the government and the establishment view is 100 percent opposite they are absolutely determined to hold these olympics no matter what no matter what the criticism they're going to push forward with everything they got mount etna on the telly and on and of sicily has erupted again sending lava rocks up to 900 meters into the air explosions could be heard in nearby towns and the airport in the city of khatami are closed because of the ash its edna's 16th eruption this year. time for a quick check of the headlines here on al-jazeera japan says north korea has fired 2 ballistic missiles that were launched from south how many young province into the sea near japan the u.s. pacific command says it shows pyongyang is a threat to its neighbors robert bryant has more from seoul it is quite a significant development it happened early thursday morning was 1st detected by

the japanese coast guard later confirmed by officials here in south korea as being 2 projectiles flying some 450 kilometers and both japanese and u.s. officials are now saying that these were ballistic missiles now this is the 1st time in a year that north korea has launched one of these provocative type of tests one in 4 people in the world who's dying of covert 19 is a brazilian more than 300000 people have now died there since the start of the coronavirus pandemic it has recently seen cases and deaths rising to record levels . the president gerry bolton r.-o. who has long downplayed the threat of the virus has announced a committee to tackle the crisis india's reported its highest number of daily infections since the end of october more than 53000 cases were reported overnight the increase in cases of follow death follow health officials protecting what's being described as a double mutant variant of the virus a double mutant is an entirely new variant but with the characteristics of 2 other

previously identified types and cases in the u.s. have now passed 30000000 since the pandemic began public health experts there were cautiously optimistic 3 months into the vaccination rollout 70 percent of americans was 65 and older but now received at least one dose of that scene and cope with 1000 related deaths of drop below the 1000 a day the average for the 1st time since november. and after a delay of more than a year then picked torch relay ceremony for the tokyo 2020 games has begun the flame is starting its journey from fukushima which was devastated by a tsunami and earthquake 10 years ago spectators are barred from the start of the relay because of code 19 the ceremony marks the 4 month countdown to the games as the world's 1st major sporting event during the pandemic so those were the headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera after the stream station that's watching. we understand the differences.

of cultures across the wound so no matter how you take it out just to. bring you the news and current affairs that matter to you. to 0. i femi oke a you know what listerine in today's episode we also the question all humans alone in the universe. is a professor of science at harvard university he joins us to talk about that but to make it a subject plus his new book extraterrestrial the 1st sign of intelligent life beyond us i have been reading this book for my research i started to turn down the pages whenever i found anything interesting every other page is turned down i know you will have questions as well jump into the comment section and you too can be

part of the day's discussion the reasons for me to buy this book basically it's like brain candy it's like junk food for the brain because there's always this nagging question what is out there we may never know but to have these thought experiments that has always fascinated me has been to me ever since our other child our very hard years old now so i'm going old fart but i still love science. it keeps the mind going it keeps you wondering and that's where this comes into play it still keeps you wondering it doesn't have all the answers but it is food for thought. well that's one way to make i guess smiled professor loaf welcome to the string so good to see. her think can write your book for you if at all well thank you for having me i wrote the book for the

young generation who i hope will occupy the horses look at the me in the future because young people do not carry a prejudice they don't carry biases they're not a patch to their ego as much as senior people are and frankly i thought the publisher of the person around the world would decide to become a saint is this after reading my book i would be satisfied it so happened that a couple of weeks ago i received an email from malawi africa from a woman that said the your book is great i'm contemplating becoming an astronomer after reading it and that made me study space already there was another one from columbia in latin america in undergraduate student who said that reading about your work change my life there was another one from a lawyer in palo alto who said similar things on. i'm quite satisfied the

facile i'm looking at an article of a q why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to vincent us so here's the question that a lot of people are wondering what and you want to in your book are we alone. right and that my suspicion is that we are not in fact that thinks like us existed for billions of years because most stars formby disappears before the sun and that the sun is that typical star and heart of the sun like stars have a planet this size of the earth roughly at the same separation so if you arrange for similar circumstances you might as well get seen our outcomes i don't think that we are special i don't think that we deserve special attention like many other people think you know when my daughters were young they were torment they thought very highly of themselves they thought that they must be you know the smartest in

the world that they are the center of the world but then when we took them to the kindergarten they realized there are smarter kids around and our civilization will be much sure once we meet others we tend to think very highly of our service you know the ancient greek philosopher are restartable suggested that we are the center of the universe and people have believed him for a 1000 years and there are local paralegals and go you will realize that the earth moves around the sun and it still took a while before people accept that. i think you know we are not at the center of anything and we should look out and find others and just looking hair has not his saying here is what she knew right now and he says of course there is intelligent life beyond earth how could we prove. what i am wondering though professor is at exposure to science fiction of a mental wards and how that impacts even how insane how scientists feel the idea of

extraterrestrial life what does that. right so science fiction i think plays a very important broadly in expanding our imagination as to what we might expect out there i have a problem with most of the storylines in science fiction i'm not a fan of science fiction i'm a fan of science or fiction separately but but they do value the fact that science fiction expands our our horizons the reason i don't like many of the story lines is because they violate the laws of physics very often but there are other scientists because of that tension of the public to science fiction and to reports about and they did it but flying objects and so forth they shy away from discussing this topic they say you know it said to popular 1 are it's controversial we don't want to discuss it at all and my point is simple you know if you go back to ancient

history there were people claiming that the human body has a soul and that we should not engage in anatomy and imagine if scientists would say all of the subject of the human body is controversial some people claim it has a source some not that we don't want to discuss it just like the response to do science fiction what would happen with modern medicine where would we be i think in fact science has an obligation to attend to a topic that is of great interest to the public and clear it up using the same method using equipment telescopes that we have are we the smartest kid on the block you know that's a very fundamental question christopher shop has a question for you professor how many said how long. i mean he shot on fuels and i believe that you're inspiring a new generation of scientists to absolutely. curiosity out statement from the scientific community my question

relates to is saying actually may now know he was government is actively investigating this and is taking the phenomena seriously happy what is your opinion all you have is and. by the u.s. government to help the nervous to gay sions what would your response city. yes that's an excellent question and what they think we should rely on is really the very best ecommerce an all of your sensors that we have a car hands right now rather than on or the reports from the pentagon that they're being declassified because they were not using the very best instruments and are based on partly on their eyewitness testimonies it's obvious why the u.s. government was classifying these reports because there was always the concern that

they might represent the chronology is that other nations possess and that poses an national security risk but them from the point of view of science what we would like to understand is are there unusual phenomena that represent perhaps something else and for that purpose or do we need to do is deploy the very best cameras and all your sense source in the same locations and record everything we see you know science is about reproducibility of results you have to reproduce results in order to believe them there is their own biblical story of abraham that. heard the voice of god and the the thought of him to sacrifice is only son isaac and then you know if abraham had the cell phone with a voice memo up equal that pressed the button and recorded the voice of god and then we would all believe it but given the fact that he didn't have a cell phone we have to decide whether we believe this testimony or not and i think

you know it's much better to focus on how we get reliable evidence in the future rather than look at documents that were based on or the quick meant and i'm very open minded the family asked to lead a group of people that will perform same difficult experiments in the same locations recording the sky and looking for unusual for now. i would be very interested in checking this out you know it's just the way we do science we look for every day as we are guided by theirs and we should not be guided by bridges i love that you talk about looking for unusual phenomena which brings me to something that was spotted in 2017 that some think is on my laptop surrounded by a little blue so call professor for those of us who are new to this tell us what you're seeing what they're seeing and what your hypotheses is that this is

. yet this is an object the 1st one that was discovered near the earth that came from outside the solar system it's sort of like finding an object in your backyard that came from the streets and it may have taken a long time to get here and he saves you the triple for going to the street then figuring out what's going up there and this is the very 1st one that we not these you know our vicinity it was given the name a warm one because it was discovered by a periscope in hawaii and there are more and more means to sculpt in the hawaiian language and at 1st the stronger merced thought well it must be just like the rocks we have seen before in the solar system either a comet or an asteroid the problem was that it didn't have any commentary tape no gas or dust around it and also as it was spinning around every 8

hours its brightness changed by a factor of 10 and that implied that it has a very extreme shape most likely flat. pancake shape so it's just like a piece of paper tumbling in the wind and then it exhibited an excess push away from the sun that can only be explained in terms of reflection of sunlight pushing it and in september 2020 we saw another object that exhibited the same kind of push by reflecting sunlight and not commentary tale thus are the battle ject which was called 2020 s all is actually a rocket booster that we launched in 1966 and their mission and we know that we produced it artificially the question is who produced or more more. sale let me throw that question back to here because this is a 5 asking such a big scientific debate around you asking who purchased

a moment because you are saying possibly professor fill in the blank an alien civilization of technological civilization you know for the past 70 years we've been searching for radio signals and we didn't get any that's just like trying to have a conversation you need the counterpart to be alive we cannot have a phone conversation with the mayans with the mayan culture because it's not around anymore but we can find evidence that if they existed in archeological digs we can find relics that they left behind and in much the same way we can do space archaeology we can look for equipment but was sent into space just like we sent voyager one corridor to nor horizons and it's floating audience space every now and then there would be a piece of equipment that we would discover in our vicinity it's just like walking on the beach and every now and then seeing a plastic bottle among the rocks that they're naturally produced and of course the

way to tell the difference between a plastic bottle and iraq in space is to send a spacecraft that we come close to it and take a close up photograph they say a picture is worth a 1000 words any in my case a picture is worth 66000 words the number of words in my book seth professor of extremely article right now but you started up huge storm of controversy and other scientists said with quite a lot of determination that you are so loose wrong in your hypotheses let me introduce you to one of them this is captain. and the representative of the after gumbo community and myself and many others disagree with dr logs assessment more and more as an actor terrestrial space probe the science just isn't there yes the moon boy is from interstellar space yes it has an

odd shaped yesterday experience gravitational acceleration and a fire stunts but all of these things have natural when ations collision between find terry bodies are very common in the universe and your jintao gassing had been shown to be a buyable explanation for why more accelerated and the path by our sign and so what i think we're really looking at is just a visiting chunk of another solar system. right so there were various suggestions that were more ways than natural object and the latest one among them is in nitrogen iceberg hypothesis that it's an object made of pure nitrogen and before that there was a suggestion that it's an object made of pure hydrogen and we just can't see the cometary tape because it's transparent for hydrogen the problem is that we showed

it in the same depict paper that it would have operant very quickly an object of the size of a football field will not last very long and can survive the journey for nitrogen iceberg and that's their plot this is that was published just a week ago i'm currently writing a paper showing that you just can't make enough of them to explain on more and more up there would be too few but all this of magnitude compared to what you need from a population that whose members are abundant enough to explain an object like that because if you think about it they view is that it's a chunk of frozen nitrogen and that you can make on the surface of planets like brutal or which are you know a small component in the solar system and solar the chance of that happening is really small if you will chip off the surface of a planet like brutal and that you have enough pluto's for every star what you need

there's thousands of pluto's for every star such that you have enough chunks of nitrogen to explain or warm what and there are other i porpoises that maybe it's a cloud of dust particles but these a 100 times less than stone air the problem with that is as it gets close to the sun it would be heated by hundreds of degrees and then it would not maintain its integrity so on all of these natural explanations involve something that we have never seen before. and my point is simple if we invoke something that we've never seen before we must keep on the table the possibility that it's our professional in origin and the fact that this is controversial just reflects on my colleagues not on me i'm just following the standard thing to fit procedure where i put all possibilities on that they both without prejudice professor i feel like i just experience what it's like to have to hear trash talk from a professor of science at harvard university there has been

a lot of controversy that continues a new theories that your work has inspired one of them me and you just mentioned this one this is from the smithsonian magazine oh they share there's this new theory suggesting that more and more is a nitrogen ice pancake we spoke to a professor of. astrophysics who actually subscribes to this now i would love for you when i when i play this to explain what he is asking and challenging iran before you reply to it because it's a little complicated have a look have a listen i've been funded by nasa for a long time to help devise strategies for looking for ilion life on exoplanets and it's by trying to understand the jew chemical cycles on these planets and eliminating false positives and every astronomer i've worked with we're all confident that we're going to find evidence of alien life maybe even within our lifetimes but we know that we're going to do this by eliminating false positives in

the same it's all normal we have to eliminate all the natural explanations 1st no responsible scientist is going to look at a normal and say it's alien technology if there are reasonable natural explanations like an end to ice fragments off of the trunk of the next. yes. steven is one of the authors of the recent 2 papers that were published last week arguing that maybe or more is a chunk of pure nitrogen and for this scenario to work you cannot allow carbon for example to be a source she added with that the iceberg because the spitzer space telescope would very tight limits on any carbon based fuels in the vapor that comes came out of fear or what if it thought it so there was no carbon and the claim is ok maybe it's just pure nitrogen and one environment where you find pure nitrogen

with live very little carbon is the surface of brutal very thin veneer you know less than a percent of the mass of blue dog on the surface is made of pure nitrogen so that proposal years that you just scrape off the surface of pluto like planets around other stars you create chunks and what we are seeing is the 1st interest that our object or more and more are was one of these chunks the thing that you have to keep in mind is we have never seen and nitrogen object in the solar system saw we have the so-called or cloud of you know about a 1000000000 objects larger than manhattan island in the vista in the periphery of the solar system and all thousands of those examples of objects that we softened up environment of the solar system were made off. i see roc you know the kind of

things we find on earth rocks including cargo on including water on their surface in the form of ice and that's what we've seen thousands of times we've never seen and nitrogen pure nitrogen chunk and then get you know sleet something that we have never seen before and we're supposed to believe that more than anything artificial in this mist artificial possibility based on that and the other thing is you know carbon and nitrogen are produced in stars by the same process and usually you know there is one example of a nitrogen rich comet that we have seen that the authors of the space are are mentioning and that one actually shows also evidence for carbon so i rest my case whenever you know typically you get carbon together with nitrogen and why would you scrape off the surfaces of pluto like objects and create the bust majority or think

the star object this way or it is of special fractional interest in our object this way rather than have the majority of them being rocks like we find the source is the problem saying is we look at our backyard that we see rocks then you tell me all in this street there are very different type of thought jets actually nitrogen pure and i said ok maybe you know that's a possibility but it's certainly not an appealing possibility knepper a shell out audience this path check this is galileo italian astronomer it was a physicist who was a philosopher as well going up against the church the church was furious at his idea of what our solar system looked like he was right they were wrong you mentioned in your book a year modern day galileo. well that's a good question and you know it really is the bends and the response of the community i am just just like busted but players keep my eyes on the ball not on

the audience i don't care how many likes a head on twitter and what the response of you know the personal attacks that people. launch at me that really is irrelevant because we have we have to look at the evidence and if it looks anomalous and the arc of the show origin appears to be more likely than things that we've never seen before then i advocate for that once we get more evidence i basically say let's take a photograph of the next object that would be looking us we are still more than what we would learn something new or no matter what because even the natural origin ideas like the one we just heard about the nitrogen ice berg even they talk about something that we've never seen before so there must be factories of objects that we've never seen before let's figure them out by getting more evidence that's my advocacy and the only reason we would not get that evidence is if you listen to those people that say you know it's always rocks it's never illions to me they

remind me of a cave men that plays with rocks all of his life and then present it with a cell phone and arguing a certain one must be just the shiny half f.s.a. you have just insulted so many of your peers and colleagues i am enjoying this immensely sound when our new chief says remaining skeptical is so important which says if we knew the truth about aliens it would change everything that we fly and one more thought here and that is the idea of from 70 he says what should we expect from the future while at church a restaurant life ever come to feel some of us here on our earth and that thought is a very quick thought professor because rev wright at one end of the show and i'm going to give you one minute go ahead it's very important it's a very important question and that. rico fermi a famous physicist where he's everybody you know i think it's presumptuous us to expect them to visit us we should go out and search for them we are not that

significant we're not that important it reminds me of the friends of my wife when i met her they were waiting for prince charming on a white horse to come and make their marriage proposal and it never happened we should expect that you know others to appreciate us we should go out and search and you know frankly we are born into this world like actors who go on a stage we felt the script the 1st thing to check is there are other actors around we you know we ask them what the plays about thank you so much professor. extraterrestrial the says side of intelligent life beyond earth and that is his new book string the controversial enjoy digging into that i mean come to conclusions professor thank you for being on the string today i really enjoyed your company side and i'll see you next time thanks for watching everybody take.

frank assessments the world is on the brink i guess there's a strong the moral samia is that a fair assessment you could be a catastrophic failure to twice and valuable backseat informed opinions should we be buying big oil ultimately it will be sovereigns and governments who are buying this or that is the direction this is all headed in-depth analysis of the day's global headlines the inside story on which is iraq. it's the political debate show that's challenging the way you think i want to know where you're to stand on cancer culture creasing the range of ideas that can be heard from international politics to the global pandemic and everything in between

if tech companies are the ones with all the power what do we do what's the solution or get organized what are world leaders or governments missing talking about targets in like 2040 or 20 targets but now up front with me while i'm out here on al-jazeera. the health of humanity is at stake a global pandemic requires a global response. w.h.o. is the guardian of global health delivering lifesaving to school supplies and training to help the world's most found people uniting across borders to speed up the development of test treatments and effects working with scientists and health workers to learn all we can about the virus keeping you up to date with what's happening on the ground in the womb and in the land advocating for everyone to have access to essential health services now more than the world needs w.-h.

on making a healthy a world. for everyone. for the 2nd time in a week north korea fires more missiles off its coast adding pressure on the new biden administration. hello i'm daryn jordan this is al jazeera live from doha also coming up hospitals in brazil are at breaking point has covered 19 deaths past 300000. i'm annoyed it up a little on the us mexico border where migrant refugee numbers are growing must present.