Chris Hadfield is one of the most accomplished astronauts in the world. In May 2013, he returned to Earth after serving as Commander of the International Space Station, where he and his crew lived for five months. In the first half, he discussed his journeys as an astronaut and how thinking like an astronaut completely changed his perception of life on Earth. He shared his amazing view of Earth from a spacewalk: "You're going around the world every 90 minutes...It's this gigantic silent incredible kaleidoscope, magnificently...turning underneath you...It's as if you were standing at Niagara Falls, right at the foot of it, and there wasn't a sound. It's all visual...and you're also weightless...which is almost like a superpower feeling. And when you look in the other direction, you're in the three-dimensionality of the universe itself."
Hadfield explained that he and the crew were kept quite busy on the space station (about the size of a football field), which has never-ending maintenance tasks and occasional emergencies to contend with. He had to devote a couple of hours each day to exercising-- ISS astronauts are typically very wobbly when they come back from space-- it took him a full year and a half for his normal level of bone density to return. While aboard the station, he also found time to create music and play the guitar. His video version of "A Space Oddity," as he floats aboard the ISS, has been viewed over 44 million times.
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Retired professor at the University of Calgary, Carmen Boulter has used her past life recall as a child to seek physical evidence for her visions of temples and pyramids. A year ago, she announced the discovery of an intact tomb in Jordan, three-stories in height and filled with gold and treasures from Alexander the Great, and possibly one-third of the lost library of Alexandria. "There's also 18 sarcophagi," she said, and the singular gold one might contain the remains of Cleopatra. Yet, she lamented, the King of Jordan has halted any further news or disclosures about the incredible find.
Boulter talked about how patriarchal or male rule has been a failed experiment over the millennia and that predynastic cultures in Egypt, and other ancient locales had more peaceable and cooperative societies built around a matriarchy and female goddesses. She has visited sacred sites like the Sphinx, and many of the chambers and passages are blocked from exploration. Boulter has noted a trend of "oppositionalism" around some of these sites, where authority figures try to deflect or obscure new revelations or accurate information about discoveries. She recounted the intriguing results of geo-scans done at Hawara, Egypt, which showed four distinct layers from separate time periods, including the Ptolemaic and Greco-Roman.
News segment guests: John M. Curtis, Lauren Weinstein