"Even in purely nonreligious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty.
It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality -- a pitiable flight from life.
As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness."
That's from "Time" magazine in 1966, when I was three years old.
And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage.
(Applause) And my question is: How did we get from there to here?
How did an illness become an identity?
When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother.
And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home.
My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon.
My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon.
(Laughter) But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one.
And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue.
The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay -- (Laughter) is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits.
(Laughter) (Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world.
And until you have children, you don't know what it's like."
And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me.
And when I was an adolescent, I thought, "But I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family."
And when she said it, it made me anxious.
And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious.
I said, "I'm gay.
That's not the direction that I'm headed in.
And I want you to stop saying that."
About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at the "New York Times Magazine" to write a piece about Deaf culture.
And I was rather taken aback.
I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness: those poor people, they couldn't hear, they lacked hearing, and what could we do for them?
And then I went out into the Deaf world.
I went to Deaf clubs.
I saw performances of Deaf theater and of Deaf poetry.
I even went to the Miss Deaf America contest in Nashville, Tennessee, where people complained about that slurry Southern signing.
(Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the Deaf world, I became convinced that Deafness was a culture and that the people in the Deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing; we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable.
It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture.
It felt as valid, perhaps, even as American culture.
Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf.
And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me.
She was facing the question of what to do with this child.
Should she say, "You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter?"
Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity, get involved in the Little People of America, become aware of what was happening for dwarfs?
And I suddenly thought, "Most deaf children are born to hearing parents.
Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them.
Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence.
Most gay people are born to straight parents.
Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on.
And here was this friend of mine, looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter.
And I thought, "There it is again: a family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary."
And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity.
There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child.
Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion.
Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children.
And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them.
You can argue that it's harder in the United States -- our current presidency notwithstanding -- to be a person of color.
And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair.
There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group, and I call them "horizontal identities," because the peer group is the horizontal experience.
These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers.
And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure.
And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them.
And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place.
There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance.
And they don't always coincide.
And a lot of the time, people who have these conditions are very angry, because they feel as though their parents don't love them, when what actually has happened is that their parents don't accept them.
Love is something that, ideally, is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child.
But acceptance is something that takes time.
It always takes time.
One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown.
When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them.
And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly.
His mother said she wasn't going to do it, and she took her son home.
And even though she didn't have a lot of educational or financial advantages, she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism, and she got Clinton enrolled with him.
And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures.
And he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures, as a result of which, he now can walk.
While he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his schoolwork, and he worked very hard, because there was nothing else to do.
He ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family.
He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially fitted car that accommodated his unusual body.
And his mother told me the story of coming home one day -- and he went to college nearby -- and she said, "I saw that car, which you can always recognize, in the parking lot of a bar," she said.
(Laughter) "And I thought to myself, 'They're six feet tall, he's three feet tall.
Two beers for them is four beers for him.'"
She said, "I knew I couldn't go in there and interrupt him, but I went home, and I left him eight messages on his cell phone."
She said, "And then I thought, if someone had said to me, when he was born, that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies ..."
(Laughter) (Applause) And I said to her, "What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person?"
And she said, "What did I do?
I loved him, that's all.
Clinton just always had that light in him.
And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there."
I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s.
This one is from 1968 -- "The Atlantic Monthly," voice of liberal America -- written by an important bioethicist.
He said, "There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down's syndrome child away, whether it is 'put away' in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense.
It is sad, yes.
Dreadful.
But it carries no guilt.
True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person."
There's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we've made in the treatment of gay people.
The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day.
But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be.
And the change that's been accomplished there, which is almost equally radical, is one that we pay not very much attention to.
One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome.
They thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be, and so they decided they would build a little center -- two classrooms that they started with a few other parents -- to educate kids with DS.
And over the years, that center grew into something called the Cooke Center, where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught.
In the time since that "Atlantic Monthly" story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled.
The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood.
The Robards had a lot to do with that.
And I said, "Do you regret it?
Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome?
Do you wish you'd never heard of it?"
And interestingly, his father said, "Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life.
But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss."
And Karen Robards said to me, "I'm with Tom.
For David, I would cure it in an instant, to give him an easier life.
But speaking for myself -- well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point.
Speaking for myself, it's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life that, speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world."
We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up.
And yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before.
Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech.
A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene.
Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene grow to full size.
Testing in humans is around the corner.
There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them.
So we have both social progress and medical progress.
And I believe in both of them.
I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress.
But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other.
And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan.
(Laughter) We have to think about how we feel about cures altogether.
And a lot of the time the question of parenthood is: What do we validate in our children, and what do we cure in them?
Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "When parents say, 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is, 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, nonautistic child instead.'
Read that again.
This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence.
This is what we hear when you pray for a cure: that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces."
It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated.
They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.
One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold, who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre.
It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it, and the first weekend I spent with them, the first of many, I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation.
And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted.
We were sitting in the kitchen.
Sue Klebold was fixing dinner.
And I said, "If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?"
And his father said, "I sure do.
I'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing."
And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute.
And then she looked back up and said, "I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head."
When I had dinner with her a couple of years later -- one of many dinners that we had together -- she said, "You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children.
If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed, and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened.
But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them.
I recognize the pain they caused to others, for which there can be no forgiveness, but the pain they caused to me, there is," she said.
"So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me."
I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting.
And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws.
If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living-room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children -- more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter -- (Laughter) I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle.
And ultimately, I feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they won't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove, so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting, which is always that sometimes, you look at your child, and you think, "Where did you come from?"
(Laughter) It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed -- there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, only so many families of children who are transgender, only so many families of prodigies -- who also face similar challenges in many ways -- there are only so many families in each of those categories.
But if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon.
Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences and our negotiation of difference that unite us.
I decided to have children while I was working on this project.
And many people were astonished and said, "But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?"
And I said, "I'm not studying everything that can go wrong.
What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong."
I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect.
And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved."
And I figured it was possible, then, for anyone to love any child, if they had the effective will to do so.
So, my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis.
I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children.
And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas.
And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time, of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis.
(Laughter) So -- (Applause) The shorthand is: five parents of four children in three states.
(Laughter) And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family.
And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist.
And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones.
And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.
The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned.
He wasn't extending his legs appropriately.
She said that might mean that he had brain damage.
Insofar as he was extending them, he was doing so asymmetrically, which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action.
And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus.
And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor.
And I thought, "Here I had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who were disabled, and I didn't want to join their number because what I was encountering was an idea of illness."
And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness.
And I wanted, also, to protect myself from illness.
And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity, they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded.
We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw.
We felt helpless.
And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly.
And when I asked the pediatrician what had been going on, she said she thought in the morning, he had probably had a cramp.
(Laughter) But I thought -- (Laughter) I thought how my mother was right.
I thought, "The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world.
And until you have children, you don't know what it feels like.
I think children had ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss.
But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine.
I'd encountered so much strange love, and I fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns.
And I saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities.
During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else.
And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers) Thank you.
I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon, which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it.
My own interest in this subject, and my passion for it, began rather accidentally.
I had bought a copy of this book, "The Universe and Dr. Einstein" -- a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle.
A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes.
And as it happened, I read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot.
And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do.
And that feeling hasn't left me yet.
That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career -- from being a software engineer to become a science writer -- so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others.
And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail.
So it took me from places like Chile -- the Atacama Desert in Chile -- to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole.
And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips.
I have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting, literally at times, their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe.
And I first begin with a pie chart -- and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation -- but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos.
All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter -- the stuff that we're all made of -- and that's four percent of the universe.
Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent.
So if you look at this pie chart, 96 percent of the universe, at this point in our exploration of it, is unknown or not well understood.
And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter.
And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors.
And the reason why they have to go underground is that, if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth, the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays, ambient radio activity, even our own bodies.
You might not believe it, but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment.
So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector.
And I went to see one of these experiments, and this is actually -- you can barely see it, and the reason for that is it's entirely dark in there -- this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960.
And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s.
And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight.
And today, you would see this inside the mine, half a mile underground.
This is one of the largest underground labs in the world.
And, among other things, they're looking for dark matter.
There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly.
If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about -- one of them being neutrinos.
And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules.
When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino.
But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this.
You need something like tens of megatons of water -- almost a gigaton of water -- in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino.
And where in the world would you find such water?
Well the Russians have a tank in their own backyard.
This is Lake Baikal.
It is the largest lake in the world.
It's 800 km long.
It's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places, and one to two kilometers deep.
And what the Russians are doing is they're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light.
And this is the scene that greeted me when I landed there.
This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter.
The lake is entirely frozen.
And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working.
The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don't have the money to work in summer and spring, which, if they did that, they would need ships and submersibles to do their work.
So they wait until winter -- the lake is completely frozen over -- and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work.
So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter.
They have to drill holes in the ice, dive down into the water -- cold, cold water -- to get hold of the instrument, bring it up, do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do, put it back and get out before the ice melts.
Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it's full of cracks.
And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving.
I still don't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest, but that tells you how hard he was working.
And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist.
And they have dedicated their lives to it.
And just to give you an idea, they have spent 20 million over 20 years.
It's very harsh conditions.
They work on a shoestring budget.
The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack.
And it's that basic, but they do this every year.
From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope.
The Very Large Telescope is one of these things that astronomers do -- they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively.
I can tell you for a fact, that the next one that they're planning is called The Extremely Large Telescope.
(Laughter) And you wouldn't believe it, but the one after that is going to be called The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.
But nonetheless, it's an extraordinary piece of engineering.
These are four 8.2 meter telescopes.
And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time.
And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about.
And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror.
Each mirror, there are four of them, is made of a single piece of glass, a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic, that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [to] imagine a city like Paris, with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower, if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy, you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high.
And that's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured.
An extraordinary set of telescopes.
Here's another view of the same.
The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert.
The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies.
Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica.
I want to spend most of my time on this part of the world.
This is cosmology's final frontier.
Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica.
I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up.
And that's where they do their experiments, and then the balloon, the payload, is brought down.
So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica.
And here we are about to board our bus.
And I don't know if you can read the lettering, but it says, "Ivan the Terribus."
And that's taking us to McMurdo.
And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo.
And you barely might be able to make out this hut here.
This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole.
Because it's so cold, the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it, with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there.
It's an extraordinary place.
This is McMurdo itself.
About a thousand people work here in summer, and about 200 in winter when it's completely dark for six months.
I was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument.
This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km.
What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight.
So you're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km.
And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica -- I won't go into the reasons why -- but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather.
The weather, as you can imagine, this is summer, and you're standing on 200 ft of ice.
And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top.
And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon -- the fabric, parachute and everything -- on the ice and then fill it up with helium.
And that process takes about two hours.
And the weather can change as they're putting together this whole assembly.
For instance, here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind, which is eventually going to be filled up with helium.
Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium.
Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station.
And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon.
The fabric alone weighs two tons.
In order to minimize the weight, it's very thin, it's as thin as a sandwich wrapper.
And if they have to pack it back, they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again -- except, when they did it first, it would have been done in Texas.
Here, they can't do it with the kind shoes they're wearing, so they have to take their shoes off, get barefoot into the boxes, in this cold, and do that kind of work.
That's the kind of dedication these people have.
Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight.
Here's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end.
So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload.
And remember, all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold, in sub-zero temperatures.
They're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff, but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that.
And I would like to share with you a launch.
(Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon.
Anil Ananthaswamy: And I'll finally like to leave you with two images.
This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India.
And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side.
And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery.
This is a close-up of the Buddhist monastery.
And I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has.
One is exploring the cosmos on the outside, and the other one is exploring our interior being.
And both require silence of some sort.
And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever.
And it was very obvious that, if we destroy these silent places on Earth, we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards, because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space.
Thank you.
(Applause)