slim's are protesting the visit of the chinese foreign minister wang held talks with his turkish counterpart never chose a show in ankara beijing approved an extradition treaty between the 2 nations in december the deal is now awaiting russification parliament some 40000 we live in turkey hundreds of people came out to raise their voice against the treatment of the ethnic minority in china much more on our stories on our website the address is al jazeera dot com do check it out. this is al jazeera and these are the top stories egypt's syria's canel storage he says it's suspended traffic through the waterway while tugboats work to free a stranded ship has been blocking the southern stretch of the busy shipping lane for 2 days and lost control in high winds and ran aground lawrence brennan is

a retired u.s. navy counted he says the accident could result in long term struction as to shipping through the suez canal autographs yesterday showed the ship hard aground at the bed and that the stern is afloat and there could could possibly emphasizing possibly cause additional damage to the ship if the ship were to break it off it could not be reflected iss and removed that would be a long term blockage of the canal in its present position the u.n. is calling for an emergency summit on me on march the death toll there continues to rise at least 4 people have been killed on thursday medical workers an l g b t activists have now joined anti coup protests. soldiers in mozambique have launched an offensive after rebel finds is raided the northern town of parma forcing residents to flee palma was considered a safe haven and around $70000.00 people fled there from other places armed groups

linked to i still have launched similar attacks in the region since 2017 foreign ministers from france germany and italy have held talks with a libyan counterpart in the capital tripoli they held the formation of the newly sworn in unity government earlier this month and promised support for elections in december north korea has fired 2 ballistic missiles into the sea of its eastern coastline the u.s. pacific command has responded saying the actions show pyongyang is a threat to its neighbors. european union leaders that is the thing pandemic strategies and pressure of a cove in 1000 vaccine shortages and a potential 3rd wave considering to care vaccine exports to the u.k. person has received more than 10000000 doses from plants inside the e.u. has exported new vaccines back to the block as the headlines news continues here on

al-jazeera after the stream stable the us. it's a very bleak picture for a lot of americans out there white supremacy impacts all of body he says you're putting more money into the hands of some workers taking money out of the hands of other workers everyone goes to their camp it becomes us versus them this is the deal about constraining your nuclear program the bottom line the big questions on out is they are. ok you're watching the stream in today's episode we also the question all humans alone in the universe is. 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 from 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 you tube comment section and you too can be part of today'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. is always fascinating to me has been to me ever since i was a child 31 years old now so i'm going on fart but i still love science. it keeps the mind going it keeps you wondering and that's where this comes into play it's to keeps you want it doesn't have all the answers but it is food for thought. that's one way to make i guess smiled profess a loaf welcome to the strings so good to see you. think did kill write your book

fall who is it. well thank you for having me i wrote the book for the young generation who i hope will occupy the horrors of 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 that 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 an undergraduate student who said they're reading about your work change my life there was another one from

a lawyer in palo article who said similar things on. i'm quite satisfied the facile i'm looking at an article that you've read 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 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 who 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 restored will suggest 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 says of course there is intelligent life beyond earth how could we be. 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 role 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 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 effect 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 much. i mean huge fan of yours and i believe that you're inspiring a generation of scientists to absolutely. curiosity

out fearing stigma from the scientific community my question relates is saying actually may now know he was government is actively investigating you is and is taking a phenomena seriously abbi what is your opinion all you have is and. by the u.s. government to help them nervous to gay sions what would you respond city. yes that's an excellent question and what they think we should rely on is really the very best ecommerce an audio 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 they're 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 and national security risk but then from the point of view of science what we would like to understand is are there unusual phenomena but represent perhaps something else and for that purpose or we need to do is deploy the very best cameras and all of 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 have 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 harlow 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. 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 and 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 award 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 flapped. slower 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 say that question back to here because this is a 5 asking such a big scientific debate around you asking who purchased a more her 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 of your 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 that was sent into space just like we sent voyager one corridor to new horizons and it's floating audience space every now and then that would be a piece of equipment that we will 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 are 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 can 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 'd the number of words in my book seth professor. extremely logical right now but you started up huge storm of controversy and other scientists said and with quite a lot of determination i think you are so loose wrong in your hypotheses let me introduce you to one of them this is captain. and the representative of the actually humble community and myself and many others disagree

with dr ladettes ask more and more as an actor treachery and space probe the giant just isn't there yet a moon where it is from interstellar space yes it has an odd shaped yes an experience gravitational acceleration and a better stand but all of these things have natural eye explanations collision between plane terry body are very common in the universe and nitrogen outgassing had been shown to be a buyable explanation for why the more exaggerated and the path they are shined so what i think we're really looking at is just a visiting chunk of another shell or 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 the 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 sink if it were 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 but you just can't make enough of them to explain all 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 their view is that it's a chunk of frozen nitrogen and that you can make on the surface of planets like brutal which are you know a small component in the solar system. in 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 one what and there are other a porpoise is that maybe it's a cloud of dust particles that is a 100 times less dense than air the problem with that is as it gets close to the sun it will be heated by hundreds of degrees and then it will not mean game its integrity so 1 all of these natural explanations fall 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 archy fishel 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 the table without prejudice professor i feel like i just experience what it's like to have to hear trash talk from

a professor of science harvard university there has been a lot of controversy that continues a new theories that your work has inspired one of them in a and you just mentioned this one this is from the smithsonian magazine or they share 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 you on 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 early in 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 and the same with them oh no we have to meet all the natural explanations 1st no responsible scientist is going to look at our own will and say it's alien technology if there are reasonable natural explanations like an end to ice fragment off of the trunk of the necks of pluto. yes. stephen 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 there was no carbon and that 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 purports the 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 was one of these chunks the think 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 plug of you know about a 1000000000 objects larger than manhattan island in the vicinity if 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 so it's 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 being the star object this way or it is of special fractional being distant object this way rather than have the majority of them being rocks like refining the source is the problem saying is we look at our backyard that we see iraq's then you tell me all in this street there are very different type of logics actually nitrogen pure and i said ok maybe you know that's a possibility but it's certainly not an appealing possibility let me show our audience this path check this galileo italian astronomer it was a physicist who was a philosopher as well going up against the church the church was serious 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 in the response of the community i am just just like busted ballplayers 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 immense a soundman 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 sent us here on our earth and thought 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. recall for me

a famous physicist ask 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 are 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 them a marriage proposal and it never happened we should expect that you know of others to appreciate us we should go out and search and you know frankly we are born into this world like actors put on a stage without the script the 1st thing to check is other other actors around it we ask them what the plays about thank you so much professor of a live extra terrestrials assess side of intelligent life beyond earth and that is his new book take 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.

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this is al-jazeera. the time is 1500 hours g.m.t. here on al-jazeera hello i'm come out santa maria welcome to the news hour a shipping mishap with global consequences the suez canal still blocked by a large container vessel that's run aground also in the news 1st was briggs it now

the vaccines as the u.k. and the e.u. hold discussions to resolve the dispute this time it's about exports of coal.