Adventure -- Heather and Marty
Description: A day with the kids, and Disney, and some cool stuff at the Lick Observatory in San Jose (ish).(Marty's Report):
This is at the pre-science part of our outing. James originally needed us to watch the kids, then, hoping I would be both interested and not narcoleptic (I, uh, tend to fall asleep at live events), he invited me to see a lecture with some ancient Disney guys who were responsible for part of the Disney parks. Benjamin wanted to go as well, so we left Heather with Arianna at the Disney Museum--I'd never been in there and was wowed by how not Podunk it was--and drove over to the Lucas building (both in the Presidio). There was a line to get in. I thought it would be two dozen old people in a side conference room, but the whole theater, probably 400 people, was packed. Who knew there was so many Disney geeks?So Yoda here is outside the entrance to the theater, and inside are the costumes for Boba Fett and Darth Vader. It must be a trip to be someone like Lucas and be able to point your finger, and a whole huge complex arises under it, including a parking garage with lots of pipes. Amazing.
The lecture was begun by a rather odd woman whose passion, apparently, are postcards from the Bay Area. She struck me as someone who had found something to know everything about, and having fused that energy to something, avoided defusing from life. But who knows. Maybe she's very well adjusted. The other there were grey hairs who worked on the Disney parks in different capacities, and told stories from the old days.
I did fall asleep. And Benjamin squirmed. But James liked it, though he wanted to hear more from the fellow who designed the animatronics. I can't say as I really get the Disney stuff, but I respect the depth that James goes with it, and appreciate that he lets me be a Philistine in this regard. Well, in many regards. He's very tolerant.
Then we had lunch at the Presidio bowling alley, and I'll be damned if they didn't make a great veggie burger! They all went off to Benjamin's piano lesson (he's recently decamped from the violin) and we headed home for a few hours before heading down to the Lick Observatory.
We discovered the Lick Observatory, which has been around for a hundred plus years, last year while on a day trip to somewhere other than where we were, and the Internets (that bunch of tubes) told us that, hey, you know, this might be a nice place to go to, ya think? And holy shit, was it! This building here is one of the most beautiful physical structures I've ever seen or been in. It was designed for what was then the largest telescope ever created, which is also pictured here. It's way outclassed by other telescopes in the world, which they keep building bigger and bigger, but in its day it was a wonder. And it's still being used. One of the draws of going this night was that we would get to look through this and another large telescope (down the hall). But I'm jumping ahead.
We drove down on a beautiful Saturday evening, jabbering about aliens and life on other planets (the topic of the night's lecture from a Berkeley astronomer). The drive up didn't seem as long-and-slightly-vomit-inducing as last time, maybe because I was driving up. It's gorgeous dry hills, leading up to the top of Mt. Davidson, which looks over Silicon Valley and San Jose. I love oak trees and dry environments, and this was a wonderful example. I've been all over the world at this point, and I've confirmed that this kind of place is the ecosystem analogue to the bio-geographic topography of my soul. So I liked it.
So we get up to the top of the mountain, to the complex of buildings scattered over the lumpy top of the mountain, and a nice young man directs us past a gate to the main building, where another nice man directs us to a parking spot. We were told we could do a tailgate party, so we brought food and watched this sunset. Well, ok, we brought a bunch of crap food that's supposed to make you feel happy to be experiencing a novel event, but with age comes the sad fact that chips and candy don't really cut it anymore. But we did make sandwiches. So there was that.I think it was a full house, and it was a mix of folks with disposable income and time, mostly our age or older. We didn't mingle too much--we're really not much minglers. The evening started with a concert by a trio of world musicians, a tabla player, a hammered dulcimer player, and a guitarist. They weren't quite my thing, but were good and enjoyable to listen to. (The guitarist, who I gathered was the only through line of 30 years of collaborations with other musicians, made a number of plugs for funding. God bless him. It must be a bitch to survive these days in the post-music industry apocalypse, full of mutants and internet vampires and zombies, among which you have to scrounge old food from dark and scary supermarkets.)
Then we heard the lecture from the Berkeley professor, who has been busy discovering new planets. The focus was mostly on the frickin' amazing last few years of exploding amounts of data on the actual verifiable existence of other planets (exoplanets). They're really out there and we can see them, and there's maybe 5 billion or so in just this galaxy. One out of 5 stars has at least one habitable planet. And that doesn't count any moons that can function, life-wise, as planets. In other words, they're utterly, ridiculously, common. There just has to be at least some pond scum growing out there with all these substrates to grow on.He was fun to listen to, and was like most true scientists I've met, having a broad mind, curious, able to hold a lot of human experience, and know their shit. We chatted with him later about discovery of life, how technically that might happen, and some of the socio-politics of discovery and knowledge, in which he appreciated me as a therapist for working on the psychologically healthy society that bothers to fund people like him. Sweet guy.
After his lecture, we went to look through the telescopes. The first was the built by students, and we got to see a binary star system, like, with out naked eye. But the second one, the ancient one, was the coolest, a globular cluster that felt 3D. It is an amazing thing to look out into the galaxy as you would look through binoculars at something distant on the Earth. For some part of my mind, it made the two equivalent and now my body feels linked up to something maybe 100 light years away, subjectively no different from the next town over. Isn't that amazing? There's a book called The Shock of the New, about the development of Modern Art, which points out how high-rise architecture changed the public's perception of space and dimension, by allowing for views of the "2D city" to become 3D. Technology matters like this: it creates the capacity for the limited human sensorium to grasp new perspectives, which make huge changes in culture. The philosopher Ken Wilber says that maturation is the capacity to hold more and more perspectives in mind (and often in paradox). This big stupid tube that channels light to a little eyepiece, built a hundred years ago, has advanced my own complexity as a human and mind. This is why Heather and I go bat shit crazy with the whiffs of anti-tech that occasionally blow through our lives like foetid waftings from the local abattoir. The smell of death.We hung out a bit with the amateur astronomers with their big ass telescopes out back, and looked again at the globular cluster, and chatted with them and with the Berkeley guy again. We then headed back down with Heather ferrying us safely home, through the wee hours, lit by stars.
(Heather's Report):
So, first off, we met James and his kids, Benjamin and Ariana, (who call us "Aunt and Uncle" although we are not blood related, but probably that close), at the Disney Museum where James, Marty and Benjamin were going to attend some talk over at ILM (yes, Lucas' mega studios in the Presidio), which I have always been impressed at how well they matched it with the buildings of the Presidio (which was a requirement for having it there). Marty is still fuming over San Francisco's (board of the Presidio really) extremely idiotic decision to pass on letting Lucas build a museum around his works and art that he's collected, for free, no cost to the city. Now it's going to be built in Chicago. Really smart move, dumb board people.
Anyway. Off the boys went and I watched Ariana. First we made little kaleidoscopes at the Disney Museum "creativity center" which was held out in the hallway due to there being a summer camp where it normally is held. Then out to the lawn where Ariana ran about with me "chasing" her or her trying to chase me. Then she wanted to find a four-leaf clover and thusly we poured over the lawn in front of the museum but alas, none were found. Apparently the leprechauns take them when you are not looking. Or so I was told by Ariana, who is five. So I started braiding clover flowers together and she was apparently so charmed by this that she collected flowers for me to braid, getting enough to make five, one for each of our party (when the boys got back) and then decided to get more so she could "give them away to people around the museum". I was fine with braiding them, gave my hands something to do, but when it came to giving them away, suddenly she got shy which she fully stated to me. I encouraged her to think about her idea to give flowers away and asked why she wanted to do that.
Ariana - "To make people happy!"
Me - "Okay, so why would you want to do that?"
Ariana - "Because I would like it!"
Me - "So can you think of that feeling of liking it again?"
She nods.
Me - "Okay, I want you to think of that feeling, take a deep breath and choose someone in front of the museum to give a flower to. You can even go up there, give it and run away!"
She pauses for a little bit but then I can see her visibly bracing herself and off she goes, running up to a little girl her age and places a flower on the table in front of her and scurries back to me. Their mom was sitting right next to me and of course had her kids (two daughters) thank Ariana who promptly hid her face in my arm. She wouldn't give anymore away but kudos for taking that first risk! The boys returned and we went to have a burger at the Presidio bowling lanes before James and Spawn had to head out for Benjamin's piano lessons. He's seven and of that age where he's changing his mind about everything. First it was violin, now piano. Soccer and then baseball. It's a thing, I think. I did it too when I was a kid.
Then later in the day, Marty and I began our long journey to the attend a musical concert, scientific talk and telescope viewing at the Lick Observatory up in the mountains above San Jose. The drive to San Jose isn't all that bad but the road up to the observatory, where you need clear (and dry) skies, is pretty twisty and windy and all that. It almost takes another hour just to get up the "hill"! But it's all gorgeous oak grassland and oak foothills ecosystems and smells dry and leafy and pretty damn gorgeous. Plus, seeing ground squirrels hanging out on the side of the road was pretty cool. These days, I'm pretty ecologically and environmentally oriented but.... If I had been any better at math than I actually am (which is about the skill level of a retarded gerbil), I very likely would have been an astronomer.
I began reading fantasy at a pretty young age. I think I read "The Hobbit" when I was 10, and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy when I was 12. I watched Star Trek (the Original Series) as I was growing up (reruns of course, as I was born in the early 70's) with my father. I gained a deep love for Doctor Who (starting with the Fourth Doctor) through my cousin David. I read "The Tripods Trilogy"by John Christopher when I was younger as well (dude, whomever called that "children's reading" was crazy, those were intense books). I was a voracious reader and could finish books well within a couple of hours, having taught myself to speed read. I devoured science-fiction books at phenomenal rates. And since I have cinematic quality imagination, I could "be there" in my books. Or I could make my own and was an avid writer of science fiction myself.
I seemed to have some sort of natural understanding of the vastness of the universe from very early on. As soon as I understood in school about the Sun, the Earth, our solar system, galaxy and beyond, somehow, I could imagine and comprehend those vast distances without much trouble. And thusly, I grew up with a solid belief (well, maybe one would call it faith) that there was other intelligent life out there. Of course this was fueled by my love for science-fiction but to me, it was just logical. All that space (and we probably didn't even know as much as we know now), how could there not be? Then, suddenly, we were discovering other planets. Outside our own solar system! Exoplanets as they are called. This was back in the mid-1990s and a few were trickling in here and there. Today, July 2014, there have been over four thousand confirmed exoplanets discovered. It was like the floodgates opened as our technology got better and better. And, with the understanding that our own planet resides in what is called the "Goldilocks Zone" or "Habitable Zone", we started looking for planets that also reside in this zone. Neither too hot (close to its star), nor too cold (too far from its star), but "just right", where a level temperature and liquid water could be maintained.
So earlier in the year, maybe last year, I can't remember, we were "wandering around" and in the midst of wandering around, decided we had had enough of our iPhone 4 phones having issues with the new upgrade to iOS7 and looked up (using our phones!) the nearest Apple store to take the plunge (after years with our trusty 4 model). We walked away with shiny new 5s phones and immediately began playing with Siri, since she did not come with the old model. She led us up high into the mountains to the Lick Observatory. We wandered around and I swear, the old 40" telescope which had been the most powerful in the world when it was built, was in the most gorgeous observation dome. Marty posted photos above. Lovely wood and copper trimmings. They had to move the dome by hand back in the day and use ladders to view through the scope, but now they they can raise and lower the floor. After heading out, I found out later that they do "visitor nights" where you can come look through the big telescopes. So we were so coming back. Hence the Adventure.
So we got tickets way back when and on the day, headed out down to San Jose with Marty driving as he did not want to take on the crazy road out from San Jose up to the observatory at night. I was bred as a driver in the mountains, these roads don't scare me, natch! Anyway, it was a lovely drive up through what I know now to be oak grassland ecosystems, with ground squirrels sitting on the fences or side of the road watching the cars go by. That really specific dry smell of this geographical area (although I would not be surprised if we were to smell it in other Mediterranean areas of the world!) Okay, I already said that.
We ate junk food... ugh, getting "too old for this" and part of a vaguely healthy sandwich. We've switched mostly to organic foods for our "make your own stuff" but occasionally feast on stuff that really shouldn't have even been created on this planet. And later, of course, felt crappy for it. Then we got our "free" mug or wine glass, Marty having gotten the coffee mug (for tea, natch) and I got the wine glass (for ice cream parfait, natch) and settled in for the concert which was made of, as Marty stated, a trio made of a guitarist, a hammered dulcimer-ist and a tabla player. It was sort of world fusion and I generally enjoyed it but was a little antsy, as I was a little worried we weren't going to get a chance to see through the scopes as it had been cloudy and sprinkling earlier (go figure, in a drought, and on the night we DON'T need fucking rain, it starts raining) and also wanting to get to the lecture by a Berkeley professor who has been on teams locating habitable planets.
But finally that moment came and we filed into the conference room where I promptly went to the front of the "classroom", as I always do. I never sit in the back. Front row for me in classes and you better believe my hand is often in the air. So, I immediately grabbed right in front of the podium. The dude who had poked his out at the end of the concert to grab the last bits of the music was our professor. You can check out his site at Berkeley here. He was an engaging speaker and like Marty said, felt like a "true scientist", open to those "what if" questions and energy open like a fucking shining beacon that screams "I am SO interested in..... (fill in blank)!!!" A lot of what he had to say I already knew (partly because I keep up with this shit, but also because I had Marty and I listen to a Nova presentation about exoplanets on the drive down).
But some I didn't. Like one out of every five stars may have habitable planets and even at the most pessimistic views of the data, there could still be over 40,000 habitable planets. I may have gotten the numbers wrong. My question (my hand flying up as soon as he opened the floor to questions) was about moons. I have an exoplanet app on my phone that I can mark "favorite" planets and I have all the habitable zone ones marked thusly so far, including gas giants. Well, gas giants aren't going to have life (AS WE KNOW IT) but their moons could possibly harbor life, maybe? I mean look at Endor and Pandora. I know, sci-fi, but... well, he stated that adding those possibilities, which ARE possibilities, it could change the numbers hugely. I mean, Jupiter has what, 63 moons? Two of which may have liquid water under their icy surfaces.
Then it was announced that amazingly, the skies had parted and the telescopes were up and running. So off we went to wait to see through the 36" telescope which had been built by astronomy students and is still used from all over the world, people logging in time to view through it. We saw a binary star system, two glowing points of light far from us (can't remember how far they said). It was cool but not nearly impressive as going to look through the old 40" at a star cluster some hundreds of light years away from us. Tons of little points of light, but what was so impressive was the 3D nature of the whole thing. Like looking into a bowl filled with stars, as if you placed your face just into the surface. Or you know those Magic Eye things were you can focus in a certain way and see the image in all the chaos, but you can continue to look around in those depths without losing the focus. That was pretty fucking amazing.
Then Marty was wondering if the signs of life could be detected with our current technology and I noted our professor turning into a room in the hallway ahead of us, so I said, "Well, ask him." and he was still fully open to questions despite our stalking. Turns out that we need a little more boost of technology but we're getting there. Basically we might be able to spectographically see differences in planets that might have liquid water and maybe plant life, thusly atmosphere. Also, Marty brought up the idea of "seeders", meaning ancient civilizations that might have "seeded" the universe with intelligent life. Think "Prometheus" without the really stupid parts. Dr. Marcy mentioned "planet hopping", basically jumping planets that might swing by (natural processes apparently) and heading out in the vastness, as a hypothetical as well. We chatted about the Fermi Paradox for a bit and went our separate ways after he thanked Marty for being a therapist (that doesn't happen very often!) and me for my ecological ways, hoping that folks like us might get us to the point where we might find something. Next generation, he kept saying, for more advanced detections. Sigh. My "I want to live forever to see what the hell happens" stuff was really triggered. Screw the next generation of astronomers, I want it now!!
Then out to the back where amateur astronomers had their, well, not so amateur telescopes (to my untrained eye anyway) set up for the public to look through. We were able to see the star cluster as a cloudy.... cloud in the sky, bringing to mind immediately the sensation of having one's face inside it from before. Professor Marcy appeared again (so, maybe he was stalking US) and happily got to use his laser pointer to point out in the Cygnus constellation where the Kepler mission has been staring at for years. That was cool, because suddenly it was like my head was rushing outwards, knowing that our thousands and thousands of currently confirmed exoplanets are hailing from this, to my eye, tiny part of the vastness of space. Oh my gods, this is so fucking awesome! More, give me more!!!
And then off we went home, with me driving in the deep dark and late hours, and us jabbering away about different ideas surrounding intelligent life. Such as:
Marty - "Maybe we ARE the seeders if there isn't anything else out there?"
Heather - "C'mon, 14 billions years and nothing else out there??"
Marty - "Well, good point... but...."
And off we'd go again on some other idea. It is still my personal belief that we are not the only sentience out here and at some point, we will make contact, or vice versa.
May it be so.
