April 27, 2021 • 40 mins
What triggered the massive explosion over Tunguska in 1908? Join Matt, Ben, and special guest Joe McCormick as they take a closer look at one of the most mysterious catastrophes in history.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So true story. Back in nineteen o eight, there was
this massive explosion in Tungusca. Do you guys remember this episode? Oh,
I most certainly do. It's one of the weirdest things
you're gonna hear about. Really the trees. That to me,
that was one of the most fascinating things about this
What happened to the trees? What caused all these trees,
(00:20):
whatever it was, to do what they did? You know,
I love a good tree story, Matt when the trees
are at the center of the mystery, and that's what
you're going to get on today's classic, including a wonderful
appearance from Joe McCormick of stuff to blow your mind fame, well,
guess one of the things I was I was excited
about off air. Joe has done some great episodes with us,
including The Bicameral Mind. Check that one out if you
(00:44):
haven't listened to it already. But for a taste of mystery,
a taste of Tungusca, dare I say, a taste of
Joe McCormick, go ahead and check this one out. Just
to be warned, this is not the Travis Walton Fire
in the Sky story. That's not what this is this
is something completely different, Yes, yes, and better. Well that's
(01:06):
up to you, folks from UFOs two ghosts and government
cover ups. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to now. Suddenly the north sky, the sky was
split into and high above the forest, the whole northern
(01:28):
part of the sky appeared covered with fire. At that moment,
there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash.
The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling
from the sky or of guns firing. The earth trembled.
And that was a quotation that comes to us via
a researcher named Leonid Kulik, who heard this account at
(01:53):
the Nara Trading Post in Russia. The account was read
by our special guests on the show today. Uh the
one the only Mr Joe McCormick, who may recognize from
forward thinking. Hello Joe, Hi, everybody. It's an honor to
be on the show of ill repute such as this.
Why thank you. My name is Matt and I'm Ben.
(02:16):
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
And today we are discussing something extremely cool, something explosive
and fiery and dangerous and deadly. Well fortunately, as far
as we know, not deadly for any humans. Yes, but
there were probably several animals injured in the making of
(02:37):
this event. Oh, I'd say no doubt about that. Yeah,
So today we're gonna be talking about the Tunguska event.
While back, Mr Ben Boland came up to me and
he asked if I'd like to be a guest host
on stuff they don't want you to know, and I said,
only if we can talk about the Tunguska event. That
was one of many of the conditions that came attached
(02:57):
to this appearance, and there's a lot of paperwork. Yeah,
we're glad we could make it all happen. But this
is such a fascinating topic because we know, we know
the facts, and for decades afterwards, people were not sure
what actually happened. But as we go through the episode today, Matt,
(03:20):
Joe and I are going to illuminate the events a
little bit by talking about what we know in the beginning,
the various theories that were proposed, and what we believe
nowadays actually happens. So this is not one of those
podcasts where you'll walk away with way more questions than
(03:40):
the answers. We have the answer, ladies and gentlemen. Uh,
we have the answer, and as uh the Mad Hatter
said to Alice. Will start at the beginning and go
through the middle, and then we'll stop at the end.
Sound good, that's great. So let's start at what exactly
was the Tuska event. Well, we should start by saying
what Tungusca is. Okay, that's not a word that pops
(04:03):
up every day. Well maybe if you're one of us three,
but not for most people. Okay, So the Tungusca or
the Podkamanya Tunguska, if I'm saying that correctly, um is
a region in Russia. It's actually a region in Siberia.
I believe in Siberia proper. So a lot of people
will say basically anything east of the Ural Mountains is Siberia,
(04:27):
not all Siberia. There's actually a part of Russia that
is officially Siberia, and this includes the Tunguska region. Right
spot on the pad Kaminaya, which I am probably mispronouncing,
is also a river that flows westward about nine hundred
seventy six miles or for everyone outside of the United
(04:47):
States and maybe two other countries uh d and seventy
one kilometers to a place called the Yenni sev River Um.
The name of this river uh means Tunguska under the pebbles.
There are a couple of different Tunguskas and their tributaries
of the Yenni sev Um and it's called under the pebbles,
(05:08):
interestingly enough, because it flows under these pebble fields, so
it's not an open river for the entirety of its run. Yeah.
And so in this region you have some you have
a lot of forests. You also have pete bogs and swamps,
and so there's a lot of great wilderness out there.
Fortunately not that much civilization. Yeah, that is fortunate. It
(05:32):
is not exactly New York City, um as as you
may have heard about Siberia. It's a pretty isolated place, right, Matt. Yeah,
it's a difficult place for humans to live. There are
a lot the only humans that really live out there
are these uh semi nomadic herders and trappers that survive
off the land, and they're few and far between there.
(05:54):
What are they called the evenki Uh. Guess we should
also do a disclaimer that uh of none of the
three of us, to our knowledge, are Russian, and Noel
I don't believe you're okay. Nol is also uh not
a native Russian speaker. Uh. But what we do know,
aside from mispronouncing a few things here and there, we
(06:17):
do know that in this isolated part of the world,
something very strange happened a little after seven am on
June in you heard the quotation right, a massive explosion
the way a lot of people at the time seemed
to have described it. And and as far as we know,
(06:39):
there was nobody at ground zero of this. There were
there were people who were quite far away but still
felt the effects imminently. Uh. So people described it as
seeing a vast light in the sky, burning particles, a
sky full of fire, a second son, uh, these terrifying
apocalyptic visions, and then feeling things like searing heat coming
(07:02):
from the air, and then uh shock wave blasts as
if described like cannon fire. And we also know that
people from as far as forty miles away reported some
stuff about this blast. So there's no argument here. Something
definitely happened. It wasn't just a bunch of nobody's denying that,
(07:26):
Like no, no no, nothing to see here, right, because
it even burned people within thirteen miles of where it happened,
and there are animals that were burned, so there are
obvious effects that you could feel and see. Yeah, there's
some real into the world stuff there. But as we know,
as we said at the top, uh, years passed and
(07:47):
people weren't sure what occurred. And in the absence of that, uh,
no one was able to say what happened. So people
started saying what they thought happened, they were believed that occurred. Yeah. Sure,
something huge happens like this, and you know, you go
to what you know or what you believe, right, That's
(08:07):
kind of what humans do something if you don't understand it,
it's just you go to your innermost beliefs. Sure. I mean,
if something like this were to have happened, say, uh,
fifty years later, you can bet I think that uphology
would immediately come into play. I'd say that wasn't such
a big thing back in nineteen o eight. I mean,
(08:29):
there were vague kind of ideas of other worldly visitations,
but they didn't have the science fiction vision of flying
saucers with energy weapons like we do today. Yeah, or
perhaps a nuclear strike something that something looks like a
second son burning in the air. Yeah, one might say
that again today, but back then, I mean, they had
(08:50):
no reference point for that. They didn't have nuclear weapons
act that we know of a right. So that's a
really interesting point though. So if we talk out some
of the things that people did believe, we will see
that some of these ideas came into play um decades
after the fact, and one of those being the idea
(09:11):
of extraterrestrials. So you'll you'll see claims that some sort
of extraterrestrial force either accidentally or purposely triggered this explosion um,
or that evidence of this craft or this weapon or whatever. Oh,
that's the most important part, that it was something made
by an intelligence, that it was not just from space
(09:32):
but purposely crafted and then sent here um. And then
you can also see that when people started speculating that
perhaps this was Tesla technology. Right. Yeah, So I've seen
this claim just uh, pretty low profile, it seems to me,
but around the web in various places people speculating, well,
I wonder if the Tunguska event, the giant fire in
(09:56):
the sky that was seen there was Nicola Tesla, the
famed somewhat maybe mad inventor testing his so called death ray. Now,
Tesla tried to disown the term death ray. He wasn't
interested in that, and he tried to distance himself from it,
but he did for many years advertised that he was
(10:16):
trying to create a particle beam that would be used
as a weapon that could end all wars. Basically, that
it would be able to repel from a great distance
any infantry invasion or air airplane attack. That it would
be a devastating weapon that would provide insurmountable defense to
every country that possessed it, right, which I think is
(10:39):
an interesting argument for deterrence. Right, and we see it
happening now. The logic of having a nuclear arsenal is
similar to the logic yeah with his particle Really, what
he's talking about, Tesla is just musually asured destruction. Well,
it could be interpreted that way. Actually did a podcast
with Jonathan Strickland on Tech Stuff about this. I'm not
(11:01):
usually a host of tech stuff, but I guessed with
him about technologies that were believed at some point might
end all wars, world peace tech. It turns out none
of those have ever worked, But so one way of
looking at weapons to end wars, is this idea of
mutually assured destruction. Everybody has weapons so powerful that it's
(11:22):
in nobody's interest to start a war because the retaliation
would be devastating to you. The other idea is a
prohibitive defensive weapon. And I sometimes get the impression that's
what Tesla is thinking about, that he's thinking about. Well,
it's not necessarily so much that it would be a
devastating retaliatory attack, but just that you could repel anything
(11:46):
coming into your border. It would be almost kind of
like a Tesla kind of steampunk version of the Iron
Dome system that Israel employees uh supposedly to shoot down
incoming rockets. Not uh, not entirely of effect, of of course.
But then also if we took at global it could
be compared to the Star Wars program if that program worked. Um,
(12:09):
spoiler alerts left and right, everybody. But we do know
that Tesla was involved in some innovative tech and also
in these uh in these experiments that have given rise
to so much speculation, one of course being warden Cliff
Tower and h Wardencliffe Tower. If we look at the
(12:31):
timeline here, uh, the Tunguska. Uh event occurred in nineteen
o eight. Warden Cliff Tower was shut down in nineteen
o five. It wasn't dismantled until nineteen seventeen. So, Um,
the timelines here don't seem to work out. But of course, um,
(12:51):
if he's talking about the particle beam instead, then we
don't really know. But we we have more compelling evidence
that says he didn't have anything to do with it. Yeah,
I am not even convinced it's likely that Tesla ever
really had a particle beam. Look, I'm just gonna say
(13:13):
if he did have a particle beaming, and I don't
know if he did, that would be the perfect place
to test it. Well, in the middle of nowhere, right,
If you assume that he was a relatively humane guy,
he'd want to be it would be like the nuclear
tests in the desert. You'd want to do them somewhere
where nobody was living. Yeah, and that's that's a really
good point, because what if there were some sort of
(13:33):
group that had technology uh Here on my notes, I
had streets of streets ahead because I was watching Community earlier,
and I used that phrase at nauseum. But I don't
know what that means it's oh man, I'll tell you later, Okay,
it's just a lame way of trying to say something's cool. Uh.
So this idea that there would be some sort of
(13:55):
suppressed technology that was being tested, not necessarily tied to TESLA.
That that's another popular idea. UM. Again, it's an idea that,
as far as we know, does not have any tangible
proof at this time. Uh. And then, of course, if
we want to get weird with it, there is the
idea of an extremely small black hole. I haven't read
(14:16):
a lot about this, but from what I have looked at,
it doesn't seem very likely. The idea is basically that
a black hole shot through the Earth. So we had
a wandering, tiny black hole that was just I don't know,
floating through space and at some point it entered Earth's atmosphere,
smashed through Earth, and exited out the other side. I
(14:37):
believe I seems fairly ridiculous on its face. It seems
like there will be more destruction something like that. Where
do happen? I don't know well, And I think the
idea is that there would be more evidence of it,
like what we'd see. It would have had more effects
(14:57):
at both ends of the Earth in an exit wound. Honestly,
we have no idea what would happen, right, Yeah, I
have a black hole interact. Sure, yeah, I'm somebody could
probably run some kind of simulation of it, but as
long as they don't do it for real. I think
also the idea of these wandering black holes all around
the Earth, that that that's basically sci fi. We have
(15:18):
no reason to think there's anything like that near the
Earth or in the Solar System. Yeah. I just don't
go near the center of the galaxy, that's all, because
the question would be how could it um in night?
Maybe not, but in two thousand and fourteen, there would
be ways to find evidence of those things if they
existed this close to us. Um. There's another idea here that,
(15:40):
as uh an armchair folklorist, I found fascinating and uh
it is the original local explanation for the Tunguska event
that depends on neither extraterrestrials nor mad science. Yeah, that's right,
we're talking about God's here. Everybody. This is exciting. There's
no reason that the only mythology we should take seriously
(16:03):
is technological mythology. Absolutely, I mean I'd say, let's talk
about the gods on even footing with with tesla and
black holes and aliens. Okay, so what is the idea.
What did the locals, or at least the locals who
believed in this belief happened at the Tungusco bent Oh? Yeah, well,
they they placed the blame of this on a god
(16:26):
named og which again I'm probably mispronouncing Od being a
thunder god whom they believed was summoned. Uh and in
a visitation to the area cursed it. Uh. There's an
interesting uh shamanic chant that comes to us, translated via
Dieter Hoffman, a professor of Siberian ethnography at Hamburg University. Um,
(16:48):
the shaman is vastily zun cool and uh. This has
a bit of um. It's kind of an invocation to o.
D uh. Do you guys want to read it? Are
you ready? Oh? I don't know. Are you ready? Listener?
Because it's about to get epic in here, all right?
The God comes, The God comes, The earth trembles in
(17:10):
fear at the coming of odd. The earth rises and
falls beneath my feet like waves of water. My place
of purification is overthrown my lodge, bulls toppling. The God comes.
The God calls out, blinding bright, His tongue lashes the sky.
His roar booms off the hills. The heavens ring with it.
(17:32):
Ogd is calling his avatar from the lower world. The
earth at my feet tears open at the touch of
his fiery tongue. The God calls out, heating the God's call,
The Avatar arises night walkers, spawn of Darkness, beast of
evil heart from the lower world. He arises, insatiable, all
devouring as wild dogs, tearing and entrails of their kill,
(17:57):
eating the God's call. The Avatar arise. Some man, I
really like that. That's that is awesome apocalyptic poetry. Seriously,
I wish, I really wish we had more of that
kind of imagery, just a colorful imagery in our mythology.
I got nothing like that here. I mean, there's some
(18:19):
pretty there, there's some pretty heavily and I guess the
right world would be epic or metal. There's some pretty
metal parts of most religions. Oh yeah, I'm just what
I would say, is that believing stuff like oh it
was aliens or o Tesla was testing his death. Ray
has no poetry like that. Yeah, so you know that's
(18:39):
a that's a good point. Um. And also I like
the idea that what we're looking at when we see
these three different explanations is a various groups of people
are attempting to explain an inexplicable event through the lens
of the way they see the world right through a framework.
It also helped the place the enormous loss of life
(19:01):
and property in perspective. So they thought some shaman had
foolishly uh called on ogdi and that was the root
of the problem. Now, they didn't really talk about this
for a while though. Um, we didn't really have an investigation,
certainly not in nineteen o eight, right, No, But years
(19:23):
later we finally did. Okay, So I guess it's time
to talk about what really happened in nineteen o eight.
What was the Tonguska event? We know it was an explosion, fire, heat, thunder,
shock waves from the sky. What was it in reality? Okay?
So it seems like the first scientific expedition to the
area happened in ninete when Leoni Coolik hit the scene
(19:47):
and he was looking for a crater. Because the basic
idea in mainstream science was this was a meteor. It
was it was a rock from space that descended, descended
into the app sphere and hit the ground somewhere and
blew up. So massive impact event. Uh And there might
have been then there. They're definitely still to some degree
(20:10):
is today debate about what the nature of this object
from space was. It Was it an asteroid, a largely
rocky body, or was it a comet like a ball
of ice and dust. But the main ideas something from
space came into the atmosphere blew up, so he wanted
to go find where it hit. And it turns out
(20:32):
when he actually did get to find it, because I
believe there were multiple expeditions before he actually found it. Uh.
So once he got to the area, it was not
hard to find ground zero because there were about more
than eight hundred square miles about two thousands square kilometers
of trees that were affected by this explosion, basically in
(20:54):
a bull's eye shape. So when you entered the area
from the outer circle, the forest turned into a landscape
of flattened trees, trees knocked flat against the ground all
outward in the same direction going out from the middle. Obviously,
it would be pretty easy to know what direction you
need to go. It would be amazing. I just want
(21:17):
to say, to walk through that, Yeah, it would be cool. Yeah.
And so it followed eight hundred square miles I mean yeah,
and as as you said, that's that's the rough festivals,
it's more than that. Yeah, yeah, I think it was more.
It was like eight hundred and twenty or eight hundred
square miles. But so they proceeded inward and found towards
(21:38):
the center of the bulls eye scorched tree trunk standing
straight up with no branches, just stripped branches gone like
charred telephone poles. I mean, what on earth? But how
interesting that they weren't knocked over the way the ones
on the outside. Right. But the branches are one of
(21:58):
the biggest piece is of evidence too, because that only occurred,
um that wouldn't occur again that we have documentation of
until Hiroshima um when Yeah, because of the speed and
the pressure knocked the branches off before it could translate
that to the trunk. So it's like getting hit so
(22:23):
hard that your arms fall off before you feel it
in your chest. Yeah. So if you think about this, though,
what it suggests is not an impact on the ground,
but an explosion from above. And here's where we get
to what has become the accepted theory of the Tunguska
(22:44):
event UH in the years since. Scientists today are pretty
much all in agreement that what happened there Something entered
the atmosphere from space and it blew up before it
hit the ground. May it just heated to the point
that it completely exploded, and then the downward shock wave
stripped and scorched the trees below it. As the shock
(23:07):
waves spread out, it was it would turn horizontal in
its direction and knocked down the trees for those hundreds
of miles. And the questions that this leaves us with
the things like what would have happened if it had
actually hit the ground. NASA has some pretty interesting information
on this and and the current theory is that this
(23:30):
was this rock was about a hundred and twenty feet across,
and that it was traveling at a speed in excess
of thirty three thousand miles prour about thirty three point
five thousand and UH that that it weighed two hundred
and twenty million pounds. Now these are all estimates, of course,
based on UH, based on the best forensic data. They
(23:55):
can pull. But uh still, even if it that is
just in the area of of the correct numbers, that
that is frightening. The craziest number was the next one,
the idea that it heated the surrounding air to four
thousand five degrees fahrenheit. That's that's yeah, yeah, well, I
(24:18):
mean it's it's very common for things entering the atmosphere
to burn up upon entry. You've heard about this before,
and uh it's often believed that the reason is friction, right,
but that's actually I've recently found out that's not true.
That it's it has to do with compression heating. So
it's traveling so fast against the thick air of our
atmosphere that it's smashing the air in front of it,
(24:42):
uh so fast. The air heats up to these incredible temperatures,
and the thing catches on fire and the outside surfaces
of it get melted. And sometimes if it gets hot enough,
and if it's composed in the right way and all
the conditions are just right, it'll just explode. See. That's
why when I re enter Earth's atmos sphere, I go slow.
It's the long con you know what I mean, Like,
(25:04):
I get down here safely, but it takes a month easy.
I really want to see schematics and diagrams of how
you do that. Then well, you know, they say, if
they're gonna build a space elevator, one thing that's gonna
be disappointing about it is it's gonna take you at
the very least days to get to space. Yeah, because
(25:24):
you can't go fast up and down this thing. It's
kind and I think that's actually that's technological limitation at
this point, but it seems like you might not want
to go fast up and down. They're probably areas where
you can speed up a little bit, and then you'll
have to slow down again and then speed up again.
I mean, if we're still talking human enterprise, it will
be traffic jams. People's space elevator pods will break down.
(25:46):
It'll be really tough to go fast, to go quickly,
even when you have the technology. But you know, maybe
we shouldn't. It reminds me a little bit of do
you guys remember Dune, How they had the force fields
for five and you couldn't the force fields would stop
a blunt trying. You guys are both staring at me.
I'm sorry, I've never read dude, somebody out there. Ladies
(26:11):
and gentlemen, you guys know what I'm talking about. But um,
going back to the object at hand, Yeah, really fast.
So this is fascinating. Also to me, NASA believes that
it exploded at at a height of twenty eight thousand feet,
which okay, so I'm just trying to understand this thing
(26:32):
that weighs millions of pounds at least according to NASA,
explodes that high up in the sky and it's still
is able to wreak such massive destruction on the ground. Yeah,
that to me is terrifying, and it does make you
think about nuclear weapons tests and other times nuclear weapons
have been used and exploded in the sky. Yeah. Well,
(26:52):
as with many great natural explosions, science communicators often have
to frame it in terms of how many atomic bombs
or how many an hydrogen bombs? Uh. They did, I
believe this the same quote you got from NASA did that.
They said basically that the explosion of this object from
space released the energy equivalent to quote A hundred and
(27:12):
eighty five Hiroshima bombs, which just foggles the mind. Uh.
And again that that further reinforces how astonishing it is
is a point that you made earlier, Joe, that no
one died as far as we know, as far as
someone might have that we don't know about, but there's
there's no record that I could find that anyone, any
(27:35):
person was killed. I'm sure lots of animals were. So
what what then? Uh? What then do we we arrive
at when the in the ongoing debate over what sort
of space rock this is? Slash was Well, there are
arguments that it was a comet, and there are arguments
that it was an asteroid rocky meteorite, and there are
(27:59):
arguments in both directions. I believe the favored hypothesis these
days is that it was a rocky rocky meteor and
an asteroid type body, based on fragments that have now
been found and analyzed by which, of course we mean
rocky as in composed of rock, not as in the
original records that later became the Rocky franchise sent sent
(28:23):
to us from space, which I would be okay with,
but you know I'd be surprised, Okay. So here's my question.
I don't want to sound like a dumb dum over here,
but from what I what I was looking at, there
doesn't seem to be any kind of crater. Right we
at the center of the Bullseye area, there are trees
standing up. There's not an impact creator or anything. No,
(28:46):
So I just want to understand better why why it was.
Why the thought is that it was a rocky creator
or a rocky asteroid from fragments, I mean, because that
it exploded and burned with such energy, I believe the
thinking is that there there were no huge fragments left
to leave a gigantic crater. I did read there there's
(29:07):
one lake near the area that some people wonder. I
wonder if a very small fragment of the of the
meteor impacted here. Maybe it was just like a few
feet wide, impacting with high energy and created the crater
that's now this lake. But I don't think that's very
well established. It's just kind of a theory. Crater lake
doesn't hold water all right, Um, And there are fragments
(29:32):
all over the place. Also, you you could see what
happened to this in dust that you can find all
over the place. So I mean it this mass, A
lot of it landed on the surface of the Earth,
but just not not not in a piece big enough
that you can usually tell, but yeah, they they found
they found traces of whatever this thing was all over
(29:55):
the place, and the peat bogs in the Tunguska area
under it, there are samples of rocks that appear to
be meteoric in origin um and I believe I've also
read that there were layers of of cosmic dust, the
kind of dust you would find after a large impact
from space, found in ice cores around the area dating
(30:17):
back to about the time. So it seems pretty straightforward
that this was an object from space, maybe a comment,
more likely a rocky meteor. And so are you are
you saying it probably wasn't the gods, Probably wasn't the gods,
probably wasn't Tesla, probably wasn't aliens or a black hole.
But that makes it no less creepy, because instead, what
(30:41):
we walk away with is the idea that there are
things out there in space that with pretty regular frequency
are going to come into our atmosphere, and they're that big,
and they come in with that much speed and energy,
and if something like the Tunguska event were to happen
over say a major city, I mean, that's game over. Yeah,
(31:05):
and it could, uh, it could easily. There's some geopolitical
dangers there as well, because depending upon which city it
hits UH and which countries they are allies or rivals
with UH, than it could escalate immediately. Yeah, I would
say we have much better ability now to predict impacts,
(31:25):
like now we have NASA's Near Earth Object program that
tracks all of the objects within range of Earth that
we that are large enough for us to detect. Yes,
so I mean we're we're somewhat better prepared than we
were in nineteen o eight. But that's that's comparing, of course. Uh,
that's comparing a little bit better vision and no real
(31:47):
protection to uh, no vision and no real protection. I mean, well, no, actually,
we do have a very important line of defense. Bruce
Willis is still that's right, you're I keep forgetting um okay, Well,
once he passes on, we we are truly naked to
the fury of the universe, of the uncarring dark, inky void.
(32:11):
But um, but there there's some other things here. Because uh,
let's let's explore this just a little bit. Uh. I
can't remember who wrote this very strange theory that was
entirely speculative about UM maybe impact events being the most
lethal threat to intelligent life on planets and said, hey,
(32:32):
maybe the reason that we have never heard from some
other intelligent life out there in the vast chasms of
time and space is because, uh, no intelligent life can
survive on a planet long enough to involve that kind
of technology before something, some impact of it occurs and
(32:54):
blows the house of cards down. Yeah, well, that that's
one of those many possible solutions to the so called
Fermi paradox, the paradox of Okay, so if we can
set up a kind of basic probability of guessing how
many alien civilizations we'd expect to see out there, again,
all the variables we plug into this our guesses, so
(33:15):
there's really no way to know. But you say, well,
there sure are a lot of stars and a lot
of planets out there. Seems like there should be some
life out there. We're listening and it sounds like nobody's home.
There's nothing coming in. So either you've got to say, well,
maybe a life evolving on on planets is fairly rare,
or maybe there is a lot of life, but then
(33:36):
becoming technologically intelligent is rare, Or maybe there's some reason
they don't want to transmit, or maybe there's some reason
that the universe, or at least our galaxy, is not
very kind to the life forms that do evolve, and
so the ones that do evolve, or at least have
the potential to evolve the technological capability to contact us
(33:58):
are smashed by asteroids before they get the chance. And
we're just pretty durn lucky to have made it this far.
And we have to remember how long it takes for
signals to reach fast distances. That's true, so perhaps there's
somebody trying to communicate. It's just it hasn't gotten We'll
get it a billion years later. God, I feel so
emo right now talking about that. But but we also
(34:19):
know that impact events themselves aren't the only threats, and
we can as as you said, we can predict um
now more than ever. We have okay prediction skills um.
But there are things that would happen so quickly that
we couldn't stop them. If we're talking about the end
of the world, right, So what if instead of traveling
(34:42):
at like thirty something thousand miles per hour, your incoming
event is traveling at the speed of light. When something's
traveling towards you at the speed of light, you can't
see it until it hits you. Oh yeah, so what
might travel what what I kill? Thing might travel towards
the Earth at the speed of light, maybe a gamma
(35:05):
ray burst and uh the pop quiz. They won't turn
us into the Hulk or she Hulk or anything like that.
They will simply end life as we know it, depending
on the circumstances. Yeah, I feel like I don't need
to tell your listeners this, but that's the thing that
a lot of people get confused about in pop culture.
Radiation doesn't give you superpowers. It just kills you. Right, Yeah,
(35:30):
so far, Matt, you're okay. Oh sorry, I didn't mean
to be say I'm okay, because you know what, I
survived the massive CME s that hit us a couple
of days ago. Ah, here we go. C ME. What's
that stand for? A coronal mass ejection, my friend? Happens
when the sun has these fun little things that it
happens when the Sun decides to throw up in our
(35:53):
general direction. Uh, just a bunch of its energy and particles,
charged particles, and they just fly towards the Earth. They
don't always fly towards the Earth because you gotta imagine
the scale of the Sun to the Earth. It's pretty
rare that the Earth gets hit by a massive CME. Okay,
what are the dangers of that that? Oh, you know,
it could just fry most of our electrical grid and
(36:15):
depending on where it hits. And when I say fry,
I mean it could just take out the wiring that's
going along your street outside your house, it can just
fry that stuff. And a short circuit anything that uses
you know, like this computer that Joe's using, just fry
all the circuits in there. Can make even make your
car not work sometimes depending on how your car functions.
(36:37):
I mean, my car does a pretty good job of
not working now, so, but yeah, but those things are
pretty creepy. And we got hit by two X class
Uh there were two X class solar flares that shot
off these massive CMEs a couple of days ago. I
didn't even know that. Yeah, and they they both impacted Earth.
But everything seems to be okay. The northern lights went
a little crazy, but we're okay. Well, thank you atmosphere,
(37:02):
I guess and timing and uh, we no matter what
we do at this point, technologically we are sort of
in the hands of fate or accident. Uh, and that
to me, uh and to you guys too, I think
is one of the most surprising, frightening, and a little
bit exciting things about the world in which we live.
(37:25):
The Tunguska event has been explained pretty well by this point. However,
other impact events in the future are a statistical certainty
after you know, after some amount of time it's going
to happen. Um. The only question is what will the
magnitude be and what will our level of technology be?
(37:49):
Will we all be on the same planet there, There's
some big questions that we would like to carry forward
and answer. Um. But first, Joe have to say thank
you so much for Green to come on our show.
Joe would only come on if we agreed to uh
do the chant to augd who may or may not
(38:11):
was just kidding about all that. I'd love to come
on and talk about all kinds of weird stuff with
you guys. That was a complete lie. I only talk
about this well. I I don't know about you listeners,
but I think I would like to have Joe back
on again. That this was a lot of fun. Uh.
Please write us and let us know uh if you
want us to do this again. Because I'm down. Yeah.
(38:32):
We uh, we always love to hear from you guys.
As you know, our best ideas come from our audience.
If you enjoyed listening to Joe McCormick as much as
Matt and I have today, then do go check out
their podcasts Forward Thinking. Uh. This podcast covers all of
the what what would you say, Joe? Well, I would
(38:53):
say that we don't take quite as dark an approach
as you guys. Sometimes. We're typically focused on on cutting
edge technology and the Future podcast about science, technology in
the future and what life is gonna look like in
twenty years. So are you saying the future is looking
pretty bright? Um? I'm saying that, contrary to the predominant
(39:16):
mood these days, there's no necessary reason to be pessimistic
about the future. You can go either way, and I
think it's perfectly reasonable to not take a dystopian attitude. Absolutely, yeah,
because uh, you know, we often hear about the bad
stuff because that's what sells, UM. But the truth is
that there there are quite a few amazing innovations on
(39:38):
the way, UM in laboratories across the world, R and
D places across the world. I mean, heck, uh, if
Ray Kurzwild turns out to be right. I'm not even
gonna say it. I know that gets under some people's
skin there, but do check out Joe's show if you
would like to write to us, or if you have
a question for Joe, we'd love to hear from you.
(39:59):
You and find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. And that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
std w y t K. If you don't want to
do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
(40:22):
We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff
they Don't want you to Know is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
So true story. Back in nineteen o eight, there was
this massive explosion in Tungusca. Do you guys remember this episode? Oh,
I most certainly do. It's one of the weirdest things
you're gonna hear about. Really the trees. That to me,
that was one of the most fascinating things about this
What happened to the trees? What caused all these trees,
(00:20):
whatever it was, to do what they did? You know,
I love a good tree story, Matt when the trees
are at the center of the mystery, and that's what
you're going to get on today's classic, including a wonderful
appearance from Joe McCormick of stuff to blow your mind fame, well,
guess one of the things I was I was excited
about off air. Joe has done some great episodes with us,
including The Bicameral Mind. Check that one out if you
(00:44):
haven't listened to it already. But for a taste of mystery,
a taste of Tungusca, dare I say, a taste of
Joe McCormick, go ahead and check this one out. Just
to be warned, this is not the Travis Walton Fire
in the Sky story. That's not what this is this
is something completely different, Yes, yes, and better. Well that's
(01:06):
up to you, folks from UFOs two ghosts and government
cover ups. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to now. Suddenly the north sky, the sky was
split into and high above the forest, the whole northern
(01:28):
part of the sky appeared covered with fire. At that moment,
there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash.
The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling
from the sky or of guns firing. The earth trembled.
And that was a quotation that comes to us via
a researcher named Leonid Kulik, who heard this account at
(01:53):
the Nara Trading Post in Russia. The account was read
by our special guests on the show today. Uh the
one the only Mr Joe McCormick, who may recognize from
forward thinking. Hello Joe, Hi, everybody. It's an honor to
be on the show of ill repute such as this.
Why thank you. My name is Matt and I'm Ben.
(02:16):
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
And today we are discussing something extremely cool, something explosive
and fiery and dangerous and deadly. Well fortunately, as far
as we know, not deadly for any humans. Yes, but
there were probably several animals injured in the making of
(02:37):
this event. Oh, I'd say no doubt about that. Yeah,
So today we're gonna be talking about the Tunguska event.
While back, Mr Ben Boland came up to me and
he asked if I'd like to be a guest host
on stuff they don't want you to know, and I said,
only if we can talk about the Tunguska event. That
was one of many of the conditions that came attached
(02:57):
to this appearance, and there's a lot of paperwork. Yeah,
we're glad we could make it all happen. But this
is such a fascinating topic because we know, we know
the facts, and for decades afterwards, people were not sure
what actually happened. But as we go through the episode today, Matt,
(03:20):
Joe and I are going to illuminate the events a
little bit by talking about what we know in the beginning,
the various theories that were proposed, and what we believe
nowadays actually happens. So this is not one of those
podcasts where you'll walk away with way more questions than
(03:40):
the answers. We have the answer, ladies and gentlemen. Uh,
we have the answer, and as uh the Mad Hatter
said to Alice. Will start at the beginning and go
through the middle, and then we'll stop at the end.
Sound good, that's great. So let's start at what exactly
was the Tuska event. Well, we should start by saying
what Tungusca is. Okay, that's not a word that pops
(04:03):
up every day. Well maybe if you're one of us three,
but not for most people. Okay, So the Tungusca or
the Podkamanya Tunguska, if I'm saying that correctly, um is
a region in Russia. It's actually a region in Siberia.
I believe in Siberia proper. So a lot of people
will say basically anything east of the Ural Mountains is Siberia,
(04:27):
not all Siberia. There's actually a part of Russia that
is officially Siberia, and this includes the Tunguska region. Right
spot on the pad Kaminaya, which I am probably mispronouncing,
is also a river that flows westward about nine hundred
seventy six miles or for everyone outside of the United
(04:47):
States and maybe two other countries uh d and seventy
one kilometers to a place called the Yenni sev River Um.
The name of this river uh means Tunguska under the pebbles.
There are a couple of different Tunguskas and their tributaries
of the Yenni sev Um and it's called under the pebbles,
(05:08):
interestingly enough, because it flows under these pebble fields, so
it's not an open river for the entirety of its run. Yeah.
And so in this region you have some you have
a lot of forests. You also have pete bogs and swamps,
and so there's a lot of great wilderness out there.
Fortunately not that much civilization. Yeah, that is fortunate. It
(05:32):
is not exactly New York City, um as as you
may have heard about Siberia. It's a pretty isolated place, right, Matt. Yeah,
it's a difficult place for humans to live. There are
a lot the only humans that really live out there
are these uh semi nomadic herders and trappers that survive
off the land, and they're few and far between there.
(05:54):
What are they called the evenki Uh. Guess we should
also do a disclaimer that uh of none of the
three of us, to our knowledge, are Russian, and Noel
I don't believe you're okay. Nol is also uh not
a native Russian speaker. Uh. But what we do know,
aside from mispronouncing a few things here and there, we
(06:17):
do know that in this isolated part of the world,
something very strange happened a little after seven am on
June in you heard the quotation right, a massive explosion
the way a lot of people at the time seemed
to have described it. And and as far as we know,
(06:39):
there was nobody at ground zero of this. There were
there were people who were quite far away but still
felt the effects imminently. Uh. So people described it as
seeing a vast light in the sky, burning particles, a
sky full of fire, a second son, uh, these terrifying
apocalyptic visions, and then feeling things like searing heat coming
(07:02):
from the air, and then uh shock wave blasts as
if described like cannon fire. And we also know that
people from as far as forty miles away reported some
stuff about this blast. So there's no argument here. Something
definitely happened. It wasn't just a bunch of nobody's denying that,
(07:26):
Like no, no no, nothing to see here, right, because
it even burned people within thirteen miles of where it happened,
and there are animals that were burned, so there are
obvious effects that you could feel and see. Yeah, there's
some real into the world stuff there. But as we know,
as we said at the top, uh, years passed and
(07:47):
people weren't sure what occurred. And in the absence of that, uh,
no one was able to say what happened. So people
started saying what they thought happened, they were believed that occurred. Yeah. Sure,
something huge happens like this, and you know, you go
to what you know or what you believe, right, That's
(08:07):
kind of what humans do something if you don't understand it,
it's just you go to your innermost beliefs. Sure. I mean,
if something like this were to have happened, say, uh,
fifty years later, you can bet I think that uphology
would immediately come into play. I'd say that wasn't such
a big thing back in nineteen o eight. I mean,
(08:29):
there were vague kind of ideas of other worldly visitations,
but they didn't have the science fiction vision of flying
saucers with energy weapons like we do today. Yeah, or
perhaps a nuclear strike something that something looks like a
second son burning in the air. Yeah, one might say
that again today, but back then, I mean, they had
(08:50):
no reference point for that. They didn't have nuclear weapons
act that we know of a right. So that's a
really interesting point though. So if we talk out some
of the things that people did believe, we will see
that some of these ideas came into play um decades
after the fact, and one of those being the idea
(09:11):
of extraterrestrials. So you'll you'll see claims that some sort
of extraterrestrial force either accidentally or purposely triggered this explosion um,
or that evidence of this craft or this weapon or whatever. Oh,
that's the most important part, that it was something made
by an intelligence, that it was not just from space
(09:32):
but purposely crafted and then sent here um. And then
you can also see that when people started speculating that
perhaps this was Tesla technology. Right. Yeah, So I've seen
this claim just uh, pretty low profile, it seems to me,
but around the web in various places people speculating, well,
I wonder if the Tunguska event, the giant fire in
(09:56):
the sky that was seen there was Nicola Tesla, the
famed somewhat maybe mad inventor testing his so called death ray. Now,
Tesla tried to disown the term death ray. He wasn't
interested in that, and he tried to distance himself from it,
but he did for many years advertised that he was
(10:16):
trying to create a particle beam that would be used
as a weapon that could end all wars. Basically, that
it would be able to repel from a great distance
any infantry invasion or air airplane attack. That it would
be a devastating weapon that would provide insurmountable defense to
every country that possessed it, right, which I think is
(10:39):
an interesting argument for deterrence. Right, and we see it
happening now. The logic of having a nuclear arsenal is
similar to the logic yeah with his particle Really, what
he's talking about, Tesla is just musually asured destruction. Well,
it could be interpreted that way. Actually did a podcast
with Jonathan Strickland on Tech Stuff about this. I'm not
(11:01):
usually a host of tech stuff, but I guessed with
him about technologies that were believed at some point might
end all wars, world peace tech. It turns out none
of those have ever worked, But so one way of
looking at weapons to end wars, is this idea of
mutually assured destruction. Everybody has weapons so powerful that it's
(11:22):
in nobody's interest to start a war because the retaliation
would be devastating to you. The other idea is a
prohibitive defensive weapon. And I sometimes get the impression that's
what Tesla is thinking about, that he's thinking about. Well,
it's not necessarily so much that it would be a
devastating retaliatory attack, but just that you could repel anything
(11:46):
coming into your border. It would be almost kind of
like a Tesla kind of steampunk version of the Iron
Dome system that Israel employees uh supposedly to shoot down
incoming rockets. Not uh, not entirely of effect, of of course.
But then also if we took at global it could
be compared to the Star Wars program if that program worked. Um,
(12:09):
spoiler alerts left and right, everybody. But we do know
that Tesla was involved in some innovative tech and also
in these uh in these experiments that have given rise
to so much speculation, one of course being warden Cliff
Tower and h Wardencliffe Tower. If we look at the
(12:31):
timeline here, uh, the Tunguska. Uh event occurred in nineteen
o eight. Warden Cliff Tower was shut down in nineteen
o five. It wasn't dismantled until nineteen seventeen. So, Um,
the timelines here don't seem to work out. But of course, um,
(12:51):
if he's talking about the particle beam instead, then we
don't really know. But we we have more compelling evidence
that says he didn't have anything to do with it. Yeah,
I am not even convinced it's likely that Tesla ever
really had a particle beam. Look, I'm just gonna say
(13:13):
if he did have a particle beaming, and I don't
know if he did, that would be the perfect place
to test it. Well, in the middle of nowhere, right,
If you assume that he was a relatively humane guy,
he'd want to be it would be like the nuclear
tests in the desert. You'd want to do them somewhere
where nobody was living. Yeah, and that's that's a really
good point, because what if there were some sort of
(13:33):
group that had technology uh Here on my notes, I
had streets of streets ahead because I was watching Community earlier,
and I used that phrase at nauseum. But I don't
know what that means it's oh man, I'll tell you later, Okay,
it's just a lame way of trying to say something's cool. Uh.
So this idea that there would be some sort of
(13:55):
suppressed technology that was being tested, not necessarily tied to TESLA.
That that's another popular idea. UM. Again, it's an idea that,
as far as we know, does not have any tangible
proof at this time. Uh. And then, of course, if
we want to get weird with it, there is the
idea of an extremely small black hole. I haven't read
(14:16):
a lot about this, but from what I have looked at,
it doesn't seem very likely. The idea is basically that
a black hole shot through the Earth. So we had
a wandering, tiny black hole that was just I don't know,
floating through space and at some point it entered Earth's atmosphere,
smashed through Earth, and exited out the other side. I
(14:37):
believe I seems fairly ridiculous on its face. It seems
like there will be more destruction something like that. Where
do happen? I don't know well, And I think the
idea is that there would be more evidence of it,
like what we'd see. It would have had more effects
(14:57):
at both ends of the Earth in an exit wound. Honestly,
we have no idea what would happen, right, Yeah, I
have a black hole interact. Sure, yeah, I'm somebody could
probably run some kind of simulation of it, but as
long as they don't do it for real. I think
also the idea of these wandering black holes all around
the Earth, that that that's basically sci fi. We have
(15:18):
no reason to think there's anything like that near the
Earth or in the Solar System. Yeah. I just don't
go near the center of the galaxy, that's all, because
the question would be how could it um in night?
Maybe not, but in two thousand and fourteen, there would
be ways to find evidence of those things if they
existed this close to us. Um. There's another idea here that,
(15:40):
as uh an armchair folklorist, I found fascinating and uh
it is the original local explanation for the Tunguska event
that depends on neither extraterrestrials nor mad science. Yeah, that's right,
we're talking about God's here. Everybody. This is exciting. There's
no reason that the only mythology we should take seriously
(16:03):
is technological mythology. Absolutely, I mean I'd say, let's talk
about the gods on even footing with with tesla and
black holes and aliens. Okay, so what is the idea.
What did the locals, or at least the locals who
believed in this belief happened at the Tungusco bent Oh? Yeah, well,
they they placed the blame of this on a god
(16:26):
named og which again I'm probably mispronouncing Od being a
thunder god whom they believed was summoned. Uh and in
a visitation to the area cursed it. Uh. There's an
interesting uh shamanic chant that comes to us, translated via
Dieter Hoffman, a professor of Siberian ethnography at Hamburg University. Um,
(16:48):
the shaman is vastily zun cool and uh. This has
a bit of um. It's kind of an invocation to o.
D uh. Do you guys want to read it? Are
you ready? Oh? I don't know. Are you ready? Listener?
Because it's about to get epic in here, all right?
The God comes, The God comes, The earth trembles in
(17:10):
fear at the coming of odd. The earth rises and
falls beneath my feet like waves of water. My place
of purification is overthrown my lodge, bulls toppling. The God comes.
The God calls out, blinding bright, His tongue lashes the sky.
His roar booms off the hills. The heavens ring with it.
(17:32):
Ogd is calling his avatar from the lower world. The
earth at my feet tears open at the touch of
his fiery tongue. The God calls out, heating the God's call,
The Avatar arises night walkers, spawn of Darkness, beast of
evil heart from the lower world. He arises, insatiable, all
devouring as wild dogs, tearing and entrails of their kill,
(17:57):
eating the God's call. The Avatar arise. Some man, I
really like that. That's that is awesome apocalyptic poetry. Seriously,
I wish, I really wish we had more of that
kind of imagery, just a colorful imagery in our mythology.
I got nothing like that here. I mean, there's some
(18:19):
pretty there, there's some pretty heavily and I guess the
right world would be epic or metal. There's some pretty
metal parts of most religions. Oh yeah, I'm just what
I would say, is that believing stuff like oh it
was aliens or o Tesla was testing his death. Ray
has no poetry like that. Yeah, so you know that's
(18:39):
a that's a good point. Um. And also I like
the idea that what we're looking at when we see
these three different explanations is a various groups of people
are attempting to explain an inexplicable event through the lens
of the way they see the world right through a framework.
It also helped the place the enormous loss of life
(19:01):
and property in perspective. So they thought some shaman had
foolishly uh called on ogdi and that was the root
of the problem. Now, they didn't really talk about this
for a while though. Um, we didn't really have an investigation,
certainly not in nineteen o eight, right, No, But years
(19:23):
later we finally did. Okay, So I guess it's time
to talk about what really happened in nineteen o eight.
What was the Tonguska event? We know it was an explosion, fire, heat, thunder,
shock waves from the sky. What was it in reality? Okay?
So it seems like the first scientific expedition to the
area happened in ninete when Leoni Coolik hit the scene
(19:47):
and he was looking for a crater. Because the basic
idea in mainstream science was this was a meteor. It
was it was a rock from space that descended, descended
into the app sphere and hit the ground somewhere and
blew up. So massive impact event. Uh And there might
have been then there. They're definitely still to some degree
(20:10):
is today debate about what the nature of this object
from space was. It Was it an asteroid, a largely
rocky body, or was it a comet like a ball
of ice and dust. But the main ideas something from
space came into the atmosphere blew up, so he wanted
to go find where it hit. And it turns out
(20:32):
when he actually did get to find it, because I
believe there were multiple expeditions before he actually found it. Uh.
So once he got to the area, it was not
hard to find ground zero because there were about more
than eight hundred square miles about two thousands square kilometers
of trees that were affected by this explosion, basically in
(20:54):
a bull's eye shape. So when you entered the area
from the outer circle, the forest turned into a landscape
of flattened trees, trees knocked flat against the ground all
outward in the same direction going out from the middle. Obviously,
it would be pretty easy to know what direction you
need to go. It would be amazing. I just want
(21:17):
to say, to walk through that, Yeah, it would be cool. Yeah.
And so it followed eight hundred square miles I mean yeah,
and as as you said, that's that's the rough festivals,
it's more than that. Yeah, yeah, I think it was more.
It was like eight hundred and twenty or eight hundred
square miles. But so they proceeded inward and found towards
(21:38):
the center of the bulls eye scorched tree trunk standing
straight up with no branches, just stripped branches gone like
charred telephone poles. I mean, what on earth? But how
interesting that they weren't knocked over the way the ones
on the outside. Right. But the branches are one of
(21:58):
the biggest piece is of evidence too, because that only occurred,
um that wouldn't occur again that we have documentation of
until Hiroshima um when Yeah, because of the speed and
the pressure knocked the branches off before it could translate
that to the trunk. So it's like getting hit so
(22:23):
hard that your arms fall off before you feel it
in your chest. Yeah. So if you think about this, though,
what it suggests is not an impact on the ground,
but an explosion from above. And here's where we get
to what has become the accepted theory of the Tunguska
(22:44):
event UH in the years since. Scientists today are pretty
much all in agreement that what happened there Something entered
the atmosphere from space and it blew up before it
hit the ground. May it just heated to the point
that it completely exploded, and then the downward shock wave
stripped and scorched the trees below it. As the shock
(23:07):
waves spread out, it was it would turn horizontal in
its direction and knocked down the trees for those hundreds
of miles. And the questions that this leaves us with
the things like what would have happened if it had
actually hit the ground. NASA has some pretty interesting information
on this and and the current theory is that this
(23:30):
was this rock was about a hundred and twenty feet across,
and that it was traveling at a speed in excess
of thirty three thousand miles prour about thirty three point
five thousand and UH that that it weighed two hundred
and twenty million pounds. Now these are all estimates, of course,
based on UH, based on the best forensic data. They
(23:55):
can pull. But uh still, even if it that is
just in the area of of the correct numbers, that
that is frightening. The craziest number was the next one,
the idea that it heated the surrounding air to four
thousand five degrees fahrenheit. That's that's yeah, yeah, well, I
(24:18):
mean it's it's very common for things entering the atmosphere
to burn up upon entry. You've heard about this before,
and uh it's often believed that the reason is friction, right,
but that's actually I've recently found out that's not true.
That it's it has to do with compression heating. So
it's traveling so fast against the thick air of our
atmosphere that it's smashing the air in front of it,
(24:42):
uh so fast. The air heats up to these incredible temperatures,
and the thing catches on fire and the outside surfaces
of it get melted. And sometimes if it gets hot enough,
and if it's composed in the right way and all
the conditions are just right, it'll just explode. See. That's
why when I re enter Earth's atmos sphere, I go slow.
It's the long con you know what I mean, Like,
(25:04):
I get down here safely, but it takes a month easy.
I really want to see schematics and diagrams of how
you do that. Then well, you know, they say, if
they're gonna build a space elevator, one thing that's gonna
be disappointing about it is it's gonna take you at
the very least days to get to space. Yeah, because
(25:24):
you can't go fast up and down this thing. It's
kind and I think that's actually that's technological limitation at
this point, but it seems like you might not want
to go fast up and down. They're probably areas where
you can speed up a little bit, and then you'll
have to slow down again and then speed up again.
I mean, if we're still talking human enterprise, it will
be traffic jams. People's space elevator pods will break down.
(25:46):
It'll be really tough to go fast, to go quickly,
even when you have the technology. But you know, maybe
we shouldn't. It reminds me a little bit of do
you guys remember Dune, How they had the force fields
for five and you couldn't the force fields would stop
a blunt trying. You guys are both staring at me.
I'm sorry, I've never read dude, somebody out there. Ladies
(26:11):
and gentlemen, you guys know what I'm talking about. But um,
going back to the object at hand, Yeah, really fast.
So this is fascinating. Also to me, NASA believes that
it exploded at at a height of twenty eight thousand feet,
which okay, so I'm just trying to understand this thing
(26:32):
that weighs millions of pounds at least according to NASA,
explodes that high up in the sky and it's still
is able to wreak such massive destruction on the ground. Yeah,
that to me is terrifying, and it does make you
think about nuclear weapons tests and other times nuclear weapons
have been used and exploded in the sky. Yeah. Well,
(26:52):
as with many great natural explosions, science communicators often have
to frame it in terms of how many atomic bombs
or how many an hydrogen bombs? Uh. They did, I
believe this the same quote you got from NASA did that.
They said basically that the explosion of this object from
space released the energy equivalent to quote A hundred and
(27:12):
eighty five Hiroshima bombs, which just foggles the mind. Uh.
And again that that further reinforces how astonishing it is
is a point that you made earlier, Joe, that no
one died as far as we know, as far as
someone might have that we don't know about, but there's
there's no record that I could find that anyone, any
(27:35):
person was killed. I'm sure lots of animals were. So
what what then? Uh? What then do we we arrive
at when the in the ongoing debate over what sort
of space rock this is? Slash was Well, there are
arguments that it was a comet, and there are arguments
that it was an asteroid rocky meteorite, and there are
(27:59):
arguments in both directions. I believe the favored hypothesis these
days is that it was a rocky rocky meteor and
an asteroid type body, based on fragments that have now
been found and analyzed by which, of course we mean
rocky as in composed of rock, not as in the
original records that later became the Rocky franchise sent sent
(28:23):
to us from space, which I would be okay with,
but you know I'd be surprised, Okay. So here's my question.
I don't want to sound like a dumb dum over here,
but from what I what I was looking at, there
doesn't seem to be any kind of crater. Right we
at the center of the Bullseye area, there are trees
standing up. There's not an impact creator or anything. No,
(28:46):
So I just want to understand better why why it was.
Why the thought is that it was a rocky creator
or a rocky asteroid from fragments, I mean, because that
it exploded and burned with such energy, I believe the
thinking is that there there were no huge fragments left
to leave a gigantic crater. I did read there there's
(29:07):
one lake near the area that some people wonder. I
wonder if a very small fragment of the of the
meteor impacted here. Maybe it was just like a few
feet wide, impacting with high energy and created the crater
that's now this lake. But I don't think that's very
well established. It's just kind of a theory. Crater lake
doesn't hold water all right, Um, And there are fragments
(29:32):
all over the place. Also, you you could see what
happened to this in dust that you can find all
over the place. So I mean it this mass, A
lot of it landed on the surface of the Earth,
but just not not not in a piece big enough
that you can usually tell, but yeah, they they found
they found traces of whatever this thing was all over
(29:55):
the place, and the peat bogs in the Tunguska area
under it, there are samples of rocks that appear to
be meteoric in origin um and I believe I've also
read that there were layers of of cosmic dust, the
kind of dust you would find after a large impact
from space, found in ice cores around the area dating
(30:17):
back to about the time. So it seems pretty straightforward
that this was an object from space, maybe a comment,
more likely a rocky meteor. And so are you are
you saying it probably wasn't the gods, Probably wasn't the gods,
probably wasn't Tesla, probably wasn't aliens or a black hole.
But that makes it no less creepy, because instead, what
(30:41):
we walk away with is the idea that there are
things out there in space that with pretty regular frequency
are going to come into our atmosphere, and they're that big,
and they come in with that much speed and energy,
and if something like the Tunguska event were to happen
over say a major city, I mean, that's game over. Yeah,
(31:05):
and it could, uh, it could easily. There's some geopolitical
dangers there as well, because depending upon which city it
hits UH and which countries they are allies or rivals
with UH, than it could escalate immediately. Yeah, I would
say we have much better ability now to predict impacts,
(31:25):
like now we have NASA's Near Earth Object program that
tracks all of the objects within range of Earth that
we that are large enough for us to detect. Yes,
so I mean we're we're somewhat better prepared than we
were in nineteen o eight. But that's that's comparing, of course. Uh,
that's comparing a little bit better vision and no real
(31:47):
protection to uh, no vision and no real protection. I mean, well, no, actually,
we do have a very important line of defense. Bruce
Willis is still that's right, you're I keep forgetting um okay, Well,
once he passes on, we we are truly naked to
the fury of the universe, of the uncarring dark, inky void.
(32:11):
But um, but there there's some other things here. Because uh,
let's let's explore this just a little bit. Uh. I
can't remember who wrote this very strange theory that was
entirely speculative about UM maybe impact events being the most
lethal threat to intelligent life on planets and said, hey,
(32:32):
maybe the reason that we have never heard from some
other intelligent life out there in the vast chasms of
time and space is because, uh, no intelligent life can
survive on a planet long enough to involve that kind
of technology before something, some impact of it occurs and
(32:54):
blows the house of cards down. Yeah, well, that that's
one of those many possible solutions to the so called
Fermi paradox, the paradox of Okay, so if we can
set up a kind of basic probability of guessing how
many alien civilizations we'd expect to see out there, again,
all the variables we plug into this our guesses, so
(33:15):
there's really no way to know. But you say, well,
there sure are a lot of stars and a lot
of planets out there. Seems like there should be some
life out there. We're listening and it sounds like nobody's home.
There's nothing coming in. So either you've got to say, well,
maybe a life evolving on on planets is fairly rare,
or maybe there is a lot of life, but then
(33:36):
becoming technologically intelligent is rare, Or maybe there's some reason
they don't want to transmit, or maybe there's some reason
that the universe, or at least our galaxy, is not
very kind to the life forms that do evolve, and
so the ones that do evolve, or at least have
the potential to evolve the technological capability to contact us
(33:58):
are smashed by asteroids before they get the chance. And
we're just pretty durn lucky to have made it this far.
And we have to remember how long it takes for
signals to reach fast distances. That's true, so perhaps there's
somebody trying to communicate. It's just it hasn't gotten We'll
get it a billion years later. God, I feel so
emo right now talking about that. But but we also
(34:19):
know that impact events themselves aren't the only threats, and
we can as as you said, we can predict um
now more than ever. We have okay prediction skills um.
But there are things that would happen so quickly that
we couldn't stop them. If we're talking about the end
of the world, right, So what if instead of traveling
(34:42):
at like thirty something thousand miles per hour, your incoming
event is traveling at the speed of light. When something's
traveling towards you at the speed of light, you can't
see it until it hits you. Oh yeah, so what
might travel what what I kill? Thing might travel towards
the Earth at the speed of light, maybe a gamma
(35:05):
ray burst and uh the pop quiz. They won't turn
us into the Hulk or she Hulk or anything like that.
They will simply end life as we know it, depending
on the circumstances. Yeah, I feel like I don't need
to tell your listeners this, but that's the thing that
a lot of people get confused about in pop culture.
Radiation doesn't give you superpowers. It just kills you. Right, Yeah,
(35:30):
so far, Matt, you're okay. Oh sorry, I didn't mean
to be say I'm okay, because you know what, I
survived the massive CME s that hit us a couple
of days ago. Ah, here we go. C ME. What's
that stand for? A coronal mass ejection, my friend? Happens
when the sun has these fun little things that it
happens when the Sun decides to throw up in our
(35:53):
general direction. Uh, just a bunch of its energy and particles,
charged particles, and they just fly towards the Earth. They
don't always fly towards the Earth because you gotta imagine
the scale of the Sun to the Earth. It's pretty
rare that the Earth gets hit by a massive CME. Okay,
what are the dangers of that that? Oh, you know,
it could just fry most of our electrical grid and
(36:15):
depending on where it hits. And when I say fry,
I mean it could just take out the wiring that's
going along your street outside your house, it can just
fry that stuff. And a short circuit anything that uses
you know, like this computer that Joe's using, just fry
all the circuits in there. Can make even make your
car not work sometimes depending on how your car functions.
(36:37):
I mean, my car does a pretty good job of
not working now, so, but yeah, but those things are
pretty creepy. And we got hit by two X class
Uh there were two X class solar flares that shot
off these massive CMEs a couple of days ago. I
didn't even know that. Yeah, and they they both impacted Earth.
But everything seems to be okay. The northern lights went
a little crazy, but we're okay. Well, thank you atmosphere,
(37:02):
I guess and timing and uh, we no matter what
we do at this point, technologically we are sort of
in the hands of fate or accident. Uh, and that
to me, uh and to you guys too, I think
is one of the most surprising, frightening, and a little
bit exciting things about the world in which we live.
(37:25):
The Tunguska event has been explained pretty well by this point. However,
other impact events in the future are a statistical certainty
after you know, after some amount of time it's going
to happen. Um. The only question is what will the
magnitude be and what will our level of technology be?
(37:49):
Will we all be on the same planet there, There's
some big questions that we would like to carry forward
and answer. Um. But first, Joe have to say thank
you so much for Green to come on our show.
Joe would only come on if we agreed to uh
do the chant to augd who may or may not
(38:11):
was just kidding about all that. I'd love to come
on and talk about all kinds of weird stuff with
you guys. That was a complete lie. I only talk
about this well. I I don't know about you listeners,
but I think I would like to have Joe back
on again. That this was a lot of fun. Uh.
Please write us and let us know uh if you
want us to do this again. Because I'm down. Yeah.
(38:32):
We uh, we always love to hear from you guys.
As you know, our best ideas come from our audience.
If you enjoyed listening to Joe McCormick as much as
Matt and I have today, then do go check out
their podcasts Forward Thinking. Uh. This podcast covers all of
the what what would you say, Joe? Well, I would
(38:53):
say that we don't take quite as dark an approach
as you guys. Sometimes. We're typically focused on on cutting
edge technology and the Future podcast about science, technology in
the future and what life is gonna look like in
twenty years. So are you saying the future is looking
pretty bright? Um? I'm saying that, contrary to the predominant
(39:16):
mood these days, there's no necessary reason to be pessimistic
about the future. You can go either way, and I
think it's perfectly reasonable to not take a dystopian attitude. Absolutely, yeah,
because uh, you know, we often hear about the bad
stuff because that's what sells, UM. But the truth is
that there there are quite a few amazing innovations on
(39:38):
the way, UM in laboratories across the world, R and
D places across the world. I mean, heck, uh, if
Ray Kurzwild turns out to be right. I'm not even
gonna say it. I know that gets under some people's
skin there, but do check out Joe's show if you
would like to write to us, or if you have
a question for Joe, we'd love to hear from you.
(39:59):
You and find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. And that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
std w y t K. If you don't want to
do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
(40:22):
We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff
they Don't want you to Know is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.