Will an Asteroid Kill You?

Could humans go the way of the dinosaurs: extinction by space rock?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Some of the jobs you might get a NASA have
really awesome sounding titles. And I heard you can morganas
and be called a spaceship commander. Yeah, or even better,
you could be the head of planetary Defense. Are you serious?
Is that like a real title? Absolutely? Wait, so what
are we what do we need to defend against? Like
rogue planets, evil planets. We're not expecting an attack from Mars,

(00:28):
but we do need to be defended against killer asteroids
from outer space. That would be an Armygeddon. That's right.
That's why they have Bruce Willis on call at all times. Hey,
I have an idea for a movie. What's your idea?
Die hard in space? In space, no one can hear
you shoot a gun. It's not hard to die in space. Soul. Hello,

(01:00):
I'm Jorge and I'm Daniel, and this is Daniel, and
Jorge explained the universe. Today. We're talking about a pretty
big question when it comes to humanity, which is is
an asteroid going to come and kill us? All? So um,
grim stuff, grim stuff, but also important. I mean you

(01:21):
might brush this off as irrelevant, but we know from
some pretty recent scientific history sixty five million years ago,
the dinosaur extinction was caused very likely by an asteroid
impact just the other day, just the other day in
geologic terms, So he could happen to us, that's right.
And so since we're all concentrated on this one planet,
you know, all of our humanities eggs are in one

(01:42):
basket almost literally, it's a reasonable question to ask. So
Daniel went out and asked people on the street, are
they concerned about and asteroids killing us? All? Here's what
they said, Well, maybe it's possibility, and I mean it's
quite possible, but there has to be certain things happened
for that to in order to that take place. You know,
they've got to have holes in the ozone, you gotta

(02:04):
have meteoroids coming. You've gotta be able to project it.
You know, you gotta know. I mean, we have the
technology so we can stop it. I think there's a chance. Yeah,
are you worried about it? Um? I read that like
it's a low probability, But every day that goes by,
the probability like compounds, so that, Um, there's a high

(02:24):
chance now. But honestly, like it's whatever, Like if it happens,
it happens, you know, Um, it's all the question of probability,
but it's uh, there's a finite possibility. So it seems
like a lot of people were aware of the danger,
but a lot of people also put it off. They're like, well,
it's a possibility, but they don't think about it, right,

(02:47):
It's like a fascinating dissonance thing. They don't seem that concerned. Yeah,
like I got other stuff to worry about, gas in
my car, or am I gonna, you know, as a
self driving uber gonna run me over? They seem to
be more worried about that. They seem to be very pregny, attic, like,
I know the probability small, so I'm not going to
worry about it as much as I'm going to worry about,
you know, getting run over by Clark. Yeah, there's like
hierarchies of worry, you know. It's like that's on the

(03:09):
list of things I should worry about, but I don't
actually have time to worry about and maybe if I
just ignore it, it'll go away, right, So that list
of problems, and then some people seem to have just
like this super confidence in scientists and engineers, you know,
they're like, yeah, I know it could kills all but
you know, I think we probably have the technology and
they're probably working on it. I love that slash. I'm

(03:31):
terrified by it. I love it because I love that
they're like, yeah, scientists are pretty capable. I mean, in
the movies, all it takes to solve this problem is
like a couple of pots of coffee and a musical montage,
and the scientists have an answer. Right. I love that.
Don't forget the chalkboard, you know, here's the solution. It's
always at least one musical montage though, right. I'm terrified though,

(03:54):
because it means that they're like, well, I don't have
to worry about it, w't have to do anything, you know,
I'm sure science has it covered in is you're gonna
learn in today's episode. There certainly are some vulnerabilities there.
You know, there's a possibility that an asteroid, if it comes,
could wipe us out even if we do see it coming.
It's non zero, the probability, it's non zero. Definitely on
the list of things you should worry about but probably

(04:16):
don't have time to do anything about anyway, right right, Okay,
so what um, what is the probability then that we're
going to get hit by an asteroid. Seven the probability,
it's fascinating. It's sort of unknown, and you know, you
have to think about, like, what is the kind of
thing that's going to hit us? Right, So we're talking
about rocks, right, And when you look out in the space,

(04:37):
you see the bright stuff, You see the stars, you
see the moon, you see things that give off light.
There's other stuff out there that's dark that you don't
see unless it happens to reflect light, you know, like
shining from moonlight or sunlight or something. So there's a
huge member of rocks that are still out there in
the in the Solar System and in the universe. And
that's what we're talking about, like a big rock slimming
into the Earth. Yeah, and I thought that was super

(04:58):
interesting to find out that. You know, when we people
are seeing movies like, oh, we're going to get him
by an asteroid, it's usually like this thing that comes
from the void of space that's going to hit us
out of the blue. Um. But the truth is apparently
that we were like surrounded by asteroids. There's like gazillions
asteroids that were like hanging around us, right. Yeah, they're

(05:20):
absolutely there's rocks everywhere in our solar system, and you
have to understand like how our solar system came to be.
You know, our solar system is like gravity slowly over
billions of years, pulling together rocks and rubble and dust
into larger pieces. Right, Like how do you form a star?
You got a big ball of gas and you wait
a billion years and gravity eventually pulls it together and

(05:41):
compresses it and compresses it so much that it turned
to like a fusion bomb. Right. That's how powerful gravity
is over long times. Right, you've given enough time you
can pull anything together, but it doesn't get everything. So
there's still you know, enough rocks slept over to make
Earth and enough bits left over to make Jupiter, and
not all those bits get pulled into a planet. And

(06:02):
that's why you have things like the asteroid belt, which
has a huge number of rocks in it. They're like
the crumbs from for making the planets. Right, that's right.
Somebody ate a cake and the asteroid belt are their
crumbs left over and they didn't sweep up yea or
like you know, when you're making like meatballs or bread
or something and you're like you're like you grab some
and you like you pat it down, you make something,

(06:23):
but there's always all these little bits land around, that's right,
And I usually wipe down my counter. But whoever, maybe
feel Solar system didn't And for scale, Like I looked
this up and um, if you added up like all
of the rocks in the asteroid belt, it's like, you know,
one twenty five of the of the size of the Moon.
So most of the stuff in the Solar System. Yeah, yeah,

(06:45):
it's four percent of the moon. If you add up
all the stuff in the asteroid belt, all that stuff,
I thought it was like thicker and more massive. Yeah,
and and fascinating. Least some of them. It's mostly a
few big rocks. Like half of the stuff in the
in the asteroid belt is just four really big rocks.
But there's a lot of rocks out there. How many
rocks are there? How many rocks are there? These are

(07:07):
an estimate, like, well, there's we don't know, um, the
number of rocks in total, because you can't count the
really tiny ones. Were the big one. And as they
get smaller and smaller, there are more and more, and
as they get really small, they get really numerous, and
then they're basically impossible to see an impossible to count.

(07:29):
And the thing to understand there is that obviously the
biggest rocks are the more dangerous and the smallest ones
are less dangerous, and so we're mostly worried about the
biggest rocks, Like some of those rocks are pretty big,
Like we need to worry about the rocks in our
solar system that we're like hanging out with. Like I
was thinking, like an analogy is that, Like we're like,
we're in the toilet, right, and this toilet is is

(07:50):
swirling around and we're like this little pebble at it?
Is this your personal toilet model of the solar system? Yes?
I think Copernic has rejected that, didn't he's splicitly um, yeah,
I don't think we had toilets back then. You're right,
you're right, all right, go ahead. So yeah, So it's
like we're swirling around and we're this little ball, but
there's all these other little balls swirling around around us,

(08:12):
and we're just hoping that in this swirling around none
of them are going to hit us. It's like this
chaotis giant thing, right, isn't it. That's right? And I
want to talk a little bit more about that. But first,
a quick break, Right, so let's think of the Solar

(08:37):
system as this big swirling mass. I think that's fair analogy.
I mean a toilet bowl makes it sound like everything
is cycling towards the center, which we're hopefully not going
to get flushed into the Sun. But but you're right,
everything's been swirling around and in the beginning, I think
there was a lot of bumping. Right, there's there's a
big disorganized mess and it's swirled together, and the bumping
is how we got planets and stars and all that

(08:58):
kind of stuff. But now, billions of years later, right,
the Earth is at least four billion years old, billions
of years later, things have been swirling around for a
long time, and things that we're going to bump together
and form together mostly have things have settled down. Yeah.
We're sort of in the you know, happy middle ages
of the solar systems. We're waiting for the big flesh.

(09:22):
Um yeah, so um. The interesting thing is that there
are rocks in our Solar system which if they hit
the Earth could do serious damage. Like the biggest rock
in the asteroid belt is nine and fifty kilometers across,
which is huge. It's enormous that's like what like Florida.
I don't know, but the one that killed the dinosaurs

(09:43):
was about ten kilometers across, so nine nine across. It's
like a planet buster. So there's definitely stuff in our
solar system which if it hit us, could do serious damage.
So maybe you're right that's a surprise to people. Yeah. Yeah,
it's like we're living with him. It's like a roommate
could kill you at any time, more like your neighbor.
But you know, that's sort of something we um were

(10:05):
accustomed to. You know, you just try not to look
in their windows too much and get too worried about it.
But yeah, you never know when your neighbor is going
to smash into you and cause an explosion the size
of a nuclear warhead. Yeah, let's talk about the the
spectacular grip stuff, like what's the probability of surviving an

(10:26):
asteroid hitting us? Right? Yeah, and that again depends entirely
on the size. For example, there are asteroids hitting the
Earth all the time, like things that are you know,
less than a meter in size. These rocks are hitting
the Earth all the time. Um, but the Earth is
big and these asteroids are small, and every time you
look up. It's in the night sky and you see
a shooting star that is a rock hitting the Earth.

(10:49):
Remember we have something like a windshield, right, we have
this this atmosphere which protects the Earth and it protects
us from various cosmic rays, but also from space rocks,
because what pens when a rock hits the atmosphere. It's
sort of like um, I don't know, like an elephant
hitting a water bed or something. Right, it's um it.
It impacts and it gets and it pushes the air

(11:11):
out of the way, but it gets heated up by
all that air. It's so fast that the air feels
like this, like this giant jet that trips it away, right, Yeah,
exactly like in all those movies when spaceships are re
entering atmosphere. That's because of all the friction from the
air on the spaceship. And spaceships usually have like nice
protection and fancy tiles or something that protect the astronauts

(11:32):
from from being burnt to a crisp. But a space
rock is just a rock and sometimes made of ice
or rubble or or whatever. It doesn't have that, and
so usually they've burned up in the atmosphere and that's
what shooting stars are. So we're constantly being hit by
very small ones which we couldn't have seen in advance
because they were too small. But they don't do any damage.
So air is good. Air is good. Um yeah. But

(11:56):
then about one every five years or so, you get
a rock that's like five meters in size. And the
rock five meters in size has a lot of kinetic
energy to it, right, it's been traveling through space for
a long time. By the time it hits the Earth,
that's been pulled them by a gravitational field. It has
about as much energy as the nuclear bomb that exploded

(12:16):
over Hiroshima. It's a lot of energy to a five
meter asteroid is about like the size of a mini
van or school bus. Yeah, yeah, it's about a school
bus and it blows up. And about once every five
years one of those hits the Earth and makes a
pretty spectacular explosion. Now, most of the Earth, of course,
is covered in water, and we're not like imaging all

(12:36):
the atmosphere simultaneously, and these things can happen in the
upper atmosphere. Because you might be thinking, hmmm, I think
i'd noticed if somebody blew up a nuclear bomb. Every
five years Um, but these kind of things can happen
and we don't necessarily notice them. Really, So five years
ago we had an Hiroshima style asteroid hit us. The
odds are that sometime in the last five years, Um,

(12:57):
there's a good chance that a pretty big hit the
atmosphere and burned up upon entry, leaving as much energy
as a Horrissima explosion. Yeah, and the energy isn't quite
as concentrated. It's not as as focused in one spot
as the Horosiam explosion. But yeah, I can leave a
substantial amount of energy, Like by the time it reaches
the ground or the ocean, it has that much energy. Yeah,

(13:18):
I think in order to reach the ground, it's that's
about the threshold, about five ms. And remember there was
a pretty big explosion over Russia in two thousand. Yeah,
I've seen the videos on YouTube. Yeah, everybody saw the videos.
It just happened like one morning, huge explosion in the sky,
like like an enormous bomb, and everybody was shocked and
like a thousand people, I think we're hurt. Um when

(13:41):
that happened, and nobody's eyes coming right like, Um, there
was no warning. The warning was when it appeared in
the atmosphere and it just blew up. And that's exactly
what happened. And I think a little bits of it
might have reached the ground, but mostly it exploded in
the atmosphere. Wow. So if it had been like twice
the size, somebody could have been hit by an asteroid. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.

(14:01):
And the bigger they get, the more dangerous they get.
You know, if it gets big enough, then it's you know,
it can it can explode the atmosphere and leave huge
clouds of dust and rubble and all sorts of stuff.
And it can when it hits the ground, it can
throw up enormous clouds of dust and rubble. And that's
where the danger really lies. Like not necessarily, even are
you actually hit by a rock, Like being actually physically

(14:23):
hit by the rock from space is a tiny fraction
of the danger. One of the real dangers is just
that it like covers the sun and causes you know,
I guess you. We call it like a environmental catastrophe,
an environmental catastrophe I was looking for, like asteroidal winter,
steroid winter after roidal winter. Yeah, we are coining new

(14:45):
science term. We have the toilet bowl universe and the
asteroidal winter you almost want to be hit by an
asteroid bargein know, so that you die instantly and you
don't die from this like agonizing post apocalyptic environmental disaster. Well,

(15:06):
I guess you can choose how you go. I mean,
if the asteroid hits the Earth and you get vaporized immediately,
like it just hits your city, huge explosions, you know,
the entire city is destroyed. Um you know, you can
make like a crater like a tho hundred kilometers wide
or something. You could die instantly, and you might prefer
that because what comes next is like a cold, long winter,

(15:26):
you know, where all the crops die and the only
people who stockpile a lot of lentils in their basements
or can survive. But also if it hits the water,
you have a whole other problem, which is like massive
tsunamis right, I mean, imagine go back to like our
space cow hitting in a water bed or I guess
we were talking an elephant or something like if a
big rock hits the ocean, you might think, oh great,

(15:48):
that's gonna absorb the impact. Well yeah, it's going to
absorb the impact, and it's gonna absorb in form of
a huge wave, right, Like, you know, a wave called
kilometer high could wash over the planet. It's crazy, but
it's sort of the ads on the size, right, So
we're getting pelted all the time by little ones. As
they get bigger, they get more and more dangerous, and
at some point it's like end of the world, that's right,

(16:08):
I think, Um, if they get big enough, then we're
talking planet killers. You know, something that starts off supervolcanoes,
you know, like rips open the Earth's crust and releases
you know, the magma and the lava that's underneath. And
we're talking about not just tsunamis and not just earthquakes,
and not just the sky full of dust, but also
massive oceans of lava covering the ground. And so that's

(16:32):
that's pretty serious stuff. But you know that's unlikely that
that requires a really really big rock, you know, And
I looked up some numbers here also in like a
five kilometer wide rock carries a hundred zetta jewels. That's
ten to the twenty three jewels, all right, And so
for comparison, is that a lot. That's a lot Like
an average American uses about ten to the eleven jewels

(16:55):
in a year. And all of humanity uses like ten
to the twenty jewels in one year, so that one
collision carries like a thousand years worth of energy for humanity.
So it's a huge amount of energy in a big
collision like that. But again, remember the really big ones
are rare, like they estimate, for example, that a rock
five thousand meters, why that's what we're talking about here,

(17:18):
is like every twenty million years or so, but we
could be at the end of that lifespan. So so
that's the thing. It's like, there's rocks of all kinds
of sizes out there, from little ones, big ones, and
the bigger they are, the less likely we are to
get the less common they are, but the more destructive
they are. That's exactly right. So it's kind of like

(17:40):
this this they this kind of this kind of opposing curves,
you know, like bigger but less likely, but more dangerous.
That's right. Bigger is less common, but more dangerous. It's
absolutely true. And there's another piece of good news, which
is the bigger they are, the more likely we are
to see them right and to spot them, which means

(18:00):
we might have some idea about whether whether they're coming
or not. Well, Yeah, let's talk about that, like how
do we see them? And like what's NASA doing about it?
People seem to have all these great confidence in scientists
and I'm going to lay it all on NASA. I
have a lot of friends in NASA, So, um, you
guys are awesome. So we like, what are they doing

(18:21):
about it? How do they see them? Yeah? They have
a dedicated team that's talk that they're called like the
Planetary Defense Force or something. And are they really call that? Yeah?
I think so, the Near Earth Objects Planetary Defense Team.
Are they called the Near Earth Objects Group? Yeah? Near
Near Earth Onjens is what they study. And they basically

(18:41):
just use telescopes and they scan the sky um and
they look for rocks. And you have to spot these
things at the right time when the sun is reflecting
off of them so that we can see them on Earth,
because they don't glow right there dark rocks, and and
the rocks respond differently lights. Some of them respond um
in this kind of lighting condition that kind of in
conditions different brightness. So you basically just have to pay

(19:02):
attention all the time and notice one. And if you
get a few pictures of it, the more pictures of
it you can get. The more you can, you can
know its size and its direction. And if you know
it's size and its direction, then you can plot its
course into the future. You can say, oh, I think
I know where this rock is in, which direction it's going,
and like which orbit it's in. Right. Yeah, you can

(19:23):
use my model of the Solar system and understand where
it's going to be and where we're going to be,
and then they can project forward. And the more measurements
they have, the tighter that band of uncertainty is, like,
the tighter their projection is for where that rock is
going to be over the next year or decade or
or century, And they can plot Earth's movements and they
can say whether or not we're in the clear or not.

(19:45):
So it all comes down to NASA sky scanning the
sky with their telescopes looking for these rocks and hoping
to spot one. So they see like a bright thought
moving in the sky, and they can maybe if you
take several measurements, you can see a curving or a
going to certain speed, so you can tell sort of
from from that you can tell kind of what the
trajectory around the Sun is. Yeah, and they've been doing

(20:07):
this for a few decades, and so they've seen these
rocks go around the Sun a few times, and they
get better and better measurements, and so they can make
better and better predictions. And that's why it's it's easier
to see the big ones, right, because they reflect more
light and they're just easier to spot. So it's good
that the big ones, the more dangerous ones, are the
easiest ones to see. It'd be it'd be scary if
the smaller ones were dangerous because they're basically invisible. Right.

(20:30):
So that's like the planetary defense strategy, right, it's just
like look out, try to spot them before they hit us. Yeah,
Step number one is figure out is one going to
hit us? And at this point they've looked out in
the Solar system. They've been watching for a while, and
they're pretty confident that they've seen all the ones that
pose really any danger, all the ones that could do

(20:52):
really any danger to the planet or to a significant
civilian population, all the ones above kilometer in size, for example.
They think they know all of the all of our
neighbors that could kill is we think we sort of
have a check on that. Yeah, they think they've seen
like a registry of it. Yeah, but you know, there
could always be one hiding. Like they've only seen what
they've seen. They by definition haven't seen what they haven't seen.

(21:14):
They can say, well, we've been looking at and so
if it had been there, we probably would have seen it.
But you know that could it only takes one, right,
it only takes one to break their their model of
how they should be seeing these things and be hiding somehow. Um.
But yeah, they've seen all those big ones and they've
plotted those trajectories and they're pretty confident that in the

(21:34):
next hundred years at least none of those big neighbors
are going to hit us. Yeah, I've seen those plots
that they're crazy. They're like a picture of the Solar system,
and so we're we're on this orbit around the Sun.
But then there's like hundreds of rocks right there. They
have to keep track of their orbits, so it's like
a it's like a huge mess this model. Right, it's
like our orbit, but then like the orbits of like

(21:55):
a hundred things going in all kinds of elliptical shapes
and hopefully none we don't intersect one of those ellipses, right,
that's right. Yeah. And the thing to understand also is
that the system is a little chaotic. Right. As we said,
we've been driving around this toilet bowl for billions of
years and things were mostly stable. But if some rock
comes from outer space, you know, from deepen, away from

(22:18):
the Solar system, and gives just a little nudge to
what to some other rock, that rock could bump into
gravitation don't even have to bump, just like affect the
orbits of one thing, that could affect the orit of
another thing, which affects the ord of another thing. And
this could you know, cascade and cause like a pilot basically,
which could knock one of these things out of orbit,
and you know, then you could change its trajectory. So

(22:40):
it's it's a difficult problem from a sort of chaos
theory point of view that a little perturbation could totally
change the answer. Yeah, let's talk about that a little
bit more. But first quick break. So you have to

(23:01):
keep looking and keep updating your model. That's right. You
have to keep looking at YEP, updating your model, and
you have to be aware that there are definitely things
that are not in your model, right, There are things
that you haven't seen, And so you're right that, like
there's a lot of stuff in the asteroid belt and
we've seen most of it. And I think that they
the guys and gals that NASA are pretty confident that
they've seen those things. But then you have to worry

(23:23):
about things like comets, right comments that's something different. Yeah,
that's something different, and it's part of our solar system.
But some of these things have really long periods, like
really long orbits, like a hundred years or two hundred years,
which means they could be on a trajectory to hit
the Earth in fifty years. But we just wouldn't see

(23:44):
them right now because they're so far out there and
they've never come by the Earth while we've had astronomy,
I mean, we've only been looking at the sky for
you know, a few hundred years. We've only had modern
telescopes for decades. So if there's a planet killer out
there that's headed towards Earth and just hasn't come by
in the last you know, said seven decades or so,

(24:05):
we might not have seen it. So we'll only see
it when it's closer to us. Yeah, and you might think,
well that seems improbable, Like I just invented that story, right,
but it actually happened once, and it happened only like
was it twenty five years ago? It happened that. Then
the comet came into our solar system out of the blue, yes,
and smashed into a planet out of the black, out
of the black. That's where I oh, I like that.

(24:25):
That's an awesome title for a book. Out of the Black. Um. Yeah,
comet Shoemaker Levy came out of the black and whizzed
and whizzed into the Solar system very high speed. And
the other thing is these comets are moving really fast.
By the time they come close to the Sun, they're
going much much faster than any asteroid. And it came in,
it whizzed around the Sun, and it actually got broken

(24:46):
up by title forces into a bunch of like twenty
three pieces. And this is really awesome because we could
see that it was going to hit Jupiter, you know,
months and weeks before it happened. Like they saw coming
into the Solar system, they recognized it, they plotted trajectory.
They're like, wow, it's going to hit Jupiter. Awesome. So
nobody thought like, hey, maybe we should warn potential people

(25:08):
in Jupiter instead of like, hey, let's make some popcorn
and less is awesome exposure. What are we gonna do?
What are gonna sending a message like watch out duck
for The amazing thing was that it broke into twenty
three pieces because and which means that we got to
see twenty three different impacts comment onto Jupiter. And the

(25:31):
thing is, it's like space is big, right, So, like
you think it was impossibly improbable that this thing would
come out of the blue and hit a moving planet
that's moving pretty fast around the Sun, but it actually happened.
It actually happened. Yeah, And Jupiter is not a small target, right,
and it has a lot of gravity and so you
don't have to get that close before Jupiter like sucks

(25:54):
you in. And uh, and that's how it got so big, right,
accumulated stuff by pulling it in. But there's something I
love about the Shoemaker Levee story. First of all this
amazing stuff, like each of the impacts when it hit
created a fireball bigger than the Earth, like wow, and
we could see it from here, Like I remember watching
this through telescopes. You could see the impact in these

(26:15):
enormous fireballs. Really, you were like paying attention because I
don't remember this happening. What um, but you were you
were near a telescope watching like a feed. Yeah, I
was a nerd in high school and h telescope? Are
you really? Absolutely? I know, I'm so cool now, right.
That's why it's so difficult for you to imagine. I

(26:37):
was totally a nerd in high school and we had
these telescopes and everybody around the world was watching. It
was a fascinating like I thought the whole earth was transfixed.
You know, apparently everybody but Jorge was paying attention I had.
I was interested in other things in high school. Well,
they the guys and girls in NASA named the bits

(26:58):
of the common They named at the A E the
C pieces right there, and then they started a hit
and you know, the first one hit Jupiter and they
called it the A spot like where the A hit,
and then the B B spot right, and they got
all the way up to you know, the F spot,
and then they were like, uh oops. And so they
had the F spot and then the G impact site right,

(27:20):
and then the H spot. And it's funny because that
that the G spot is kind of it probably sort
it only came about not that long before the eighties, right, Yeah,
I think that was a cultural thing, and as so
it's sort of cosmically cultural space based and also human based.

(27:40):
But the lesson there is not that you know, Jupiter
has a g spot that we should all search out.
But the lesson is that these things happen, and if
it happened in the last thirty years, that means it's
not that unlikely it could happen again. Right, So we
should be on the lookout for comments. It's good the
NASA has been looking at asteroids, but comments are a
real danger to keep fun NASA, keep funding NASA. Right,

(28:02):
So the question it should really be is not is
an answeryd going to kill us? All? It's like, is
a comment going to kill Saul? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, is
a common going to kill us? Aul? Is a fair
question that we don't know the answer too, because we
can't possibly see all the comments because some of them
are so far away and uh okay, and we haven't
seen them in a while. Yeah. Well, so now that
I'm concerned, um, what can we do? You know, people

(28:24):
seem very confident about scientists. We've all seen um Urmageddon,
and we've seen Bruce willis deflect an as steroid for us.
What can we actually do is like is that for real?
Will you just sit back, drink your coffee and watch
the people and ask it go to work? Right? You know,
just wait for that musical montage and then you get
your solution. Um. Yeah, the short answer to the duct

(28:46):
tape and duct tape and like, uh, spare parts. Yeah,
you gotta push up your glasses, up your nose a
few times, and you know, then you get to the answer. Um.
The short version of the answer is the earlier you
see it, the better. Like you're much better off seeing
some thing which is going to hit the earth in
six months or a year then something that's going to
hit the earth next week. Um. And the reason is

(29:06):
that you have two options. Really, one is deflect and
the other is destroy. Deflect or destroy deflectors are the
two options if we know something's coming at is we
can deflect the destroy right. We're coming up with great
titles for science fiction novels. We have into the black,
deflect or destroy right. The idea behind deflect is these

(29:26):
things are traveling really fast and the Earth is also
moving really fast, So if you could just nudge it
a tiny bit, like a year in advance, it would
totally change its trajectory and you can miss the Earth
by a few minutes. And that's all it takes, right,
just has to fly by instead of smacking into us.
Earth is not that easy a target to hit. It's
like threading a putting a thread through a needle. Yeah,

(29:48):
it's like it's such a small thing so that if
you can make it go off a little bit, it
will totally miss the eye of the needle. Yeah. It's
like a sniper shooting a thread through a needle from
a mile away. Um, and if somebody pushes him very
slightly or nudges the tip of his rifle, then he's
gonna miss. And so if you can spot this thing
a long time in advance and somehow deflect it, then

(30:11):
you could be safe. But you know, how are you
going to do that? So how would you do that? Yeah? Yeah,
you'd have to build a rocket to go up there
and visit it somehow. One thing you could do is,
you know, just bump into it, like send something which
literally bumps into it and deflects it. Another thing you
could do, it's called a gravity tractor, which is an awesome.
Name is you just send something up there which hangs

(30:32):
out next to it, and it's gravity gently pulls on
it over a long period of time, a few weeks
or months. It changes its trajectory. Yeah, like like hey,
what's up standing next to you? Give me cam? Yeah
that's yeah. So those who deflect, you know, sometimes you

(30:55):
could change its trajectory a little bit. You could save
are all of our lives, Okay, but you have to
know way in advance, like you have to see it coming, yeah,
and you have to be able to get there. And
we don't have great technology there. I mean, we have
pretty slow rockets. It would take a long time to
get something to Mars, for example, and so to get
something to like Jupiter, even if you see it coming,
we need much much faster rockets, and so people have

(31:17):
ideas for you know, like plasma based rockets. It could
be much faster to deflect this stuff. But we don't
have the technology. Like if we saw tomorrow a comment
that was going to hit the Earth in a year,
we're not like ready to launch with some awesome rocket
that could do this. It would take us years to
develop that Rocket's just not a priority right now. That's option.
A deflected option is destroyed destroy it right. So you think,

(31:38):
I'll just send up a nuke, right, Um, But what
happens if you're if the asteroid of the comment is
like about to hit the Earth like tomorrow, and you
send up a nuke to blow it up, Well, you're
just going to create like a thousand tiny bombs instead
of one huge bomb, right, And that's how a thousand
radioactive tiny babs. It doesn't really help you because it

(31:58):
still delivers all that enter onto the Earth. So you
have to blow it up far enough in advance that
then the pieces are going to miss the Earth. And
also it depends on like what is it made out of.
Is it a loosely held ball of rubble, in which
case blowing it up doesn't really change very much, or
is it a tightly bound rock, in which case blowing
it up could fracture it. And then you get two rocks,

(32:19):
each of which passed just on the side of the Earth. Like,
it depends a lot of those details. Do you have
to be lucky? You have to be lucky, and you
have to you have to get it early enough so
you can't just sit here and say, oh, we'll blow
it up when it gets here, right, that's not a
good idea. That might as well just blow yourself up,
all right, So let's recap. Let's see, is an asteroid
going to kill us? All? And first we learned that

(32:42):
we're surrounded by our asteroids, and there's a bunch of
them in our own solar system, and we're gonna get
hit by one. It's going to come from our own
solar system most likely, that's right. And there's even other
stuff we didn't talk about, Like there's the stuff outside
beyond Neptune and this stuff further out there that we
didn't even touch on. We just talked about this stuff
in the asteroid belt, which is the closest. Those are
the ones we've seen. Yeah, okay, um, But the bigger

(33:05):
they are, the more likely there are two kill us.
But also the bigger they are, the more likely regard
that we have seen them and we know they're they're
we're tracking it, that's right. And all the big ones
in the solar system that are potentially planet killers or
human extinction makers, we've seen those guys, and we're pretty
sure that the next hundred years is clear. That's, you know,
according to the good work done by our pals at NASA,

(33:28):
But even more dangerous could be a comment more than
an asterary because those could come out of the blue
and out of the black. Won't see him coming out
of the out of the void. Let's go generic term,
they're uh, and so it's a comment which may be
more worried about yeah and comments and what we'res some
because they're potentially going faster and they're harder to spot.

(33:49):
We wouldn't necessarily have seen them, and we have an
example of one hitting a planet just in the last
few decades, so it's not just a crazy science fiction idea.
And so the strategy is lookout and make sure that
we see them early enough so we can do things
like deflected or destroyed. That's right. So we should definitely
keep funding NASA because it's only because of NASA and
their worldwide partners that we have any idea of what's

(34:12):
out there. But we also desperately need to get cracking
on some defense systems, you know, um, building things that
can go out there and protect us in case this
happens or you know. Another strategy is like let's spread
the human eggs out of just this basket onto some others,
because it's very unlikely that like Earth and Mars are
both going to be hit by an asteroid simultaneously. So

(34:33):
if we could like get humans the planet, Yeah exactly.
I mean that's the kind of stuff we should be
working on. Well, cool, I feel great now. I think
it's I think it's fascinating that most people go through
their lives and don't worry about these existential threats, right
because you can't. There's nothing that you can do about.
It's not like if you spent five minutes of your
day working on this problem, it's going to help humanity

(34:55):
or something, right, But it is important that we all
think about this when it comes to time like funding
science and basic research and NASA, because that's that's when
we can do something about it. When we support candidates
that support basic research, that's when you're helping the planetary
defense system. Right. Well, technically everything is an existential crisis
to you, right, Like getting hit by a truck. That's

(35:15):
a pretty existential crisis for you. You wouldn't um, yeah,
every night worried about you. I'm sorry. Please be careful
when you cross the street. Please, I'll look up from
my phone, I promise all right, well, thank you for
joining us. Thank you very much for listening to us.

(35:37):
Worry about the end of the world and keep your
eyes on the sky. Yeah, look out for the void,
Watch out for the void. Do you have a question
you wish we would cover, Send it to us. We'd
love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge One Word, or email

(36:00):
us to feedback at Daniel an or a dot com.
H