Richard C. Hoagland is the principal investigator and founder of The Enterprise Mission, as well as the vision and the voice of The Other Side of Midnight. In the first half, he discussed images from Odysseus, a recent unmanned American lunar mission. According to Hoagland, the new lunar mission's close-ups dramatically confirm his decades-old "ancient, artificial structures on the Moon model" that he first proposed at the National Press Club in March 1996. The Washington Post even published a "hit piece" 28 years ago on the press event. He suggested that the reason many private and non-US missions to the Moon have run into problems is because they are literally crashing into the glass dome, which he claims exists all over the Moon but is denser in certain regions.
The dome, Hoagland continued, could be billions of years old and has been battered by a stream of interplanetary micrometeorites that, over eons, have left holes in it. In image #2 that he sent us, he explained that you can see the sun shining through the "incredible geometry of the glass dome" as the light bounces off of it, creating a refraction. He has concluded that a renegade group in and outside of NASA wants to reveal the truth about these structures on the Moon, and that the recent Odysseus mission functioned as a kind of Trojan horse for that goal. There are ruins throughout the solar system, he added, and it will be fascinating to eventually learn who placed them there and if they are related to our species.
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Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome and runs Ramakrishnan Lab. In the latter half, he discussed the science of mortality and aging, the giant strides being made in the field, and the possibility that we may someday be able to extend our lifespan. The oldest person that ever lived (that we have reliable records for) was a French woman named Jeanne Calment, who died at the age of 122 in 1997. Aging is the accumulation of chemical damage to our molecules and cells over time, he explained, and it starts gradually with small defects; these lead to medium-sized ones that manifest as the morbidities of old age, leading eventually to the system-wide failure that is death. Someone like Calment may have an extraordinary ability to fend off or repair the body's defects that come with aging. For instance, as we age, the risk of cancer goes up, he noted.
Scientists are now asking if it's possible to extend our longevity past 120. Ramakrishnan believes we may have to alter our natural biology to achieve this, which could be a challenging proposition. He reported that larger species tend to live longer on average-- for instance, a blue whale or Greenland shark will live 400 years, and other whales live 200 to 300 years. He cited that stress can take a toll on a person, while the "trinity of health" is the combination of a good, moderate diet, exercise, and adequate sleep. Sleep deprivation, he pointed out, increases the risk of many diseases of aging, including cardiovascular problems, obesity, cancer, and Alzheimer's. This may be because during sleep the body performs various repair mechanisms.
News segment guests: Howard Bloom, Mish Shedlock