LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Lakeport City Council will meet new staff and begin the process of looking at goals for the coming fiscal year at its upcoming meeting.
The council will meet Tuesday, April 2, at 6 p.m. in the council chambers at Lakeport City Hall, 225 Park St.
The council chambers will be open to the public for the meeting. Masks are highly encouraged where 6-foot distancing cannot be maintained.
If you cannot attend in person, and would like to speak on an agenda item, you can access the Zoom meeting remotely at this link or join by phone by calling toll-free 669-900-9128 or 346-248-7799.
The webinar ID is 973 6820 1787, access code is 477973; the audio pin will be shown after joining the webinar. Those phoning in without using the web link will be in “listen mode” only and will not be able to participate or comment.
Comments can be submitted by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. To give the city clerk adequate time to print out comments for consideration at the meeting, please submit written comments before 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2.
On Tuesday the council will meet new city employee Melissa Carpenter and present a proclamation designating April 2024 as Arts, Culture and Creativity Month.
Under council business, City Manager Kevin Ingram will ask the council to authorize him to execute a professional services agreement with Willdan Financial Services for a comprehensive citywide cost of service fee study in an amount not to exceed $28,000.
Ingram also will lead the council in a strategic planning workshop to determine the citywide departmental goals for fiscal year 2024-25.
On the consent agenda — items considered noncontroversial and usually accepted as a slate on one vote — are ordinances; minutes of the City Council’s regular meeting on March 5; the March 22 warrant register; approval of the continuation of the proclamation declaring a local state of emergency due to severe weather conditions including heavy rain and extreme wind; approval of application 2024-013, with staff recommendations, for the 2024 Memorial Day Pancake Breakfast; approval of application 2024-015, with staff recommendations for the 2024 Autism Advocacy and Awareness Spring Carnival; authorization for out-of-state travel for two utility staff members to attend the California Rural Water Association’s Annual Expo.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-04) and Democratic Woman’s Caucus Chair Rep. Lois Frankel (FL-22) have introduced a resolution to support the goals and ideals of National Women’s History Month.
Thompson introduces this resolution each year to mark March as Women’s History Month and celebrate the diverse history of our country’s women.
The theme of National Women’s History Month 2024 is “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.”
The resolution resolves that, “The House of Representatives (1) supports the goals and ideals of National Women’s History Month; (2) recognizes and honors the women and organizations in the United States that have fought for, and continue to promote, the teaching of women’s history and the women’s suffrage movement; and (3) recognizes and honors the unique intersectional experiences of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Native American, and LGBTQ+ women and women with disabilities in the United States throughout history, the women’s suffrage movement and in the ongoing fight for equality.”
“Every year, we come together to highlight the extraordinary contributions of women throughout our nation’s history and the continued need to push for equality,” said Thompson. “The history of America cannot be told without women’s history. Women’s History Month, which originated in our district, provides an opportunity to highlight the incredible contributions of American women. I am proud to introduce this resolution every year to elevate the stories of women from our nation’s history.”
“Each March, we celebrate and honor the trailblazing women who have fought for a better future for women everywhere,” said Chair Frankel. “In every field — from medicine and math, to education and politics — women have often led the charge in pushing America forward and advancing the ideals of equity and justice for all. As we reflect on their legacy, we take inspiration to continue our fight for women’s equality. They never backed down and neither will we.”
Until the late 1970’s, women’s history was rarely included in K-12 curriculum and was virtually absent in public awareness.
To counter this, the Education Taskforce of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women initiated a “Women’s History Week” celebration in 1978 centered on International Women’s History Day.
With the help of the National Women’s History Project, founded in Sonoma County, thousands of schools and communities joined in the commemoration of Women’s History Week.
In 1981, Congress responded to the growing popularity of Women’s History Week by making it a national observance and eventually expanding the week to a month in 1987.
The National Women’s History Project is based in Santa Rosa and chooses the theme of National Women’s History Month each year.
This year, National Women’s History Month celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.”
The resolution was cosponsored by 53 members of Congress.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Middletown Area Town Hall is planning to hold a special meeting early next week to discuss the revised plan to bring a major new resort to the south county.
MATH will meet at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the Middletown Community Meeting Room/Library at 21256 Washington St., Middletown.
The meeting is open to the public and is in-person only.
The group will discuss and consider action on the “request for review” from the Lake County Community Development Department regarding the revised Guenoc Valley Mixed Use Planned Development Project.
Community Development is asking agencies and organizations, including MATH, to determine if additional information is needed, which permits are required, and to outline environmental concerns and give recommendations for any modifications to the project to reduce potential environmental impacts.
The county is asking that comments be submitted as soon as possible, but no later than April 12.
Community Development also is planning to hold a meeting on the project in Lakeport, with the date still to be determined.
As a result, MATH is calling the special meeting and will discuss and prepare a response to the request for review.
That response will then be forwarded to the MATH membership for review before the regular April 11 meetings so that it can be submitted to Community Development by the April 12 deadline.
MATH — established by resolution of the Lake County Board of Supervisors on Dec. 12, 2006 — is a municipal advisory council serving the residents of Anderson Springs, Cobb, Coyote Valley (including Hidden Valley Lake), Long Valley and Middletown.
For more information email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
The U.S. national poverty rate declined significantly to 12.5% during the 5-year period from 2018 to 2022, according to American Community Survey, or ACS, 5-year estimates.
The rate was down from 14.6% during 2013-2017, the most recent nonoverlapping 5-year period.
Comparing the 2013-2017 and 2018-2022 5-year estimates offers a longer-term look at national and local economic trends.
The ACS 5-year estimates differ from the 1-year estimates released in September because they pool five consecutive years of 1-year ACS data, allowing Census Bureau researchers to estimate poverty rates for areas with smaller populations and all 3,144 U.S. counties.
How poverty is measured
Poverty status is determined by comparing annual income to a set of dollar values (called poverty thresholds) that vary by family size, number of children and the age of the householder.
If a family’s before-tax money income is less than the dollar value of their threshold, that family and every individual in it are in poverty. For people not living in families, poverty status is determined by comparing the individual’s income to their poverty threshold.
The poverty measure excludes children under age 15 not related to the householder and people living in institutional group quarters, college dormitories or military barracks.
The poverty rates in this article are based on the official poverty measure and are different from the Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM.
The SPM differs in a number of key ways such as the factoring in of additional resources and expenses not included in the official poverty measure as well as geographic variation in poverty thresholds.
County poverty rates
During the 2018-2022 period, county poverty rates ranged from 1.6% to 55.8% (Figure 1).
Counties with the lowest poverty rates in 2018-2022 included: Borden County, Texas (1.6%); Morgan County, Utah (1.7%); Sterling County, Texas (1.8%); Falls Church independent city (considered a county equivalent), Virginia (2.3%); McCone County, Montana (2.4%); Kenedy County, Texas (2.6%); Douglas County, Colorado (3.0%); and Stanley County, South Dakota (3.2%) among others. These estimates are not significantly different from one another at the 90% confidence level.
Three counties in South Dakota – Oglala Lakota County (55.8%), Todd County (52.2%) and Mellette County (49.1%) – were among those with the nation’s highest poverty rates. All three are in the western part of the state and are home to American Indian reservations. These estimates were not significantly different from one another at the 90% confidence level.
Figure 2 shows the share of total counties per census region along with the percentage of counties in the high and low map categories. The total counties category indicates the percentage of U.S. counties in the region.
Of the 172 counties in the highest poverty category (poverty rates of 25% or more), 142 (more than 80%) were in the South, compared to 45% of total counties.
The 219 counties in the lowest poverty category (poverty rates of less than 7.0%) were more evenly dispersed around the nation. Approximately 44% were in the Midwest, compared to 34% of total counties; 28% were in the South.
Just less than 10% of all counties in the South were in the high poverty category. No other region had more than 3.1% of its total counties with poverty rates of 25% or more. The four regions had a range of 4.4% (South) to 9.6% (Northeast) of its counties in the low poverty category.
Change from last five-year period
Changes in county poverty rates from the last 5-year period (2013-2017) to the most recent (2018-2022) show where and what economic changes have occurred over a longer period.
The national poverty rate decreased 2.0 percentage points to 12.5% and 1,144 counties — more than 36% — had a significant change in poverty rates (Figure 3).
Poverty rates decreased in more than one-third (1,042) of all counties. Only 102 counties experienced an increase in poverty rates compared to 2013-2017. It should be noted that counties that have had geographic changes over this period were not used in the comparison and are identified in Figure 3 as counties with no data available.
Where did changes occur?
Of the 1,042 counties that had lower poverty rates in the recent time period (2018-2022) 466 were in the South, 303 in the Midwest, 191 in the West and 82 in the Northeast.
In the West, 42.7% of all counties had lower poverty rates, while in the Northeast poverty rates decreased in 39.2% of all counties, 32.8% in the South and 28.7% in the Midwest.
Among the counties where poverty rates increased, 49.0% were in the South and 30.4% in the Midwest. There was less of a regional difference where poverty increased. In all regions, between 2.9% and 3.5% of counties experienced poverty rate increases from the 2013-2017 to 2018-2022 period.
Craig Benson is a survey statistician in the Census Bureau’s Poverty Statistics Branch.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has a new, big group of dogs waiting to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Alaskan husky, American blue heeler, Anatolian shepherd, border collie, Chihuahua, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, Labrador Retriever, pit bull terrier and Rottweiler.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The East Region Town Hall, or ERTH, will meet on Wednesday, April 3.
The meeting will begin at 4 p.m. at the Moose Lodge, located at 15900 Moose Lodge Lane in Clearlake Oaks.
The meeting will be available via Zoom. The meeting ID is 830 2978 1573, pass code is 503006.
On Wednesday ERTH will discuss the general plan and Shoreline Area Plan update.
Other agenda items include an update on the Clearlake Oaks Consolidated Lighting District update, crosswalk safety at East Lake School and Highway 20, Spring Valley, commercial cannabis and the Cannabis Ordinance Task Force, and reports from Northshore Fire Protection District Chief Mike Ciancio and Supervisor EJ Crandell.
ERTH’s next meeting will take place on May 1.
ERTH’s members are Denise Loustalot, Jim Burton, Tony Morris and Pamela Kicenski.
For more information visit the group’s Facebook page.
Travel nurses take short-term contracts that can require long commutes or temporarily living away from home. Time and again, they have to get used to new co-workers, new protocols and new workplaces.
So why would staff nurses quit their stable jobs to become travel nurses?
Many of the people I interviewed disclosed that they left permanent positions to combat burnout. Although they welcomed the bump in pay, travel nursing also gave them the autonomy to decide when and where to work. That autonomy allowed them to pursue personal and professional interests that were meaningful to them, and it made some of the other hassles, such as long commutes, worth it.
On top of earning more money, travel nursing “gives you an opportunity to explore different areas,” said a nurse I’ll call Cynthia, because research rules require anonymity. “When you actually live there for three months, it gives you a chance to really immerse yourself in the area and really get to know not just the touristy stuff, but really hang out with the locals and really be exposed to that area.”
Other study participants said they enjoyed the novelty and educational opportunities.
“You don’t get bored or stuck in a routine,” Michelle said. “You’re always trying to learn new policies at the new hospital that you’re in, learning about the new doctors, nursing staff, new ways of doing things, where things are located. That helps keep me from feeling burned out so quickly.”
Said Patricia: “I want to see how other operating rooms across the country do things and how they do things differently. I do learn a lot of things going from place to place.”
But nurses with permanent jobs can get aggravated by this arrangement when they learn how much more travel nurses earn for doing the same work, as I found through another research project.
While travel nurses can help hospitals, nursing homes and doctors’ offices meet staffing needs, there are signs that patients don’t always fare as well with their care.
And a Canadian study found that when hospitals let staff nurses work part time and offer other alternative arrangements, their retention rates may rise.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
People often think of disasters as great equalizers. After all, a tornado, wildfire or hurricane doesn’t discriminate against those in its path. But the consequences for those impacted are not “one-size-fits-all.”
Overall, the Census Bureau estimates that nearly 2.5 million Americans had to leave their homes because of disasters in 2023, whether for a short period or much longer. However, a closer look at demographics in the survey reveals much more about disaster risk in America and who is vulnerable.
It suggests, as researchers have also found, that people with the fewest resources, as well as those who have disabilities or have been marginalized, were more likely to be displaced from their homes by disasters than other people.
Decades of disaster research, including from our team at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, make at least two things crystal clear: First, people’s social circumstances – such as the resources available to them, how much they can rely on others for help, and challenges they face in their daily life – can lead them to experience disasters differently compared to others affected by the same event. And second, disasters exacerbate existing vulnerabilities.
This research also shows how disaster recovery is a social process. Recovery is not a “thing,” but rather it is linked to how we talk about recovery, make decisions about recovery and prioritize some activities over others.
This recovery process is made even more difficult because policymakers often underappreciate the immense difficulties residents face during recovery.
Following Hurricane Katrina, sociologist Alexis Merdjanoff found that property ownership status affected psychological distress and displacement, with displaced renters showing higher levels of emotional distress than homeowners. Lack of autonomy in decisions about how to repair or rebuild can play a role, further highlighting disparate experiences during disaster recovery.
What the Census shows about vulnerability
The 2023 census data consistently showed that socially vulnerable groups reported being displaced from their homes at higher rates than other groups.
People over 65 had a higher rate of being displaced than younger people. So did Hispanic and Black Americans, people with less than a high school education and those with low household incomes or who were struggling with employment compared to other groups. While the Census Bureau describes the data as experimental and notes that some sample sizes are small, the differences stand out and are consistent with what researchers have found.
Residents who don’t know how to find information about disaster recovery assistance or can’t take time away from work to accumulate the necessary documents and meet with agency representatives can have a harder time getting quick help from federal and state agencies.
Disabilities also affect displacement. Of those people who were displaced for some length of time in 2023, those with significant difficulty hearing, seeing or walking reported being displaced at higher rates than those without disabilities.
Prolonged loss of electricity or water due to an ice storm, wildfire or grid overload during a heat emergency can force those with medical conditions to leave even if their neighbors are able to stay.
That can also create challenges for their recovery. Displacement can leave vulnerable disaster survivors isolated from their usual support systems and health care providers. It can also isolate those with limited mobility from disaster assistance.
Helping communities build resilience
Crucial research efforts are underway to better help people who may be struggling the most after disasters.
For example, our center was part of an interdisciplinary team that developed a framework to predict community resilience after disasters and help identify investments that could be made to bolster resilience. It outlines ways to identify gaps in community functioning, like health care and transportation, before disaster strikes. And it helps determine recovery strategies that would have the most impact.
Shifts in weather and climate and a mobile population mean that people’s exposure to hazards are constantly shifting and often increasing. The Coastal Hazard, Equity, Economic Prosperity, and Resilience Hub, which our center is also part of, is developing tools to help communities best ensure resilience and strong economic conditions for all residents without shortchanging the need to prioritize equity and well-being.
We believe that when communities experience disasters, they should not have to choose among thriving economically, ensuring all residents can recover and reducing risk of future threats. There must be a way to account for all three.
Understanding that disasters affect people in different ways is only a first step toward ensuring that the most vulnerable residents receive the support they need. Involving community members from disproportionately vulnerable groups to identify challenges is another. But those, alone, are not enough.
If we as a society care about those who contribute to our communities, we must find the political and organizational will to act to reduce the challenges reflected in the census and disaster research.
This article, originally published March 4, 2024, has been updated with severe storms in mid-March.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County 2050, the update to the Lake County General Plan and eight local area plans, is set to begin and community members are being invited to participate in helping plan the county’s future.
Lake County 2050 will guide county decisions on land use, circulation, safety, natural resources, environmental justice and other important topics through the year 2050.
In the first round of community workshops, participants will learn more about the project and discuss key issues in each local area plan planning area.
A community workshop will be held for each area plan, hosted by the established town hall or advisory group in that area, or by county staff. In-person meetings will feature small group discussions and Spanish translation will be available.
The schedule for that first round of meetings, with information on locations, dates, times and Zoom access, is below.
Shoreline Communities 2, East Region Town Hall Wednesday, May 1, 4 p.m. *Abbreviated meeting. No breakout groups or Spanish interpretation Clearlake Oaks Moose Lodge, 15900 Highway 20, Clearlake Oaks https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83029781573?pwd=KZYEE4bdvQ2Oh81VAFaCMSqOVylXec.1 Meeting ID: 830 2978 1573 Passcode: 503006
BERKELEY, Calif. — An orbiting space telescope approved by NASA last month and scheduled for launch in 2030 will conduct the first all-sky survey of ultraviolet, or UV, sources in the cosmos, providing valuable information on how galaxies and stars evolve, both today and in the distant past.
The $300 million satellite mission, called UVEX or UltraViolet EXplorer, will be managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory, or SSL, at the University of California, Berkeley.
The mission’s principal investigator is Fiona Harrison, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. recipient who is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
The telescope’s all-sky UV survey will complement ongoing or planned surveys by other missions over the next decade, including the optical and infrared Euclid mission led by the European Space Agency with NASA contributions, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared telescope set to launch by May 2027. Together, these missions will help create a modern, multi-wavelength map of our universe.
“When UVEX launches, for the first time we'll have the entire sky covered from the UV all the way through the infrared,” said Daniel Weisz, one of the science team leaders for the UVEX mission and a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy. “Having ultraviolet coverage of the entire sky, which has never really been done before, is groundbreaking.”
UV emissions come from hot objects, but these wavelengths are blocked by Earth's atmosphere and must be studied from space.
The survey will focus on hot, massive blue stars — many of which are thought to be members of binary star systems — as well as exploding stars. In binary star systems, the most massive of the stellar pair often strips material from its companion, which exposes its hot UV-emitting core. UVEX will map the distribution of these “stripped” stars in galaxies around the Milky Way.
The telescope also will carry a UV spectrograph, jointly built by UC Berkeley and Caltech, to record detail about the UV wavelengths emitted by massive stars and during stellar explosions. These observations will provide new details about how stars and galaxies form and how they die.
“One of the things we're going to produce is a chart of the whole pathway from the genesis of these binary stars all the way to what happens when they explode and interact with whatever materials around them that they've lost over time,” he said. “UVEX will just completely change the field.”
UVEX will also be able to quickly point toward newly discovered sources of UV light in the universe. This will enable it to capture the light that follows bursts of gravitational waves caused by merging neutron stars in binary systems, events that are regularly recorded by three large collaborations around the globe, including the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
“A lot of transient events are best seen in the ultraviolet,” said Bill Craig, UVEX project manager. “Having a wide field of view to follow gravitational wave events is a really strong reason for selecting this mission now, so that as LIGO goes through its next campaigns, UVEX will be up there to zero once they see a merger. We then can zip over and see the aftermath of that.”
Low-mass galaxies today and in the early universe
Weisz is particularly interested in low-mass galaxies — those that are about one-tenth the size of the Milky Way.
The most famous of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — satellites of the Milky Way that are one-tenth and one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way, respectively — but there should be millions of smaller galaxies within our galactic neighborhood. Only about 50,0000 have so far been seen, and few have been studied spectroscopically at UV wavelengths.
“Our sensitivity limits extend to galaxies that are 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way,” Weisz said. “That's about a million solar masses.”
Such small, but faint, nearby galaxies are hard to identify using optical or infrared telescopes, he said, because they look nearly identical to very distant galaxies whose UV emissions have been redshifted to optical and infrared wavelengths. But if they also emit UV light, they're likely our near neighbors.
“When you see a galaxy that has UV, optical and infrared, it has to be nearby,” Weisz said. “We're trying to map out the structure of these millions of low-mass galaxies across the entire sky in order to better understand how mass, which is mostly made of dark matter, is distributed in the local universe.”
A better understanding of nearby low-mass galaxies will give insight into the nature of many low-mass galaxies now being discovered in the very early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
“These nearby low-mass galaxies are pretty small, but also very deficient in metals. Some of them may only have 1% of the metals of the sun or less,” said Weisz. “And it turns out that these very metal-poor, but very active, star-forming galaxies are analogous to what people are finding with JWST at very high redshift.”
Metals, to astronomers, are anything heavier than hydrogen and helium, the primordial material of the universe. A low metal content implies that a galaxy has not had enough cycles of star formation and explosion to seed the galaxy with many of the heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen and iron.
Capturing UV from a supernova
Another UVEX science team leader from UC Berkeley, Raffaella Margutti, along with Ryan Chornock, associate adjunct professor of astronomy, are interested in what UV data can tell us about exploding supernovae.
“Our goal is to acquire the first UV spectra of very young supernovae less than two days after they explode,” said Margutti, professor of physics and of astronomy. “If we can get the first time sequence of UV spectra from a supernova, it can help constrain the chemical composition of exploding stars and help us understand their behavior in the last moments of their evolution before core-collapse.”
Other UC Berkeley members of the UVEX team are Wenbin Lu, assistant professor of astronomy, and Miller Research Fellow Yuhan Yao, who focus on high-energy transient phenomena, and Joshua Bloom, an astronomy professor who works on ways to combine data from multiple satellites and telescopes in order to respond quickly to transient events.
NASA selected the UVEX Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) concept to continue into development after a detailed review of two proposed MIDEX missions and two Mission of Opportunity concepts, and after evaluating the proposals based on NASA’s current astrophysics portfolio and the agency's available resources.
The UVEX mission was the only proposal selected, but its launch was pushed back two years, to 2030, because of budgetary reasons. The two-year mission will cost approximately $300 million, not including launch costs.
Craig, who has managed several other NASA-funded missions, including the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, which launched in 2019, noted that UVEX is a much larger satellite and has about twice the budget as ICON.
SSL has also been mission control for numerous other space missions, including the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, and NuStar, an X-ray observing satellite that was also a collaboration with Fiona Harrison of Caltech.
“I think you could say that this represents a sort of validation of the fact that Berkeley and the Space Sciences Lab have built up a core competency in implementing missions that allow us to do the science that people want to do,” Craig said.
The UVEX satellite will have an elongated shape, like a shed, to accommodate the optical components of the telescope. It will measure 20 feet tall, 9 1/2 feet wide and 8 feet deep and will weigh about 2,200 pounds.
Its intended orbit, which requires one loop around the moon to establish, will at its farthest point be about 310,000 miles from Earth — closer to the moon than to our planet. This allows it to avoid the thermal stresses associated with entering and exiting Earth's shadow many times a day, which is typical of stationary satellites in low-Earth orbit.
While Craig focuses over the next six years on bringing the many pieces of the satellite together, the scientists have their own intense prep work.
“We have a ton to do because this is a two-year mission, and we're supposed to deliver everything within six months after the prime mission ends,” Weisz said. “If our job is to go find 100 million galaxies, we basically have to know how to do that before we even launch. No one's ever tried to find 100 million galaxies before across the entire sky because we've never been able to do it. So as soon as we launch and get calibrated, we're going right into science mode.”
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
Douglas Vakoch, California Institute of Integral Studies
We collected audio recordings in 103 languages, and we decided how to convert these into waveforms that show these sounds visually. Colleagues from NASA etched these waveforms into the metal plate that shields the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.
I also designed another part of the message that visually depicts the wavelengths of water’s constituents, because water is so important to the search for intelligent life in the universe.
Etching messages into spacecraft isn’t a new practice, and Clipper’s message fits into a decades-old tradition started by astronomer Carl Sagan.
In 1972 and 1973, two Pioneer spacecraft headed to Jupiter and Saturn carrying metal plaques engraved with scientific and pictorial messages. In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft headed to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Nepture bearing gold-plated copper phonograph records. These records contained tutorials in mathematics and chemistry, as well as music, photos and sounds of Earth and greetings in 55 languages.
Water words
As water is essential for life on Earth, searching for its presence elsewhere has been key to many NASA missions. Astronomers suspect that Europa, where Clipper is headed, has an ocean underneath its icy surface, making it a prime candidate for the search for life in the outer solar system.
Part of the Clipper message features the word for water in 103 languages. We started with audio files collected online, but we then needed to analyze those and find an output that could be engraved on a metal plate. I ended up going back to some of the techniques I used in some of my early psycholinguistic research, where I explored how emotions are encoded in speech.
The 103 spoken words we recorded represent a global snapshot of the diversity of Earth’s languages. The outward-facing side of the Clipper plate shows the words as waveforms that track the varying intensity of sound as each word is spoken.
Each person whom we recorded saying the word “water” for the waveform had a connection to water. For example, the lawyer who contributed the word for water in Uzbek – “suv” – organizes an annual music festival in Uzbekistan to raise awareness of the desertification of the Aral Sea.
The native speaker of the Catalan water word – “aigua” – hunts for exoplanets, discovering potentially habitable planets that orbit other stars.
The Drake Equation
Clipper’s message also pays homage to astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – by bearing the Drake Equation, his namesake formula. By drawing on scientific data, as well as some best guess hunches, the Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy currently sending messages into the cosmos.
By one widely quoted estimate, there are a tenth as many of these extraterrestrial civilizations as one’s average lifetime in years. If civilizations survive for a million years, for example, there should be about 100,000 in the galaxy. If they last only a century on average, scientists would estimate that about 10 exist.
Radio astronomers study the universe by examining the radiation that chemical elements in space give off. They spend much of their time mapping the distribution of the most abundant chemical in the universe – hydrogen.
Hydrogen emits radiation at a certain frequency called the hydrogen line, which radio telescopes can detect. During Project Ozma, the first modern-day SETI experiment, Drake looked for artificial signals at the same frequency, because he figured scientists on other worlds might recognize hydrogen as universally significant and broadcast signals at that frequency.
The water hole
As our team developed our water words message, I realized that the message would only make sense if it were discovered by someone already familiar with the contents inscribed on the plate. The Drake Equation would only make sense if someone already knew what each of the terms in the equation stood for.
The Europa Clipper will crash into Jupiter or one of its other moons, with Ganymede or Callisto the leading candidates. But if for some reason the mission changes and it survives that fate, then humans far in the future with a radically different cultural background and different language conventions may retrieve it millennia from now as an ancient artifact.
To ensure we had at least one part of the message that a distant future scientist might be able to understand, I also designed a pictorial representation of the same frequency that Drake used for Project Ozma: the hydrogen line. We engraved this on the Clipper plate, along with a frequency called the hydroxyl line.
When hydrogen (H+) and hydroxyl (OH-) combine, they form water. Scientists call the range of frequencies between these lines the “water hole.” The water hole represents the part of the radio spectrum where astronomers conducted the first SETI experiments.
We displayed the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines using their wavelengths in the Clipper message. The metal plate also has diagrams showing what hydrogen and hydroxyl look like at the atomic level.
We’re hoping that future chemists would recognize these chemical components as the ingredients of water. If they do, we will have succeeded in communicating at least a few core scientific concepts across time, space and language.
Waveforms let our team tie the messages on the two sides of the Clipper plate together. On the water words side, over a hundred words are depicted by their waveforms. On the other side, the wavelengths of hydrogen and hydroxyl – the constituents of water – are etched into the plate.
METI International funded the collection and curation of the water words, as well as my design of the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines, providing these to NASA at no cost.
While designing the message for the Europa Clipper, we got to reflect on the importance of water on Earth, and think about why astronomers feel so compelled to search for it beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The spacecraft is scheduled to enter Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030.