof-of-concept light sail spacecraft fleet to Alpha Centauri at 20% the speed of light with a 20-year journey time.
• Breakthrough Enceladus will work with NASA to explore the possibility of life on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

What am I doing today for SETI?  Just a cheerleader.

Super Typhoon Hinnamnor is today at 150 MPH, with the eye heading for Miyakojima.  It is the first Category 5 ocean storm of the season.  The path is moving southwest, but soon will essentially make a right turn and move between Taiwan and Naha into the Taiwan Strait.  Not sure today whether landfall will be China, South Korea or Japan.  Watch this exciting video.

This brings back further memories you can read in my posting on Okinawa for 3 September 2019:

....my first trip to Miyakojima.  This was more than two decades ago, and I was one of the leaders of an international effort entitled Green Enertopia to select an island for each country to serve as the symbol of energy self-sufficiency.  Miyakojima seemed to be the ideal site for Japan, so I flew there and met with the Mayor over dinner.  He seemed disinterested in what I was saying until I noted that the island had something called Strongman, the triathlon of Japan.  While it ends with a marathon, the other two segments are shorter than the Iron Man.  Anyway, it turns out that, like Kailua-Kona, this is their biggest event of the year.  While the Mayor's face lit up when I mentioned Strongman, he then practically gave me the key to the city when I mentioned that, by the way, Judy and John Collins, the inventors of the concept, were good friends of mine.  This interaction went a long way into making Miyakojima, now, the solar island of Japan. 

In that article was a photo of a lunch I had with Bob Nakasone, John Tasato and Tomoyo Nonaka three years ago at Orchids.

• Bob and John are the leaders of that Okinawa Festival we were planning to attend at the end of October.  However, we decided to bypass Okinawa because Japan is having a terrible time with the pandemic, and Okinawa has been the worst hit prefecture/capita.  John and his wife recently moved into Arcadia, while we are still working on Bob and his wife to join 15 Craigside.

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  Tomoyo Nonaka (here with Henk Rogers of Hawaii) is a former female anchor on NHK and was chairperson of Sanyo Electric.  I had earlier met her in 2013 at an OTEC gathering, and she was serving as an honorary ambassador from Kumejima, which has an OTEC facility. 
• Professor Mac Takahashi (bottom right) of Tokyo University and I somewhat seriously urged Tomoyo to run for Japan Prime Minister.  He is to the right below with Professor Yasu Ikegami (at the top of the photo) from Saga University, who is currently the OTEC professor for the world.

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