Seeing the man on the moon

Friday, I went to the monthly astronomy lecture at Maikalani expecting to hear more about Fermi's paradox. It turned out the paradox (more about that later) was only a stepping stone to the big news, which is that astronomers are plotting to build the largest telescope ever to search for habitable planets within 50 light-years.

Jeff Kuhn, the lecturer and head of the Haleakala Observatory of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, modestly described himself as just a cog in an international venture to build The Colossus, but he's the project director and, I suspect the concept is mostly his.

The-Colossus.com is already a private corporation with an (unnamed) capitalist backing it. I was surprised to learn from Jeff that for the past 150 years, all the successive largest telescopes have been built with private money and that the cost, in constant dollars, has remained the same -- the Yerkes was $6 million and the Colossus will be about a billion, which is what $6 million was a century ago.

(Apparently Jeff does not count the Russian 6-meter telescope, which was larger than Palomar when finished, but since it was built in the cloudy Caucasus Mountains was never used for anything much.)

Russian theory is better than Russian practice, and Jeff takes off from a half-century old idea about advanced civilizations. As they advance, they need more and more energy. The Colossus is intended to spot an extrasolar planet whose inhabitants use 1% or more of their star's energy. (Earth is at about 0.4%.)

The inner Solar system (only terrestrial planets) as seen at 50 light years away from the Sun by the Colossus. The Sun to Mars distance will be seen at the angle of about 100 milliarcseconds. The sizes of the planets and the Sun on this image are not scaled with the distance.
Civilizations acquire more and more information and storing it takes energy -- think of Google's server farms and their huge air conditioning bills, multiplied many times. The laws of thermodynamics require that light energy, once absorbed, be re-emitted as heat. ("The real global warming," says Jeff, like me a skeptic about what might be considered AGW-lite that people are demonstrating against.)

As a result, a planet in its star's habitable zone will, once it acquires a sufficiently advanced life, be dim in visible light and bright in infrared. Even if the aliens don't want to signal their presence to the nearest, perhaps hostile advanced lifeforms, they cannot help it.

No telescope can even almost spot this optically dim, bright infrared planet, in part because even the biggest is not big enough, and in part because each successive biggest telescope is built to see more and more of the Universe.The Colossus would be designed to focus on something as small as a planet at 50 light-years distance -- it could also see a man (your size) on the moon, or the surface of a distant star. (This is why I suspect Jeff is behind the concept; Haleakala Observatory is a solar specialist.)

To do the job, the team has designed a group of 60 8-meter mirrors arranged in a circle about 250 feet across. Ideal sites would be the same as ideal sites for other giant telescopes, Hawaii or Chile.

The cost is estimated to be half that of current proposals for next successive biggest (general) 'scope, about a billion.

With money, it could be up in 5 years, but it would require nightly observations of the 60 nearest stars for several years to accumulate the tiny differences that would spot the planet.

Which brings us back to Fermi's paradox, which asks why, if life is common in the Galaxy, we don't hear from those other guys? Jeff notes that as discoveries have accumulated, each successive one tells us that Earth is nothing special. If Earth has life, then lots of other stars should have planets with life.

I buy this argument, if you consider the statistical event under scrutiny to be the likelihood of advanced life. If Earth is like billions of other planets, then at least millions ought also to have life. It's the old Drake equation.

The thing about the Drake equation, though, is that it is almost all unknowns. Usually it is said that the only known factor is that there is life on Earth -- the factor for life-in-the-universe is 1.

But I am more interested in biology than in physics, and there is another known factor hidden in the Drake equation (though I have never seen it discussed). We know how long it took from the beginning of one-celled life to multi-celled life.

If we guess that, once multi-cellular life (or something close to it) occurs, intelligence necessarily follows (through the power of natural selection, which we  know operates wherever there is life), then advanced life should be common.

However, there's an "if" that the astrophysicists do not (so far as I know) worry about. What if the 3 billion years it took to reach eukaryosis -- a hard fact -- is fast? Our experience must be on either the short side or the long side of average. We don't know which, although it is more likely we were on the fast track.

The reason is that the lifespan of the Galaxy is finite. It might be that given enough time, advanced life almost always results, but we are not given unlimited time. Compared to 3 billion years, we have only a little time to work with. If the average time to eukaryosis is, say, 6 billion or 9 billion years, then advanced life will be scarce, because not enough time has passed yet.

The statistic of interest then is not something close to 1 (life almost everywhere), but the number of microbial interactions that have to occur before one microbe absorbs another without digesting it and also manages to incorporate its machinery in its own output.

Put that way, the number of missed opportunities before our success must have exceeded the number of particles in the universe, and life begins to look most improbable. "Accidental" as Jeff expressed it when I asked him about it.

In that case, Jeff said, the Colossus would find nothing, and that would tell us something.

My own sense of it, based on the fact that almost every time we learn more about a biological process it turns out to be way more complicated than it looked, is that the progression from one cell to many probably required an intermediate step, perhaps evolution of a virus that coated a microbe and prepared it for absorption without digestion. Or something.

Anyway, Fermi's paradox is like the question of theodicy. Religionists ask themselves, if god is good, how can there be evil, and tie themselves in knots trying to put constraints on a putatively omnipotent Big Spook. Much easier to answer if you propose that god is not good. Fermi's paradox fades if life is scarce.

Bad timing

Senator John McCain continued his tirade against Chuck Hagel Sunday, again scolding him for predicting that the "surge" in Iraq would be the worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam. McCain picked a bad day for it, since a coordinated series of bombings across Baghdad killed dozens of Shiites.

Just like before the surge.

Commentators from all angles of the political spectrum usually treat the surge as a success. Often, until he got caught with his zipper open, using its alleged success to praise General Petreus.

It is only stating (but, regretably not restating) the obvious to say that the surge was a failure.

If its goal was to give our defeated Army time and space to retreat in orderly fashion from the battlefield, then you could call it a success. But that wasn't what it was sold as.

Before the surge, Iraq was having a civil war, with Sunni rebels successfully paralyzing a mostly Shiite central government. And now, Iraq is having a civil war, with Sunni rebels successfully paralyzing a mostly Shiite central government. Not that the Sunni had to do much, since the Maliki government was barely functioning anyway.

Book Review 269: The Big Rich

THE BIG RICH: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, by Bryan Burroughs. 466 pages, illustrated. Penguin, $29.95

The men profiled by Bryan Burroughs in “The Big Rich” were four of the least interesting businessmen America produced.

They did not innovate in business organization, like Rockefeller; or in operations, like the first Howard Hughes; or in research, like Thomas Watson. All they did was find oil or, just as often, manage to acquire rights to oil somebody else had found.

The only thing that distinguished them from a smelly, ignorant prospector tugging his mule through the High Sierras was lots and lots of money. And they may have been even more ignorant, with the partial exception of Clint Murchison, who had some interests beyond oil, cattle and cards.

Burroughs tells their story with zest, although his claim to be a Texan is suspect. He calls a steer a heifer. And there are some other howlers. He has Joe McCarthy, a senator, chairing the House Un-American Activities Committee; and moves Estes Kefauver from Tennessee to Kansas.

We would not be interested in H.L. Hunt, Murchison, Sid Richardson or Hugh Cullen if they hadn't used their money to try to influence politics. Here Burroughs fails his reader, by not putting these Texas yahoos in context.

In “The Big Rich” their ignorant ideas appear to rise from the prairie, fully-formed like a reverse of Athena rising from the head of Zeus; but, of course, they were boys of their time. Their ideas, if they can be said to have had any, came out of the same backwater that produced senator and governor Pappy Daniels and the governors Ferguson.

When, late in life, all four, but especially Hunt, decided to try to influence American political thought, they brought knives to a gunfight. Burroughs says, “America in 1950 had not a single leading politician who could be termed conservative by today's standards.” He overstates, as Senator William Jenner was as conservative as anyone and influential, even if forgotten now.

But it's true that all four did their best to add sludge to public life. That they were largely ineffective was due more to their lack of skills in publicity than to a lack of bad intentions.

It's true that American political discourse is more self-consciously rightwing than it used to be, but the intellectual origins of that change were in the East, not Texas.

Much the most interesting part of the book is the collapse of the second generation of the Big Rich. America has been friendly to money dynasties, starting with the du Ponts. Some families continue to be potent social, political, cultural and, occasionally, even business forces into the fourth, fifth, even sixth generations.

Richadson had no offspring, but the families of Hunt and Murchison attempted to get even richer and failed, while the Davis fortune and influence was dissipated, in part by philanthropy.

In sum, “The Big Rich” is gossipy and fun and not too reliable. What I got most out of it was the resurrection of the career of Glenn McCarthy, who almost made the Big Rich but flamed out.

He was, in many ways, more interesting that any of the four who made it, but he did not have the dinero and American popular culture has thrown him down the memory hole.

Book Review 268: "Only a Poor Old Man"

Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge: 'Only a Poor Old Man,' by Carl Barks. 240 pages. Fantagraphics

Uncle Scrooge was my favorite comic when I was 8 or 9 years old, although my favorite character was Gyro Gearloose. I never could get enough of him.

I did not know that the author-illustrator of the comic was Carl Barks – Disney was careful not to allow credit to accrue to anybody but Disney.

Barks was a westerner, born in 1901, one of the last of that great generation of free spirits that also produced Linus Pauling and Eric Hoffer. Barks's accomplishments were less ambitious but, as it has turned out, still full of ideas for later readers to mine.

This volume has commentary by a gaggle of American and, curiously, Italian scholars, mainly academics.

This volume, 12^th in the Fantagraphics catalogue raisonne of Barks but first in terms of the McDuck legend, introduces the skinflinty but honest Scotch duck and explains where he accumulated his “three cubic acres” of money.

My boyhood reading came a little later in the series, and I was surprised to see how hard-edged the original Barks conception was. Scrooge, though honest, was ready to take advantage of the unwary (and was consequently often taken advantage of because of his own reluctance to pay a reasonable rate for services); and the Beagle Boys were not only vicious but cruel and murderous. Those qualities softened as the Eisenhower years rolled on.

Barks was not political; none of the monarchism that makes Disney so unpalatable ever seeped into Duckburg, but his attitude toward wealth and the getting and spending of it was complex, as befitted a child of the frontier, where great disparities of wealth were usual and where Barks himself was one of the have-nots.

Scrooge liked money for its own sake. He was not one for luxury, except the luxury of swimming in money. But he also was not the pinched and querulous miser of classic aspect – he was not like Ebenezer Scrooge. He did not hate and fear people with less money (though he feared the Beagle Boys' schemes), which distinguishes him from today's rich. Scrooge McDuck just liked money.

Much of the appeal of the great comic artists was their subversive intent. Barks's subversion centered on Huey, Dewey and Louie, young ducklings who consistently showed more common sense and foresight than any older residents of Duckburg.

As with all Fantagraphics reprints, “Only a Poor Old Man” is done in first-rate style all the way. They are not cheap, and Scrooge would be loath to buy his own book, but in the long run they are worth it.

Grappling with competition

If wrestling isn't a sport, according to the Olympic organizing committee, what is?

There has been some speculation that the decision was political, to make way for something called modern pentathlon. I am sure the reason is the same as the reason for the rearrangement of every other public event, from State of the Union addresses to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade – if it does not televise well, kill it.

Or change it till it's as good as dead, which means arranging for sponsor plugs. That is why, for example, the Macy's parade changed from a mildly amusing shared spectacle to an unwatchable infomercial.

However, with sport – unlike the Macy's parade – there is a social-philosophical question: What is sport?

Sport is competition against time, distance or weight, or against another person. Everything else is pastime.

So, golf is a sport but mountain climbing is not. Swimming races are sport but diving is not. Wrestling is sport, gymnastics is not.

More generally, if style points are awarded, it cannot be sport.

Television is also responsible for eliminating one of the other markers of a sport, the tie.

Ties, when between skilled opponents, are the most exciting outcomes in sport. The Laver-Newcombe match that led TV to kill ties in tennis was, without question, the most exciting sporting event ever televised.

I watched it, and was willing for the match to go on until the sun set, if need be; but it isn't really necessary. It makes sense to establish a time limit. If one of two opponents cannot prevail after a set time, then the verdict is that, on that day, they were equal.

If they are equal at the supreme level of effort possible, then, that is a good thing to be able to say.

College football used to understand this. Several “games of the century” between unbeaten untied teams ended in ties. What's wrong with that?

The most dramatic, heart-stopping sporting event I ever watched in person was a tie, back when I was a sportswriter, before I lost interest in sport and pastimes as practiced today.

It was a college swimming race, something of a stunt set up by the coach, who had two All-America distance men. It has been nearly 50 years and I cannot recall their names, but I recall the race vividly.

At the end of a routine intercollegiate competition, the home coach staged a race at a rarely used length – I cannot recall whether it was in yards or meters, and I forget the length. 10,000 yards, I think.

The entrant from the other school quickly faded, leaving the two home men to fight it out in front of a small audience of mostly teammates and a few friends.

One man was tall and slender, the other short and compact. But, as their coach knew, they were perfectly matched.

The race took something over 20 minutes, freestyle, and during that long time, neither man ever got more than a head in front of the other. The tension was crackling. Each man was going all-out because, as the coach had plotted, the winner was probably going to break the intercollegiate record.

They did. By minutes. In a dead heat.

White mischief

I agree with every word of Sam Tanenhaus's New Republic piece about how the Republican Party changed from a party of  civil rights to one against civil rights. His history is precisely what I observed in the South.

I have never read a piece of political journalism before that I didn't disagree with at least part of.

I would add just three points:

Although Tanenhaus is no doubt correct as he traces the intellectual history of the transformation in ideology in the national Republican Party, Southerners didn't need any Eastern pointy-head intellectuals to revive the political thought of John Calhoun. We took that in with our mother's milk. My grandfather, born in 1890, was named John Calhoun Eagar.

Second, though Tanenhaus does not mention it, his history explains the desperate GOP opposition to the Voting Rights Act (and exposes the libertarians as just rightwingers who won't admit to it).

Three, the reason the Republicans were not concerned as they lost the Latino vote was that they were certain, for ideological reasons, that Latin immigrants, as they became citizens, or their children grew old enough to vote, would vote their social conservative views and not their economic interests or their desire for self-respect. This was obtuse when contemplating a social group that puts so much emphasis on respect.

The more or less simultaneous disappearance of the Republican black vote was a feature, not a bug, and the party was happy to see them go.

Nut graf:

But that history, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party's electoral woes. The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun's ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

Dodging a bullet

We haven't heard much from Sarah Palin lately, which is a shame, because she's almost always good for a laugh.

But not every time. Now, in the kind of gratuitous slap at the president that passes for policy among Republicans these days, she is demanding that Obama make some sort of gesture for Chris Kyle, and condemning him (Obama) for not ordering the nation's flags down to half-staff when Kyle died.

"We may never know to what extent Chris kept us free or how many lives he saved by his brave actions in the line of fire. But his fellow warriors know how important he was," Palin wrote.

Yeah, we know one he didn't save. His own. Because the gun nut provided a weapon and ammunition to a man who was -- Kyle thought -- mentally unbalanced. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, yeah. The man shot Kyle. You could say he was asking for it. Too bad about the bystander who also got shot to death, though.

Scary to think about that mean-spirited, small-minded woman in high office.