The death toll for Category 4 Hurricane Helene is now up to 64 .  Surprisingly enough, South Carolina is up to 23, with Florida at 11, with 10 of them from the Tampa Bay area.  Perry and Tallahassee had none.  Note that the dangerous quadrant is to the northeast ( 0 to 90 degrees ).  These numbers are expected to further rise.  There is particular worry about North Carolina.   4.8 million lost power.   Notice how the eye of Helene has circled back to Tennessee. I read an article by John Crisp on  Live on Mars? How about life on Earth? What should be the priority of NASA?  Send people to the Moon and Mars?  Or minimize mammoth expenses by focusing on telescopic explorations to find life in our solar system and beyond? I once worked on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the NASA Ames Research Center, and eight years ago Harry Jones, who works there, speculated that the  cost of the first human mission to Mars wo...

Four years ago the  Smithsonian Channel  featured Steven Hawking on four space documentaries.  One was  Leaving Earth:  Or, How to Colonize a Planet .  He passed away in 2018 at the age of 76 before the program was completed.  I just watched this episode and it helped me synthesize variant thoughts in my mind about the ultimate fate of Humanity. In 1976 I spent a summer at NASA's Ames Research Center, joining a group of university faculty on Project Orion to  design the first device capable of detecting an extrasolar planet .  At that time, the planets of our solar system were the only ones ever seen.  After meeting Carl Sagan at Ames during that interval to view the first photo sent back by Viking 1, five years later when I was working for the U.S. Senate, I helped him convince the U.S. Congress to gain the initial funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Established was annual funding for 12 years, leading to the forma...