THE FIRST SIGN OF POSSIBLE EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE?

As I'm completing this posting last night soon after the first presidential debate, I'll hope to get reinforced by non-partisan polls, but my sense is that Joe Biden did okay, but Donald Trump bullied himself to extinction.  There will be a VP debate next Tuesday, followed by two more presidential skirmishes, but it would be best for Biden to just move and maybe avoid that travesty.   Trump needed to make a difference to pull in undecided voters.  He miserably failed.  All Biden had to do was hold his own.  That he did.  No need to do it again.

The speculation for extraterrestrial life:

• Began over 2000 years ago in Greece:
• Then Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, who had to be careful because of The Church, helped pave the way for these creative thoughts.
• In 1686 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle wrote Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.  A paperback version today from Amazon costs $20.
• Much of the search even in those days has been for intelligent life.

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  1869:  French inventor and poet Charles Cros (right) imagined using a parabolic mirror to flash coded messages to Mars and Venus.  That is, to communicate.
• Today, radio dominates the sending and receiving efforts, usually in the microwave.
• Even Nicola Tesla got into this field, saying in 1901 he thought he got strange signals from Mars, and Gugliemo Marconi in 1920 said he detected radio emissions from outer space.
• Albert Einstein felt that some visual means of communication made more sense.

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  Finally in 1959 radio-based SETI began with Giuseppe Cocconi (middle) and Philip Morrison writing about powerful radio transmitters.
• 1961:  Frank Drake (right) offered an equation for this search.

If we luck out and detect an intelligent signal, fabulous.  However, I've long felt that the best we'd ever do was find some kind of life in the Universe, and that the first success would be microbiological.  It was in 1960 when I attended a lecture by Joshua Lederberg (photo when he won the Nobel Prize in 1958) at Stanford where he effectively said:

Exobiology is no more fantastic than the realization of space travel itself, and we have a grave responsibility to explore its implications for science and for human welfare with our best scientific insights and knowledge.

He in effect invented the field of astrobiology, which NASA adopted.  All those projects they sent to Mars looked for signs of microbial life.

When Charles Townes and I proposed in 1976 to the NASA Ames Research Center a technique to not only for the first time detect an extrasolar planet, also measure the atmospheric composition, we were rebuffed.  This concept could also have found compounds like phosphine.

Which leads me to what was announced two weeks ago by an international team of scientists using a telescope on Mauna Kea:  a possible detection of life in the atmosphere of Venus.  What they discovered was a rare gaseous compound, phosphine, which can ONLY be produced by microbes in the natural conditions found on Venus.  Phosphine:

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  Is a toxic gas (smells like rotting fish) with the chemical formula of PH3, that is, one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms.
• The measurement these scientists made at 31 miles from the surface of Venus was 20 parts per billion, which, on that planet, can only come from "life".
• This gas is destroyed by ultraviolet radiation, and thus must be self-replenishing.

Of all the coincidences, there is a New Zealand company, Rocket Lab, working on a mission to Venus...now to discover life.  Their Electron rocket will deliver a satellite, called Photon, to that planet in 2023, which has a probe to crash on the surface.  Quoting Peter Beck (left), CEO:  This mission is to go and see if we can find life.  They have already launched a dozen rockets, putting satellites in orbit for the private sector, NASA and U.S. military.  This effort will cost tens of millions of dollars, and they are seeking partners.  NASA has two larger missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, in their Venus plans.

Of course, I have a special interest in this heavenly body because my next book might be entitled The Venus Syndrome.  I now have a storyline because of these recent developments.

My countdown is at #91, and there are two songs in contention, both by the Chiffons:

• He's So Fine
• One Fine Day

Here they are more recently on PBS.

Now how could these two songs rate higher than something from the Beatles?  The overriding factor is meaningfulness and emotion.  They were released early in 1963 when I was in boot camp.  To recap, I got married late in 1962, worried about being drafted, so joined the Army Reserves, where they sent me to 8 weeks of sheer agony at their Helemano Military Reservation.  I had never before been so physically challenged.  Maybe because of these songs, I survived, and even volunteered for another 8-weeks of advanced infantry training.  After 16 weeks I was in the best condition of my life.

So what is #91?  I'll just select both.

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