Most people focus on the two-dimensional surface
that we have here on Earth.
Disputes about financial matters.
You know, Brexit.
When you look at the big picture, these are
childish issues.
That’s one small step for man, one giant
leap for mankind.
50 years ago, before I was born, the Apollo
11 space flight landed the first two people
on the moon.
Do you believe it?
You should.
It actually did happen.
President Trump wants to go further.
We will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps, someday, to many worlds beyond.
Hello and welcome to a special outer space
edition of your GZERO World.
I’m Ian Bremmer and to help me get a better
grasp of what's out there many worlds beyond,
I have two very special guests.
The first, former commander of the 
International Space Station.
The second, a Harvard physicist whose work
on black holes is eclipsed only by his theories
on alien life.
Get the eclipse?
That's a space pun.
Taken together, Chris Hadfield and Avi Loeb
offer a unique look at the cosmos.
My God, it's full of stars.
Of course, I've also got your Puppet Regime.
Zuckerdata, where are we?
My data says that we're in the desert of an
oil-rich community that you despise.
But first a word from the folks who help us
keep our lights on.
It was 10 a.m., January 3rd.
This year, China's space program was moments
away from doing something no one had ever
done: a lunar probe, named after a Chinese
goddess, descended on the far side of the moon.
When it finally touched down at 10:26 a.m.
the unmanned craft would deliver the clearest
signal yet of China's growing ambitions in space.
Though Chinese tech still has a lot of catching
up to do, its lunar landing threw American
and Russian space dominance into question.
Mars, Jupiter, asteroids.
They're all now in Beijing’s sights.
A new space race has begun.
But this time, the field is more crowded.
In fact, India is planning its first human
spaceflight next year on the cheap.
Japan has already harvested space rocks from
an asteroid…which is a space rock.
So that sounds sneaky.
And the U.S., which for years favored a more
privatized approach like sending Elon Musk
and Jeff Bezos into space, has plans to up
its game at the federal level.
Mr. Trump, you do the honors.
Space Force.
Space Force.
Space Force.
Space Force, that’s where it’s at.
Space Force.
Space Force, that’s where it’s going to be.
This Space Force, space.
Space.
Force.
Space Force.
Space Force.
Does that make sense?
Thing is, the cosmos is an unforgiving place.
In space, nobody hears you scream.
Despite political posturing at home, nations
have often been forced to work together and
few know this better than the former commander
of the International Space Station.
Why is man going to space?
To explore his world, man has always risked
the unknown.
My name is Chris Hadfield.
When I was a kid, the very first people flew
in space.
And it changed my whole perspective of what
I might be able to do.
Me, this little Canadian kid, maybe I could do that.
And looking back now, after three space flights
and visiting two different space stations
and doing spacewalks and commanding the International Space Station, it was even better than
I dreamed it would be.
Flying a rocket ship is both exhilarating
and crazy dangerous.
Three…two…one…zero and liftoff of Space
Shuttle Atlantis.
My very first flight was on a space shuttle.
In fact, it was on Atlantis in the fall of ‘95.
The power is staggering.
It's like 80 million horsepower and you can
feel all of them, all of those horses kicking you.
This thing starts to violently ram you up
through the atmosphere, you're crushed in
your seat, you're shaken, you can't even focus
on the instruments in front of you.
But finally, at the end of it, the vehicle
has gotten you to just the right altitude.
The computers have done their job.
They've honed you in on perfectly the right direction.
You're just about out of fuel and the engines
shut off and you're weightless.
It's an amazing transition.
It's the most wildly different nine minutes
of my whole life.
And the best part is, that's just the start
of spaceflight.
I've spent about half a year off the earth,
most of it onboard space stations, and we
would talk to mission controls all around
the world.
Station, this is Houston.
And each of them would tell us what's going
on today.
The important stuff, the priority stuff, see
if there are any questions.
And then we’d split.
All six astronauts working all the experiments,
working all of the maintenance that had to go on.
Maybe you're talking to the President today.
You've got to get ready for that.
Get the cameras set.
Maybe you're helping to make an IMAX movie
or you're running a nanoparticle experiment
or seeing how flame behaves without gravity
or looking at the radiation environment or
testing a new piece of equipment that removes
carbon dioxide from the air.
We run about 200 experiments always on the
Space Station.
So here's a soaking wet washcloth.
Space Station is a wonderful, very hard-earned
and proven example of how we can explore the
next stepping stones in space together as a species.
I mean, it's weird for 15 countries cooperatively
to be doing anything for decades at a time
and doing it peacefully and cooperatively.
And yet Russia and England and Germany and
Japan and the United States and Canada and
all the other partners, we've been doing that
on the Space Station since the early 90s.
Every single day, hand in glove.
And so as we go from the Space Station, where
we've tested equipment, done experiments,
learned how to work together, now it's time
where we can sort of sail over the horizon
with our next spaceships.
It's an amazing start of a whole new era of
human capability and evolution.
And the rocket ships that we're building and
flying right now, the ones I've had a chance
to fly, they are just the initial enablers
of all of that.
Back on Earth, astronomers across four continents
have also been busy working together.
In April more than 200 researchers revealed
one of the most mysterious entities in the cosmos.
Working together with eight telescopes around
the world, they peered out into space to capture
the first ever image of a black hole some
55 million light years away.
My next guest worked on that very project.
If life is out there, we should search for it.
In principle, we can shorten the time it takes
to reach targets of interest in the solar system.
Avi Loeb.
Professor, director of the astronomy department
here at Harvard, founder of the Black Hole Institute.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me.
We've been sort of submerged into this first
photograph that everyone has now seen, which
you said was not all that surprising.
It wasn't surprising because a decade ago
we wrote a paper with my postdoctoral fellow
Avery Broderick, in which we predicted how
the image would look like.
That was the first paper that drew attention
to M87, this giant galaxy that is much bigger
than the Milky Way galaxy, at a distance that
is 2000 times farther than the distance to
the center of our galaxy.
But because it has a black hole that is six
and a half billion times the mass of the sun –
that is about 1,600 times more massive
than the black hole in the Milky Way galaxy –
it's so big on the sky that we can actually
resolve its shadow.
So we wrote this paper where we made predictions –
More easily than we can the black hole in
our own galaxy.
Yeah.
Both of them occupy roughly the same angle
on the sky, which is tiny by the way.
We're basically using – we correlate the
data that is obtained from stations across
the globe and from that we basically use the
entire Earth as an aperture.
And can resolve the tiny size of the shadow
of the black hole.
So about 15 years ago, we wrote a series of
theoretical papers with my postdoc predicting
how the image would look like.
And by the way, it was quite rewarding to
see it on the cover of The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal –
Everything.
All over the world.
All over the world.
Something that was just theoretical a decade
ago appearing for real.
And there are two ways by which you can analyze
such an image and learn something new.
First, it could have been that Einstein was
wrong, that gravity is not really behaving
the way his equations prescribe a black hole
to look like.
And it seems that the equations work fine,
that the predicted shape of the black hole
shadow resembles what we see.
The second thing that you can learn is how
matter behaves under extreme conditions in
the vicinity of a black hole, where once you
cross the so-called horizon – which is a
region around the black hole – once you
enter into it, you can never check out.
Which is an amazing concept if you think about
it, because a black hole is just a distortion
of space and time.
There is nothing there.
You can cross the horizon of this M87 black
hole and you wouldn't even notice.
Nothing would happen to your body.
It's just that your friend who might be outside
the horizon would not be able to receive any
signals from you.
It's the ultimate prison.
Even light cannot escape from that region.
You can cross the horizon without feeling
anything but then eventually you reach the
so-called singularity in the middle, where
you will be torn apart by the very extreme
gravitational tidal force.
But the gravitational pull at the horizon
is something that in principle would not destroy
all matter.
No, if the black hole is big enough.
These objects that are extremely massive,
these beasts, black holes that exist very early
in the universe by the way – we find them
when the universe was only five percent of
its present age – sort of like looking at
a nursery and finding a giant baby already early on.
We find such black holes up to billions of
solar masses early in the universe and they
are very rarefied, so you can cross the horizon
of those without noticing anything unusual.
On the other hand, a star that is approaching
the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
galaxy would get spaghetti-ized.
It will get stretched into a stream of gas
that destroys it basically and we see such
events every hundred thousand years.
And so when we see all of that light that
is around the black hole in the photos,
is that the debris of stars that are being distorted
by the black hole itself?
It could be most likely just gas that fell
towards that drain, that sink from the host galaxy.
So the way to think of it is just like water
going down the bathtub and there is a reservoir
of gas in the host galaxy that slowly drifts
inwards and crates onto the black hole and
that's how the black hole grows in mass.
Now I have to say when I first saw the reporting
on you in your response to this object Oumuamua,
I was a little surprised that everyone was
surprised that you were saying this because
I mean it seemed like an unexplained object
deserves to have speculation, right?
That's what science is all about.
But you've taken a fair amount of heat from
many in the field who seem to argue that this
is not an acceptable approach to science.
Now I mean I figure because you're here at
Harvard, you have tenure, you know, you run the center.
Some clearly disagree.
But what's it like for you in the field right
now as an academic?
How do you think about the way your discipline
functions on these great unknowns?
Well first of all, I should say that the people
I respect scientifically were very supportive.
There was a small minority of people that
I do not particularly respect that were vocal about it.
It's very unfortunate because if you look
at the history of science it is – the progress
was always based on independent thought and
on evidence, not so much on social pressure.
And what I see is people objecting to the
notion of an extraterrestrial civilization
as part of the mainstream of astronomy while
at the same time, in theoretical physics,
people contemplate the notion of extra dimensions
for which we have no evidence.
String theory.
String theory.
It simply helps some theories unify two pillars
of modern physics, quantum mechanics and gravity,
through the mathematics of extra dimensions.
But that doesn't mean that extra dimensions exist.
If you just look at the evidence, we have
three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.
And if you were conservative, you would basically
say, let's unify those theories within what we know.
Nevertheless, people are allowing themselves
to explore the hypothesis that there are extra
dimensions and it's becoming very popular.
There is a whole community of people doing
that and that to me is a paradox while at
the same time, if I say that on many other
planets a quarter of all the stars have a
planet similar to the earth and if the conditions
on it are similar to those on earth you might
get the same outcome, people have a taboo
on discussing it.
I find that unhealthy because I think that
we should put all possibilities on the table
and explore the evidence.
The problem with having a prejudice and gut
feeling is basically that it assumes that
the future will be the same as the past and
it doesn't rely on evidence.
And I think we should not have a prejudice
simply based on the history of science.
For example, just to give an example, in 1952
there was an astronomer that said, let's imagine
the solar system being arranged a little differently.
Let's imagine taking Jupiter and putting it
closer to the sun.
And if that's the case, then it would move
the sun back and forth as it moves around
the sun and we might be able to detect the
existence of such a planet much more easily.
And so let's search for closing Jupiters around
other stars.
For 40 years, time allocation committees on
major telescopes refused to give time to observers
to look for such systems.
Why?
Because we know about Jupiter being far from
the sun in the solar system and we have a
theoretical understanding of why this is the case.
40 years later, some astronomers dare to look
and found the first exoplanet, which was Jupiter
close to a star.
It opened a new field of the study of exoplanets
and since then thousands of planets were discovered.
If you think that you know the truth before
having evidence for it, you are misleading us.
So what's the research area in your field
right now that excites you most?
What's the one that you think is most fertile
for a world view, a philosophical changing conclusion?
I think it's the search for extraterrestrial
life, either in the form of microbial life
or in the form of technological signatures
that we might find out there.
It would have a fundamental effect on society.
It will change our perspective about our place
in the universe.
It could introduce new areas of research.
For example, how to communicate with 
another civilization.
Astro linguistics.
How to trade with other civilizations, how
to learn from their technology.
Can we – should we ask them for answers
to questions that bother us?
We can learn much more than we can teach.
You’re willing to power your lights with
dead dinosaurs, you should be willing to borrow
technology from extraterrestrials.
I mean, neither of which have anything to
do with us.
I agree.
Most people focus on the two-dimensional surface
that we have here on Earth.
Worry about mundane issues like borders, disputes
about financial matters.
You know, Brexit.
These are – when you look at the big picture – these are childish issues.
We really have to think bigger than that because
in the long term, we will be forced to think
bigger than that.
I mean, Brexit is stupid even in the context
of the short term, right?
I mean, that's just an enormous waste of time.
But generally speaking I see where you're
going with this.
And the way I see science is as a continuation
of our childhood curiosity.
I remember my childhood as being very enjoyable
growing up on a farm and basically thinking
about the big questions and not being afraid
of making mistakes and just being curious.
And when I watch people around me as I entered
academia, I noticed that this innocence, this
fundamental curiosity is being lost.
You have to play to the tunes of selection
committees, you have to look distinguished.
You have to look nice in the mirror.
I know but tenure means never having to 
look distinguished.
Exactly.
That’s a beautiful thing.
That's the paradox.
You would expect tenure, which was formulated
in order to give academic freedom to scholars,
you would expect people to behave in a more
risky way, taking innovative ideas and pushing
them in order to find the truth.
I mean, you never know in advance.
You have to take some risks as you do in the
context of business.
And the strange thing is the business world
adapted to that.
The venture capitalists funding a lot of risky
projects because they know that one of them
might mature one day and pay for all the rest,
all the failures.
And for some reason academia became much more
sterile and the issue I see is that it also
leads the public to some kind of – to develop
a distance from academia.
In the populist movements, academia is viewed
as the elite and I see that as a self-inflicted would.
I see that because I noticed my colleagues
saying, let's find out the truth in a closed room,
figure out the final answer, and then
come out to the press or to the public when
we know for sure what the answer is.
To me, that sounds arrogant.
The public should see that most of the scientific
process involves uncertainty.
Where we don't have enough evidence, we're
trying to find a truth.
Once we converge with a unified opinion, it
means that the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt.
You don't want it to be magic.
No, I want it to be transparent and straightforward
and in fact when people come to help me at
home – for example, when we had the problem
where the basement was flooded because the
sewer was clogged by roots from nearby trees,
it occurred to me that we don't often think
about what happens to matter as it falls into
a black hole.
You know, just the same way that I didn't
think about where the water goes when it leaves
my house.
It goes to a reservoir of the town but I've
never thought about that until the sewer was clogged.
So that led me to think, where does matter
actually collect in the inside of a black hole?
And I thought maybe there is an object there,
a quantum object, where all the matter that
falls in – you know, six and a half billion
solar masses that made the M87 black hole
must collect somewhere.
And as a result of the sewer in my home being
clogged, I started thinking about it.
Maybe there is a quantum object at the maximum
density that we can imagine where all the
matter assembles or maybe it goes somewhere
else, you know, to another universe.
It's really a fundamental question that we
cannot answer at the moment because we don't
have a quantum theory of gravity.
Or maybe your drainpipe is an event horizon
and you just shouldn't put your hand beyond that.
I mean, that's the other possibility.
Avi Loeb, thank you very much.
My pleasure.
And now, for something completely different,
I've got
Your Puppet Regime.
Last time on Space Force…
We were busy exploring the galaxy for condo
investment opportunities when we ran out of
fuel and hurtled toward a strange planet.
Zuckerdata, where are we?
My data says that we're in the desert of an
oil-rich community that you despise.
Yes, Iran!
We've finally invaded Iran!
John, what the hell are you doing here?
Simmer down, it's not Iran.
Iran doesn't have taco bowls growing in the
desert like that.
It's somewhere…closer.
Captain, look!
Over there!
It's America!
We’re home.
Come on guys, you can all come too.
Except for you, Angela.
We don't want any more German imports.
Well, that is highly illogical.
Is that what I think it is?
Well, it only looks like a half-built structure
to me, Mr. President.
It’s a wall!
Oh, my wall.
Oh hello wall, open up.
It’s me.
Please step back.
You are too close to the United States.
Thank you and yes, I am very close to America
as President, which I won by the largest margin
in history.
Prove it.
Prove what?
Prove that you’re President.
Documents, please.
Uh – Zuckerberg, you have everyone's data,
don't you?
Could you –
We lost it all in the crash, captain.
Plus I'm trying to respect privacy now.
God!
We accept tax returns, college transcripts,
high school report cards.
Those are things that will not be released
by me as your President.
Then you will apply for asylum like everyone else.
Look, this is a disgrace.
Coyotes…yes!
People are saying they will help us get through.
That is just the animal, captain!
The animal!
You know, I have very, very powerful weapon
that will enable us to infiltrate United States.
Wait here, I bring it right now.
We did not have this conversation!
Really sophisticated.
Whoa!
No big deal.
That's our show this week.
We'll be back next week because it's a weekly show.
That's – it's awesome the way that works.
Please don't miss it.
In the meantime, if you like what you've seen – and you're still here, so obviously you did –
check us out on gzeromedia.com.
