October 15, 2025 • 19 mins
In this episode, Kevin Cirilli sits down with Dr. Ed Lu, Executive Director of the Asteroid Institute, a program of the B612 Foundation. A former NASA astronaut who spent six months aboard the International Space Station, Ed joins Kevin to unpack one of the closest asteroid flybys in recorded history. Just a few weeks ago, asteroid 2025 TF skimmed past Earth — flying over Antarctica at only 428 kilometers above the surface, nearly the same altitude as the ISS. Kevin and Ed break down how astronomers detected it only after it passed, what that near miss reveals about our blind spots in planetary defense, and how new technology could help us find the next one before it finds us.
Read more about Dr. Lu and his work HERE
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 (00:08):
I don't know if you saw these headlines, but there
was an asteroid that flew by Earth only two hundred
and fifty miles away. This was a very close flyby
of our planet, and it caught astronomers off guard, and
it zoomed right over Antarctica. Now, it was not like
(00:29):
a dinosaur killer. It wouldn't have been the end of times,
but it raises a pretty big question, how do we
know if an asteroid is coming? Hello Future, It's me
keV and this is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The planet is Earth. The year is twenty twenty five.
My name is Kevin Sirilli. I'm the founder of MTF
dot TV's platform Meet the Future. My guest today literally
(00:50):
the best in the country on all of these issues.
His name is doctor Edward lou. He is the head
had show over there at the Asteroid Institute, which thinks
about all of these questions, and we're going to talk
a lot about what the Asteroid Institute does. He's also
an American physicist and he's also a NASA astronaut, so
(01:10):
he's flew on three Space Shuttle flights and he even
made an extended stay aboard the International Space station. So
this guy's been to space, okay, and not like eleven minutes.
He's been up there for a very long time, so
he knows what he's talking about. And thank you so
much for coming on here. I have to ask you,
I really have always wanted to go to space. I
(01:31):
did not get to do it like you've done it.
But with today in the world that we're in, do
you think it's possible for someone like me to go
to outer space?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, it's definitely possible. I mean, people are starting to
pay for these flights. I think it's a great thing.
I think it's just a natural evolution of spaceflight because
if things go as they did for aviation, then we'll
reach the day where now flying at an airplane isn't
a big deal. It used to be one hundred years ago.
Now you know, people just buy it. They don't even
think about it. That's going to happen some day in space.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
So when you were up in space, what were you doing?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
It depends on the mission. Various missions had different different objectives.
My first mission was a flight to the Mere Space
Station on board the Space Shuttle. The second one was
one of the first instruction flights to the International Space Stations,
where I got to do a spacewalk to help build it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
My third mission was the sort of rescue mission after
the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. We had to
get an emergency crew of just two people on board
the space station just a few weeks after the crash
of Columbia. Wow. And I was chosen by the United
States to be the one American on that flight. There
was one Russian, one American, and we flew a Russian
(02:42):
spacecraft called the soil Us up to the space station.
And then I spent six months up there, just me
and one other person.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Wow. What did you do when you got bored?
Speaker 2 (02:55):
First off, you don't get bored. There's just too much
to do. It's hard to get board up there, so
always busy. We had the opposite problem, always busy because
we only had two people to run the space station. Wow.
And there was a lot more work.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So as you are up there and you're looking at
planet Earth and you're thinking, first of all, thank you, truly.
I don't think astronauts get thanked enough for the sacrifice
that they and their fit.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
No, well, well, and also thank you to your kids,
and thank you to your family for no truly, please please,
because I don't think they get thanked enough for what
for the sacrifice that you make for not just for
our country but for our species. But as you're up
there and you're looking at the planet and you're thinking
of this big but also incredibly small, pale blue dot
(03:47):
that we all call home, an asteroid could take it
out in an instant. And now you lead the Asteroid Institute,
which thinks about planetary defense. And I have been having
so much fun to know so many of you over
the last couple of months, and I'm so grateful and
I'm very relieved that there is an organization that is
(04:07):
thinking we don't want to end up like the dinosaurs.
But when I saw this headline, my first call was
to your colleague Danica, and I said, Danika, there was
almost an asteroid that hit Antarctica. What did you think
and put it in context of the work you're doing
with the Asteroid Institute.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Well, my first thought was just another day. WOWU Asteroids
come by the Earth all the time, and many of
them we don't see up until the very last minute,
and these are generally pretty small ones. So by small
asteroids meaning you know, just a couple of meters across.
The size of the power or less. The amount of
damage that something like that could do is completely minimal
(04:44):
because they basically won't make it through the atmosphere. So
they show up as fireballs in the sky or shooting
stars or things like that. And this happens all the time.
Asteroids that are that we don't see it until very late.
I get worried when we missed one that's of good size,
you know, not like this case we had the other day,
but one that is larger frank for instance, the one
we had in twenty thirteen over the Russian city of
(05:06):
charlie Bins. We had one that was about sixty feet
or so across, so you know, not huge size of
a building, right, small building, but something that size had
the energy when that thing exploded in the atmosphere, had
the energy of about thirty times the bomb dropped over Hiroshima.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on thirty times
the bomb of Hiroshima.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Wow, And luckily it missed the city.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Now this energy was deposited up high. It blew up
high in the atmosphere, unlike nuclear weapons are exploded in
the atmosphere but low to the ground, so you know,
the shockwaved. But even still that the energy from this
was pretty tremendous. And this is considered a very very
very small asteroid, you know, in the planetary defense scheme
(05:56):
of things, and just sixty feet across, and it was
probably fifty or more kilometers from the city that it
entered the atmosphere, so it was a good distance away.
And even that, I think it put a couple of
thousand people into the hospital. Wow, fifteen hundred or so
people in the hospital collapsed. The number of buildings broke,
like one hundred thousand windows, like every window in the
(06:18):
city was shattered by the sonic boom from this. Anybody
who looked at it, you know straight you know, outside,
their faces were burned, they got they got essentially really
bad sunburns.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Is where you're describing as a war zone.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, yeah, we're talking a half a mega ton of TNT.
Remember that the bomb dropped over Hiroshima was like fifteen kiloton,
so fifteen kilotons of energy, and this was five hundred kilotons,
so much larger than the bomb dropped over Hiroshimer. And
this happens every ten years so you get a random
impact like that, and these are the small ones, so
(06:55):
you know, we do want to find these things before
they hit us. And the kind of cool thing is
that now we reach the point where we can actually
deflect these asteroids if we know about them long in advance.
So our the real goal here is find them long
in advance. And when I stay long in advance, I'm
not talking like hours of days, I'm talking decades, wow,
so that you can have time to properly plan the
(07:16):
side and prevent it from hitting the ear. And the
ones you really need to do this and ones are
the bigger ones, you know, the ones that are even
a thousand times this side or ten thousand or a
million times this size, because those are the ones are
you clearly do not want to hit the air.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So this is fascinating to me. I'd lose my guest today.
And he's he's one of these people. I mean, here's
an ash literally an astronaut. He's been on board the ISS,
he's been to space multiple times, spent six months up there.
I mean this this, and now he runs the Asteroid Institute, which.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
By the way, is I do want to put in
a plug the Asteroid Institute is one of the programs
of the B six twelve Foundation, which is a nonprofit.
We are completely supported by private donations.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
So but I want to I don't consider this a
plug by the way, like like this is. This is
an organization that is quite literally mapping the asteroids in
our solar system. I want to I want to stay
here a little longer because I don't. When I was
a kid, you know, a Miss Frizzle and the Magic
school Bus was teaching me about the Solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
(08:21):
the asteroid belt. And now she's like, okay, that's where
the asteroids are, and then you get to the other
the outer planets and whatnot. You don't even learn about
the work cloud or anything else. But you don't really
think about what the asteroid belt actually is at all.
You don't really think about how big these asteroids are
(08:41):
and where they even come from or what's even on them.
And then I saw the movie ed Armageddon with Bruce
Willis and Ben Affleck, which remains I know, this is horrible.
It was not. Yeah, I love that movie. It was
it was I still love one of my favorite side movies.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Side note here My first launch was the video that
they filmed, and then they doubled it up for in
the movie they have two spacial launching at once. That's
actually a video of my very first launch board the
special letland.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Are you kidding me? Ed? That is so cool?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So they would only given me some royalties I could
pay for the Asteroid Institute's budget.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Wait, yeah, no, for sure. Can I tell you something.
I watched that movie multiple times every year, So yeah,
you are missing out on royalties because I'm so glad
you It sounds like you like that movie because a
lot of people say the science is wrong. On the side,
I'm like, it is such a good movie. I don't
care any it says. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I mean, as long as you put yourself in the
right frame of mind, which is never getting any science
from any movie period, you can have fun with that.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Okay, well, very well said. But it was really cool.
The thing I'd love about that movie is that it's
blue collar workers who are going up there to do
the work and not really as someone who grew up
outside of Philly, it was just really cool to see
that reflected in media. But the Asteroid Institute, So you're
a former, you're I mean, once an astronaut, always an ashot.
(10:08):
So you're an astronaut. You now run this Asteroid Institute,
and it is charged and correct me if I'm wrong,
and from grossly oversimplifying. It's charged with quite literally putting
into a database every single asteroid and its location in
our solar system. And all of these new telescopes like
(10:29):
Rubin and the Web James Web Telescope are finding and
able to find all of these new things in our
solar system? Is that what you guys do? And then
the second question is how many asteroids are there in
our solar system?
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Okay, so first what do we do? Yeah, we're one
of the many groups working on this problem. I mean,
there are thousands of people who have realized the importance
of this because again, these things do happen that they're
not everyday occurrences, But it only makes one really bad
asteroid to ruin the complete day for all of civilization.
There are a number of observatories scientists around the world,
(11:10):
people at NASA, people at the European Space Agency, and
you know the real and one private organization that's us
working on finding and tracking these asteroids. So we all
work in various parts of the problem. But essentially, what
we're all doing is we're trying to map the locations
and trajectories of all the asteroids. And here we're talking
millions of asteroids in the Solar System.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
There's millions. There's millions of asteroids far away.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Nearly every world in our Solar System is an asteroid.
It is not a planet. There are a few large planets,
you name them, but there are millions of asteroids, and
so nearly every world and these are all small worlds, right,
become big and small and whatnot, but they nearly every
world in our Solar system orbiting the Sun, all going
moving continuously around the Sun is an asteroids. To get
(11:58):
to keep that in mind, sometimes the larger planets get
hit by asteroids. You know. Just look at the Moon, right.
The Moon is covered in craters. In fact, there are
craters on top of craters, right, And then think to yourself, now,
how often has the Earth been hit by assay, the
answer is more than the Moon, because we're larger and
(12:20):
we have stronger gravity than the Moon, which sucks in
more of it. So why don't you see all these craters.
It's because we have oceans and we have weather, we
have vegetation. You know, you built, you make a crater
in the middle of the Amazon, you won't see it
ten years later because it just grows back over it
and it turns out. You know, the history of there
(12:41):
is it has been hit by asteroids big and small
for billions of years. It's just an after process. So
you mentioned the dinosaurs. They went away because a very
large assoy hit and most of those asteroids died that afternoon.
I mean, it was a very rapid thing and those
very large esery that was probably about ten miles across.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Which to me isn't even I mean, that's not that
big in any ways, it doesn't.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Sound that big until you calculate the energy from that.
Remember that when the bottom parts of that asterid are
hitting the ground, the top parts are above the highest jetliner.
So that's a big deassige. And the energy is in
multiple tens of billions of the size of our largest
nuclear weapon. So good one thinking the energy involved is
(13:30):
if you place the large nuclear weapon, not like one
of these tiny Herosiama bombs, but one of the big ones,
modern nuclear weapons, and you placed one about every few
hundred yards, and you covered the earth every few hundred yards,
like cabout five hundred yards away, six hundred I put
another nuclear weapon a thousand times bigger than the one
dropped in Russiama, and I set them and I covered
(13:50):
the whole earth everywhere like that and set them all
off at once. That's about the energy that we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
So I'm still back on the fact that there's millions
of asteroids. That there's millions, millions of asteroids. What is
considered this the size of a big, big, big asteroid.
Is it bigger.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Than we're small to large? And far more of them
are small than there are large. It's kind of like rocks,
you know. There's a lot of sand grains, you know,
some smaller rocks, you know, much less boulders. All right,
So now most of these, as you said, or but
the sun between Mars and Jupiter that's called the asteroid belt,
(14:30):
and the big ones there are hundreds of miles across
the small ones there are sand grains. Okay, So these
things are just rotating, and we're talking again millions, but
almost all of them are small. So now occasionally one
of those gets uh it's gravity uh, or the gravity
of it gets too close to something like Jupiter or Mars,
(14:54):
and the gravity there changes its orbit and it gets
thrown into the inner Solar System, which is where our
planet orbits the Sun. And once these things end up
in the inns to them, then they mostly get cleaned
out by hitting Earth or Venus or marks. And so
it's those ones that we're concerned with, the ones who
are not in the asteroid belt. So let's talk about
(15:15):
what's big or small, roughly call it a half mile
or a kilometer or so in size. Is thought that
if one of those hits the Earth, then you're pretty
much talking the end of human civilization. Wow. It's not
gonna make all the species extinct, but what it will
(15:35):
do is end growing seasons Northern and Southern hemisphere by
throwing up enough dust and stuff into the upper atmosphere,
and I'm talking way high that you would lose it
would be pitch black for a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
All right, So let me ask you the question, how
much food do you think human civilization has stockpiled at
any given time?
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Oh? Wow, my kitchen is literally none.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
So all of humanity has a couple of months worth
of food, that's it, Yes, which means we are always
dependent upon the next growing season. Yes, yes, right, So
now let's say we lose growing seasons northern and southern
hemisphere for three years, we run on a few food
in a a couple of months. What happens to civilization
(16:26):
a few years down the road there is no food.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, it's not good. That's not good.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So you can see. So that's that's why it's commonly
thought that, you know, an asteroid, to call it a
little over half a mile or kilometer in size, that's
the end of human civilization or whatever comes out of
the other end of that is not what went in
to the front of it, right, Yeah, you know, whatever
civilization looks like that, what remnants remain are going to
be completely different. So that's something we cannot let happen, right,
(16:53):
or or we start over. Right, this is control all
delete on human civilization. So that's a kilometer across. Those
are fairly rare. They only hit the earth about it
once every call it a million years or so. A
million years ago, if that happened, you know, we didn't
have a big civilizations. There weren't billions of people on Earth,
(17:16):
and if that happened, it doesn't sort of end you
in subsation, because there wasn't that one civilization to beginning.
Correct gatherers running around on the planet. Some of them survived,
some of them die, you know, that happens today. It's
a big change because we have built so much, all
of you know, our ancestors, their grandparents, their grandparents and
(17:38):
their grandparents and so on, have built over the last
several thousand years everything we see around us. And that's
what's at risk right now. We're much more at risk
then when we were just a few one hundred thousand,
you know, you know, basically eights running around one hundred gatherers.
So we can't let something like that happen and once
(17:59):
every million years sounds like, oh, you know, that's pretty rare,
which it is. But put it this way, in your lifetime,
call it one hundred years. Standard person lives about one
hundred years. Now. That means it's a one in ten
thousand chance or point zero one percent chance that this
happens during your life.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Handed well, and you know what, I didn't even know
what the word pandemic meant until twenty twenty, and so
I don't want to take my chances and think.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
About the effect of that that that you know, that's
not that's that's a tiny lip right right right now.
Let's say you know, civilization collapses and we're back where
humanity was ten thousand years ago, pre Bronze Age or
something like that. Okay, that's that's the kind of thing
you're talking about. And so you can't let that happen.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
No, we can't.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
And the chance of it happening in your lifetime is
about point zero one percent. That's thousands of times more
likely than you know, winning a lottery ticket.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Wow. See when you put it in context like that, Ed,
that you have a better chance of getting hit by
an asteroid than winning the lottery. That's wild, Ed Lou.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
And it's thousands of times more And this is a
large answer. I'm not just talking an asteroid that wipes
out a city or a continent or something like our country.
I'm talking about the wiping out of human civilization.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, no, the dinosaur killers, Ed Lou, you're gonna have
to come back on the program. Thank you so much
for for helping us understand. I learned so much, and
thank you so much for for everything that you're doing. Uh, edlu.
He is the head of the Asteroid Institute. Also an
astronaut has been to space multiple times talking about that
that that that fly by, that zoom by of Antarctica,
(19:40):
that asteroid and just the different sizes
I don't know if you saw these headlines, but there
was an asteroid that flew by Earth only two hundred
and fifty miles away. This was a very close flyby
of our planet, and it caught astronomers off guard, and
it zoomed right over Antarctica. Now, it was not like
(00:29):
a dinosaur killer. It wouldn't have been the end of times,
but it raises a pretty big question, how do we
know if an asteroid is coming? Hello Future, It's me
keV and this is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The planet is Earth. The year is twenty twenty five.
My name is Kevin Sirilli. I'm the founder of MTF
dot TV's platform Meet the Future. My guest today literally
(00:50):
the best in the country on all of these issues.
His name is doctor Edward lou. He is the head
had show over there at the Asteroid Institute, which thinks
about all of these questions, and we're going to talk
a lot about what the Asteroid Institute does. He's also
an American physicist and he's also a NASA astronaut, so
(01:10):
he's flew on three Space Shuttle flights and he even
made an extended stay aboard the International Space station. So
this guy's been to space, okay, and not like eleven minutes.
He's been up there for a very long time, so
he knows what he's talking about. And thank you so
much for coming on here. I have to ask you,
I really have always wanted to go to space. I
(01:31):
did not get to do it like you've done it.
But with today in the world that we're in, do
you think it's possible for someone like me to go
to outer space?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, it's definitely possible. I mean, people are starting to
pay for these flights. I think it's a great thing.
I think it's just a natural evolution of spaceflight because
if things go as they did for aviation, then we'll
reach the day where now flying at an airplane isn't
a big deal. It used to be one hundred years ago.
Now you know, people just buy it. They don't even
think about it. That's going to happen some day in space.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
So when you were up in space, what were you doing?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
It depends on the mission. Various missions had different different objectives.
My first mission was a flight to the Mere Space
Station on board the Space Shuttle. The second one was
one of the first instruction flights to the International Space Stations,
where I got to do a spacewalk to help build it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
My third mission was the sort of rescue mission after
the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. We had to
get an emergency crew of just two people on board
the space station just a few weeks after the crash
of Columbia. Wow. And I was chosen by the United
States to be the one American on that flight. There
was one Russian, one American, and we flew a Russian
(02:42):
spacecraft called the soil Us up to the space station.
And then I spent six months up there, just me
and one other person.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Wow. What did you do when you got bored?
Speaker 2 (02:55):
First off, you don't get bored. There's just too much
to do. It's hard to get board up there, so
always busy. We had the opposite problem, always busy because
we only had two people to run the space station. Wow.
And there was a lot more work.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So as you are up there and you're looking at
planet Earth and you're thinking, first of all, thank you, truly.
I don't think astronauts get thanked enough for the sacrifice
that they and their fit.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
No, well, well, and also thank you to your kids,
and thank you to your family for no truly, please please,
because I don't think they get thanked enough for what
for the sacrifice that you make for not just for
our country but for our species. But as you're up
there and you're looking at the planet and you're thinking
of this big but also incredibly small, pale blue dot
(03:47):
that we all call home, an asteroid could take it
out in an instant. And now you lead the Asteroid Institute,
which thinks about planetary defense. And I have been having
so much fun to know so many of you over
the last couple of months, and I'm so grateful and
I'm very relieved that there is an organization that is
(04:07):
thinking we don't want to end up like the dinosaurs.
But when I saw this headline, my first call was
to your colleague Danica, and I said, Danika, there was
almost an asteroid that hit Antarctica. What did you think
and put it in context of the work you're doing
with the Asteroid Institute.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Well, my first thought was just another day. WOWU Asteroids
come by the Earth all the time, and many of
them we don't see up until the very last minute,
and these are generally pretty small ones. So by small
asteroids meaning you know, just a couple of meters across.
The size of the power or less. The amount of
damage that something like that could do is completely minimal
(04:44):
because they basically won't make it through the atmosphere. So
they show up as fireballs in the sky or shooting
stars or things like that. And this happens all the time.
Asteroids that are that we don't see it until very late.
I get worried when we missed one that's of good size,
you know, not like this case we had the other day,
but one that is larger frank for instance, the one
we had in twenty thirteen over the Russian city of
(05:06):
charlie Bins. We had one that was about sixty feet
or so across, so you know, not huge size of
a building, right, small building, but something that size had
the energy when that thing exploded in the atmosphere, had
the energy of about thirty times the bomb dropped over Hiroshima.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on thirty times
the bomb of Hiroshima.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Wow, And luckily it missed the city.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Now this energy was deposited up high. It blew up
high in the atmosphere, unlike nuclear weapons are exploded in
the atmosphere but low to the ground, so you know,
the shockwaved. But even still that the energy from this
was pretty tremendous. And this is considered a very very
very small asteroid, you know, in the planetary defense scheme
(05:56):
of things, and just sixty feet across, and it was
probably fifty or more kilometers from the city that it
entered the atmosphere, so it was a good distance away.
And even that, I think it put a couple of
thousand people into the hospital. Wow, fifteen hundred or so
people in the hospital collapsed. The number of buildings broke,
like one hundred thousand windows, like every window in the
(06:18):
city was shattered by the sonic boom from this. Anybody
who looked at it, you know straight you know, outside,
their faces were burned, they got they got essentially really
bad sunburns.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Is where you're describing as a war zone.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, yeah, we're talking a half a mega ton of TNT.
Remember that the bomb dropped over Hiroshima was like fifteen kiloton,
so fifteen kilotons of energy, and this was five hundred kilotons,
so much larger than the bomb dropped over Hiroshimer. And
this happens every ten years so you get a random
impact like that, and these are the small ones, so
(06:55):
you know, we do want to find these things before
they hit us. And the kind of cool thing is
that now we reach the point where we can actually
deflect these asteroids if we know about them long in advance.
So our the real goal here is find them long
in advance. And when I stay long in advance, I'm
not talking like hours of days, I'm talking decades, wow,
so that you can have time to properly plan the
(07:16):
side and prevent it from hitting the ear. And the
ones you really need to do this and ones are
the bigger ones, you know, the ones that are even
a thousand times this side or ten thousand or a
million times this size, because those are the ones are
you clearly do not want to hit the air.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So this is fascinating to me. I'd lose my guest today.
And he's he's one of these people. I mean, here's
an ash literally an astronaut. He's been on board the ISS,
he's been to space multiple times, spent six months up there.
I mean this this, and now he runs the Asteroid Institute, which.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
By the way, is I do want to put in
a plug the Asteroid Institute is one of the programs
of the B six twelve Foundation, which is a nonprofit.
We are completely supported by private donations.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
So but I want to I don't consider this a
plug by the way, like like this is. This is
an organization that is quite literally mapping the asteroids in
our solar system. I want to I want to stay
here a little longer because I don't. When I was
a kid, you know, a Miss Frizzle and the Magic
school Bus was teaching me about the Solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
(08:21):
the asteroid belt. And now she's like, okay, that's where
the asteroids are, and then you get to the other
the outer planets and whatnot. You don't even learn about
the work cloud or anything else. But you don't really
think about what the asteroid belt actually is at all.
You don't really think about how big these asteroids are
(08:41):
and where they even come from or what's even on them.
And then I saw the movie ed Armageddon with Bruce
Willis and Ben Affleck, which remains I know, this is horrible.
It was not. Yeah, I love that movie. It was
it was I still love one of my favorite side movies.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Side note here My first launch was the video that
they filmed, and then they doubled it up for in
the movie they have two spacial launching at once. That's
actually a video of my very first launch board the
special letland.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Are you kidding me? Ed? That is so cool?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So they would only given me some royalties I could
pay for the Asteroid Institute's budget.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Wait, yeah, no, for sure. Can I tell you something.
I watched that movie multiple times every year, So yeah,
you are missing out on royalties because I'm so glad
you It sounds like you like that movie because a
lot of people say the science is wrong. On the side,
I'm like, it is such a good movie. I don't
care any it says. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I mean, as long as you put yourself in the
right frame of mind, which is never getting any science
from any movie period, you can have fun with that.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Okay, well, very well said. But it was really cool.
The thing I'd love about that movie is that it's
blue collar workers who are going up there to do
the work and not really as someone who grew up
outside of Philly, it was just really cool to see
that reflected in media. But the Asteroid Institute, So you're
a former, you're I mean, once an astronaut, always an ashot.
(10:08):
So you're an astronaut. You now run this Asteroid Institute,
and it is charged and correct me if I'm wrong,
and from grossly oversimplifying. It's charged with quite literally putting
into a database every single asteroid and its location in
our solar system. And all of these new telescopes like
(10:29):
Rubin and the Web James Web Telescope are finding and
able to find all of these new things in our
solar system? Is that what you guys do? And then
the second question is how many asteroids are there in
our solar system?
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Okay, so first what do we do? Yeah, we're one
of the many groups working on this problem. I mean,
there are thousands of people who have realized the importance
of this because again, these things do happen that they're
not everyday occurrences, But it only makes one really bad
asteroid to ruin the complete day for all of civilization.
There are a number of observatories scientists around the world,
(11:10):
people at NASA, people at the European Space Agency, and
you know the real and one private organization that's us
working on finding and tracking these asteroids. So we all
work in various parts of the problem. But essentially, what
we're all doing is we're trying to map the locations
and trajectories of all the asteroids. And here we're talking
millions of asteroids in the Solar System.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
There's millions. There's millions of asteroids far away.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Nearly every world in our Solar System is an asteroid.
It is not a planet. There are a few large planets,
you name them, but there are millions of asteroids, and
so nearly every world and these are all small worlds, right,
become big and small and whatnot, but they nearly every
world in our Solar system orbiting the Sun, all going
moving continuously around the Sun is an asteroids. To get
(11:58):
to keep that in mind, sometimes the larger planets get
hit by asteroids. You know. Just look at the Moon, right.
The Moon is covered in craters. In fact, there are
craters on top of craters, right, And then think to yourself, now,
how often has the Earth been hit by assay, the
answer is more than the Moon, because we're larger and
(12:20):
we have stronger gravity than the Moon, which sucks in
more of it. So why don't you see all these craters.
It's because we have oceans and we have weather, we
have vegetation. You know, you built, you make a crater
in the middle of the Amazon, you won't see it
ten years later because it just grows back over it
and it turns out. You know, the history of there
(12:41):
is it has been hit by asteroids big and small
for billions of years. It's just an after process. So
you mentioned the dinosaurs. They went away because a very
large assoy hit and most of those asteroids died that afternoon.
I mean, it was a very rapid thing and those
very large esery that was probably about ten miles across.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Which to me isn't even I mean, that's not that
big in any ways, it doesn't.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Sound that big until you calculate the energy from that.
Remember that when the bottom parts of that asterid are
hitting the ground, the top parts are above the highest jetliner.
So that's a big deassige. And the energy is in
multiple tens of billions of the size of our largest
nuclear weapon. So good one thinking the energy involved is
(13:30):
if you place the large nuclear weapon, not like one
of these tiny Herosiama bombs, but one of the big ones,
modern nuclear weapons, and you placed one about every few
hundred yards, and you covered the earth every few hundred yards,
like cabout five hundred yards away, six hundred I put
another nuclear weapon a thousand times bigger than the one
dropped in Russiama, and I set them and I covered
(13:50):
the whole earth everywhere like that and set them all
off at once. That's about the energy that we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
So I'm still back on the fact that there's millions
of asteroids. That there's millions, millions of asteroids. What is
considered this the size of a big, big, big asteroid.
Is it bigger.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Than we're small to large? And far more of them
are small than there are large. It's kind of like rocks,
you know. There's a lot of sand grains, you know,
some smaller rocks, you know, much less boulders. All right,
So now most of these, as you said, or but
the sun between Mars and Jupiter that's called the asteroid belt,
(14:30):
and the big ones there are hundreds of miles across
the small ones there are sand grains. Okay, So these
things are just rotating, and we're talking again millions, but
almost all of them are small. So now occasionally one
of those gets uh it's gravity uh, or the gravity
of it gets too close to something like Jupiter or Mars,
(14:54):
and the gravity there changes its orbit and it gets
thrown into the inner Solar System, which is where our
planet orbits the Sun. And once these things end up
in the inns to them, then they mostly get cleaned
out by hitting Earth or Venus or marks. And so
it's those ones that we're concerned with, the ones who
are not in the asteroid belt. So let's talk about
(15:15):
what's big or small, roughly call it a half mile
or a kilometer or so in size. Is thought that
if one of those hits the Earth, then you're pretty
much talking the end of human civilization. Wow. It's not
gonna make all the species extinct, but what it will
(15:35):
do is end growing seasons Northern and Southern hemisphere by
throwing up enough dust and stuff into the upper atmosphere,
and I'm talking way high that you would lose it
would be pitch black for a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
All right, So let me ask you the question, how
much food do you think human civilization has stockpiled at
any given time?
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Oh? Wow, my kitchen is literally none.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
So all of humanity has a couple of months worth
of food, that's it, Yes, which means we are always
dependent upon the next growing season. Yes, yes, right, So
now let's say we lose growing seasons northern and southern
hemisphere for three years, we run on a few food
in a a couple of months. What happens to civilization
(16:26):
a few years down the road there is no food.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, it's not good. That's not good.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So you can see. So that's that's why it's commonly
thought that, you know, an asteroid, to call it a
little over half a mile or kilometer in size, that's
the end of human civilization or whatever comes out of
the other end of that is not what went in
to the front of it, right, Yeah, you know, whatever
civilization looks like that, what remnants remain are going to
be completely different. So that's something we cannot let happen, right,
(16:53):
or or we start over. Right, this is control all
delete on human civilization. So that's a kilometer across. Those
are fairly rare. They only hit the earth about it
once every call it a million years or so. A
million years ago, if that happened, you know, we didn't
have a big civilizations. There weren't billions of people on Earth,
(17:16):
and if that happened, it doesn't sort of end you
in subsation, because there wasn't that one civilization to beginning.
Correct gatherers running around on the planet. Some of them survived,
some of them die, you know, that happens today. It's
a big change because we have built so much, all
of you know, our ancestors, their grandparents, their grandparents and
(17:38):
their grandparents and so on, have built over the last
several thousand years everything we see around us. And that's
what's at risk right now. We're much more at risk
then when we were just a few one hundred thousand,
you know, you know, basically eights running around one hundred gatherers.
So we can't let something like that happen and once
(17:59):
every million years sounds like, oh, you know, that's pretty rare,
which it is. But put it this way, in your lifetime,
call it one hundred years. Standard person lives about one
hundred years. Now. That means it's a one in ten
thousand chance or point zero one percent chance that this
happens during your life.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Handed well, and you know what, I didn't even know
what the word pandemic meant until twenty twenty, and so
I don't want to take my chances and think.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
About the effect of that that that you know, that's
not that's that's a tiny lip right right right now.
Let's say you know, civilization collapses and we're back where
humanity was ten thousand years ago, pre Bronze Age or
something like that. Okay, that's that's the kind of thing
you're talking about. And so you can't let that happen.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
No, we can't.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
And the chance of it happening in your lifetime is
about point zero one percent. That's thousands of times more
likely than you know, winning a lottery ticket.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Wow. See when you put it in context like that, Ed,
that you have a better chance of getting hit by
an asteroid than winning the lottery. That's wild, Ed Lou.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
And it's thousands of times more And this is a
large answer. I'm not just talking an asteroid that wipes
out a city or a continent or something like our country.
I'm talking about the wiping out of human civilization.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, no, the dinosaur killers, Ed Lou, you're gonna have
to come back on the program. Thank you so much
for for helping us understand. I learned so much, and
thank you so much for for everything that you're doing. Uh, edlu.
He is the head of the Asteroid Institute. Also an
astronaut has been to space multiple times talking about that
that that that fly by, that zoom by of Antarctica,
(19:40):
that asteroid and just the different sizes
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
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.