Hiram Huesca

[Hiram Huesca]

"I was born in Habana, Cuba and became a refugee, in Miami, in 1961, under a U.S. visa waiver program facilitated by the private Inter-American Affairs Commission headed by Wendell Rollason.

I graduated, from USF , with a Master of Science degree in physics.
I have been a teacher all my life and a scientist for a short stint with NASA's SETI project.

I am currently concluding my career as a teacher of mathematics, in Los Angeles, and my loves include Cold War events and realia of the period, Medieval social history, Women’s Studies, cosmology, cooking, and a vicarious, if somewhat pathetic, enjoyment of my nexus ( in Forrest Gump style ? ) with people and jumbled happenings that have long passed into shoddy history books."

[Evan Burton]

Wow - SETI! That must have been fun, to some degree. So the question: is there some type of life out 'there'? How much significance do you place on the discovery of water on Mars?

Cheers and welcome!

[Hiram Huesca]

Hello Mr. Burton,

I'm sorry I took so long to reply. I just looked in here now.

SETI was great, while it lasted. A New Democrat Congress Critter decided to make a name for himself by killing our project after we had endured numerous flip-flops on this, the most economical way to search for alien technology, by many orders of magnitude.

Eventually, SETI went private, with the generous donations by Barney Oliver, Steve Balmer, Steven Spielburg, and many others. By that time I had found employment elsewhere.

We did state-of-the-art research and development in signal processing and detection of unimaginably weak signals buried in enormous levels of radio noise; natural and man-made. My location was at Moffet Field ( civilian side ) home of the late P3 Orion planes that patrolled our coast line to monitor ships that spied on our Silicon Valley electronics industry.

The work was challenging and tedious. But from time to time, while I waited for the main-frames ( named Mars, Venus, etc. ) to finish my latest batch of nested-loop convolution integrals , I had a chance to go outside our little trailer and lie back on my car to look at the stars, by the droning of the Orion planes as they feathered their props, and realize what it was that I was doing ( Radio-astronomical Archaeology / Anthropology ) and that made me feel great.

There have been some detections that were extremely suggestive of ET technology, like the famous "WOW!" signal of early SETI Researchers. But, unless these are sustained and recorded, they cannot be further analyzed for content. Many of these are from secret spy satellites and their exclusion depends on the cooperation of our national alphabet soup agencies to confirm that they come from their "birds " .

The project has moved far beyond its former limits, as computers have advanced and as analytical mathematics has developed from Fast Fourier Transforms to Wavelet analysis ETC. Also, the introduction of optical frequency signal detection has opened a new frontier to exploration.

You may want to look up S.E.T.I. Institute, in Palo Alto and peruse their web site.

There is even a distributed computing screen saver that lets you participate in the actual search when your computer is idle.

Of course, they would love a donation as much as anyone.

As for the significance of water seeping in the Martian soil, I find it very exciting. But we must categorize this as a necessary but not sufficient precursor to biologicals. I just hope they find a bug before I kick the bucket. And I am always frustrated that they won't slap a freaking microscope on a lander and dang well LOOK !!!

But what do I know ?

Edited October 18, 2015 by Hiram Huesca