06/14/04

LC040614

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Good science or coincidence? Two earthquake predictions came
true. Should we be nervous about the third?

John Vidale>> The prediction is that in a large area in
southeastern California there will be a magnitude 6.4 or greater
earthquake before September 5.

Val>> And then, a driving force on the Red Planet. We'll meet
the JPL scientist who's at the wheel of the Mars Rover. Plus, a
Texas insider with some untold stories on George W. Bush.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Living here in Southern California, all of us have
occasionally thought about "The Big One". Fortunately, it
hasn't hit yet, but we're also familiar with the legend, the one
that says "Giant quake hits California and shears off part of
our coast." But could that really happen? Hollywood has its
own ideas and has crafted what may be the ultimate disaster
movie set right here on the West Coast. But as Toni Guinyard
reports, with earthquakes, there's a giant gap between science
fiction and science fact.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Hollywood's depiction of what will happen when
"The Big One" hits is often exaggerated, but this is the real
thing.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Seismologists spend a lot of time observing,
monitoring and analyzing what happens before, during and after
an earthquake. They can tell you why earthquakes happen.

Lucy Jones>> Fault is always stressed. It's the moment at
which it finishes slipping.

Toni Guinyard>> They can tell you how they happen.

Lucy Jones>> It's actually a lot like snapping your fingers.
When we slip on the fault, a wave travels out and makes the
ground vibrate under your house.

Toni Guinyard>> But there is still a lot they don't know. They
can't tell you when and where the next earthquake is going to
take place.

Lucy Jones>> What we're really wanting is to predict which one
will be big, so we're wanting to predict the magnitude of a
future earthquake. There's not, as far as we can tell,
something special that only happens before big earthquakes and
not before small ones.

Toni Guinyard>> The NBC television miniseries, "10.5", is the
latest version casting an earthquake in a leading role, disaster
as entertainment.

Howard Braunstein>> This film will fill a need and people will
have fun with it as a big old time disaster picture. It's
entertaining. It's a ride and hopefully people will go on it.

John Lafia>> We're trying to show the worst case scenario of an
earthquake in Southern California in the entire West Coast area.

Lucy Jones>> "10.5" is complete science fantasy. It has
nothing to do with anything we know about earthquakes. As long
as people remember that, they can enjoy it if they can
(laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> Lucy Jones is the U.S. Geological Survey
scientist in charge of Southern California. She is also a
member of the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation
Council. The council has been busy in large part because of
earthquake predictions made by UCLA Professor Dr. Vladimir
Keilis-Borok.

Lucy Jones>> The first one was for a magnitude 7 or greater in
a very large area of northern Japan, which was fulfilled by a
magnitude 8.1, the Hokkaido earthquake in September. The second
one was for a very large area of central California, which was
fulfilled by the magnitude 6.5, San Simeon earthquake.

Toni Guinyard>> The professor and his international research
team were able to accurately predict two earthquakes would take
place months rather than years before they happened.

Lucy Jones>> So when we look at this and say he's gotten two
right, that's a good start. It is not enough to tell us whether
or not he's right because the approach is fundamentally
statistical. The fact is, earthquakes happen a lot, a lot more
than many people realize, and the random chance of success is
clearly there.

John Vidale>> One has to be very careful before thinking a
prediction is successful, though I think one or two more
successful predictions and it will be clear that there is
something in this new method.

Toni Guinyard>> Professor John Vidale is Interim Director of
the UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. The
earthquake predictions put a spotlight on seismic research being
done at the campus. The topic has become the subject of a
lively discussion and debate.

John Vidale>> Well, I was skeptical and I am still somewhat
skeptical. The chance of each prediction coming true at random
would have been out about one in ten, so when they have two
correct predictions in a row, that could still happen by chance.
Over the years, many people have tried to predict earthquakes.

Toni Guinyard>> Another prediction has already been made.

John Vidale>> The prediction is that, in a large area in
southeastern California, there will be a magnitude 6.4 or
greater earthquake before September 5.

Toni Guinyard>> The professor emphasizes the prediction is for
a fifty-fifty chance an earthquake will happen in the California
desert before September 5.

John Vidale>> We're worried that people will misinterpret the
statement to mean that September 5 is a particularly dangerous
day. In fact, September 5 is no more dangerous than any day
that went before it, according to the model, and in fact it's
probably a little less dangerous because as time passes without
an earthquake, it's more likely that the prediction is not
right.

Toni Guinyard>> Lucy Jones points out that the earthquake
prediction not only covers a vast area, ten to twelve thousand
square miles, it is also defined by a number of earthquake
faults.

Lucy Jones>> We have the San Andreas fault that runs along
here, the San Ysidro fault that runs along here, the Elsinore
fault, Banning fault. All of those are very big. Dozens of
faults up to here. The San Bernardino Mountains regularly have
magnitude 5's all the time. We've seen several 6's and 7's on
these small hills out here through the desert. All of those are
possible candidates that would be a success under this
prediction.

John Vidale>> Well, the concept is to look at the history of
earthquakes in an area and look for various symptoms that might
indicate that the ground is so stressed that it might be on the
verge of breaking in a large earthquake.

Toni Guinyard>> The prediction theory is based on four
indicators.

John Vidale>> One indication is if the seismicity has been
rising recently, so more earthquakes recently than in the more
distant past. Another symptom is if the moderate sized
earthquakes have more aftershocks than usual. A third symptom
is if the seismicity will rise over a broad region, not just in
a few places. The fourth concept is that there will be fewer
little earthquakes for each bigger earthquake, so the mix of big
and little earthquakes will shift, indicating that perhaps the
bigger earthquake is coming.

Toni Guinyard>> A big earthquake, perhaps not "The Big One",
but one with a magnitude great enough to cause damage.

Lucy Jones>> This isn't going to give us that holy grail of
something that's really going to make a difference in how people
respond to earthquakes, but it will tell us there is information
in the earth about how big an earthquake will be before it
happens and this will be the first time we can say that.

Toni Guinyard>> So as you watch Hollywood's version of "The Big
One" on TV, consider this:

John Vidale>> You know, Superman flies around the earth and
turns back time to undo earthquakes in other movies, and it's
clearly not true. That would never happen, a 10.5 earthquake in
California.

Toni Guinyard>> Why not?

John Vidale>> Well, the biggest earthquake we've ever seen in
the last fifty years, 1960, it was a magnitude 9.5. So these
faults like the San Andreas in California, even though they're
pretty long, they're only ten or twenty kilometers deep and
they're just not that big. Even if the whole San Andreas broke
from Mexico most of the way up to Oregon, it would still only
probably be at most a magnitude 8.5 earthquake.

Lucy Jones>> I don't believe any scientists were harmed or
consulted in the making of this movie (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> Entertainment may take center stage for the
moment, but the science behind the prediction of earthquakes is
getting its share of attention.

Lucy Jones>> If somebody could actually do it, we'd love it. I
mean, science is prediction and anything that advances that is
an excitement.

Val>> So far, the Northridge earthquake has been the most
costly natural disaster ever to hit California. It's been more
than ten years and some homeowners are still putting together
their houses and their lives.

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Val>> No one knows President Bush better than the veteran
political reporters who covered him in Texas. Back then,
President Bush wasn't engulfed in the bubble of the White House
and journalists got to know the man and the people around him
quite well. Now James Moore is sharing some of what he knows in
a new book that's highly critical of the Bush presidency. It's
called "Bush's War for Reelection" and tonight the author goes
one-on-one with Philip Bruce.

Philip Bruce>> Jim Moore, I have to tell everybody up front
that you and I are old friends. We've known each other since
our days as Texas reporters and I know you as a veteran
political reporter from Austin who knew George Bush very well.
The question is, why are you so critical of the Bush presidency
right now?

James Moore>> The reason I'm so critical, I think, is because I
saw the potential that the president had as a governor and as a
person in public life. Look, he came into office in Austin and
he built these coalitions that were phenomenal. You know,
sometimes in politics, common sense passes for genius, but this
guy comes in and he brings in all the Democrats and all the
Republicans -- 181 of them individually -- and says what can we
do to work together? What's on your agenda? Here's what's on
my agenda.

He built these coalitions. He was moderate as a governor. He
governed from the middle and then, when he became president, it
was almost as if the real George Bush had been hiding in the
weeds, a guy who lived out on the right-hand edge of the
cracker, and he's taken the country in a very almost radical
direction.

Philip Bruce>> You raise some questions about the priorities of
the Bush administration as the transition was being made from
Clinton to Bush. Tell me about that, about how the priority
list came about and what it was and who had what to say about
it.

James Moore>> There's a tradition on inauguration day when a
new president comes into office and he meets the outgoing
president. They're in the Oval Office, they shake hands, they
say hello. There's this sort of gentlemanly -- and someday it
will be a gentlewomanly -- sort of thing where they say here's
what I know and this is the advice I can offer you as you take
over.

Bill Clinton listed five things he thought that George W. Bush
should concentrate on. He said, top of the list, Osama bin
Laden. This guy is crazy, he hates us, he's coming after us.
We've had all sorts of intelligence. You've got to concentrate
on him. He said India and Pakistan are pointing nukes at each
other. Be wary of that. There's North Korea, they're
developing a nuke, they've got a crazy leader. And then there
is Saddam Hussein.

George W. Bush shook Bill Clinton's hand and said, thank you
very much, Mr. President. I appreciate your advice, but I think
you got your priorities wrong. I'm putting Saddam at the top of
the list. From the day they went in, they were planning on
going in. In fact, I think it was even during the campaign,
there was something they had in the back of their minds that
they were planning.

Philip Bruce>> From the cover on your book, the picture of
George Bush there in that flight suit, we get a pretty good
impression of what you think about this whole issue, of him
running as a war president and presenting himself as some sort
of military leader. One of the things you raised early on was
Bush's service in the National Guard and how that all came
about. I mean, is that issue still alive or do you think it's
gotten enough attention?

James Moore>> No, it's completely unanswered. There's a reason
that it's relevant and there's a reason that I've been obsessed
with it, as you know, since 1994 when he ran for governor and I
asked the question in the debate against Dan Richards. It
hasn't been answered because documents are still missing. He
was grounded and, for some reason which we don't know, he was
not allowed to fly an airplane after taxpayers had spent
$900,000 training him to fly a fighter jet.

There is a document which is a Board of Inquiry report, a
Commander's narrative, explaining why he was grounded. That has
not been released and it never will be released until the
president authorizes it with his signature, just as John McCain
did in South Carolina when he was being accused of being
mentally unstable. The last thing I would say about this is
that I think this is relevant for a very important reason.

Our current forces in Iraq, or a large percentage of them, are
composed of National Guard soldiers who were called to active
duty. George W. Bush's behavior, his disappearance from Texas
to Alabama without permission and not showing up for duty in
Alabama, goes to the heart of his moral authority to call up our
kids and send our kids into combat. Where would we be in this
alleged war on terrorism in Iraq if these kids that he has sent
over there had all been off in Alabama and had been as
capricious or irresponsible about their oath as he was about
his?

Philip Bruce>> I have to say, for some of your critics who've
tried to paint you as an attack dog in the Bush administration,
I don't remember you that way when you were covering George Bush
back in Texas. In fact, you had a pretty friendly relationship
with him. Now you're clearly upset about what he's doing as
president and what he's doing in Iraq. What are your thoughts
about what's going on now in Iraq as you see this?

James Moore>> It's a horror and it's a horror that didn't have
to be and it gets worse and worse every day. We went to Iraq
for all the wrong reasons and we keep saying that, well, we're
going to bring democracy into Iraq. We're going to stabilize
the Middle East. The truth is, if we leave tomorrow or we leave
ten years from tomorrow, that country is going to turn into a
theocracy. It is going to have an Islamic government. A
powerful cleric, whether he be Shiite or Sunni, is going to
control the government and, if he's a smart cleric, he'll build
coalitions between the two sects and the country will be
stabilized.

Philip Bruce>> We pointed out in the introduction to this
interview that you're in the rare position to have known George
Bush before he got in the bubble of the White House. That let
you get a sense of what the man is like. Would you have ever
anticipated George Bush as president would be the president he's
turned out to be?

James Moore>> No, no. I absolutely didn't. I mean, in fact, I
reported on him way back in 1978, Phil, when he was running for
congress in west Texas and I was a beginning TV reporter. You
know, I knew him then. I interviewed him in Iowa when he was
campaigning for his dad, as you know, when he became the
managing general partner of the Texas Rangers and, you know,
spent all of that time running as governor. He and I used to
run around town late together and he's a very affable, likeable
person, fairly smart, but not at the top of the class.

But he was a guy who seemed to be very moderate in all things
and he always talked about compromises. I interviewed a bunch
of people through the years who knew him in his days when he was
hanging out in Austin after he got out of college. He was
always talking about compromise, bringing people together,
getting in the middle. He has presently divided our country in
a way that I think is worse probably than anything that's
happened, even Vietnam, since the Civil War. Families are being
divided now.

Philip Bruce>> That gets to an issue that I know you've heard
before. A lot of people will say this guy is saying all those
bad things about the president because he just doesn't like him,
and I've never known you to personally not like George Bush.

James Moore>> I've always liked him. I've always thought he
was a good guy. He was always accessible. He was always able
to explain his positions. He knew where he was going. He knew
what he wanted to do. I've been baffled as somebody who knows
him and as somebody who found him a likeable person about what
he's doing now. I want to say that I voted for the guy three
times, twice as governor and once as President of the United
States. I think, like a lot of people in this country, I feel
like I've been sucker-punched.

Philip Bruce>> Well, Jim Moore, thanks for your time on the
book. The book is called "Bush's War for Reelection". Good
luck to you.

James Moore>> Phil, thanks for having me.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Life and Times
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Val>> We all know what it's like to navigate the freeways in
Los Angeles. Can you imagine being an earthbound driver of a
vehicle that's on the planet Mars? Well, we all recall the
spectacular images from the Mars Rovers as they cruised across
the Red Planet. Now we're about to see what it takes to steer
those Rovers from a computer terminal near Pasadena. Saul
Gonzalez takes us to JPL headquarters for a talk with one of the
men behind the wheel.

Saul Gonzalez>> Scott, you have what to me is one of the most
interesting jobs on the planet. That is, you come in to work
every day and you help to drive and navigate a vehicle on
another world. What is that like?

Scott Maxwell>> It's a lot of fun and very stressful at the
same time. What I really like about it, I think, the best part
about it, is that every day is something new. Just as soon as
we get to the point where it's something routine, oh, we've been
driving this terrain for a while, the terrain changes, there's a
new challenge, they want to do something with the vehicle like
dig a trench that we haven't done before or something like that.
So every day, you know, there is something that we just haven't
done before. It's a great challenge and it's just a lot of fun
to do.

Saul Gonzalez>> Now I use the word that you "navigate" the
vehicle on another world, but it's not really done in real time,
right? The driving isn't done. How do you do that?

Scott Maxwell>> Well, you're right. Since Mars is roughly
fifteen light minutes away now, if we were trying to drive
interactively, then by the time we turned the wheel, it would be
thirty minutes later before we saw the results. I mean, you
just can't drive with that kind of delay. So instead, we use a
model where we plan the whole Rover's day in advance and then
uplink those commands to the Rover.

So basically, we come in at the late afternoon as far as the
Rover is concerned, put together a whole list of things we want
the Rover to do for the next day overnight and then uplink those
to the Rover the next morning and the Rover carries out those
commands through the day. Then we come in later that day and
start the process over. To help us do that, we've written some
software that does simulation and visualization of the driving.
So we can look at a 3-D model of the terrain similar to what you
would see on video games and put a 3-D model of the Rover within
that terrain and then --

Saul Gonzalez>> -- try it there. Try the driving first there.

Scott Maxwell>> Exactly. We put together that list of
commands, have the Rover kind of drive through the model and,
when it's doing what we want it to do, then we send those
commands to the real vehicle and it does that. So this is the
Rover following a course that we laid out for it a couple of
days ago, day before yesterday, driving from its starting
position here in between an obstacle, a basketball, to the left.
It was just a little bit too big for the Rover to climb over.
These rocks here called Three Amigos on the right which were way
too big for the Rover to climb over, so going out to where you
see these comically oversized lawn darts here, and heading out
more or less directly to the target, Route 66, and then doing a
final correcting move.

Saul Gonzalez>> And how far is that from its start point to its
end point?

Scott Maxwell>> It's about seventeen meters, so about fifty
feet, more or less. We also move this around and kind of see
from overhead, kind of fly down and kind of examine the Rover
from different vantage points to kind of make sure that it's
interacting with the terrain the way that we would like, that
kind of thing. Unfortunately, as it gets further out, the data
gets kind of rattier and so the Rover, in the simulation, is
doing things the Rover in the real world will not do. But we're
aware of kind of those limitations and take those into account
when we're doing our planning.

Saul Gonzalez>> And comfortably speaking, you can plot how many
feet out in the Rover?

Scott Maxwell>> Typically, we can do a drive where we
micromanage the Rover's drive out to about twenty or thirty
meters away from a starting point and then, after that, we
pretty much -- the data that we have isn't good enough for us to
safely plan a drive for the Rover in advance, so we would, after
that, tell the Rover to find its own way until we have the next
day's images to start planning with again.

Saul Gonzalez>> Now do you and your colleagues already have the
knack of just sort of looking at something like this and just
eyeballing what it can do or what it can't do? Just by looking
at this image, which rocks are too high, which rocks it can
comfortably handle?

Scott Maxwell>> This is sad, but I've gotten so much in the
habit of doing that, this is absolutely true. I was walking
across the JPL campus the other day. I saw a rock out of the
corner of my eye and said, oh, that's a mobility hazard. We
can't go over that (laughter). So I'm just kind of doing it
automatically.

Saul Gonzalez>> You take your work home with you (laughter).

Scott Maxwell>> Yeah, yeah, I'm afraid I am. But not only are
we doing it all the time when we look at these images, I'm just
doing it all the time anyway. Yeah, when we started the
mission, I wasn't really as confident in doing that, but now
we're getting the data back from the Rover and the first thing I
do is, when I look at it, I'm like, okay, that's a hazard,
that's a hazard, we can't go there, okay, we can go through
there, yeah, we can get where you want to go, and I can kind of
make those assessments much more quickly than I used to be able
to just from all the practice we've been getting.

Saul Gonzalez>> How do you choose where it goes? Who makes
that decision? How is that done between scientists and
engineers?

Scott Maxwell>> The raw scale sort of planning is mostly done
from the scientists. You know, when we landed, they kind of
took a look around. They said, oh, there's this cool crater,
Bonneville Crater, we'd really like to go there. There are also
these really cool hills, Columbia Hills, off to the east. We'd
really like to go there. The long-term objectives were set by
the scientists to say basically, okay, we want to go to
Bonneville, then we want to go to the hills.

The day-to-day kind of tactical planning comes down to the
engineers to take a look at the terrain immediately around us
and say what path from where we are leads us as close as we can
get to the next objective. Sometimes that means going a little
bit away. When we were finished at Bonneville Crater and we
were going to the Columbia Hills, the hills were at the east,
but the best path out was to go to the southwest actually and
kind of get out into a terrain where it was a little less rocky
and the vehicle could make better time.

That was a decision, for example, that was up to the engineers.
The long-term plan didn't change, but the short-term plan, the
daily plan, was up to us to say, well, we can kind of get where
we want to go by going a little bit away from it first and then
kind of zooming around.

Saul Gonzalez>> What is it that the vehicle can do on its own,
that Spirit and Opportunity can do on their own, that you don't
really even have to be a part of? And what are the things that
only you can do by sending up instructions?

Scott Maxwell>> The vehicles have little eyes kind of mounted
on the front of the body, kind of the main gold box of the
Rover, the electronics box, that let it see a world around it
just ahead of it. The goal of those cameras for navigation is
to spot any hazards that are in the Rover's way. We can tell
it, for example, you're here, we want you to go here, go.

The Rover will kind of look at the world in front of it, kind of
take a step forward, look at the world in front of it, take a
step forward, see a hazard, kind of back up and kind of go
around and figure out a path on its own. Very much like
exploring kind of a cluttered room, if you imagine exploring a
cluttered room with a candle where you can kind of only see a
zone that's kind of a little way around you.

Saul Gonzalez>> Creeping forward, checking the position and
creeping forward.

Scott Maxell>> Yeah, exactly. You'll see an obstacle, backing
out, and kind of going around, so the Rover has the facility to
do that. However, it can't always do those kinds of things on
its own. If, for example, -- there was one rock, Humphrey. It
was a big rock, way too big for the Rover to climb over. The
Rover's autonomous software wouldn't let it go near that rock
because it was a hazard that could damage the Rover. So final
approach drives like that, well, we say, okay, kind of get
yourself close to this rock, but we'll take care of getting you
the last couple of meters or so that you're kind of too scared
to drive on your own. We'll plan that part out for you. Those
parts kind of come down to us as well.

Saul Gonzalez>> Having now been involved in exploring the
Martian surface now for three months, do you feel like an
explorer? Do you feel like you have some kind of a link to, you
know, Lewis and Clark or Amelia Earhart or Neal Armstrong?

Scott Maxwell>> I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I
might put the Rovers in that category. Certainly one of the
cool things about these Rovers is that they give you a sense of
being there. They're kind of your height and they move around
in the terrain, so you're kind of seeing through their eyes.
It's very different from being in an orbiter mission where you
have this kind of, you know, global overview of a planet.
You're really kind of down there on the surface and you feel
like you're there. It's just been a great experience. I mean,
I'm having the time of my life now.

Val>> And there are no parking meters on Mars. And that's our
program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times,
thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.