ah, there was always liked only we're brave enough to see it only who are brave enough . ah . all right, let's have a quick recap of the headlines here and out there and south africa says it will ease restrictions after cove 19 infections drop by almost 30 percent last week for government believes it's past the peak of the conference over the miller has more now from co, tough, full indications. all that south africa has passed, the peak of its 4th wave, which appeared to have started toward the end of november or early december. now they've seen a 30 percent decrease in in fictions, and that was the week leading up to christmas and compared to the week before. that's a significant reduction in infections. and the government is saying that they have

the hospital capacity, hospital admissions, or low. the number of depths so low, but people should continue to be in mind that the army con variance is highly infectious. in china, 13000000 residents in the city of she hom, have been locked down for week. the city is struggling with the highest number of cases recorded in china this year. there are reports of people are struggling to find food supplies. daily code 19 infections in india have more than doubled over the past week. experts claimed the country is now entering a 3rd wave driven by the on the convent. authorities are imposing new restrictions to prevent mass gatherings ahead of new year's day celebrations. hundreds of homes have been destroyed in the us state of colorado after wildfires driven by high winds, gulf to towns near denver being described as a life threatening situation. tens of thousands of people have been told to leave their homes. the president of the united states and russia have spoken for the

2nd time this month, and a bid to deescalate tensions over ukraine. joe biden repeat the threat of sanctions if moscow invades ukraine. vladimir putin responded that such move could lead to a complete breakdown of ties between the countries. more than $100.00 ranger refugees who spent almost a month to drift at sea in a damage boat. and now in quarantine in indonesia, they were moved into temporary housing. once health checks have been completed, it is your initial plan to turn the boat away but allowed it to land after international pressure and countries have started celebrating the new year in orbit muted fashion due to play with 90. new talent must railey have welcomed 2022 through fireworks and light display. yet they will headlines. won't you come up here in our desert right after the street? i for us in 2002 coins and bank notes. mark the launch of the euro

today is the official currency of 19 of the 27 members states of the european union . on the 20th anniversary of the euro entering circulation, al jazeera investigates how the eurozone benefited from having an official currency . i i semi 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 particular subject class, his new book, extra terrestrial. the 1st sign of intelligent life beyond us, i have been reading this book for my research. i study to turn down the pages whenever i found anything interesting and the other page is turned down. i know you will have questions as well. jump into the chief comment section, and e e e e t could 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 bring. because this always does negate question. what is out there? we may never know, but to have these thought experiments let is always fascinating to me, has been to amaze, ever since i was a child, i'm 31 years old now. so i'm an old fart, but i still love science. i'm. 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 who 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 paid person around the world will decide to become a scientist. this, after reading my book, i would be satisfied it. so happened that the, 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. and there was another one from a lawyer in palo alto who said similar things. so i'm, i'm quite satisfied the fafsa. 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 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 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 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 pv ally ones? what i am wondering though, professor, is our 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 i do value the, 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 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 all the subject of the human body is controversial, some people claim it has a sore thumb 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 i, what i think we should rely on is really the very best in cameras and 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 they 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 warm 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 b or so it was spinning around every 8 hours. its brightness changed by

a factor of 10. and that implied that he has a very extreme shape. ah most likely flats, ah, so 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 commentary tale. thou 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 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 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 going 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 a rock 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. the number of words in my book. so professor isa 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 book community myself and many other disagree with dr. law assessment of a, as an extraterrestrial space for the science just 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 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 am currently writing a paper showing, but 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 there are other i porpoises, that maybe 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. think the big procedure, what i put or 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 so more more we will learn something new no matter what. because even the natural origin, ideas like the one we just heard about a 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 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 minutes go ahead. yeah, it's very simple. it's very important question and that and recalls jeremy, it's m a 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 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 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 with a says sign of intelligent life beyond us. that is his new book. it is extremely controversial. enjoy digging into that, i mean come to you and conclusions. professor alive. thank you for being on the string today. really enjoyed your company signing off. see you next time. thanks for watching everybody takeoff

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