This week’s Congressional-style inquiry into the reality of ET contact with humans was very significant, both in terms of its content and what it reveals about our societal trajectory.

Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr. — who allegedly examined the Roswell crash debris in 1947 — testified last week at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
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Running from April 29 to May 3 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the “Citizen Hearing on Disclosure” — while not perfect — hit a genuine homerun.

Before I get to the details, here’s the context:

A variety of long-term and current indicators — including macroeconomic (financial Panic of 2008), geopolitical (the Iran-North Korea crisis), technology (the Mach 25 X-37B space plane), and others — suggest strongly that we are rapidly approaching a 1960s-style “critical state,” apparently due to self-organization over decades of the international economic system.

Such twice-per-century “critical states” can be traced back to Lewis and Clark and always dramatically change the world. Although typically preceded by financial panics and geopolitical stress, critical states are best seen through Maslow Windows that are triggered by major JFK-style economic booms and driven briefly by the societal euphoria (“ebullience”) that always follows.

The most recent Maslow Window was in the 1960s and featured an extraordinarily diverse agenda typical of critical states including the Cuban missile crisis, Apollo Moon program, and Peace Corps. A similar transformative, albeit bumpy road is expected with the arrival of the next critical state/Maslow Window — by mid-decade.

Over the last 100+ years, public fascination with intelligent life in space has surged as we approached each new Maslow Window; Click: State of the Wave: ETs Surge to Center Stage
And recent interest in UFOs, extra-solar planet discoveries, and now the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure indicate this pattern is continuing.

The CHD featured an unprecedented gathering of 40 of the world’s most significant UFO researchers and witnesses.

My favorite was the Tuesday afternoon panel on tampering with nuclear ICBM launch sites in the U.S.. Four former USAF personnel (including three officers) violated their security oaths (one, Capt. Schindale, for the first time) by describing multiple examples of UFOs hovering around Minuteman launch sites, including instances where ICBMs were mysteriously disabled by the UFO. The men and their stories continue to be believable and the national security implications are obvious and stunning.

The Wednesday afternoon panel on the UFO crash at Roswell in 1947 was good too; it featured the usual riveting suspects — Kevin Randle, Don Schmitt, and Stan Friedman. It’s always impressive to hear Dr. Marcel describe his first-person view, as an 11-year old, of the Roswell debris that his father brought home directly from the crash site.

During the week, several participants were invited to speculate on rationales for the multi-decade UFO cover-up by the U.S. government. The suggestions ranged from military technology to new game-changing energy sources.

However, on the Friday “Truth Embargo” session, historian-researcher Richard Dolan recounted two stories of the very disturbed emotional states that former President Jimmy Carter and (later) a high-level Reagan official appeared to be in after receiving key classified information regarding the nature of UFOs. Dolan speculated that a fear-factor may also be involved in the cover-up.

The CHD organizers hope that increased exposure of the facts about UFOs to the media and the public will trigger a true Congressional investigation into what the government and all its retired members actually know about UFOs.

And it’s likely the CHD will be a key step in that direction as we begin to become engulfed by the 1960s Camelot-style ebullience of the approaching Maslow Window.

Dennis Tito wants to send humans to Mars, and he wants to do it before 2020, not in the misty, fuzzy future after 2030! Tito and other ebullient leaders point to a rapidly approaching 1960s-style “critical state” where unprecedented space adventures are just around the corner.

Tito is a world-class example of what we call “early ebullience.” And NASA agrees (2/27/13), “It’s a testament to the audacity of America’s commercial aerospace industry and the adventurous spirit of America’s citizen-explorers.”
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“Ebullience” — a highly positive, almost giddy view of the future — is always associated with the approach of transformative, twice-per-century Maslow Windows over the last 200 years.

Although not seen since JFK and the 1960s Apollo Moon program, when Walter Cronkite predicted that after Apollo 11, “everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk,” this level of extraordinary excitement has been the fundamental driver of great explorations back to Lewis and Clark, as well as the largest macro-engineering projects, such as the Panama Canal and Apollo.

Tito is the former rocket scientist/businessman who ironically paid a hefty fee to the Russians for a ticket to the International Space Station back in 2001, when the U.S. was officially uninterested in fostering space tourism.

This time Tito wants to send a middle-aged married couple, who may have already have had children, on a 501 day mission to Mars using the free-return trajectory available in 2018. With no Mars landing or orbital goals, the mission costs less, is safer, and can be done sooner.

For you Apollo fans this would be like 1968′s Apollo 8 — the first human mission to the Moon’s vicinity — without the orbits, so the Tito mission is obviously not about Mars science. It’s operational focus is cruise science, which features the biggest remaining unknowns: i.e., the mental, physical, and social health of a Mars crew.

In my memory, the idea of using married couples on Mars missions goes back to a suggestion by sociologist Betty Halliwell, Ph.D. in the late 1980s. I remember seeing her paper in 1988 at NASA’s 2nd Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century in Houston. After 25 years, I located her and she promised to send me the paper so I could highlight it here.

But what’s really driving the quintessentially ebullient, 72-year-old Tito?

We have not sent humans beyond the Moon in more than 40 years. I’ve been waiting, and a lot of people my age have been waiting. And I think it’s time to put an end to that lapse.

This giant step in human expansion into the Cosmos “is very symbolic, and we need it to represent humanity with a man and woman.”

What a great way to start the New Year with a peek at the future in space at Spaceport America just north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA.

The Spaceport bills itself as: The world’s first purpose-built, commercial spaceport, designed to enable affordable, efficient and effective space access and unlock the potential of space for everyone.
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(All images by Bruce Cordell on 1/6/2013.)

Designed, built, and operated by the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, the $200+M Spaceport is home to the world’s first commercial passenger spaceline company, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

The word is that the first group — including Branson himself — of the several hundred aspiring future private astronauts who’ve booked their reservation with Virgin Galactic will be launched into suborbital space by the end of 2013.

Spaceport America provides some of the most spectacular evidence that we are indeed just around the corner from the next transformational, 1960s-style Maslow Window, expected by mid-decade.

This view to the east from the security station shows the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space building — a 120,000 sq ft combined hangar and terminal — with the San Andres Mountains in the distance. White Sands National Monument and the Space History Museum in Alamogordo are to the southeast over this range.
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Just north of the Gateway building is the Spaceport Operations Center dome.
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We’ve pulled up to the front door and are looking north.
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On the second floor of the Ops Center the “Eye” window allows us to survey all activities on the runway officially known as the “Governor Bill Richardson Spaceway,” visible to the east.
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Here we look south to the Gateway building from inside the Ops Center (through the glass).
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In this north view we’re experiencing breathtaking (!) speeds along the 10,000 foot runway. It’s currently being lengthened by about 2000 feet (too late for us!).
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After Branson and his guests and crew land following their first trip into space, they’ll taxi back to the Gateway much like this (looking west).
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This close-up of the Gateway building’s east side reveals the third-floor balcony where passengers and guests will gather to contemplate how life-altering it is to become a private astronaut and venture 100 km above the Earth!
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At the end of our Spaceport America tour in front of the Gateway, we experienced a “reflective” moment ourselves (look closely below) …
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… and realized that Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America have the potential to not only trigger a quantum leap in commercial spaceflight all over the world, but to transform the state of New Mexico into a new, global center for space-related informal education and tourism.

With New Mexico’s impressive space-related assets and history (e.g., Alamogordo Space Museum, White Sands, Holloman AFB, NASA and NMSU facilities, VLA), expected hordes of tourists drawn to the Spaceport for a glimpse of the future, and world-class investors taking notice (e.g., Ted Turner’s major ranch nearby) — isn’t it possible we could see the birth of a new Disney-style space-related theme park in southern New Mexico to complement the anticipated success of Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America, and to celebrate our expansion into the new international Space Age?

Time will tell.

Christmas is an official national holiday in the United States and the day that Christians around the world celebrate the birth of Christ about 2000 years ago.

This year we are being treated to a heavenly sky show involving a dance between the most spectacular planet in the sky — Jupiter — and our favorite satellite — the Moon — which are less than 2 degrees apart on Christmas evening. Click HERE for details.

The Moon and Jupiter are two of the closest friends the Earth has ever had!
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(Courtesy D.A. Seal/JPL)

As you enjoy this cosmic Christmas spectacle, keep in mind that the Moon and Jupiter are credited with playing major roles in making Earth habitable for humans!

For example, Earth’s axial tilt of 23.5 degrees — which produces the annual seasons — is anchored by the Moon’s gravity. In its absence our axial tilt would chaotically vary from 0 to 85 degrees, producing either no seasons and enlarged polar ice caps (for near-zero tilts) or winter-like snows near the equator (for larger tilts). This kind of climate instability would have made life for early humans (i.e., ~200,000 years ago) much more difficult, if not impossible.

Jupiter is traditionally viewed as a comet deflector stationed in the outer solar system, but recent studies indicate its role has been much more proactive and nuanced. For example, its mass and position are apparently tuned to deliver just the right amount of water to Earth (to form its oceans) via ancient asteroid impacts — too much and the continents would have been covered by water and too little and life could not have flourished. Always the cosmic guardian, other asteroids apparently targeted by Jupiter caused mass extinctions on Earth, including the most famous one 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs, paving the way eventually for humans.

However, now that the dinosaurs are ancient history and Earth has plenty of water we take a dimmer view of potential Jupiter-inspired asteroid extinction events on Earth. Far from making Jupiter a villain in disguise as some have recently suggested, it appears that Jupiter is continuing in its nurturing/protective role for humanity by encouraging us to learn how to mitigate cosmic threats to Earth by expanding into space.

This process is being accelerated by the approaching transformative Maslow Window, expected to arrive by mid-decade.

It isn’t the one you think.

Sadly, NASA hasn’t been inundated with hundreds of phone calls per day from panic-stricken citizens about it, like NASA has about 12/21/12 and the end of the Mayan calendar.

Will our number finally come up today?
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It’s isn’t about Nibiru (aka Planet X) that magically has escaped detection for decades and threatens any minute to swoop down on Earth and flip its poles or worse — trigger an instant replay of the cosmic disaster that took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Indeed dark comet enthusiasts — including astronomer Jocelyn Bell who discovered pulsars in the 1960s — are right about the potential threat to Earth, but there is no astrophysical reason to expect our number to come up TODAY!

And it’s certainly not about galactic alignments, where earthquakes and tsunamis are triggered on Earth by the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way.

Let’s get real: even if a special Sun-Earth-Galaxy Center line-up existed today — which it doesn’t — the supermassive black hole is still 27,000 light years away. That’s a long, long way from us and its force is negligible.

The Real Planetary Doomsday we face today is that cuts in NASA funding are triggering the loss of a generation of planetary scientists.

According to Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute:

The US solar system exploration program is supported by NASA-funded scientists at government facilities, universities, and private companies … Their work directly advances the strategic goals of the NASA Planetary Division and strongly contributes to STEM educational efforts across the country …

Sykes ominously concludes that due to NASA cuts:
“Younger planetary scientists in particular face an imminent crisis in their careers. They will be lost first. Many more will follow. The consequences will be long term.”

While this funding situation is expected to turn around dramatically as the mid-decade Maslow Window and “Critical State” begins to engulf the world, the fact remains that many planetary scientists face near-term challenges.

Despite the bright future just around the corner, many will be lost.

The 4th of July is the day Americans celebrate freedom and all its fruits, including prosperity, innovation, and the pursuit of happiness!

To read about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Click HERE.

Dr. Harrison Schmitt, the first scientist on the Moon, shows how good the American flag — the symbol of freedom — looks on the Moon during Apollo 17.
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Princeton University professor Gerard O’Neill (1927-1992), author of The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977), believed that the colonization of space would open up …

a hopeful future for individual human beings, with increasing personal and political freedoms, a wider range of choices, and greater opportunities to develop individual potentials … The most chilling prospect that I see for a planet-bound human race is that many of those dreams would be forever cut off for us.”

As I pointed out recently in Ad Astra of the National Space Society, the macroeconomic and technology history of the last 200+ years indicates we are approaching a transformative, 1960s-style decade known as a Maslow Window.

It will feature a new international, Apollo-level space age that will be triggered by a major economic boom … by mid-decade.

However in the short term, there is still plenty of bad news — e.g., the Wall Street Journal reported this morning (top, front page headline) that the U.S. manufacturing sector shrank in June for the first time in 3 years — and some see this as evidence for another recession.

While hopefully this will not occur, it’s important to realize that “double-dip” recessions are common in the years immediately preceding Maslow Windows, and signal the approach of much better times.
Click: “Slow Recovery Fits 200-Year Pattern”

And historical analogs indicate that — during times like now — the widespread drive for prosperity results in a political realignment that triggers a new economic boom.

Enjoy the 4th’s fireworks and remember that the new Space Age is just around the corner…!

Decades of sightings of unidentified flying objects that have been archived and studied by scientific groups like MUFON, suggest extraterrestrials may be visiting Earth.

Where might they be coming from?

If new science continues to suggest that we are alone in the Galaxy, how should we rethink famous UFO sightings like Roswell?
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This is a question of growing public interest — a situation typical of times since the 19th century when we are approaching a transformative, 1960s-style Maslow Window (such as now) — as evidenced, for example, by serious meetings in recent years on ETs at the Vatican and the UK Royal Society.

What’s especially interesting is that new scientific data and theories — especially in astrophysics and physics — when applied to intriguing UFOs from around the globe, significantly narrow the range of plausible explanations for UFOs while they expand our worldview.

In one of the greatest space programs ever, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first roughly Earth-size planets in orbit around Sun-like stars, suggesting that — while still quite rare — they may be more common than expected in our Galaxy; i.e., about 2-3% of Sun-like stars may have one.

Using an updated, anthropic version of the Drake Equation — including the latest Kepler data — I estimated last year that it’s likely we are alone in the Galaxy. This point has also been made in more depth by others, including especially UK astrophysicist John Gribbin in his 2011 book, Alone in the Universe:

Even if other earths were common, my view is that while life itself may be common, the kind of intelligent, technological civilization that has emerged on Earth may be unique, at least in our Milky Way Galaxy.

In their stunning JBIS paper of 2005, Deardorff et. al asserted that the UFO problem must now be informed by inflation theory which points to an infinite Universe including the real possibility of a multiverse. They conclude

that current cosmological theory predicts that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation…

Extragalactic visitors or those from other universes (if they exist!) would be fundamentally different than emissaries from nearby stars or Mars. Unlike Klaatu and Gort (who originated from our Solar System), the very distant visitors would require exotic transportation concepts (e.g., wormholes) to physically reach us. This suggests an ultra-civilization that’s 10s or 100s of thousands of years (or more) in advance of us, as opposed to only 100+ years for more local visitors. So their technology would be unfathomable to us; as Deardorff et al. (2005) puts it:

The huge technological head start of the presumed ETs would still come as a great shock to many scientists as well as citizenry … It could be so great as to seriously challenge our consensual reality, a not insignificant danger.

For the moment let’s take these budding scientific paradigms seriously and assume we’re alone in the Milky Way Galaxy (the Empty Galaxy Hypothesis; EGH) but that very, very advanced ETs can visit from other galaxies or other universes (the Infinite Universe Hypothesis; IUH).

Here is a preliminary list of 5 EGH/IUH rules-of-thumb that can guide us as we rethink famous UFO cases:

I. Ultra-ETs are assumed to be living biological entities formerly like humans, but are now extremely advanced. For example, their nanosystems almost instantly detect and fix any system defect to the molecular level, so there will be no vehicle crashes or accidents. With such impressive command over space-time in this and possibly other universes, it’s unlikely that ultra-ETs wil experience any equipment-related or environmental surprises.

II. There will be no direct contact with Ultra-ETs. They are so advanced that it would be of little interest.

III. Radio SETI can be expected to fail and there will be no interstellar Von Neumann Probes due to EGH. VNPs — self-replicating machines that could colonize the Galaxy — would be archaic and unnecessary for Ultra-ETs.

IV. Ultra-ETs will be highly rational, for obvious reasons. But it will often be difficult for us to discern their thought patterns.

V. It is unlikely that ultra-ETs have violent or negative intentions toward each other or toward humans because they would have already exercised them. And we’re still here.

To demonstrate the potential utility of this science-based approach, let’s rethink some famous UFO cases in light of new science (EGH/IUH).

1. Roswell UFO Incident (1947):
Previous Analysis: Stan Friedman and other well-known UFO investigators have traditionally regarded Roswell as evidence of a crashed ET spacecraft complete with alien bodies. Indeed, the story has been subjected to multiple — even self-admitted — government coverups.

EGH/IUH Analysis: EGH suggests the Roswell UFO did not come from our Galaxy, and IUH argues that crashes are not viable (Rule 1). Thus it apparently came from Earth, and may indeed have been a secret military project, although not necessarily one of those specifically mentioned by the U.S.

Similar logic would apply to other alleged UFO crashes, such as Kecksburg, PA in 1965. The Roswell pattern is reinforced by stories of lost NASA documents relating to their investigation of the retrieved UFO. (NASA obviously couldn’t report on their study of a secret military vehicle.)

2. Fr. Gill, Papua, New Guinea (1959):
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Previous Analysis: The presence of 3 dozen+ witnesses watching a large UFO for many hours on 2 successive nights and the testimony of respected Anglican priest William Gill (1928-2007) make the case one of the best of all-time — this includes the 4 human-like creatures on the UFO who waved back to Fr. Gill. Dr. J. Allen Hynek investigated the incident and accepted their stories which imply an ET spacecraft.

EGH/IUH Analysis: This UFO probably did not come from our Galaxy because of EGH. Is it plausible that ultra-ETs who are extragalactic or even extra-universal were hovering for hours in full view of humans near Papua New Guinea while they repaired their spacecraft, and even waved back at the ground? This appears to contradict at least the spirit of Rule I and possibly Rule II above and argues against an Ultra-ET. So the Gill UFO apparently came from Earth. Initially Fr. Gill thought the UFO was an American experimental aircraft!!…and ultimately, he seems to have suggested the most scientifically likely explanation.

3. The Travis Walton Abduction (1975)
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Previous Analysis: This incident remains controversial despite 6 eyewitnesses to the abducting UFO whose basic story was supported by polygraphs, and active police searches for Walton during the 5 days he was missing. Inside the UFO Walton claims to have encountered 3 Greys with large eyes and a few other beings who appeared to be human-like.

EGH/IUH Analysis: The UFO was not native to our Galaxy according to EGH. The presence of both Greys and human-like creatures in the UFO is an interesting detail, but the Walton story suffers from the same issue of most alleged abductions — motive. Why would Ultra-ETs continue to abduct defenseless humans? It contradicts Rule V and suggests that either the event did not occur or Walton was manipulated by an Earth-based attempt to simulate an encounter with ETs, similar to what Jacques Vallee has previously suggested.

4. The Washington, D.C. UFO Sightings (1952):
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Previous Analysis: On two successive weekends numerous UFOs were spotted on both civilian and military radar, and seen from the ground and in the air by pilots and others. The UFOs appeared over the White House, Capitol and Pentagon and when fighter jets were scrambled to intercept them, the UFOs disappeared only to reappear when the jets left. Radar returns measured UFO speeds up to 7000 mph and in one close encounter with multiple UFOs and a jet, the UFOs easily outmaneuvered it. Apparently the Truman White House was concerned enough to issue a shoot-down order for any UFOs that didn’t land when instructed to.

EGH/IUH Analysis: EGH argues against the UFOs being Galactic, but it’s also difficult to imagine anyone from Earth testing secret military hardware over the White House, especially without Truman’s knowledge! This leaves Ultra-UFOs from far away and, with full awareness of Rule IV, invites us to speculate on their motives. Ultra-ETs would not need to test their systems against ours to ascertain their vast superiority, however they might be interested in seeing our reaction to our own helplessness, reminiscent of the Deardorff et al. (2005) quote above.

The theme of high UFO superiority also appears in other UFO incidents such as the Iran UFO of 1976, and the bottomline appears to be the same.

Although some have noted similarities between the celebrated Phoenix Lights of 1997 and the Washington UFOs, it appears more likely that a military explanation suffices for Phoenix.

A FINAL NOTE: None of these very brief discussions should be regarded as conclusive. The point is merely to demonstrate how new perspectives based on new science in astrophysics and cosmology can alter prevous interpretations of UFOs.

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The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago is the world’s arbiter of all things tall. They keep endless, ballistic statistics on tall buildings of all kinds, and make official, industry-recognized decisions about whose building is The One.

The 20 tallest buildings completed in 2011 point to a new 1960s-style “Golden Age” that’s just around the corner.
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For example, last month the CTBUH announced that the new One World Trade Center tower in New YorK City (at Ground Zero) might not become the tallest in the Western Hemisphere after all because the 408 foot antenna atop the building would not be enclosed in an architectural spire; according to the CTBUH, spires count, but antennas sans spires don’t (Wall Street Journal, C. Bialik, 5/12/12).

Indeed, such erigible esoterica is of considerable significance as we at 21stCenturyWaves.com continue our development of a global ebullience index.

This is because — over the last 200+ years — large Macro-Engineering Projects (e.g., Panama Canal) and Great Explorations (e.g., discovery of the N and S poles) appear to be triggered by large economic booms, but are fundamentally driven by “ebullience” (e.g., “Panama fever”, “pole mania”) — a somewhat irrational, but highly positive view of the future.

For example, In the 1960s Apollo program and Peace Corps of John F. Kennedy it was the ebullient feeling that we could do almost anything; in the early 20th century it was Theodore Roosevelt’s Panama fever and (north & south) pole mania; in the mid-19th century it was manifest destiny of James Polk and the central Africa adventures of Dr. Livingstone, I presume; and about 200 years ago it began auspiciously with Jefferson, Napoleon, and Lewis & Clark.

Earlier this year at the University of Southern California an internationally recognized architect confided to me that erecting tall buildings is usually more about egos than profits.

The CTBUH executive director agrees and the early abullience shown by Saudi plans for the first kilometer supertower — that bests the current tallest Burj Khalifa in Dubai by 500+ feet — and other recent extraordinay endeavors suggest we are indeed headed for a new 1960s-style “golden age”.

For example, in their annual review (for 2011) of tall building trends, the CTBUH noted:
1) 2011 continues the trend since 2007 that each successive year has more 200 meter+ buildings completed than ever before; this record-setting pace is now expected to continue even through the current great recession.

Looking to the future, it is now foreseeable – indeed likely – that the recent trend of an annual increase in building completions will continue for the next several years, perhaps even through the end of the decade. This represents a change in recent predictions. It had been expected that skyscraper completions would drop off very sharply after 2011, as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis and the large number of projects put on hold. Now however, due in large part to the continuing high activity of skyscraper design and construction in China, as well as the development of several relatively new markets, this global dip is no longer expected.

2) Global shifts in the locations of the top 100 buildings are significant. For example, Asia (with 46) is edging toward 50% of the all top 100 towers, and the Middle East increased by three, while Europe dropped to only one building in the top 100.

3) While China remains a dynamic market for 200 m+ buildings, its production declined from 33% in 2010 to only 26% in 2011, which indicates the market is diversifying. For example, Panama — site of one of the most ebullient MEPs in the world today: the Panama Canal Expansion Project — is enjoying a 200 m+ spurt:

Before 2008, no 200 m+ buildings existed in all of Panama. Then, between 2008 and 2010, three buildings opened. In 2011, Panama City completed ten 200 m+ skyscrapers, more than any other city and more than double the number of completions in all of North America. With these completions, there are now 12 such buildings in Panama, perhaps signaling a new day for the tall building in this region.

The CTBUH Summary for 2011 concludes by forecasting a decade-long surge in tall buildings around the globe.

With over 300 projects above the 200-meter mark currently under construction internationally, the tall building community is set to continue to develop at an incredible pace. As new markets continue to discover and develop the tall building, it is quite possible that this pace will continue through the end of this decade. Without a doubt, the skylines of the world will see tremendous change by the year 2020.

The tall building community sees beyond current global economic difficulties to a more ebullient 1960s-style “golden age” that will sparkle into the 2020s. It’s called the 2015 Maslow Window and will also feature the new international Space Age.

Yesterday famed filmaker James Cameron became the first human to go solo to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — 35,810 feet below sea level — the deepest place on the ocean floor.

Cameron’s space-inspired description of the Challenger Deep included “very lunar, a very desolate place, very isolated.”
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Cameron repeats a stunning feat first accomplished in 1960 — early in the Apollo Maslow Window — by the ocean’s most daring explorers, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh who first descended into the Challenger Deep, which is much farther (a mile+) below sea level than Mt. Everest is above it. Although unmanned submersibles have been there in recent times, until Cameron no human had risked the trip again.
Click: Nereus, Mohole, Apollo and the New Race to Space

Although Cameron and National Geographic view this voyage into inner space as an important scientific and engineering project, it’s also evidence of increasing “early ebullience” as we approach a new international Space Age expected by mid-decade.

Despite continuing economic challenges, early ebullience is evident around the world today — e.g., booming Antarctic tourism, architectural projects such as the Shanghai Tower, the Panama Canal Expansion Project, Spaceport America and the birth of the space tourism industry, the International Space Station (an “international marvel”), international plans for bases on the Moon.

One might ask the rather naive question of why — in this day of remotely operated vehicles (ROV) and telepresence — he risked the trip personally. After all Cameron did have to surface early because of hydraulic problems.

Patricia Fryer (University of Hawaii) gives the standard “scientific” explanation:

The critical thing is to be able to take the human mind down into that environment, to be able to turn your head and look around to see what the relationships are between organisms in a community and to see how they’re behaving—to turn off all the lights and just sit there and watch and not frighten the animals, so that they behave normally. That is almost impossible to do with an ROV.

While true, considering the ebullient entertainment instincts of Cameron, it reminds me of the NASA official who once pointed out that,

We don’t give tickertape parades to robots.

Widespread ebullience and an increasingly fractal geopolitical situation will fundamentally drive public interest in Apollo-style space spectaculars and briefly become the dominant global zeitgeist over the coming decade, as they did during the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window.

Recently the Kepler Science Team released the results of the first 16 months of searching for Earth-like planets around nearby Sunlike stars. A statistical analysis by Space Daily (John Rehling, March 8,2012) suggests that Earth-like planets are likely to be “extremely rare” in the Galaxy.

According to Space Daily, “the pessmistic characteristic of these results suggest that to find earth-like worlds elsewhere, we should prepare to look hard – and quite possibily very hard for decades if not centuries.”
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This is important because, to the public, the two most enticing drivers of human expansion into the Cosmos during the approaching new International Space Age are: 1) the discovery and exploration of Earth-like worlds, and 2) the prospects for extraterrestrial life, especially with intelligence.

The new Kepler data is consistent with analysis by JPL scientists Joseph Catanzarite and Michael Shao, that I discussed here, based on 4 months of Kepler data, but not with other more optimistic estimates.

Catanzarite and Shao — whose paper was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal in 2011 — adopted an Earth Analog region characterized by a planet radius of 0.8 to 2 (Earth radii). The lower value corresponds to a mass of about 50% of Earth’s, the lower limit for retention of an oxygen atmosphere. The upper value is adopted by the Kepler scientists and, assuming Earth-like parameters, implies a planet with twice the surface heat flow of Earth and half Earth’s lithospheric thickness. Active plate tectonics and volcanism would be expected..

Catanzarite and Shao fit the Kepler transit data to power laws for both the planet radius and the scaled planet distance; they judge that the power laws are excellent fits to the data for distances from 0.2 AU to 0.5 AU (inside the HZ limits) and planetary radii from 2 to 4 (just larger than the EA range).

Using the power laws, the Kepler data set is then extrapolated into the Earth analog region defined above to obtain their estimate — based on the first 4 months of Kepler data — of the fraction of Sun-like stars likely to have Earth-analog planets: 2% +1.6%/-1.1%.

The addition of 12 more months of new Kepler data is summarizied in this table from Space Daily:
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Bins of planet radius versus bins of planet period, out to the habitable zone (Earth is 365 days) are shown here; planet frequency estimates are the product of actual observed numbers of planets times their de-bias factor. This compensates for Kepler bias towards close-in and larger planets in the data.

The Kepler data show that planets with nearly exactly one Earth mass (0.9-1.1) are most likely at periods of 4-8 days, well inside a Mercury-like orbit (88 days), and also 6 bins inside the habitable zone. These are hot planets.

We can make this data more comparable to the radius limits of Catanzarite and Shao by summing appropriate bins and extrapolating them to the right (to the habitable zone) using Rehling’s median factor (0.72) relating a bin’s frequency to that of the bin to its left.

The new value — based on 16 months of Kepler data — for the fraction of Sun-like stars with Earth-analog planets is about 3.6%. This is very close to Catanzarite and Shao’s previous result, and suggests strongly again that Earth-like planets are rare.

This latest Kepler analysis reinforces:

1) An updated, anthropic Drake Equation, suggesting that high intelligence is rare in our Galaxy.
Click: Kepler, Watson, and Gott Point to the Rare Earth Hypothesis,

and

2) The proposition that — in defense of high intelligence — space colonization should be a high priority for humanity.
Click: Is Earth Unique? What this “Benchmark Moment” Means for ETs and Our Future