EL SEGUNDO HERALD August 11, 2016 Page 3 Looking Up Is Earthly Life Premature from a Cosmic Perspective?; August Moon Star Party in Westchester By Bob Eklund The universe is 13.8 billion years old, while our planet formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists think this time gap means that life on other planets could be billions of years older than ours. However, new theoretical work suggests that present-day life on Earth is actually premature from a cosmic perspective. “If you ask, ‘When is life most likely to emerge?’ you might naively say, ‘Now,’” says lead author Avi Loeb of the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But we find that the chance of life grows much higher in the distant future.” Life as we know it first became possible about 30 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars seeded the cosmos with the necessary elements like carbon and oxygen. Life will end 10 trillion years from now when the last stars fade away and die. Loeb and his colleagues considered the relative likelihood of life between those two boundaries. The dominant factor proved to be the lifetimes of stars. The higher a star’s mass, the shorter its lifetime. Stars larger than about three times the Sun’s mass will expire before life has a chance to evolve. Conversely, the smallest stars weigh less than 10 percent as much as the Sun. They will glow for 10 trillion years, giving life ample time to emerge on any planets they host. As a result, the probability of life grows over time. In fact, chances of life are 1,000 times higher in the distant future than now. “So then you may ask, why aren’t we living in the future next to a low-mass star?” says Loeb. “One possibility is we’re premature. Another possibility is that the environment around a low-mass star is hazardous to life.” Although low-mass, red dwarf stars live for a long time, they also pose unique threats. In their youth they emit strong flares and ultraviolet radiation that could strip the atmosphere from any rocky world in the habitable zone. To determine which possibility is correct— our premature existence or the hazard of low-mass stars—Loeb recommends studying nearby red dwarf stars and their planets for signs of habitability. Future space missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and James Webb Space Telescope should help to answer these questions. August Moon Star Party On Saturday, Aug. 13, 7 to 10 p.m., Westchester Amateur Astronomers will provide telescopes for public viewing of the August Moon and planets Saturn, Mars, and Venus – plus stars and nebulae. Location: In the Christian Science church parking lot at 7855 Alverstone Ave., Westchester (One block west of Sepulveda, at 79th St.). Children are welcome – bring them and learn astronomy basics together. The event is free and all are welcome to look through the telescopes, but you may bring your own telescope if you wish. This is a good time to view much of our Solar System lined up across southern sky: yellow Saturn with its bright moon Titan; red Mars, now in gibbous phase; our own August Moon, also in gibbous phase; and Venus, returning to the evening sky in the west just above the sunset glow. For information about the star party – or if you are interested in helping form a local astronomy club – call star party host Bob Eklund at 310-216-5947 or email Bob at beklund@sprynet.com. “All moons beautiful, but August moon most beautiful.” (from the movie “Teahouse of the August Moon”) • Laura and Bob Eklund. Photo courtesy of Bob Eklund. Real Estate Booms for Office Space Cross Paths By Rob McCarthy This is a tale of two commercial-property booms. One is losing some momentum, while the other looks unstoppable. A new forecast cautions that construction and leasing of office space throughout the state will begin to slow with the U.S. economy by 2019. The July outlook by Allen Matkins/ UCLA Anderson School of Management thinks the demand for office space has peaked and it notes that commercial developers themselves are less optimistic than they were in 2014. The survey taken in June “provides the first indication of a topping out in office and retail markets,” said senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg with the UCLA Anderson Forecast in a three-year outlook for commercial real estate in California. Most of the office development projects already approved in Southern California are expected to break ground despite the bearish vibe. The commercial-property outlook tells investors, landlords and leasing agents they can expect to feel the slowdown sometime after 2017. The office-rental market isn’t staring at a bust, barring an extraordinary global event that jars the financial markets, forecasters said. The downward sentiment picked up in the commercial-property survey occurs as developers become more pessimistic about where rental rates and vacancy rates are headed, forecasters say. Vacancy rates, notably in Los Angeles County, have dropped and rental rates climbed by 20 percent since 2014 as companies expanded their operations and hired more employees. The developers remained optimistic about the prospects for industrial properties, and they’re slightly bullish about the building and leasing of retail space. They are slowly losing their confidence in the office-space boom, which forecasters say is based on developers’ belief that rental rates and vacancies will only hold steady for another three years. Hiring and wage growth are identified as the fundamentals of commercial real estate, and California is expected to outperform other parts of the nation in both important categories. The worry for developers and landlords is that the recovery that began in earnest after the unrealized threat of a government shutdown in 2013 is slowing. The July unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, and it’s been hovering there for a year, prompting the head of the San Francisco-based Federal Reserve to proclaim the county as full employment. Wage growth typically runs 3 percent to 3.5 percent during full employment, however, wage growth in the current economy is running at 2.5 percent, which Fed President John Williams called puzzling in a May interview with CNN Business. He did predict that full-time workers would see their paychecks increase as a result of employment dipping below 5 percent. Commercial developers and investors have time to get their projects approved and finished to take advantage of the current seller’s market condition, UCLA economist Nickelsburg said. Vacancy rates and rental prices are moving in opposite directions, which favors the landlords and commercial property investors. “The interest in building new office space has held steady and the expectation is for more building to occur in the 2016-17 time frame than in the past 12 months,” Nickelsburg said. When one door closes, another door opens, as is the case with redevelopment of commercial buildings into creative, worker-friendly offices. This redevelopment trend has transformed pockets of red-brick machine shops in Playa del Rey and El Segundo into vibrant hubs of employment for techies and digital arts companies. Playa del Rey and El Segundo are nearly built out, and the search continues for the next hot spot for entertainment and design companies that are looking for flexible office space that are close to their customers and public transportation. Creative offices feature higher ceilings, fewer walls and more amenities to attract and retain talented employees is the wave of the future, says the author of a report about the push to find properties that can be redeveloped into creative office space. Petra Durnin, Southern California director of research and analysis for CBRE, said that all office space is destined for a change. “Office space is changing for everyone,” she said. “Within the next five years. creative office and office will be synonymous … it all will be very different.” Redevelopment has turned vintage buildings, former factories, office buildings, churches and post offices into workspaces that are molded to meet the expectations of younger workers and their employers, Durnin said. Offices reduce their space requirements by allowing employees to telecommute, work offsite at the studios, or cut down on their actual time in the office. “Your 100,000-square-foot- plus is going to be a law firm. So much content and content drivers is driving the market right now. These don’t need so much office space due to the nature of their business,” Durnin said. Tech, TV and entertainment is clustered on Los Angeles Westside, making Culver City the next logical hot spot for the conversion of old buildings into offices. The creative redevelopment movement started in Santa Monica, and leapfrogged to Playa del Rey. Once the recovery gained momentum in 2014, Playa vacancy quickly dropped from 40 percent to 17 percent, and “it really took off,” Durnin said. The redevelopment began with the Hercules Campus, aka Spruce Goose, which leased quickly and moved on to the Hayden Tract in a deja vu of the dot.com boom in 2000. See Office Space, page 9
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