While love and happiness prevail, my mind nevertheless wanders and wonders a lot.  I see homeless people and realize that with only a wrong decision or two, that could have been me.   I have been lucky,  Very lucky. I consider my life to be a success.  Of the  117 billion born , surely I rank in the top one-tenth of one percent.  In other words I am among the best 11.7 million  Homo sapiens  who ever lived.  I'm tempted to improve this by another order of magnitude to 1.17 million, for it has only been in the past century that life became tolerable for most, but all this analysis is meaningless, for what is success? In this thoughtful mood, I looked back on certain points in my life and wondered where I would be today if I made another decision.   A big one was, which college? As a junior at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was only an above-average student, with no athletic talent and little social skills. Then my life changed.  My blog describes this all. I did not bother to ap

Roger Penrose has been my scientific hero for a very long time.  He might not be the smartest, for 47-year old Terence Tao, the   Mozart of Maths,   at 230, has a higher IQ.  Setting aside intelligence quotients,   one list  early this year has Stephen Hawking ( IQ only 160-170 ), who passed away five years ago, as the smartest ever.  In this ranking, Tao only comes in at #27, with Benjamin Netanyahu   (the leader of Israel, 180 ) #12, James Woods ( 180, the actor ) #18 and Marilyn Vos Savant (w ho Guinness had in 1986 as possessing the highest IQ in the world at 186 ) #20.  No sign of Penrose. Who is Roger Penrose ?  From  Wikipedia : Was born in England and is now 91 years old. Is an emeritus professor of math at Oxford. Won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for "discovering" the concept of the Black Hole. In his twenties communicated with MC Escher to create the  Penrose Triangle .  Simple, yet impossible. His 1974  Penrose tiling  is difficult to explain, but was observed a decade la

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

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 formation of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto. Sinc