things you in recognition does is highlight the rumba. sound is as congolese just as reggae is jamaican and other off or recognized by the you and cultural agency. the music plays on louder and more crowded around, cock, or desert. ah, this is al jazeera, these are the top stories of friday marks 2 years since china told the world health organization but an illness similar to pneumonia that since become known as covert 19, the city of chun is battling the biggest community outbreak. the countries seen this year global corona virus cases of it, a record high over the past 7 days, with almost a 1000000 detected on average each day. the u. s. has the worst affected accounting for nearly one in 3 cases in the world. the u. s. and russian presidents have spoken for the 2nd time this month, and a bid to deescalate tensions over ukraine. the white house,

as the call between joe biden and vladimir putin lost at 50 minutes by them repeated the threat of sanctions of moscow invades ukraine flooding. a put and responded that such a move currently to a complete breakdown of ties between the countries. john hendern has the latest from washington, d. c. gen saki, a press secretary for president. joseph biden has put out a statement in that. she says, president biden urged russia to de escalate tensions with ukraine. he made clear that the united states and its allies and partners will respond decisively if russia further invades ukraine. president biden also expressed support for diplomacy and it goes on to say, the president reiterated that substantial progress in these dialogues can occur only in an environment of de escalation rather than escalation. and the state of colorado, hundreds of homes have been destroyed after wildfires, driven by high winds in gulf to cities near denver has been described as

a life threatening situation. tens of thousands of people have been told to evacuate immediately. the u. s. has condemned the killing of at least 4 protesters by security forces in sudan that was shot and undermine with thousands of people rallied against the military involvement and politics. demonstrators in the capital costume approached the presidential palace. they want the military to stay out of government affairs during the transition to feel actions. a group of writings, refugees who spend days at sea in a damage boat have been rescued by indonesian authorities. the boat was towed by a navy ship off the coast of actually province 105 people, mainly women and children. this in box in the port city of cranes. ok. but they've been given a temporary accommodation that we're trying to reach malaysian those are the headlines. the news continues here on, on to 0, after the stream. goodbye. always been a hands on celeste's working in asian africa. there'd be days where i'd be choosing

and editing my iron stories in a refugee camp with no electricity. and right now where confronting some of the greatest challenges that humanity is ever faced. and i really believe that the only way we can do that is with compassion and generosity and compromise. because that's the only way we can try to solve any of these problem is together as well to 0 is so important. we make those connections. ah, hi, i sammy ok. you're watching the stream. and today's episode we asked the question all humans alone in the universe? abby lobe is a professor science at harvard university. he joins us to talk about that, but ticket as subject plus his new book, extra terrestrial. the 1st sign of intelligent life beyond us, i have been reading this book for my research. i studied 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 youtube comment section, and u t could be part of today's discussion. the reasons for me to buy this book. basically it's like brain counties like junk food for the brain because this always does negate crush them. what is out there. we may never know, but to have this thought experiments that is always fascinating to me, has been jimmy's ever since a little child. i'm 49 years old now. so, i'm an old fart, but i still love science and it keeps to mind going and it keeps wondering, and that's where this comes into play. it's taught kitchen wandering. it doesn't have all the answers, but it is food for thought. oh, that's a long way to make, i guess, smiled professor know welcome to the stream said, get to see who thank you. write your book for who is it?

well, thank you for having me. i wrote the book for the young generation who i hope will occupy the horse of continuing the future because young people do not carry a prejudice. they don't carry biases, they're not attached to their ego as much as senior people are. and frankly, i told the publisher that the person around the world will decide to become a scientist. this, after reading my book, i would be satisfied. it's so happened a couple of weeks ago, i received an email from my law. we africa from a woman that said that your book is great. i'm contemplating becoming an astronomer after reading it and that made me satisfied already. there was another one from columbia in latin america, an 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. so i'm, i'm quite satisfied the fast and now i'm looking at an article that you write, why do we assume extra terrestrials might want to visit us. so here's the question that a lot of people are wondering and you want to in your book, are we allowed? right. and that my suspicion is that we are not that in fact, it thinks like us existed for billions of years because most stars formed billions of years before the sun. and the sun is a typical star. and half of the sun, like stars have atlanta, the size of the earth, roughly the same separation. so if you arrange for similar circumstances, you might as well get similar outcomes. i don't think that we are special. i don't think that we deserve special attention, like many other people who think, ah,

you know, when my daughters were young, there were at home and they thought, very high heeled himself. they thought that they must be, you know, the smartest thing, the world that they are, the center of the world. but then when we took them to the kindergarten, they realize they're smarter kids around and our civilization will mature. once we meet others, we tend to think very high. you are so, you know, the ancient greek philosopher. aristotle suggested that we are the center of the universe and people who believed him for a 1000 years until that copernicus and galileo realized that the earth moves around the sun and it still took a while before people accepted that. so i think, you know, we are not at the center of anything and we should look out than find others. and just looking home has not his son, who is what she knew right now. and each upset, of course, is intelligent life. be on the staff. how could we peavey only ones? what i am wondering though professor is an exposure to science fiction over many

years. and how that impacts even how and how scientists feel the idea of extra terrestrial 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 story lines 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 the fact that science fiction expands 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 the attention of the public to science fiction and to reports about unidentified flying objects and so forth. they shy away from discussing this topic. they say, you know, it's said to popular. 1 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 on the subject of the human body is controversial. some people claim it has a saw some not. and we don't want to discuss it just like the response to, to science fiction. what would happen with more than madison? 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 st. you pick method using equipment, telescopes, that we have. are we the smartest kid on the block? you know, that's a very fundamental question. christopher sharp has a question for you, professor. have a listen. have a look. i'm a huge fan of yours, and i believe that you're inspiring a new generation of scientists to actively by curiosity,

without fearing stigma from the scientific community. my question relates to us. so as you may now know, us government is actively investigating your site and is taking a phenomena seriously happy. what is your opinion of your face? and if ops to you by the u. s. government to help them in their investigations. what would your response, the yes, that's an excellent question. and, and what i think we should rely on is really the very best cameras in all your sensors that we have at our 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 the eye witness testimonies. it's obvious

why the u. s. government ah, was classifying these reports because there was always the concern that they might represent technologies that other nations possess and pose a and national security risk. but them from the point of view of science, what we would like to understand is other unusual phenomena that represent perhaps something else. and for that purpose, or we need to do is deployed the very best cameras and all of your sensors in the same locations. and record everything we see, you know, you see science is about reproducibility of results. you have to reproduce results in order to believe them. there is the, all biblical story of them. abraham that ah, heard the voice of god and the the told him to sacrifice his only son, isaac. and then, you know, if abraham had a cell phone a, with a voice memo up, he could 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 how we get reliable evidence in the future. rather than look at documents that were based on or the quip meant, and i'm very open minded if i'm asked to lead a group of people that will perform scientific 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 best, weird guided by evidence and we should not be guided by prejudice. i love that you talk about looking fur, unusual phenomena. which brings me to something that was spotted in 2017, that something is on my laptop, surrounded by a little blue circle. professor. for those of us who are new to this,

tell us what you're seeing, what they're saying. and what your hypotheses is that this is yeah, 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 back yard that came from the street. and it may have taken a long time to get here and it saves you the trip of going to the street and figuring out what's going on there. ah, and this is the very 1st one that we noticed in our vicinity. it was given the name a warm why? because it was discovered by telescoping why and there are more, more means his cow in the hawaiian language. and at 1st astronomers thought, well, it must be just like the rocks we have seen before in the source, is them either a comment or an asteroid? the problem was that it didn't have any commentary tail,

no gas or dust around it. and the or so it was spinning around every 8 hours. it's brightness changed by a factor of 10. and that implies that it has a very extreme shape. ah, most likely flat, ah, so pancake shape. so it's just like a piece of paper tumbling in the winds. and then exhibited an excess push away from the sun that can only be explained in terms of a reflection of sunlight pushing it. ah, and in september 2020 we saw another object that exhibited the same kind of pushed by reflecting sunlight and no commentary. tail fell saw the battle object which was called 2020 s o is actually at rocket booster that we launch the 1966 in luna and their mission. and we know that we produce it artificially. the question is, who produced or more more?

so it was for that question back to you. because this is miles, has been such a big scientific debate around you asking who purchased a murderer because you are sang, possibly, professor filling the blank and alien civilization of technological civilization. you know, for the past 70 years we've been searching for your signals and we didn't get any that's just like trying to have a phone 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 he existed in archaeological 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 voyager to new horizons and it's floating out in 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 the spacecraft that we come close to it and take a close up photograph. they say a picture is worth a 1000 words. and in my case a picture is worth 66000 words. ready the number of words in my book says, professor, you sat as extremely logical right now, but you started up a huge storm of controversy and other scientists said, with quite a lot of determination. i think you said lutely wrong in your hypothesis. let me introduce you to one of them. this is cutting and the representative of the afternoon,

the community myself and many other disagree with dr. law assessment up as an extraterrestrial space. the scientist isn't there? yes, a is from interstellar space. yes, it has an odd shape. yes, it experience non gravitational acceleration as a buyer's son. but all of these things have natural explanations. collision between planetary bodies are very common in the universe, and nitrogen al gassing has been shown to be a viable explanation for why we're excel rated other passed by our son. 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 are more, more than natural object. and then the latest one among them is a nitrogen iceberg hypothesis that it's an object made of pure nitrogen. and then before that there was a suggestion that it's an object made of pure hydrogen. and we just can't see the

commentary tane, because it's transparent for hydrogen. the problem is that we show the dinner st dipping paper that it would evaporate very quickly. an object of the size of a football field will not last very long and couldn't survive the journey for nitrogen iceberg. and that's airport. 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 more more. there would be to few by orders 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, the idea is that it's a chunk of frozen nitrogen that you can make on the surface of planets like pluto, which are, you know, a small component in the solar system. and so the chance of that happening is really small that you cheap off the surface of

a planet like pluto 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 more and more. and then there are other i, porpoises, that may be it's a cloud of dust particles. that is a 100 times less dense than air. ah, 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 maintain its integrity. so. 1 all of these natural explanations invoke something that we have never seen for. 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 artificial in origin. and the fact that this is controversial just reflects on my colleagues, knock on me. i'm just following the standard thing, the big procedure of what i put or possibilities on the table without prejudice. profess, 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. and you just mentioned this one, this is from the smithsonian magazine, or they share this, this new theory suggesting that what is a nitrogen ice pancake. we spoke to the festa astrophysics who actually subscribes to this. now i would love you when i, when i play this, to explain what he's off taking and challenging you on before you applying to it. because it's a little complicated. have a look have this and i've been kind of a nasa for a long time to hope to buy strategies for looking for alien life on x o planets. and it's by trying to understand the g, a 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 the law. we have to eliminate all the natural explanations. first, no response will, scientist is going to look at it and say it's alien technology. if there are reasonable natural explanations like an end to ice fragment off of the trunk of the next of yes. so it's stephen is one of the authors. so the, the recent 2 papers that were published last week are doing that may be more more. is it chunk of pure nitrogen and for this scenario to work, you cannot allow carbon, for example, to be associated with that the iceberg. because at the spits of space telescope put very tight limits on any carbon based molecules in the vapor that comes came out of fit or more more if it thought, ah, 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 lip very little carbon is the surface of pluto, a very thin veneer. ah, you know, less than a percent of the mass of blue dog on the surface is made of pure nitrogen. so that proposal is 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 moi was one of these chunks. the thing that you have to keep in mind is we have never seen an nitrogen object in the solar system. so we have the so called, or cloud of, you know, about to be on objects larger than manhattan island in this, in the periphery of the solar system in order thousands of those examples of

objects that we saw from that environment of the solar system were made off i see rock, you know, the kinds of things we find on earth rocks, including carbon, 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 are supposed to believe that more than anything artificially dismissed 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 an nitrogen rich. a comment that we have seen that the authors of this paper are mentioning. and that one actually shows also evidence for carbon. so i rest i case whenever, you know, typically you get carbon together with nitrogen. and why would you scrape off the

surfaces off blue to like object and create the vast majority of interest in our objects this way, right is substantial fraction of interest in our object this way, rather than have the majority of them being rocks like we find in the sources them all i'm saying is we look at our back yard that we see rocks, then you tell me, oh, in the street there are very different type of folk jacks, actually, nitrogen pure. and i say okay, well maybe you know, that's a possibility but it's certainly not an appealing possibility. let me show our own instance culture. this is paulette me, italian astronomy. he was a physicist. he was a philosopher as well going up against the church. the church were furious at his idea of what asked. so in a system, looked like he was right. they were wrong. you mentioned this in your book a you and modern day galileo. well, that's a good question. and you know,

it really depends on the response of the community. i am just just like basketball players, i can keep my eyes on the ball, not on the audience. i don't care how many likes i have on twitter and what the response of, you know, the personal tax that people are launch it me, that really is irrelevant because we have, we have to look at the evidence and if it looks anomalous. and the artificial 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 subject that would be looking as we are the sun warm up. we will learn something new no matter what, because even the natural origin ideas like the one we just heard about the nitrogen iceberg. even they talk about something that we've never seen before. so there must be factories of objects that we have never seen before. let's figure them out by

getting more evidence. that's my advocacy. and the only reason we will not get the evidence is if you listen to those people that say, you know, it's always rocks. it's never aliens. to me they remind me of a cave man that plays with rocks all of his life and then presented with a cell phone and are doing a cell phone must be just the shiny professor. you have just insulted so many of your peers and colleagues. i am enjoying this immensely. salman on the chief says, remaining skeptical is so important, which says, if we knew the truth about aliens, it would change everything that we've learned. one more thought here, and that is the idea of from savvy, he says, what should we expect from the future will extra terrestrial life and come to visit us here on al us and that so it is a very quick so professor, because we're right at the end of the shell, and i'm going to give you one minute. go ahead. yeah. it's very important. it's very important question and that, and reconfirming thomas physicist,

worries everybody, you know, i think it's presumptuous bus 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 or my wife when i met her. they were waiting for prince charming on a white horse to come and make them a marriage proposal. it never happened. we shouldn't expect that, you know, of others to appreciate that we should go out and search. and you know, frankly, we are born into this world, like actors put on a stage without a script. the 1st thing to check is other, other actors around it, ask them what the plays about. thank he say my professor. i've a low extra terrestrial with the 1st sign of intelligent life. beyond of that is he's new book. it is extremely controversial. enjoy digging into that, i mean come to your own conclusions professor alive. thank you for being on the string today. really enjoyed your company signing off. see you next time. thanks so

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