a say they don't want me to the ruth . there was always like, only we're brave enough to see. only we're brave enough. ah . ah, hello, you're watching out here. these are the top stories is our, the pandemic is killed almost 5 and a half a 1000000 people since the virus was 1st reported in the chinese city of wu han,

2 years ago, global infections if he had a record high over the past week with more than a 1000000 cases detected on average h j. but south africa says it'll eas restrictions after infections. they're dropped by almost 30 percent last week. the government believes it's past the peak of the army con variant. it's a different story in india where daily cases have more than doubled over the past week. pap, me, missile has more from new jelly. the overall cases in india us to lower than in the direction he'd at which the heading war has alarmed official. the government says we are in the 3rd wave, it is with no hook restrictions to sub this spread. now, many states has imposed nicer use, especially in light of the fact that we are new year's eve today. but he deli, where we all of this is, have been doubling at an alarming rate. so we are in was called

a yellow load. hundreds of homes have been destroyed in the us state of colorado. after wildfires driven by high winds engulfed to towns me danver, tens of thousands of people have been told to leave their homes. us in russian presidents have spoken for the 2nd time this month in a bid to deescalate tensions are the ukraine turbine and repeated the threat of sanctions in mosque. if moscow invites you, crime, vladimir putin responded that such a move could lead to a complete breakdown of ties between the countries and the u. s. and the u. n. have condemned the killing of at least 4 protest is by security forces in sir jan. that was short during a crackdown on nationwide protests pro democracy activists have been marching against the military, which seized power in october. those are the headlines i'm emily angland. the news continues after the strain. stay with us. for in 2002 coins and bank notes mark the launch of the euro today is the official currency of 19 of

the 27 member states of the european union on the 20th anniversary of the euro entering circulation. i'll just hear investigates how the eurozone benefited from having an official currency. ah, i semi ok, you're watching the stream in today's episode, we asked the question, ok, humans alone in the universe. every lobe is a professor science at harvard university. he joins us to talk about that, but ticket a 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 you take a big part of today's discussion. the reasons for me to buy this book.

basically it's like brain county, it's like junk food for the brain because there's always does neg and crush them. what is out there? we may never know. but to have this thought experience letters always fascinated to me, has been tommy's. i wasn't a little child, i'm 49 years old now, so i'm an old art but i still love science. um it keeps the mind going and it keeps wondering, and that's where this comes into play. it store kitchen, wandering. it doesn't have all the answers. but it is food for thought. oh, that's one way to make, i guess, smiled professor low, welcome to the strings. so get to see you who they did you write your book for? who is it for? well, thank you for having me. i wrote the book for the young generation who i hope

will occupy the horse because the me in 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 will be satisfied it. 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 the reading about your work, change my life. and there was another one from a lawyer in palo alto who said similar things. so i'm, i'm quite satisfied the facts and now i'm looking at an article that you write,

why do we have seen 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, that 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're 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 highly of themselves. 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 valero, 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 that tension 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 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 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 sharp has a question for you, professor. have a listen. have a look. i am a huge fan of yours. and i believe that you are inspiring a new generation of scientists to actively my curiosity, without fearing stigma from the scientific community. my question

relates to yours. 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 it asked to you by the us 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 in commer eisen, 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, are there unusual phenomena that represent perhaps something else? and for that purpose, all we need to do is deployed the very best cameras and audio since source 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 the 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 cellphone, 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 evidence. we are 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 seeing, and what you're 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 is 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 warrant. why? because it was discovered by telescoping how, why and there are more, more means to scout in the hawaiian language. and at 1st the 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, its brightness chained by a factor of 10. and that implied that he has

a very extreme shape. ah, most likely flats, ah, slow pancake shape. so it's just like a piece of paper tumbling in the winds and then it 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 comment. the retail 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 produced 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 my and culture. because it's not around anymore, but we can find evidence that it 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 lisa 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 hypotheses. let me introduce you to one of them. this is cutting and the representative of the afternoon. i'm bo, community, myself and many other disagree with dr. law assessment a 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 out 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 objects. and then the latest one among them is and 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 tail because it's transparent for hydrogen. the problem is that we show the dinner st dipping paper that it would evaporate very quickly and 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 maybe it's a cloud of dust particles that is a 100 times less dense than air. and 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 scientific procedure where i put all possibilities on the table without prejudice or fast. 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 new theories that your work has inspired. one

of them, he 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, i 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 are planning 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 stephen is one of the authors. so the, the recent 2 papers that were published last week are doing that may be or 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 live, 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 davis, 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 wrist, 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 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 is this picture? this is caliah me, italian astronomy. he was a physicist. he was a philosopher as well. going up against the church that charge were furious at his idea of what our solar system looked like. he was right. they were wrong. you mentioned this in your book a year 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 launches 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 some more more 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. us be just the shy half professor. you have just insulted so many of your peers and colleagues, i am enjoying this immensely. salmon on you. cheap, 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 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 minutes. go ahead. yeah. it's very simple. it's very important question. and that, and reconfirm your premise 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 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. it never happened. we shouldn't expect the 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 a script. the 1st thing to check is other, other actors around it, ask them what the plays about. thank you so much, professor. i've a low extra terrestrial the 1st sign of intelligent life beyond 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 much and have a

john, you are on that just i you do your we look back on us president joe biden supposed be in office 12 months on from the capital building. ryan, be part of the stream. enjoy him out. social media community at sierra leone recovery from civil war continues. we moved to decades since the end of one of africa's most brutal complex, the bottom line, the clemons dives headlong into the u. s. issues that shape the rest of the world. as we enter the 3rd year of it, 19, we go back to woo hm. where it all began and investigate how far we come. since the pandemic january on a just to europe

a right of passage present to the generation. my cousin was laying down there until was claiming she was helpless. the woman who after indoors as go so far talk of paint for what fact my name meets the women affected by s g m. and those re shaping perception. do you think people will abandon the site eventually, but to those take algae 0. correspond the cut off 2020 the year of lockdown and social distance saying he can't reach across the screen and get someone to hug. alley re explore is one of the global pandemic. biggest side effects loneliness, everyone who lives alone has been forced to be socially isolated for the 1st time ever highlighting its effect on physical and mental health and discovering unique ways of coping. controllers being alone together, episode to of all hail the locked down on al jazeera mm.

holding the powerful to account as we examined the u. s. is role in the world on al jazeera. ah, the army, crown, and del to very ins drive a dramatic increase in the number of infections across the world. i'm from either mina intake down south africa, where the government has reduced cobra 19 restrictions just ahead of the new year. ah, hello, i am emily anguish. this is al jazeera live from dough. so coming up.