rapidly into a new dimension and in the audience walking very very much conversation pleasure welcome to the program today carter m r d we've been he's been a guest of conversations a number of times in the past he has an incredibly interesting story and field of vision in terms of his work he's the director astro visualize asian at the hayden planetarium with the rose center for earth and earth and space presentation carter so good to see  that give us a look into the incredible world of planetariums but maybe you could incidents that introduce yourself to the audience in a formal way you're the director of astro visualisation and a member of a about ten years where planetariums went from a traditional medium of showing displaying the stars as if you're in a sort of open field looking up in a sky far away from a city now so that you can see the milky  that the ability to turn that display into a video display run by computers allows us to present a three dimensional layout of the universe and be able to actually feel as though we're moving through it so what we're moving through is a plotting of real data so where we know where stars are in the sky and sort of traditional map of the sky when it was the grist of the of the tradition of planetariums we now know distances to those stars and knowing distances the stars distances to galaxies and so we can put together a a layout of the universe and see it for what it's worth you can move out into that accurate starfield and accurate field of galaxies and when you do and you see that layout you tend to turn around and sort of look back as as the apollo astronauts did the see where we are in it and i think  that the the science and the the medium of the display and everything our shows that we create i buy direct shows at the american museum of natural history that that display this data and tell the story of process of the universe a process so we can simulate better and better now i think creating increasing computer speed is simulations of the universe and process but in the sense that we we tend to see this broader perspective and we see ourselves in a so we can look back at the earth and the earth is very tiny from the moon yeah it's even just a dot if we move out into the solar system pretty soon we can only relate to our position in space as as the light of the sun itself because the earth has disappeared is a little pale blue dot as in the words of carl sagan and if you move farther afield than we just see our  r r our ability to locate where we are is no longer earth or just even the sun it just becomes the entire milky way galaxy you know galaxies typically have several hundred billion stars we're finding planets at such a rate that indicate that it's not unlikely the typical galaxy has perhaps a trillion worlds we know of many worlds in arse in our own solar system but we only know of one world in the entire universe that has life which is several hundred billion galaxies within our view of the universe and we know that our view of the universe is actually not the entire unit not at all a mystery because they've gotten used to that billions and billions planetarium to give a view of the universe is over but it's also able to take into account processes here on earth and those shows that you put on are putting you in touch with a lot of will be goldberg and a lot of the production facilities of the film industry and so forth so there's a lot of blending going on we hear that is really interesting and particularly if you extend out the into the educational implications of all of that is something you're right on the cutting edge you you've got a feel very honored because i was yeah as a child i was inspired by the planetarium i started taking classes my mother would drive me in every week when i was age ten wow really and so while the plant term was inspiring to many but it's interesting that as soon as we walked on the moon once that the second time around the people were complaining that their soap opera was being programming was being interrupted by a repeat of what we had done so it's very curious how something is monumental is going to the moon suddenly becomes boring i remember when you stepped on the moon do you remember that i guess you know  intellectually of the broader process is that which we've been a part apparently the science of this for a couple hundred thousand years our species is coming to a crescendo we understanding scientifically based understanding and intelligent understanding of the universe and role in it with the trends of the take ology we are more interconnected as a species than we ever have been in the past right we have access to information like never before that are out there visiting the planets we can take that information put that together into large planetary maps including the height maps so the like google earth we can you know visit any location on earth and see it  google also does moon and mars in a similar fashion we do that as well within the planetarium but unlike google which will is mainly a globe as a kind of you know our construct to look a particular globe we show those worlds in their proper planetary context of where they are at any one given time and and also to see where certain spacecraft are to show the satellites this sort of thing  which is in a solar system which is part and parcel of the universe we call this the digital universe which is it's a data gathering and maintenance process my colleague brian abbot at the museum maintains this this database and so it goes from the earth in its data sets to the planets in their their data sets across the solar system really even though we're working now with space weather  so the radiation environment caused by living with our star the sun and and then on out into the local solar neighborhood of stars and the locations of stars that have planets which is an ever growing amazing  set of current observations we now know of about a thousand worlds out there that number is growing all the time and then we live in this galaxy literally of hundreds of billions of stars and we can extrapolate that but we only have as far as six discrete measurement we have about one hundred thousand stars and then beyond the milky way galaxy we have discretely on the order of about two our understanding of it is that we have to invoke physics and somehow we understand how the universe works we invoke astrophysics and we can simulate this and in machines with ever growing speed so that our ability our result our resolution of those phenomena and our ability to look at a simulation that used to be that we just do a simulation maybe in two dimensions now typically we're doing them in three dimensions you know we have the third dimension then we can visualize this this information that i call a color by numbers right like you know so that we can we can visualize that simulation and show that process and that show it in context yeah to the observed layout of absolutely and also   he invented the the notion of that twenty four hour orbit which is twenty two thousand miles out from earth and then two hundred forty thousand miles out is the moon the moon is so far away it takes light about just over a second to reach us like what's been reflected from the light of the sun the sun is so far away it takes about eight and a half minutes ninety for the y a million ninety seven million miles yes in the end two hundred forty million thousand two hundred forty thousand miles a quarter of a million miles an inner planets mercury and venus inside the earth's orbit then of course we have mars so the mars earth venus mercury the rocky inner planets and jupiter saturn you can see the distances growing it takes light about four hours to get to neptune we also see here the trajectories for voyagers one and two and also pioneers ten and eleven people for tend to forget about them but we we show them they're going to continue on up at that we terminate their their line at about twenty four light hours one light day away from earth as we move away from the sun that the sun begins to dim were true we brighten the sun but it's dimming as we're moving away we're going to see some of the nearest stars come out to play with us here and they're labeled here  locations of stars that have planets and we put that in context now to an almost invisible sun in the center but this fear you see represents how far radio waves once the earth became radio bright just before  radar and the english had invented so that that little sphere represents our presence of electromagnetic radiation human generated against the entire galaxy which is now coming into view and we begin to lose it because it's so tiny we are about twenty five thousand light years from the center the galaxy the galaxy about one hundred thousand light years across it is merely an example of this is presenting no where it's we're were speeding up and you can see our satellites in the magellanic clouds but we go once around the galaxy just as we go around the sun every year we go around the galaxy all the stars with us in a carousel we go around the galaxy about every two hundred fifty million better quarter of a billion years ok and right here those that's andromeda over on the left and him for thirty three a companion galaxy but this represents our local group andromeda although we're moving toward it and we're going to collide around the time the sun burns out about five billion years that andromeda is about two million light years away from us everything you see coming up now are not stars but other galaxies  and the red areas are groups of galaxies that are tight cluster associations and as we move out farther we now sort of fade in these deeper galaxies but if we think about the you know we only know of life on one planet and now we're seeing the screen get crowded with upwards to about two million galaxies is that if every galaxy has on the order of maybe a trillion worlds you might look through and were a trillion worlds and so if you look at this and just say maybe if life is just one in a trillion world wise worlds why is it you can look at this map and say yes or galaxies but another way to look at this is that you could look at this and say maybe this is a map of the tapestry of life it's almost like a and this this distribution you see is is artificial in the sense that it's only where we've looked we have not looked in those vacant areas yet so that the sort of butterfly wings of the universe this is this is an observational fact that we've only looked and catalogue you know sections of sky limited because of the budget of the surveys in volved and the locations of the telescopes usually on earth and behind all of this i see the video is picking it up as the cosmic microwave background remember i said that it takes light about a second to go from the moon to the earth in a minutes from the sun to the earth that in the middle of this is us were observing like onion layers of time farther and farther out we're we're seeing from us that they would see a universe that was as it were in the present and we see that the past around us of course because the universe the speed of light is limited in that if you are some distant galaxy you would you'd be in the present you'd see us in the past and so this we know that the universe is larger than the sort of visible severe that is limited in space and time essentially for view but what you're looking at is is the two degree field survey in the two micron all sky survey these are the galaxies that we don't is the dad of the you deal with yes and these are academically available freely available catalogs wonder that as i mentioned my my my colleague brian abbott yes and puts them into a consolidated single catalog which all is all pertaining to the same cartesian system and so on we here we are coming back into the milky way galaxy now we're coming back yes made out and i'm we're coming back to sort of our starting point here in this film all we are we i did this in north shipping sweden this is an involvement that we have hosting very talented students there for their are the people that are involved with planetary us and they've created this software working with me over the last decade called uni view and it allows us as a as a viewer there are other viewers for this data set by other planetary inventors but that we're all doing the same thing we're looking at the universe of sensually of data and visualizing it properly so that you see the proper constellations in the brightness of the stars where you are in it that sort of thing but as we come back we're sort of remind one that has already like getting that is the sun so we that's we're coming back into this right we had flown way and if we dimmed the sun down we can now begin to resolve just a little the major planet so it's coming in they've got to think power of ten where they go like that and you can see things that are very now what we're doing is they're coming back and it will come back and presumably on earth yeah yeah so we're here we are we're coming back into our solar system if you think the farthest we've ever been away from the earth is the moon that right now are coming up on the moon on the earth and you'll begin to see just very dimly you'll begin to see the the orbit of the well we don't even see it there's realize that we are in space there's a spaceship earth made her my own life i've wanted to go into space and all that but there's part of what the atlas does is make you realize sun at almost three times that speed and so the time to be between when you wake up in the morning and when you eat lunch the distance it took the apollo astronauts three days yeah right we're coming up on geography here and and we're going to come in on that area so this is sweden and you can see denmark over there norway off to the horizon but we're coming up locally in an area of earth that might it's sort of anywhere on earth that happens to be nor shipping sweden where  humanity on the planet where we typically settle near water and you can see a landing strip here and as we come in we're coming into this town of now the world as we were familiar with it begins to come  process developed saab aerospace but with the students from the university and we're now flying over the university the lynchpin universe is a former mill town of nor shipping and so and the university is over to the right and we're mill building to now house one of the most sophisticated dome feeders for a living in the world and it's so this is the visualization center we're come up on the the actual building so one hundred year old building and that down front there's a you know serve a lecture ability and so we have a table this is a one meter table that we set up and this is photographic i know this is computer graphic but it's improved raced on the actual you know universe here's a sesame seed which you can hold in your fingertip and a grain of salt which if you look at salt you're sort of reaching the edge of human now this is a this is a this is a thing this showing educational think is this strand of d n a in the back but this is a mouse leukocyte it's an antibody and this is from the protein databank again we're plotting real information as the model of the e coli it was a model it was accurate in its scale and yeah it looks like represents that when when when atoms come together they share their electron clouds and so that it's that it's that which holds us together chemically into the universe that that we know of certainly here amongst ourselves and in the molecules of life and what we deal with on earth and then we're here we're coming up on the nucleus of a carbon atom and if you look really close you can see the tiny little quarks but we remind you looking o the dome that this was all created in that in the beginning of the big bang so we project that up and so in this in this case what we've done is we've essentially taken you through this an internship with the students and they've created the software that you just saw when did you do that when did you finish this we did this in two thousand and ten two thousand we did it in four months yeah we did this in four months but it represents we had that data of the universe because we moved through the digital universe we had that and then as the company that was formed from my students they've enabled our ability to read the data sets like land's end and  building of the theatre and so on to were put all that together with the flight path created to actually take or you flew in the window but also what you had that was like film where that was like a film made things that's it that was the landscape yeah i mean it's right and we were using a sort of parade through the entire range of scale of the embers to remind us that in our coffee cup as a reminder of this sort of our daily life is we're surrounded by the small and that we live as a tiny tiny planet you know really a tiny tiny galaxy if you compare that to the size of the universe yeah and that's the reality of our daily lives yeah and we know this through science we know this or measurement and in order to display that as a reminder that this medium allows us to sort of see that and and i think it's in the room you are talking about is now is is is this turns come closest to recognizing that as the way and projecting that so it's the largest i've talked to you in the past a large video display screen in the world are our planetarium that's right how do they nest with the traditional world of television film expression and what are the educational implications of increasing bandwidth there are increasing beyond moore's law capability to have digital capability manipulate things and so forth where does it fit in terms of future representations of reality that could have mazing into intellectual and education no relevancy to presenting the whole of understanding and more smaller screens and people are you know communicating through text and text messaging and and and facebook and that we're networked with you know a global community like never before and  t the resolution of you know with these technologies is getting better and better the high definition and and radical displays on the macs a and so forth and these are tremendous capabilities information is different because we're getting say a presentation from an authority who's present in the room with us who can guide you through this information whereas whereas so much of the the information experience today is one where people are becoming more private in the sort of sitting behind their screen you might be talking to many people but you have that screen interface what i like about planetarium is that you know it's it is a you know it's a it's a theatrical experience it's your you are sort of immersed and in the state of the complexities of what you can present are vast you can present just about anything with and so you need a narrative that really will will make that understandable we work very hard in our show productions for that narrative to to be thorough yet brief and and allow you to show you can walk through the lower portion of the sphere yeah and that's a flow it's a walk through space but it's about a it's a two or three minute program in there where you come in and you look down and then instead of looking up at the dome you're looking down it's a sort of a giant  that these what what galaxies were you thought the universe might just be the entire milky way and edwin hubble was able to get a distance fixed to the end drama the nebulosity as it was called we didn't know whether was gashes and close maybe a solar system of the formation spiral but in fact no it was like our galaxy the milky way and it was over there is like an island universe separated by a couple million light years of the take it takes light and you can see the enjoyment of a galaxy you know on a fine fall evening away from the city look up you'll see the milky way you know casting basically through between the light that left two million years ago you're looking at light that left before any humans walked on the planet and beyond that that's a that's one of our nearest neighbors and and so that th universe were in and the dynamics of what's actually happening with the universe the fact that we looked out and saw the galaxies all moving away from us as if we're in the center of some giant expansion and that  this is the universe we saw and the hubble was able to get numbers for and so in one thousand twenty three he got he got the distance to the interim the galaxy by nine hundred twenty nine he had published that these distances distances and the speeds together this is with accuracy with accurate well with the best accuracy yeah i'm which is we're growing all the time and the reason the hubble telescope is named after him is that we are able to really put a much finer resolve because we can see so much better and that this universe is expanding and that it's very interesting to note that when we looked at these vast scales that we saw that that  universe was expanding it indicated that the universe had begun from a time just one of the clock back to where the universe is sort of on top of itself in an incredibly hot and that very hot dense in fact denser than the inside of a star galaxy if you look at it and you can tell these velocities and we can tell that these galaxies in clusters are moving far too fast for the the amount of mass there to hold it together gravitationally and this was means that there is an invisible there's invisible matter there we can't see it now looking for des there's a lot of detail and then but we other thing that we saw more recently is that with surveys not so much from the hubble telescope the ground bases that we're able to begin to account for remember as we moved out i was talking about those look back time when you look at a galaxy farther away than the closer galaxy you're seeing something that's younger because it's taken light longer to get to and so are seeing a younger and younger universe and we're now able to look at using these supernova that we can use a sort of a standard candle of light you know if we we filled the new york city with like twenty five watt bulbs and you'd be able to measure discretely like the distance everything because  whole twenty five watt bulbs so in a similar sense you look out in the universe and see if you can see something in you know exactly how bright it is and and then you can actually see how how dim it ends up on your telescope you can actually calculate the distance because the farther away it's going to be the d m or it's going to be so we we apply this to these supernova that go off regularly in these the the spate of galaxies that we look at and see now and we began to see the evidence in the late ninety's of dark energy which is that as the universe expands we thought that the that the totality of mass of the universe that might be enough to cause the universe to slow down and then kind of crunch cell what we found was just the opposite as as universe gets bigger and spatially that it's latent with this this energy this dark energy which is causing it to actually accelerat galileo and so forth and you know the earth centered notion of the universe and that is just a quantum a qualitative transformation in terms of what's becoming available to us in a knowledge way about the realities of coming to a point of not just quantitative new stage of history of things but we're coming into some sort of a qualitative new relationship to the whole process by which we can understand the universe and our place in the spaceship that it's a time a qualitative transformation almost on close to thinking that we may be coming toward the end of a process that began two hundred thousand years with the emergence of our species or that we're going to come into a new relationship in the universe in evolutionary sense well it's i wonder just how far the understanding of me is it is resonating really tantalizing to think that we're coming maybe to a point of position of fulfilling a whole and functioning universe and that how punctuated equilibrium how the new appears well and  that we know a lot but we don't know everything we know of life on this planet in all its complexities is amazing we are looking for signatures out there on you know on mars or perhaps europa and sell  saturn has liquid water under its surface these places where water exists we are we're water beings so we but we haven't found life anywhere else in the universe we're not looking yeah look and we may be on the verge of seeing some chemical signature reflected by the light very exciting time and also we can we can account for the universe in a way to sort of have a description of itself aleutian and we can see out sort of to the edge of the microwave background so we've accounted for that but we don't know really what set that in motion we can we can think about that in terms of these that actually that the conditions on the almost a quantum level the tiniest detail that sets up the maybe the that the initial conditions of it's an amazing time for these armada of spacecraft now robots that have gone out and are bringing us this data back we take this in a planetarium context of immersive reality of virtual reality sense and create atlas of the universe has an interesting sort of parallel and sort of a sort of shift of just reckon you're recognizing where we are that occurred with the apollo program and that is that when we went to the moon we were very why this show old and while while we're looking for that operating manual i think there is that realisation that we are all pilots of the spaceship we are on a spaceship as i mentioned we're traveling fast we're traveling faster around the sun than the astronauts had to travel to get to the moon yeah right now we're traveling about four or five times that speed just going around the galaxy right and we're traveling faster than that on our intergenerational spaceship we send people there i'd like to remind people that our complexities of life are such that you think you're going to get off star trek fashion and walk around and you know  in the cool waters of that other world and this time machine is probably never the case because we have such a symbiosis with the bacteria that are hurting our system at all if we're going to see a back to that's right yeah and so that we in our spacesuit we take that with us and i can't i can't imagine being very very romantic to be standing there in a spacesuit you know on a run on a beach and and so the this the while we're on the spaceship earth and we quest to go farther and i like to think of our little our you know our planetarium in our military to virtually recreate you know flight over mars and mary high level detail it's fascinating  i want more and more i want more and more of that data we have to get out of that and we already have a ton of data on the earth that has been processed into that experience and that's part of what we do on a daily basis but that to really live on mars live on the earth you're living in this life support structure which you really understand because it's all engineering and if they are gets too low you know if they were or you know gosh you know if the bathroom breaks you know th you come pretty close in to what your limitations are well we live on life support on this planet and we have to realize we have no other alternative than to live within the system it's understandable that getting around to where the i can't get over the fact that this educational process that began as part of the evolutionary process of universes of evolution of life form on this planet there were coming to a point of qualitative transformation it could be the fact that we have extend we have the self reflective conses this that can ask the larger issues that probably is not characteristic of most of the creatures and we also have the ability to extend our consciousness through the use of tools and technology means of communication so forth in the unique way and now in one vector we have weapons systems that apparently from the modeling it there and least in the spasm of eight period in a real politic scene world apparently would mean the end of the species that those systems exist after two hundred thousand years and on the other side we have an incredible capability of creating synergetic glee a liberated order for all of humanity and all of the ecology that's equally available to as now after the track there were time a qualitative transformation that might very well be relating us to the universe of the level transcended to what we've been throughout the human experience to the place where all that can be put together most efficiently and most implications of these immersive video patterns that we are dealing with here in television and i think it's just an amazingly important educational proposition that you all are  think you are thank you and i appreciate that you know it's really important in the complexity we're at as a planetary species we're we're coming into the realisation of i think we came into that fairly quickly when we could see the earth rise picture about how we were then so we spent so much effort to get a cold war effort to sort of get to the moon but really the most lasting image of it is our place in space and so as we begin to understand more and more science we understand the complexity interleaving of all of this and that that is tantamount to our survival so when i had a guy humans in that you know sure i mean we tend to bother each other every now and then i mean just living here in new york you know a crowded subway car i mean we can i got to get off and somebody is in my way but you know that's that sort of thing but we all we're all participants  interdependency may be our celebration it must be our salvation and these abilities to present the earth as as a unit as a unified experience there's