It turns out that at Penn State. They just recently released a computer model of New York City through the year 2300 Think about that we're able to look at the weather into the past and the weather into several centuries and we're talking about whether or not a sea level rise or storm surges would be the greatest threat to New York City and speaking about New York let's talk a little bit about pollution New York City and London used to be the center for industrial pollution on the planet however things have changed however we still have pollution there's a new study coming out from the Simon Fraser University showing that 16 percent of the deaths in the world can be attributed to pollution that is astounding think about that out of every 100 people who die on the planet Earth 16 of them die unnecessarily. Because of pollution so let's study a little bit about how that study was done and what the implications are and then we're going to go into outer space 1st of all did you know that a rock from outside the solar system is whizzing around the sun even as we speak yes that's right it's about a 5th of a mile across it's an asteroid apparently from another solar system it's not from our solar system at all and the question is how do we know now what does it mean next comets are also in the news it turns out that our satellites are so sensitive now that we can actually detect comets going around other stars in the universe Personally I never thought that would be possible in my own lifetime but yes artists instruments are sensitive enough to even pick up comets in other solar systems in outer space and they will say a few things about the latest developments in astronomy in exploration. Well it's just jumped right into some of the big stories of the past week well you've heard it all before we had hurricane Harvey Hurricane Earl hurricanes that devastate the Florida Keys hurricanes that devastate Puerto Rico I mean it just keeps going on and on and on and now p.b.s. Television is coming out with a new documentary talking about paleoclimatology that is what was the climate hundreds of thousands of years into the past 1st of all you may ask yourself a simple question how do we know anything about the temperature of the past well of course we have human records but human records are very spotty and inaccurate and so for a 1st order approximation we look at tree rings. Tree rings expand every year because of the rainy season and by cutting open a tree you can actually go back centuries in fact thousands of years into the past and not just tree rings but we can also use Lakes sediments if you were to drill right into the bottom of the lake you're going to pick up sediments for example from floods and volcano eruptions that took place hundreds of years ago and then if you go to the north pole in the South Pole and dig into the ice you can pick up ice cores to go back half a 1000000 years into the past it turns out that not only can you see evidence of catastrophic activity like sediments laid down from volcano eruptions You can also calculate the temperature that existed thousands of years ago he said there are air bubbles air bubbles that are trapped inside the ice cores and by analyzing the chemical composition of the air trapped in the ice thousands of years ago you can actually get an equation to calculate the temperature that existed back then and then by looking at the air pockets inside the ice cores we can determine how much carbon dioxide there was in the atmosphere certain things just jump right out 1st of all it turns out that carbon dioxide levels and temperature levels go up and down like 2 roller coasters in synchronization when the c o 2 level goes up the temperature goes up now why should we care because by going to different kinds of areas in the Caribbean we can actually calculate the temperature of the water back then. And the temperature of warm water determines the frequency and strength of hurricanes because that's where the energy of a hurricane comes from it comes from warm water 1st of all warm water heats the air on top of it hot air rises and so as hot air rises it begins to spin because the Earth spins beneath it that's called the Coriolis force and bingo you get a hurricane now by looking at the human data you can get some inkling as to what happened centuries ago for example in 1718 in the Caribbean there was a gigantic monster hurricane the largest in recorded history that hit Haiti and Cuba back in 1780 killed 22000 people it was an enormous hurricane 22000 people were killed. 5000 more people died of starvation and disease and then the question is are there more monster hurricanes like the one of 780 and the ones of course of 2017 Well this is where paleoclimatology where we go to the cutting edge now is a said for ice cores and lakes sediments and tree rings we can use that to determine the temperature and general weather conditions centuries thousands of years ago but hurricanes are much different hurricanes of course only last for a few weeks few days and they're very transients and they don't leave much evidence so what scientists did in this p.b.s. Documentary was they look for sea floor settlements not Lake settlements but sea floor sediments and also stuff like tides in caves caves have some water that drips down from the top of the k. They carry sediments and over thousands of years they create a star like mine and it's the like Tide. By cutting that open by looking at the chemical composition of the Select tights and the like mites then we were able to reconstruct an approximate history of the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean So what does it all mean 1st of all is there a smoking gun by which we can say aha that's where the year 2017 when 1000 it is horrendous year of the hurricane you can't even say with certainty that global warming directly caused these monster hurricanes you see global warming is an average phenomenon if you were to graph these on a chart then you could start to see straight lines and regularities but yeah every individual hurricane is very difficult to say that it was due directly to global warming however the documentary is pretty clear when you look at the sea floor sediments in the Caribbean you look at stuff like tides in caves what you find is the frequency in ferocity of hurricanes is directly related to the temperature of the water and the temperature of the Caribbean is getting warmer and warmer as a consequence that's the engine which helped to energize these monster hurricanes of 2017 so it was a directly caused by global warming well maybe maybe not but in terms of an average for nominal if it's right on the chart now what does that mean if you want to buy beach house in Florida 1st of all the tremendous Florida real estate boom took place in the Seventies and Eighties Well back in the fifty's and sixty's there were monster hurricanes that hit Florida as a consequence there was not much building activity in the early years but in the later decades there was a tremendous boom in housing because people were loath to sleep into thinking that the hurricane seasons were basically over well we now know that's wrong so you may think twice if you're thinking about buying beachfront property in Florida. And speaking about Florida what about New York City where I live well it turns out that at Penn State University they created a computer program that wanted to calculate damage damage caused by storm surges and rising sea levels 1st of all they found that the greatest indicator of damage was the level of sea water not so much storm surges However as sea levels begin to rise storm surges become more ferocious in fact by the year 2100 a monster storm surge would be 17 feet tall think about that think of a way that 17 feet tall coming your way in the year 2100 in the year 2300 it will be 50 feet tall well you can kiss many skyscrapers goodbye you can kiss much of Manhattan goodbye if the storm surge in a maximum scenario would be 50 feet above sea level and so these are computer programs done by Penn State and you can also use these computer programs on other cities and so if you want to know whether your city is going to be underwater in the near future you may want to consult the climatologist at Penn State who have computer programs calculating the level of sea water and from that the amount of damage that you can get with storm surges. And speaking also about thermal pollution Let's talk about chemical pollution as well it turns out that it Simon Fraser University they did a rather straightforward study 1st of all they took the total number of deaths that took place around the world and then calculated what percent of those deaths come from pollution while the numbers are very interesting then realize $9000000.00 premature deaths which 16 per cent can be attributed to pollution I mean think about that 16 percent of every death on the planet Earth can be tied to pollution that's 3 times more than the deaths from Aids tuberculosis and malaria combined fish as 15 times more than the deaths from all the wars and crimes and violence on the planet Earth is one of the largest single sources of death on the planet Earth and where did these deaths occur well 92 percent of these deaths came in lower income levels now you can sort of say that history repeats itself if you go back a 10200 years and you look at the Industrial Revolution you see times when London was completely fogged over because of the enormous pollution from coal burning and things like that and you can actually see the rise in respiratory deaths as a consequence of that when I was of London hundreds of years ago and now in some sense we're repeating that around the world and as nations industrialized they too are creating a large amounts of pollution and the price you pay for that pollution is you're going to kill a lot of your people that's what the numbers show in a study done at Simon Fraser University. And also news from outer space I mean way out in outer space we're talking about going outside the solar system for the 1st time in history scientists have gotten conclusive evidence of an intruder from another solar system another system of planets far beyond ours sun it was seen by telescopes in Hawaii the object at 1st people thought maybe was a comet from another solar system now we know it's not because it doesn't have a tail is perhaps just an ordinary asteroid of some sort it is about a 5th of a mile across. And it is just now whipping around our sun and then returning back into deep space now you may ask yourself a simple question how do we know we don't have any space shuttles out there to photograph this thing how do we know that it came from another solar system Well the way we do it is actually rather simple we have the laws of motion therefore we can track these things we using our telescopes by taking photographs of the night sky at different times and then by calculating interject Yuri. This object we can apply didn't laws of motion by implying to the laws of motion we can run the videotape backwards or run the videotape forwards and when we run the videotape backwards we find that the trajectory of this asteroid is unlike any unlike any asteroid or comet that we have ever observed instead of going around the sun in the in the solar systems plane called the clip that plane. This object is going around the sun off the cliff plain and if you complete the dots you see that this object came from another solar system and so we know know that yes objects will go between solar systems now why should you care Well one theory that has gained some traction recently is the fact that the 1st d.n.a. May not necessarily have come from the earth it turns out that 3 or 4000000000 years ago we had tremendous amounts of meteor and asteroid bombardment which would make life very difficult to form on the planet Earth but as soon as this bombardment ended Mome d.n.a. Gets off the ground over 3 and a half 1000000000 years ago so some people say that it's just too short a few 100000000 years and d.n.a. Gets off the ground some people say therefore that maybe d.n.a. Didn't come from the earth maybe d.n.a. Came from outer space maybe from Mars maybe an asteroid plowed into Mars and shot some debris which eventually landed on the earth or for that matter maybe d.n.a. Came originally from another planet in outer space going around another sun We don't know for sure because of course we don't have a space shuttle now we can intercept this object to see what the chemical composition is however is intriguing to realize that there could be debris from other solar systems that interact with the planet Earth. And speaking about asteroids that are out there yet another 1st was done just this week it turns out the back analyzing the Kepler like data scientists have conclusively shown evidence of a comet circulating another star in the universe this is amazing an extra solar a comet Now why is that amazing because planets are very difficult to see by telescopes because they don't emit light especially planets going run other stars therefore how do we do it we look for the planet moving in front of the Mother Star Starlight dims a little bit it was a Jupiter sized planet star light will dim by about one percent so by looking for the dips in Starlight you can then reconstruct what is moving around stars in the galaxy that's how we know that 4000 planets have been identified that are revolving around other stars in the galaxy now it turns out that we can even detect Earth like planets going around other stars is very difficult because you're at this very small. Now the new breakthrough is we can detect comets going around other stars comments are real tiny Haley's Comet for example the famous Halley's comet that whips around the solar system it is only about 1015 miles across its tail of course is huge but the comet itself is only 1015 miles across therefore the fact that our satellites can detect a comet that's only 1015 miles across orbiting another star in the Milky Way galaxy that is astounding. First of all the comet itself is very small 1015 miles across but the tail of course the tail of course is much bigger the tail will actually unfurl a distance over a distance of several 1000000 miles to up to perhaps even 100000000 miles and so the tail of the comet we think is was being observed by ground based telescopes and by the Kepler satellite by looking at the did meaning of starlight not by one percent but by a fraction of one percent when Jupiter goes in front of another star Starlight thems by one percent a comet comet tail with the Starlight perhaps less then one percent. Now let me say something about the mail I get I get a lot of e-mails a lot of e-mails concerning things like well engine aliens and planet x. . Some people believe that there is a new planet out there called Planet x. That could whip around the Earth causing enormous destruction maybe even hit the Earth Well let me tell you right now we see no evidence of planet x. We've scanned all the debris even beyond the Pluto and we see nothing but small ice icy bodies outside the orbit of Pluto that I want to same size are much much smaller than Pluto we see no evidence of planet x. Now some people may be confused by the story hitting the newspapers that there is another planet a giant planet the size of Neptune that is orbiting the sun way out in outer space Yes that is true however it is so many billions of miles away from the planet Earth that there's no way there's no way that this new planet is going to collide with the planet Earth so to sum up at the present time we see no evidence of neighbor route the planet x. We see no evidence of that We've scanned all the stuff going outside the orbit of Pluto we see no evidence of that however there is a Neptune sized planet way out there in what is called the Khyber belt of comments and it is apparently real is gravity is so strong that it makes nearby objects jiggle a little bit and that by looking at the jiggling and putting it into a computer program you can actually calculate that yes something is tugging on the outer planets. And speaking about aliens from outer space there's one question that I always get and that is the question about ancient aliens they've seen stories on the History Channel for example talking about well strange hieroglyphics strange pictures that seem to indicate perhaps astronauts astronauts from a distant world once upon a time landed on the planet Earth freaked out that the Earthlings on the planet and as a consequence of the memories of these encounters were engraved in stone Well maybe maybe not I mean it's not the smoking gun when you look at all these ceremonial head dresses and contraptions maybe they were spaceships or maybe they were just head dresses and different kinds of religious contraptions used in ceremonies However there is one form of ancient aliens that is very hard to dismiss and that is if you look at the movie 2001 it talks about the fact that maybe ancient aliens landed on the moon robotic aliens that left a probe probe on the moon that would be stable for millions of years because there's no erosion on the moon and the probe would simply wait wait and basically analyze the progress of homo sapiens on the planet Earth now if you think about that that is perhaps mathematically the most efficient way for an advanced civilization to scan the galaxy there are so many planets in our own galaxy so many galaxies out there how can an intelligent spacefaring creature possibly catalog all of these things well the way to do it is a stand self replicating one Newman probes to the various moons these are robots which can make copies of themselves just like in the movie 2001. Starting with one robot on the moon you have maybe a 1000 that it creates by creating a factory on the moon each of these robots blast off to the next solar system where they land on the moon and create a 1000 more so starting with one robot you get a 1000 then a 1000000 then a 1000000000 trillion in quadrillion and pretty soon you have a gigantic sphere a huge fear of billions and billions of annoying months self replicating probes that are beginning to colonize the nearby moons now you've seen this before in biology class think of the way a virus propagates a virus is just a more kewl and yet after 2 weeks it creates trillions of copies of itself so you get a cold and you start to sneeze and so perhaps this is one way in which aliens could actually begin the process of colonizing the galaxy with so for catering of I know human problems now how big are they what do they look like no one knows but you figure they must have nanotechnology that is the ability to create machines at the atomic level in other words these Vineland one probe is maybe the size of a of a bread box. Perhaps you have one in your backyard and you don't even know that you have been visited by aliens from outer space so you see we've been brainwashed brainwashed by Hollywood in the newspapers to believing that these flying saucer people would come down in gigantic flying saucers why perhaps you would come down a small little probes and their object is not to make contact with us but the simply land on the planet Earth multiply and basically monitor the planet Earth because of course there are so many planets in the galaxy we've already located 4000 planets in our own galaxy the total galaxy count perhaps is on the order of 20000000000 earth like planets and our own Milky Way galaxy and so perhaps the mathematically most efficient way to explore the universe is not through engine aliens landing on the planet Earth making contact with primitive earthlings that's rather inefficient the mathematically in a way to send robots that sell for up arcade and then can begin the process of colonizing thousands of planets in the Milky Way gal