Updates

Apparently PG&E is as excited as we are to have RFO back online. 😉 The PSPS outage only lasted a couple of days, but it stings to miss even a single night of observing!

It’s official! There is a LaserSETI observatory in town, specifically in Sedona, AZ. While the the installation was successful, we were unable to focus the instruments while in Sedona due to the cloudy Arizona skies. So, we will be returning in the coming months to complete this final step. With the addition of the two LaserSETI stations that comprise this observatory, our sky coverage will increase from approximately 18 to 30%. That’s one step closer to monitoring all the sky, all the time. Read more here: https://www.seti.org/new-laserseti-observatory-installed-sedona-az.

After much work, coordination, and patience, the summit of Haleakala has been reenergized since the fire forced them to cut power. It’s always nice to reconnect and find healthy instruments, ready to do science!

The bad news is we won’t be doing any observing tonight, given the weather. Oh well.

At least it’s a beautiful night at RFO!

Exciting news for LaserSETI! Two new LaserSETI stations will be installed this weekend in Sedona, Arizona. Although the current installations in California and Hawai’i observe almost 20% of the sky at one time, that will go up dramatically with the new observatory. You can see here how the LaserSETI team has been hard at work getting ready for the install.

The team’s mascot, Stormy, obviously helping with the preparations.

Part of the team getting ready for the shipment to Sedona.

Preparing the new LaserSETI stations!

We lost power to the summit of Haleakala at approximately 9am Pacific, when Maui Fire Dept requested de-energization to prevent further ignitions and risk to personnel. They’re currently projecting power to remain off through Saturday night.

Thus far, no injuries and structural damages were due to the fire, which is located at around the 7,000-foot elevation level. Four engines, three wildland engines, 11 tankers, five dozers, two helicopters, an Maui Fire Department crew and a 27-person state Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Forestry and Wildlife’s wildland crew were utilized to battle the fire on Thursday. Crater Road remained closed at last report. The Summit District of Haleakalā National Park remains closed until further notice.

We thank all those involved in protecting life and property, as well as observatory efforts to work with first responders and get us back online as soon as possible.

For more information, please see Maui Now or other news sources.

We lost power at the summit of Haleakala today. Looks like planned electrical work, as it was from roughly 9am to 5pm Hawaiian time. I know MECO/Hawaiian Electric has some infrastructure upgrades to do, so this is a Good Thing if it means we avoid more multi-week outages in the future when big storms hit.

Our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply–a fancy battery) kept us running for almost two hours before giving out. That’s slightly under the predicted runtime, but still solid performance I’m happy to see.

Unfortunately, the network upstream from us isn’t battery backed, so there’s nothing we can do remotely when these happen. We just have to let the software execute the automatic failsafe, then check that everything is ok when it comes back online.

In a weather update, this winter has been the worst for observing since we started. Normally winter is one of our best times: a lot of long dark nights with low humidity. This winter has not been that, at either observatory. We did start getting some good–and even simultaneously good–nights in the past couple weeks. Fingers crossed for more clear skies!

Humans have taught other species signals and words for millennia. Some of us have even barked back at a dog, meowed at cat, or mooed at a cow, wondering what–if anything–they understood from our attempt to reach them. Being able to communicate with another species in its own language has always eluded humanity and been a source of quiet discomfort for the SETI field: we can make “contact” with the existence of a signal, but would what we learn be limited?

Putting SETI aside for a moment, imagine the implications of being able to communicate with another species on Earth, especially one so different and clearly intelligent. Could we interfere with them less if we understood their perspective? Could they teach us to improve ocean conservation? What could we learn about human cognition, and intelligence in general, with insights from a second species?

Conversing with a Humpback Whale Named Twain

Only in this context can we begin to understand the magnitude and excitement of this accomplishment. In December of last year, I was in the room with Laurance and most of the SETI Institute’s other scientists. Many of us had given talks about our work, status of our projects, etc. Tons of great ideas and innovative projects. Then Dr. Laurance Doyle rose to give his talk, not just sharing but demonstrating that this breakthrough was forthcoming. Rarely am I in a room with so many distinguished scientists, but I looked around the room as he was walking off stage, and we all had this look on our faces as if we’d all brought our best biplanes to the hangar and Laurance had just pulled up in the shiny new jet plane he made.

On a personal level, I would like to add that I’ve known Laurance for over 20 years. Not only is he the kindest person you could hope to meet, but he’s been studying whales as long as I’ve known him, so this is a result of a huge amount of effort and dedication, which makes sense given the enormity of the task. He’s also one of the smartest people you could hope to meet. He’s not even a biologist actually. He’s a physicist, and one with some of the simplest and most interesting ideas that I’ve ever seen for studying the intersection of relativity and quantum physics, for example.

So, when I say “hats off” to my friend Laurance and his team, I mean the biggest hat to the most deserving person you can imagine!

For more information, I recommend:

• A recent talk by Dr. Doyle
• A Templeton Foundation article with video and links
• UC Davis podcast interview

Even with my general (and limited) understanding of biology, that unless it’s forbidden by the laws of physics, nature generally does anything and everything you can imagine… This one blew my mind.

And not just once, with creatures having eyes on their shells, but with the number of times eyes have evolved within just that genus (remember: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), and also the correlation between nerve holes in the shell and eye complexity.

Researchers Solve Mystery of The Sea Creature That Evolved Eyes All Over Its Shell

It’s amazing how something can make total sense while being hard to wrap your brain around it at the same time!

It is a sad day indeed to share the news of William (Jack) Welch’s passing. I won’t duplicate here his achievements and awards, list his papers, nor attempt to wax poetic about his outsized contributions to the fields of radio astronomy and SETI. That’s all here and here.

What I’d like to add is that he was a wonderful person. As you can see from the picture below, he always had a smile, kindness, warmth, fun, and positive energy to share. He had the soul of an explorer, realistic yet indefatigable.

We’ll miss you, Jack.

Won’t you come, and wash the rain away? For those in California and around the world laboring under a deluge from the sky, perhaps this video from the frontiers of astroseismology will be entertaining and informative, if not comforting.

The short version is that it’s not implausible for a microscopic black hole to enter the sun, start consuming material and producing back-pressure against the massive gravity. As you can imagine, its growth eventually alters the life cycle of the star, but perhaps more subtly than you’d think.

And, back in the context of SETI and general cosmology, while we’re pretty sure our Sun doesn’t (yet) have one, it is encouraging to think that we can place constraints on the number of primordial black holes there are flying around out there, as well as confirm or rule out some dark matter theories.