for me maybe 2019 was summarized by no event better than the black hole that the

event horizon telescope system managed to actually take a picture of now this is
such a mind-blowing thing to somebody like me because Einstein who basically
predicted the existence of black holes said that at the same time he was just
uncomfortable with the notion of them and if you had shown him a photograph of it
like this I mean really he would have fallen over so this network of telescopes
basically manages to take a picture of something in the center of galaxy m87
which is 55 million light years away and the black disc that you see in the
center of the image is the black hole something so powerful that not even light
can escape from it the ring of it there is basically ejecting this jet of
particles about a thousand light years out into space and we got a picture of all
of that which is just absolutely unbelievable but then of course in true 2019
fashion by the next day we've had ruined the whole thing because a picture of one
of the researchers who helped to make it possible woman at Cady Bauman who
basically created part of the algorithm that did the imaging well a picture of
her got out and went viral of her you know being as excited as any researcher
would be that her work had you know worked and suddenly internet trolls come out
of the woodwork and say this can't possibly of her you know she's a girl so it
can't you know she's getting undue credit I mean terrible terrible stuff and so
the idea that we had this incredible moment of human choreography and innovation
and then this incredible moment of human bias smashed together for me that is
2019 in a nutshell now of course here on earth there was a lot going on there was
a steady dismal tide of bad news around climate I mean the United Nations
basically said that that they'd found that one in eight plant and animal species
were facing accelerated extinction we only have about eight million species on
earth 1 million of them seemed to have had some sort of accelerated extension
coming bad bad news they're a big study out of Cornell had shown that 2.9 billion
birds in the United States and Canada had gone dead since 1970 but out of that of
course we also got unlikely heroes Greta tunberg who basically has to to all of
the the you know standard tropes of celebrity I mean you wouldn't even get on an
airplane she took boats to her various appearances around the world and inspired
us all as a teenager out in space humanity had some incredible successes this
year the Japanese put a lander called Hayabusa 2 out into space to go visit an
asteroid called ryugu and managed to do this incredible thing basically they got
up close to it shot a bullet at the surface of this asteroid and then caught the
pieces that were ejected off the asteroid in response I mean this incredible feat
of coordination right and this time next year those samples are gonna return to
earth so that we can study them here the first time anyone's ever really been
able to do that India Israel all these different countries began to try to put
things on the moon India in fact trying to attempt to be the fourth country to
get something out of the moon with their land or the vikram of course it didn't
work out but for me just seeing that that you know countries which 50 years ago
couldn't have imagined having a space program are suddenly now launching their
own vehicles in space amazing and speaking of amazing SpaceX had this
extraordinary thing that not everybody I think can appreciate but you know a few
years ago they've been talking about the potential for reusing the rockets and
basically bringing them down and standing up upright like a building once they
had used them up in space it used to be we've just thrown away that land the
ocean we'd start over again in this case they literally bring them down like
you're balancing a pencil on your finger and they can now regularly land it on
either a tray in the ocean or here somewhere on earth and manage to put them back
into space in a few weeks time incredible in privacy news we saw all kinds of
trouble there I mean a couple of years ago you might have just sort of you know
given your gym your genetic information over to a genealogy site called GED match
or any of a number of these genealogy sites just to find lost relatives and so
forth well this year GED match got purchased by a company called Vera gen which
is a genetic forensics firm specifically making that database a favored tool of
law enforcement in fact that's how Joseph James D'Angelo the Golden State killer
was identified through these kinds of systems and it just reminds me that the
privacy policies that we are signing today cannot possibly anticipate what might
be coming up next especially in the world data breaches right you saw Capital One
lose a hundred million customers worth of data you saw Toyota lose big databases
in Japan and Vietnam and Thailand you know you saw breaches at Facebook I mean it
just goes on and on and we saw it all against the backdrop of of this kind of
national allergic reaction to surveillance which we realized that was going on
all the time via facial recognition and phone location you know for me the
California consumer Privacy Act is the one sort of you know happy thing coming
out of this the CCPA is a big act that's going to take effect on January 1st and
will in fact be the first sort of national style regulation of all this stuff
which is gone totally unregulated until now Hey see news viewers thanks for
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