In This Episode

Join us as we dive into the cosmos with Christian Koberl, a professor of impact research and planetary geology at the University of Vienna. With a rich background as the director general of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Christian shares his expertise on meteorite impacts and their implications for Earth and beyond.

In this enlightening conversation, we explore key insights about how studying extraterrestrial events can inform our understanding of Earth's geological history and future. Christian discusses the significance of impact craters, revealing how they can provide clues about past cataclysmic events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and even potential future threats from asteroids. He highlights fascinating examples, such as the discovery of iridium layers that point to asteroid impacts, and discusses the recent findings related to supernovae and their effects on Earth's atmosphere.

The dialogue takes unexpected turns as we connect these cosmic events to broader implications for humanity's future in space exploration. Christian emphasizes the importance of scientific inquiry in understanding our place in the universe and the potential risks we face from both solar activity and extraterrestrial impacts.

Episode Outlines

  • Introduction to Christian Koberl and his expertise in planetary geology
  • The significance of studying impact craters on Earth
  • Insights from meteorite impacts and their historical context
  • The role of iridium in understanding past extinction events
  • Discussion on supernovae and their effects on Earth's environment
  • Comparative analysis of solar flares and their potential risks
  • The importance of historical events in predicting future risks
  • Challenges faced in space exploration regarding radiation and micrometeorites
  • Reflections on humanity's relationship with cosmic phenomena
  • Conclusion: The future of planetary defense and space exploration

Biography of the Guest

Christian Koberl is a distinguished professor of impact research and planetary geology at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has served as the director general of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, where he has significantly contributed to our understanding of meteorite impacts.

His research focuses on planetary geology, particularly the study of impact craters and their implications for Earth’s history. Christian has published numerous papers on these topics, advancing our knowledge of how extraterrestrial events shape our planet.

With a commitment to education and public outreach, Christian engages with various initiatives aimed at promoting scientific literacy regarding planetary science. His work connects deeply with themes discussed in this episode, particularly regarding humanity's future in space exploration. The themes in today’s episode are just the beginning. Dive deeper into innovation, interconnected thinking, and paradigm-shifting ideas at  www.projectmoonhut.org—where the future is being built.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, everybody.

(00:01):
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into ages.
You personally have just lived to experience the information age and what a ride it's been.
Now consider that you may right now be living through a transitional age into the age of infinite, an age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which were made possible through a construct where the moon and earth, as we call it, Mearth, will create a new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into this infinite future.

(00:41):
The ingredients for an amazing phi sci sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.
This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation.
We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, we were named by NASA, to the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on Earth to improve why we live on Earth for all species.

(01:08):
If you're interested in knowing more, you can go to www.projectmoonhot.org.
And in the top right hand corner, there are several videos that you may be able to watch.
Now on to our program.
Today, we're going to be exploring a fantastic topic, transcending and understanding the effects of extraterrestrial events.
We have with us Christian Koberel, who is a professor of impact research and planetary geology at the University of Vienna, Austria.

(01:36):
He's been the director general of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and he is best known for his research on meteorite impact craters.
I've how are you, Christian?
I'm okay.
Thank you.
Good.
As always, we do a very brief introduction.
But yet at one point about several months ago, someone said, it's amazing how much research, David, you do for all of these podcasts.

(01:58):
And I said to them, I think I need to add something to the beginning of our podcast.
First of all, I don't know anything about what the guest is going to be talking about.
So let me share with you the process.
A guest is selected.
We have a conversation to see if that guest is an appropriate guest.
They end up watching some videos, the same videos that you are able to watch, and we decide and we work on developing a topic.

(02:24):
And then if the topic is good, we create a title.
This could take upward the longest, took over 4 hours just to create the title, finding what we wanted to talk about.
Then we're done.
Christian goes on his way.
He doesn't talk to me anytime in between.
I do absolutely no research.
The only thing I do is today or yesterday, I took out a piece of paper, 12 of them, and at the top, I put the title of the program, Christian's name.

(02:50):
That's it.
They're blank.
I don't know where he's going with it.
We then turn off we we meet.
We review the process.
We turn off the cameras, and now you and I, you as the guest, are gonna be learning along with me from Christian.
So I have just as much knowledge about this topic as you do.
So, Christian, do you have an outline for us?

(03:12):
Well, yeah.
Sort of.
Okay.
Well, let let me hear it, and I will write it down on these 12 pages.
So we're talking about basically what we can learn from studying terrestrial environments and and rocks, what we can learn about astrophysical remains.

(03:33):
So our place in the universe, basically.
So the first topic that I wanna talk about is impacts and what they tell us about kind of our neighborhood in the solar system.
Okay.
Next.
The next topic is bigger events, that are recorded in in Earth, rocks.

(03:55):
What can we learn about supernova, for example, nearby?
Those are big star explosions.
Next.
And then, you probably have heard of solar flares and solar eruptions that can cause a lot of damage, not only on the Earth, but also to our technology.

(04:16):
And is there any way how we can learn about past events again from studying rocks Okay.
And other things on earth?
Is there another?
And then the final one for me would be to kind of bring that all into perspective.
What do we kind of learn about our place in the solar system in the universe?

(04:38):
What do we learn about by studying the past?
What can we say about the future and the effects that these extraterrestrial events might have on us, on earth, on the humans?
Okay.
Perfect.
That's a great list.
So let's start off with the first one, impacts and what what we can learn, what they tell us.

(05:02):
So impacts.
Impacts are, something that is actually fairly common in the solar system.
Fortunately, not so common that, we have seen any big impacts on Earth.
But if you look at the moon, you see the results of impacts.
Lots of big circular features there, craters, but also the big mare.

(05:27):
And in recent history, we are old enough to remember that, of course.
In 1994, there was a comet that got too close to planet Jupiter, which is the largest planet in the solar system.
And the kind of the the comet, the nucleus of the comet got ripped to pieces, and each of those pieces was something like, the kilometer in diameter.

(05:56):
And one after the other, these pieces in the summer of 1994 hit the surface of Jupiter.
Now Jupiter doesn't have a solid rocky surface like our moon or Mars or the Earth.
It has a very, very dense atmosphere.
And so what you see is kind of a big blob in the atmosphere that disappears with time in a few weeks or a month.

(06:19):
But what was interesting to see, and people could see that on television because telescopes were following that all the time, and there was a spacecraft nearby that synced by pictures, of these impact effects from Jupiter to the Earth.
And what we could see is that each one of those, about kilometer size, pieces of rock and ice that hit Jupiter left a huge cloud about the diameter, the size of the Earth.

(06:49):
Real?
That large.
That was what, you know, everybody was really surprised about.
But, basically so a very small object because they hit the surface at very high velocity, they they create a huge effect there.
Now on a solid body, of course, the effect is not quite as huge.

(07:11):
So about a kilometer diameter rocky body that hits, say, the surface of the moon or the earth will make a crater that is about 20 times bigger than the impacting object, but still, I mean, that's pretty big.
So if you have a 1 kilometer diameter rock that hits the surface of the Earth, the result is a crater that is about 20 kilometers in diameter.

(07:38):
So What was just you probably what's the you might talk about it later, but what's the size of the, the rock that hit the earth that made the dinosaurs go extinct.
We'll come back to that.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, I can I can tell you?
It's 10 about 10 kilometers.
Okay.
Actually, that story features prominently, in a few minutes.

(08:03):
Okay.
No worries.
It's just come in about It It came to mind because I'm saying, okay.
If that's the size, that's fair that's a that's that's not I I'm thinking of this mushroom cloud going up, and then I'm saying, well, then how big was that other?
So okay.
10:10 kilometers to 1.
From from the study of that actual impact, or how we even got to know that there was an impact, we we we kind of learned a lot.

(08:28):
But let me lead to that.
We will get there in a few minutes.
So, anyway, I was just saying, you know, so if you look at the surface of the moon, for example, you have lots and lots of craters.
And, what we kind of have to realize is that people back then when they first saw these craters on the moon, they did not know that they were formed by impact.

(08:53):
Because on earth, craters can form through a large variety of geological processes.
Maybe the most common one is volcanism.
Volcanism causes craters of different types and shapes and sizes.
And, when, for example, Galileo Galilei in 1610 published his first observations of the surface of the moon through a telescope, he described craters, but he didn't know how they formed.

(09:27):
And other scientists around that time, a little later, they all said, oh, well, we have plenty of volcanoes in Italy.
There's Vesuvius, there's Etna, but then there's also the Campi Fregre, which are Calderas and so on.
And, and so they knew volcanoes and so similar features.
They look similar.

(09:49):
And it was interesting that in 1664, 65 approximately, And, English scientist, Robert Hooke, published a book in which he described various experiments.
So, you know, these people were polymath back then.
He was looking through a microscope, and he discovered the cell, and he did other things.

(10:12):
And he made an experiment where he took rocks and threw them on a muddy surface with high force.
And he said, well, the resulting, indentions, they they look actually like craters of the moon on the moon.
So it could be that something fell on the moon, but he said that's probably not very likely because as we know and that's you know, he's speaking 1664.

(10:37):
Yeah.
As we know, the space between the planets is empty, and that was what people knew in 1664.
I I just I just finished Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci.
So I'm I've I'm in this time zone already, and it's amazing the types of experiments these individuals have done to figure out everything.

(11:00):
And I I'm trying to go back in my mind to think about what it would be like to have not to not know that the moon was, deformed or changed through impacts.
I it's it's an amazing thing to think that that was not common knowledge.
Well, I mean, that's because and people can say, well, you know, who he had the right answer, but he threw it out.

(11:25):
Well, because, that was the knowledge of the time.
Yeah.
Minor planets or asteroids were not known yet.
The first minor planet was discovered, about a 135, 136 years later in 1801.
Meteorites were not known at the time to be of extraterrestrial origin.

(11:46):
Many people thought that goes back even to to, the Greeks and so on.
They thought those are concretions that form in the Earth's atmosphere either from distant volcanoes or something similar to hailstones.
Hailstones.
So they they assume that all of those would have formed because of the way the Earth shoots up volcanoes.

(12:09):
So, therefore, the only way that they can have that is the dissimilar thing.
That makes sense.
So this is what people thought for a long time.
And only at the beginning of 19th century did people realize through measurements that meteorites actually come from outer space, from outside the earth.
Nobody knew that.
But so Robert Hooke, basically, he have in a way, he he he made an experiment, and his interpretation was constricted by the knowledge of the time.

(12:41):
Yep.
And so he didn't make a wild speculation.
He actually concluded something on the basis of what he knew.
Yeah.
And so I don't think anybody can fault him for that.
No.
I think I think it's actually amazing that
But this is how science works.
Yeah?
Yeah.
He he actually came
up with an experiment.
I mean, he did something, and he analyzed it.

(13:02):
And the conclusion was not correct, but the approach to solving it was.
Yeah.
He
it's fascinating that
And I find it fascinating too because it kind of tells us I think it tells us 2 very important things.
First of all, it tells us how science works.
It works through experiment, interpretation, but we're constrict constrained by what we know.

(13:27):
What we know about us, the world, the universe, and so on.
What do we know about physics, chemistry, etcetera?
And we constantly learn more, and that leads to new interpretations, of course.
And the second thing I think is important that we learn here is the importance of of history.
We learn from history.
We learn, and we can say, okay.

(13:50):
This was tried, that was tried, and now, you know, now we know more, and now we can make more and better interpretations.
So that's why I think these stories are kind of interesting and important.
Yeah.
Very much so.
Okay.
So Go ahead.
Me continue with the story about of the impacts here.
So how we know?
Okay.
So as I said, in 17th century, nobody really knew that, impacts were the ones shaping the craters on the moon and the surface of the moon.

(14:19):
And, of course, nobody was even thinking about the Earth because you didn't see so many craters on the Earth.
And if you did see any, well, most of them were volcanoes.
So let's fast forward a a few 100 years and go to the beginning of 20th century.
At the beginning of 20th century, there was a relatively young mining zone.

(14:42):
Because you made a comment, so I wanna make sure I didn't miss something.
You said they didn't realize that meteorites came from an external source until 19th century.
How did they what what was the what was the who who came up with this concept that it was?
And or because it sounds like we're missing it.
We go to 20th.
Well, okay.
So, meteorites, were observed to fall, of course, all the time.

(15:07):
But as I said, you know, people thought they were thrown out from volcanoes far away or just, condensed in the atmosphere.
Okay.
It
so what was necessary was that somebody, not just one person, but several people observe a meteorite or several meteorites to fall so they can reconstruct their path through the atmosphere and see where it came from actually.

(15:33):
And this happened at the beginning of 19th century.
There was a large meteorite fall, several meteorites.
Meteorite broke up into several pieces, but so several meteorites, you know, big fireballs on the sky were observed in Northern France, and it was such a huge event that many, many rocks fell down.

(15:55):
It was such a big event that the French Academy of Sciences sent a young mathematician and astronomer, from Paris to investigate.
The guy's name was Biot.
And, he interviewed lots of people and basically had a lot of eyewitness reports and that helped him to reconstruct the trajectory of various meteorites in the atmosphere.

(16:25):
And because he had, for each of those, various observers that were in different points on the earth, he could triangulate, basically.
So each person said, okay.
I see I saw this meteorite, this big fireball in front of the background of these and these and these stars, and somebody else on a little slightly different angle.

(16:47):
And if you have at least 3 positions from which you observe, you can actually reconstruct the trajectory.
And it turned out, whoops, it comes at very high speed, and it comes from outside the atmosphere.
So this was the first time, there was basically a measurement, so to say, that showed us that meteorites came from outside the atmosphere and not from any nearby volcano or something like that.

(17:14):
So there were other investigations then during 19th century, but that, you know, concerns small bodies.
Yep.
And so by the end of 19th century, basically, everybody or even by the middle of 19th century, everybody in science and then whatever, they they agreed.
So okay.

(17:35):
Meteorites, you know, these small, fist size or or baseball size objects that fall down.
Okay.
They come from outer space.
But nobody made the connection to craters yet.
Okay.
And that's kind of the next important step.
So that's the 20th century.
Yeah.
And this is now where we get into the 20th century.
Now there's a crater, that has been known, of course, but, again, people didn't know how it formed, that is not far from Flagstaff that is a little bit, east of Flagstaff.

(18:09):
And now we know it under the name media creator or under the name of the person who first studied it.
It's Beringer Crater because there was this young mining engineer, Daniel Morrow Beringer, who had heard that around this crater, which by the way back then was called Coon Butte, because, obviously, there was lots of coons that were sending themselves in the rim of the crater.

(18:37):
But, anyway, so he had heard that around that crater, people had found a few years earlier, big chunks of iron that turned out to be iron meteorites.
Well, by big, I mean, also the the biggest one is maybe the size of a of a big suitcase or something like that, you know, but most of them small.

(18:59):
So lots of fragments of ion meteorites found around that crater.
And interestingly enough, at that time, the boss of the US Geological Survey, the scientific director, sent somebody to investigate to see if that crater might have been formed by, these meteorites.

(19:22):
And the conclusion was, well, probably not because there's lots of volcanic craters nearby.
There are volcanic sunset crater, for example, is close by.
That's a volcano not far away, few kilometers away.
So it concluded maybe it was kind of a gas explosion crater.
But bearing our thought a few years later, I said, that that sounds strange.

(19:46):
His opinion was that in fact, there is an even larger piece of the meteorite and what is found around the crater is just little fragments.
And the big main meteorite that made the crater is still buried underneath the crater floor.
And what he want to do is he wanted to drill into that and then mine it out because iron meteorites contain not just iron and some nickel, but they also contain fairly large amounts of, like, the platinum group elements.

(20:19):
Those are elements that are rare on the surface of the earth, but are much more common in meteorites, in all types in almost all types of meteorites.
Even most stony meteorites have abundances of platinum group elements and other rare metals.
Rare
metals.
I'm gonna I'm gonna push it.

(20:40):
One of the stories I had heard about very early in project Moon Nut's journey, because I have not been a person who's engaged in the beyond Earth ecosystem at all, was that, I did learn about this platinum and that someone had or data that I had found, I don't know where it was.
I can't remember today.
They said that for every 100, meteorites that have hit the moon, 3 of them each have more platinum in them than we've used in the entire history of humankind.

(21:16):
Well, I I can't redo that calculation.
But it but it was amazing that the data was that there's so much platinum, and Yep.
We we look
Basically, you know, so there's not just platinum, but there's the so called platinum group elements, which are 6 elements that are all similar.
There's also palladium and rhodium and osmium and iridium and and and platinum, of course.

(21:41):
Well, well, my
similar chemically, very similar elements.
But in meteorites
Well, so let me just let me so
So I'm 1,000 more abundant than in rocks and mirrors.
So that's Okay.
That's it.
That's it.
There's a more there's so that platinum on a meteor is so there's so much as relative to what we would find on Earth that we mine platinum out of ancient meteorites.

(22:10):
No.
No?
No.
No?
That that would be going a little too far.
Okay.
No.
The point is that, of course, if you look at a meteorite, a stony meteorite, then what you have is basically the building the rim the remnant.
Meteorites are fragments of asteroids, and asteroids are basically what is left over from the formation of the solar system.

(22:36):
So Earth, the moon, Mars, Venus, everything formed by lots and lots of rocks that were thrown together early 4 and a half 1000000000 years ago.
And some of those rocks are left, and they are the meteorites or the asteroids.
If you Okay.
If an asteroid breaks up, you have a meteorite.

(22:58):
Okay.
So that's kind of so what we when we study meteorites, their composition is very similar to the composition of the bulk Earth.
Now the keyword here is bulk.
Because Earth is a huge planet and it's hot in the interior, it's segregated.

(23:23):
The metal went to the core, and the rocky bits are on the outside.
And so the Earth as a whole has a huge amount of platinum, iridium, osmium, whatever else, but it is irregularly distributed.
So it's all almost all in the core of the earth, and there's very little left at the crust, basically, at the surface.

(23:47):
So this is why when a meteorite falls down, it has a 100,000 times more platinum, iridium, osmium, whatever than the Earth crust.
Okay.
But the Earth as a whole is plenty.
Right.
That that's
the Earth
That's great.
Thank you.
Ores.
Thank you.
So we can mine these ores.

(24:09):
Yep.
And that's what we've been doing.
And it's still a lot cheaper to mine the ores on the earth than to fly to an asteroid and try to mine out the platinum and iridium there.
Yeah.
So that won't happen anytime in the near future as far as
I'm concerned.
It's the crust that has minimal amount of platinum on it.
But when you get one of these meteorites, you're talking a 100 times more platinum.

(24:35):
100000 times.
100 100000 times more platinum.
Wow.
However,
it's still not very much.
It's still like a 1,000 of a percent, you know, or something like that.
So very little in in total.
So that's the point, but still a lot more than on the earth surface.
Yep.

(24:56):
That's what we need to compare.
Yep.
I get it.
I part of the story
Yeah.
As well later on in a few minutes.
That'll be important for the story because this is where the dinosaurs will come in.
So hold on a few minutes.
That's okay.
I'm I'm I'm always if you listen to podcast, I ask a lot of questions and we go on tangents.
So great.

(25:17):
Of course.
Otherwise, it get boring.
Just me talking.
Yeah.
Anyway, so this guy, Barringer, you know, so he thought back in 1905, he thought, well, there's a big meteorite buried underneath the surface of the crater floor.
The the one that made that big crater, the crater is about little over a kilometer in diameter.

(25:40):
And, he was gonna mine it out because it has all these rare metals, and he'll get rich from that.
That was the theory.
Because at that time, nobody actually knew how craters formed from meteorite impact, That was a hypothesis, but, unfortunately, it turned out that was not really the case.
Because what he did not know, but which was developed the the the understanding of what happens when a large asteroid or meteorite hits the surface of the earth was only the first publications that only came out in the 19 tens 19 twenties.

(26:18):
And what these people, there were 3 2 or 3 separate groups of people who were working on these things.
And what they basically said or calculated was because an asteroid hits the surface of the Earth at such high speed.

(26:40):
Those of us who still remember from physics, from school, the equation for a kinetic energy, which is 1 half times the mass times velocity squared.
So if you have something traveling at high velocity and you square that, a huge amount of energy is being released at that point.

(27:01):
I I did do the physic I did do the physics.
I don't remember it.
So
it's a simple equation, but Yes.
Half of the mass times the velocity squared, that's kinetic energy.
So, anyway, so that means you have a a a a body coming from outer space, And because that's the way how celestial mechanic works, they encounter the earth with a velocity of somewhere between 10 70 kilometers per second.

(27:32):
So that is fast.
Yes.
And you take that velocity and you square it.
So a huge amount of energy is being released within a split second, and that leads to something like an explosion, and that forms the crater.
And people didn't realize that earlier on.
This is why no one made the connection with all the craters on the moon and everywhere else, because nobody understood how much energy is really involved.

(27:59):
And that brings us back to the point that I made a little bit earlier, how much larger the resulting crater is compared to the impacting body.
And so in this case, a kilometer size crater was actually made by an ion meteorite only about 50 meters in diameter.

(28:20):
So like a big house.
So his interpretation would be it would be a kilometer wide, but it's actually a lot smaller.
So he had the right idea just like Hooke, you know, basically back then.
Barringer had the right idea.
It was an impact, but he grossly overestimated the size of the body that made a crater like that because, again, he didn't know that the physics that made us kind of understand what happened during an impact was only developed 10, 20 years later.

(28:55):
And so then it was kind of clear that these little fragments of ion meteorites, well, they were just the little pieces that kind of came off the object before it hit the ground.
But the main object, 95 or 98% of the object, when it hit the ground, and this the next thing what happens is because of that enormous amount of energy, the meteorite or asteroid, whatever you wanna call it, that hits the ground is more or less not just broken to pieces, but it's vaporized.

(29:28):
So it's it's gone.
Mhmm.
And it's small because it is the huge energy that makes the crater in in the first place.
So this is where Beringer kind of was right and wrong at the same time, but, of course, you learn in a way by doing.
So so No.
He was not
If I was to take a jump and I'm thinking about the moon, because there's no atmosphere, there's no vaporization, there's no explosion.

(29:58):
It would be more like the mud.
Right?
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No?
The the atmosphere is actually irrelevant in this case.
Okay.
Hitting the circuit the object that hits the surface, it vaporizes because it gets so hot.
It
does the same thing on the moon then?
Of course.
The same thing on the moon.
And even better because even smaller objects are not in the earth atmosphere.

(30:22):
Small objects like meteorite size, you know, if you say centimeters to maybe a meter in diameter, they will be slowed down by the atmosphere.
Yeah.
But they won't make a crater at the end because by the time they hit the surface, they're too slow.
Yep.
If the big objects that basically they a kilometer, an object that's a 100 meters in diameter, it says, poof, the atmosphere.

(30:49):
I don't care.
Poof.
I'm through it already.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Mhmm.
And then hits
the surface of the ground with almost the same speed, as it was traveling in space.
On the moon, even an object a centimeter in diameter is not slowed down, but will hit the surface and make it greater than 20 centimeters in diameter.

(31:10):
Okay.
Yep.
So and the object itself, because of the high speed at which it travels and the enormous amount of energy is being released, will go will get so hot that it's vaporized.
So if you take any anything, if you take a rock and heat it up, atmosphere or not around, doesn't matter, it will vaporize.
It will turn into vapor.

(31:31):
Everything turns into vapor.
Ion turns into vapor at high temperature.
So it's, it's just the temperature.
It's not
what it's called.
That's the chemistry.
That's the chemistry side of it.
Part of physics, actually, in this case.
Yeah.
But it's not chemistry when you're doing reactions?
Yeah.
The chemistry is when you have reactions.
But if you just heat something up, it's just physics.
Oh, okay.

(31:52):
I'm trying to remember back of where I was to I took this in university and hey.
Look at we were I was in the stone age when I tell you this.
Anyway, so this is what happened at the beginning, the early decades of 20th century.
Yeah.
People finally started to understand what happens during an impact event.
Huge amount of energy, high temperatures, the object that comes in is vaporized, and because of the explosion and the shock waves and everything, it makes a crater that is about 20 times in diameter.

(32:25):
Now people still did not some people still did not think that this was something that happened a lot because if you look around on Earth, well, how many craters do you actually know?
How many craters do you see?
Not that many.
And on the moon, well, there is plenty.
And still astronomers, even into the first half of the 20th century, they were still thinking, well, most of those craters probably are of volcanic origin.

(32:55):
And it really took more and more studies.
And finally, the investigation of the moon from from space, from satellites, and bringing back rocks that convinced everybody that, really, those are all impact craters.
So more or less, every crater we see on the surface of the moon is an impact crater.

(33:18):
And we see on the moon so many more impact craters than on the surface of the Earth for two main reasons.
The first reason is that on Earth, all the craters that form and there are as many craters forming on the surface of the Earth as do on the surface of the moon because we're sitting in the same area of the solar system and the same number of big objects hit the surface of the moon and the Earth.

(33:45):
But on Earth, we have a lot of active geology going on.
There is erosion going on through the atmosphere, through the water.
There is no water.
There's no atmosphere in the moon, so that doesn't change anything.
If you look at mountains and not just the impacrated mountains, they are eroded away.
The Appalachian Mountains, for example, 900000000 years ago, were as tall and as big as the Himalaya is now.

(34:11):
So, that is how wear and tear more or less wears down the rocks on the surface of the earth.
So you have an impact created forms, but within relatively short time because of plate tectonics, because of volcanism, because of erosion, it is either covered up or kind of sand blasted, eroded away through the action of water and and wind and and atmosphere and so on.

(34:35):
So that's why we don't see too many on the Earth.
And the second thing is that the the moon, also shows all the impacts all the way back basically to its formation because the moon hasn't been geologically active for a long time.
So we have many more recorded in the moon or many more preserved, let's say, on the moon than we would have on the surface of the Earth.

(35:02):
So this is why even in the second half of the twentyth century, many even geologists didn't think that impact cratering is something all that important on the surface of the Earth, but in fact, it is.
And so now here we come to the story of the dinosaurs.
And this is what everybody is interested in, of course, is dinosaurs and how did they disappear from the surface of the Earth.

(35:28):
And that was kind of known for a long time to paleontologists, the dinosaurs.
They all just disappeared about 65000000 years ago, and it was not only the dinosaurs that disappeared, but many, many other species just disappeared, plants, other animals, etcetera.

(35:52):
And, about over 70% of all species that lived on the surface of the Earth back then were made extinct suddenly.
Yeah.
And this is what paleontologists knew for a long time, but nobody knew why.
And so here was an interesting hypothesis that was published around 1970.

(36:13):
There was a couple of of scientists who said, well, maybe there was a nearby supernova explosion.
And the extreme radiation from that supernova explosion, a lot of hard X rays and gamma rays and and all kinds of nasty stuff that would hit the surface of the atmosphere of the Earth, and, that could cause the extinction of, of a large group of animals within a very short time.

(36:44):
Yeah.
Possible.
But you need to find evidence for it.
And so a little bit later, about 10 years later, there were, some, American scientists, led by Walter Alvarez, who is now at the University of Berkeley.
Back then, he was at Lamont, and then moving to Berkeley, but he worked with his father who was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Louis Alvarez.

(37:12):
And what they were interested in was actually something different.
They didn't.
They were not really that interested in the dinosaurs at that time, but they wanted to know kind of how long does it take for certain rocks to be deposited.
Because a lot of rocks that we have now that form mountains were actually deposited on Earth and ocean floors, small little bits and pieces of of of rock flour accumulating on the ground.

(37:41):
And it's interesting to kind of know how long does it take if you stand in front of a big rock, face and you have a 100 meters of rocks there.
You say, did they take 10000 years or 10,000,000 years or a 100000000 years for these rocks to be deposited from the bottom to the top?
And so they were working on that, and they were studying rocks that were of the age of the Cretaceous, which is what is before 65000000 years old.

(38:09):
And then the rocks afterwards at the time, they had the name tertiary rocks.
Mhmm.
In between these two rock units, there is a thin layer of clay minerals, interestingly enough.
So that's something altered.
That there was something before, but difficult to know what it was before.
But there was only, like, a centimeter or 2 thick, the layer.

(38:32):
And they were doing some chemical analysis, and what they wanted to do is they u they wanted to use the influx of extraterrestrial dust, which rains down small tiny little dust rains, rain down permanently on the surface of the Earth.
And because coming back to what we just discussed a few minutes ago, extraterrestrial dust contains a lot of platinum group elements compared to the surface of the earth.

(39:03):
So you can use platinum group elements as like a proxy as a as a as an indicator how much extraterrestrial dust was accumulating on the surface of the Earth.
If you have very little extraterrestrial dust in a particular rock, that means it is highly diluted.

(39:26):
So that means it came down relatively it was it was acute the rock was accumulating relatively fast.
If you have a lot of extraterrestrial material in a particular rock, that means that rock was accumulating very slowly.
So it could accumulate a lot of extraterrestrial material in there.

(39:47):
And this was all and this is this is ubiquitous.
You found this all over the world.
Your Earth, I'm assuming.
Everywhere.
Yes.
Everywhere.
Yep.
Everywhere and and every age.
You know?
Because the exothermic dust rains down all the time.
Yep.
Anyway, so, they were trying to measure and because platinum itself is not so easy to measure, the element iridium is easier to measure, but it's the same.

(40:11):
You know?
It comes down with the same, extras, so they were measuring the amount of the iridium in normal rock units, to may to kind of try to determine how fast did they form.
And by chance, they also included that very thin layer of rocks between the cretaceous age rocks and the tertiary age rocks.

(40:34):
And what they found in there was a huge surprise.
They found a lot of iridium in there, a huge amount of iridium, which would have meant basically that there is a lot of extraterrestrial dust in there, which could have meant that that rock is this thin layer was deposited very, very slowly over a period of maybe 10,000,000 years or 20,000,000 years, but that's impossible because the rocks above and below, there's other ways to date them too.

(41:06):
Yeah.
Actually, that layer must have deposited relatively fast.
So there was a contradiction here.
Now then they thought, hey.
Wait a minute.
That layer, that's the actual layer that indicates where the dinosaurs become extinct.
So maybe that measurement of the high iridium tells us something about how the dinosaurs became extinct.

(41:31):
Now one possibility would have been that maybe that supernova hypothesis that was published 10 years earlier, there's something to it because maybe the iridium could have come from a nearby supernova, but then you would also have to find a relatively large amount of plutonium.

(41:52):
There's a particular plutonium isotope that is formed also in supernova explosions, and it has the mass 244, so it's called plutonium 244.
Yep.
And so they tried to find plutonium in their little rock sample from that little layer in between the cretaceous and the tertiary rocks.
We call it the cretaceous tertiary boundary, and they didn't find any plutonium in there.

(42:19):
And so they said, okay.
So it's not a supernova.
So where else could it come from?
Well, an impact.
Asteroids, like we know from meteorites, contain a lot of iridium and platinum and everything else.
So then they measured all the other platinum group elements as well, their abundances, and what they found was that the relative abundances, so the abundance ratios of these elements relative to each other were identical to what has been measured in meteorites.

(42:53):
And so they concluded, they said, a large asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter to explain all the amount of Iridium found around the earth could explain what happened at the end of the Cretaceous 65000000 years ago, and the environmental effects from that impact was enough to alter the climate and lots of other things on the surface of the Earth that leads then to the extinction of the dinosaurs and of all the other species that went extinct around that time.

(43:30):
So if I get this straight and I never had thought about it this way, I well, if I was to make an assumption based upon what I think I would have thought about, I would have thought that they had found a crater and then did it backwards.
But what what it sounds like and you tell me if I'm wrong.
It sounds like what happened was they've this made this discovery, and then they said, where did this thing hit?

(43:53):
And then they searched for it.
It was the opposite that I would have thought.
Precisely.
And you're you're entirely correct.
And this is what, of course, threw a lot of people off.
Yeah.
They didn't see it.
They found it in this little layer, and now they're saying where on the planet is this?
Because when you think about it, if you have an impact that's large enough, a lot of material is thrown into the atmosphere and then comes down all over the Earth.

(44:22):
You need a large impact for that.
And so that was, of course, the idea.
You find these layers of boundary rock between cretaceous and tertiary age rocks, aged 65000000 years.
You find them all over the planet.
There are these rock units in rock sections where you find this boundary everywhere around the world.
You find them in in the US.

(44:44):
You find them in Canada.
You find them in New Zealand.
You find them in Spain, in Italy, in Austria, in in India.
You know?
Wherever you wanna look at, where we have rocks of that age, you'll find that boundary layer.
And in that boundary layer, everywhere around the world, you will find high amounts of these extraterrestrial metals.

(45:05):
Cool.
So that was the status 1980.
In no way, that was known, indeed, at that time.
Wow.
Okay.
They published that paper in the journal science, and it caused a huge sensation,
of course.
Yep.
And it was the reaction was quite interesting because remember I said that even in the second half of the twentyth century, a lot of people working in the geosciences had never heard of impacts before.

(45:34):
So here was a group of people, a geologist, 2 chemists, and a Nobel Prize winner in physics that postulated that one of the most significant episodes, in Earth history, namely the extinction of the dinosaurs, was caused by the extraterrestrial event.

(45:55):
Many people thought that was the famous deus ex machina solution, something invoking something extraterrestrial when there were perfectly good terrestrial causes, to cause extinctions.
Maybe yes, but none of these terrestrial causes would explain the extraterrestrial platinum group elements Right.

(46:16):
In these samples around the world.
Mhmm.
This is what these guys found, and this is where they based their they they basically made a measurement and said, okay.
We don't find plutonium, so it can't be a supernova, but we do find all these other things.
So the best explanation for that is an impact because we know that meteorites carry all these elements in there.

(46:37):
And, of course, then mainly paleontologists, they said, impact, never heard of.
What nonsense.
Yeah?
On the other hand, mineralogists and geochemists, people who have, let's say let's not forget it's 1980.
These people have been studying lunar rocks that were brought back to the earth from 1969 onwards.

(46:59):
And they said, oh, that's interesting.
That's a reasonable explanation.
Great measurements, great interpretation.
So in the geosciences, there was this kind of divide from people who have been working on geochemistry and mineralogy and maybe have been working on lunar rocks.
And, of course, mineralogist also work on meteorites, and they said, yeah.

(47:21):
Okay.
Yeah.
We understand that.
Make make sense.
Logical.
Makes sense.
What's fascinating to me and this is it's 1980.
Yeah.
It's Not
that long ago.
It's not that long ago.
I I had this impression in my mind that and I graduated from from, the American High School, went to university in 81, is that this has been around for a very long time, and it's obviously not.

(47:52):
So I'm I'm kinda shocked at how how new this is.
This is this is, going back to Hook and and his experiment.
It's almost that realization of something.
Wow.
I would've I would've if you had asked me that question and I had would've won a a €1,000,000, I would've lost a €1,000,000.

(48:13):
Oh, pity we didn't.
So and, indeed, you know, a lot of the people who were skeptical said, well, you have an interesting story here, but there must be a huge crater somewhere.
So where is it?
And, of course, no crater was known at the time, and it's also interesting.

(48:35):
In 1980, less than a 100 craters had been identified as of meteorite origin on the surface of the Earth.
Today, we know a little more than 200 craters.
So even that, you know, that is not a large number.
If you look at the surface of the moon and you see millions of impact craters, that's because on the earth, they are eroded away or covered up.

(48:59):
That's the point.
Yeah.
So people were saying, okay.
Maybe.
Yeah.
But where's the crater?
Now there was a very interesting measurement that was made about 4 years later, and that was when a researcher named Bruce Bohor who worked for the US geological survey.
He found in the same boundary layers around the world, he made a mineralogical study.

(49:24):
So these guys made a chemical study basically or geochemical study.
But this guy looked at what minerals are in there, and what he found was tiny little quartz crystals that had a very strange phenomenon that you would not normally see in quartz crystals.
They had some lamellae that cross when you look at it under the microscope, very high magnification microscope.

(49:52):
These quartz crystals were crisscrossed by lamellae, and these lamellae were known only to form during impact on Earth.
What is lamellae?
What is lamellae?
A lamellae is basically if you just imagine a quartz crystal that has, like, Venetian blinds over that's.
Yeah.
Yep.

(50:13):
So, basically, lines that cross that crystal.
And these lines, they form they're actually planes that go because what we do is make a thin section of the rock.
So it looks like 2 dimensional, but in fact, three-dimensional.
You can do it in the electron microscope too, and then you see 3 dimensions.
So you see planes, that go through it.

(50:35):
When you look at that from just in a cup, then it looks like lamellic.
Anyway, so this form because of the high shock pressure during an impact in it.
Now pressure in shock pressure is not necessarily the same thing.
When you take a pressure, you apply a pressure long term.
If you put your your hand down on the surface of the table and press down, that's pressure.

(51:00):
But if you only hit the surface of the table for a split second and then withdraw again, that would be shock.
So you still have the shock, the high pressure, but only for a split second, and that makes a little difference in the effects.
So in this case, we have known from known impact craters on Earth like that one in in, in in in Arizona near Flagstaff that quartz crystals, when they are subjected to a very brief high pressure shock effect, they form these interesting lamellae, but nowhere else.

(51:40):
So if you have any static pressure, like you have, when you have rocks that are subjected to high pressure deeper in the earth, or even if you have a volcanic eruption that is not of high pressure enough, they don't form.
You know?
The quartz crystals look just the same as they normally look.

(52:02):
And so this this guy, this mineralogist, he said, in these rocks that form the tertiary boundary around the world, we don't only see the high amount of extraterrestrial material in their platinum metals, but also we have evidence for shock, and that forms only when a big meteorite hits the surface of the earth on earth.

(52:31):
So this was published also in science, and he found that all over the world in all these rocks.
And, of course, other people confirmed that they found it too.
And so now was even more evidence that there was an impact demand, but still, where the heck is the crater?
And that took some more investigating.
And, of course, you can then look and say, okay.

(52:54):
If you had an impact somewhere, if you get closer, it's the same with volcanoes, of course.
If you have an an impact or anything else that throws stuff out from a crater and deposits it somewhere else, the closer you are to the source, the thicker the deposit will be.

(53:15):
And the farther away you go, the thinner it will be.
Yeah.
So that boundary layer all around the world, no matter if you look, as I said, in in Spain, in New Zealand, in Austria, in South Africa, is maybe 1 or 2 centimeters thick.
Only if you get to the southern part of the US and the Caribbean, it gets to be maybe 10, 20, 30 centimeters thick.

(53:42):
So, basically, We're getting close to the place where the impact might have happened.
And then in, geophysical studies, people found a circular anomaly underneath the surface on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

(54:07):
And there was the circular anomaly about 200 kilometers across, but it was covered on the surface by about 1 kilometer thick layer of younger rocks.
So that structure was not directly accessible, but the Mexican oil company Pemex had been drilling exploration wells in that area before already in the 19 sixties.

(54:34):
And people now went back to the these these rocks
There would be.
Okay.
And they found that in that structure, actually, there were a few drill cores taken.
And then they looked at them and they said, here it is.
There's the equipment.
So I can imagine I can imagine the people at Pemex saying, wait.

(54:55):
Wait.
Wait.
We we still have the core samples.
Right.
And they're running back saying, I I can't believe it because there many of them will be geologists, and they lay them out, and there it is.
I can imagine that happening.
That was kind of a spectacular thing that happened in the early nineties only.
So, really, only 30 years ago.

(55:17):
So it took over 10 years when the evidence was already there that there was an impact to go around and say, hey.
Where is it?
Or where was it?
And now we know.
And now this structure has been studied in great detail and drilled and drilled by scientific organizations and so on.
So now we know very well.

(55:39):
There is the crater.
It's 200 kilometers in diameter.
It was the largest impact event of the last, at least, 100, 150000000 years on earth, and it had devastating consequences.
And so, you know, I find this this whole story really interesting because of the many links that there are.

(56:03):
That, you know, first of all, you find something, a hint of something, but you actually start looking because you had the idea there might have been a supernova explosion.
But then when you get look at the data as something totally different Yeah.
Then you don't find the source of that for another 10 years.

(56:24):
People who who have studied lunar rocks were the first to accept the hypothesis and so on and so forth.
Now never mind.
There are still a few people out there even in the geosciences, that say now it was not the impact.
It was some volcanism in India that happened around the same time.
Yeah.

(56:45):
Yeah.
There was volcanism in India, but it happened spread out over a much longer period of time, and that doesn't, of course, eject platinum group elements that are extraterrestrial.
There's by the way, not just the abundances that help us understand that there's extraterrestrial material in there, but there's also isotopes isotopic ratios of some of these elements that are different between terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials.

(57:13):
And clearly, the osmium, for example, or chromium in that boundary layer, there is extraterrestrial material, love extraterrestrial material in there.
So we know how much there was.
We know there was an impact from the shock minerals and all these things.
So this is basically 99.9% of all scientists now accept that there are a few people who, I guess, I don't know what their motivations really are.

(57:41):
But
Some people don't see things.
Yeah.
Some people just have their own ideas.
Yep.
They have their own ideas.
We'll leave it at that.
But, anyway, so that's kind of the story.
Wow.
And what I just wanna conclude that part with, if there was the longest part.
You know, the other two parts are shorter.
Yep.
That's okay.
3.
This was great because my my through through my journey with Project Moon, there are different types of experiences, and I've not really focused on this type of category.

(58:15):
And the the reason it's important is we're talking about the moon hot.
We're talking about the moon and the and the connection between them.
We do talk about the solar flares and radiation challenges.
So all of these things come together as something that fits into what's necessary to understand.
It's very relevant for Very relevant.
Our understanding of not only how the moon or the earth formed, but also kind of what can we expect in the future, and what do we need to worry about.

(58:42):
Yep.
That's exactly we we talk about solar flares.
We talk about micrometeorites.
We talk about the the challenges that we could face on Earth, on the moon, in in project Moon Hut, in variety of different categories of work we're doing.
So, yes, this is something that's why when I think you might not when we if you remember, I know you remember.

(59:04):
We were having the conversation, and I kind of pulled back thinking maybe there's nothing here.
And then you hit me really hard with, no.
This is this.
This is this.
And I it was one of those moments, which, again, a lot of individuals never get a podcast.
I said, I wanna explore this.
I wanna find what's here that I'm missing.
And that's if I'm assuming you remember, there was a pullback on my side.

(59:28):
Yeah.
I remember.
And you came back and you hit me, and I said, okay.
Let's explore this because there's something that I need to know.
So I appreciate your persistence right through my my wall that
I put up.
Sometimes one one doesn't see, the connections between things, and it takes a little longer.
It
that's why some of these interview scenarios can take several hours because I'm trying to figure out how that connects to what I'm thinking.

(59:56):
It's not just an interview.
There's actually an application that we're looking for.
There's actually a need basis.
It's not just to get a person on, and it's not just about a name.
And then when we went that next step, it was wow.
Okay.
Now these things are there's some value that could be generated here.
So, no, this is fantastic.
I love the story.
Alright.
Alright.

(01:00:17):
Anyway, so what we what we now know and what let's let's go back again a few years.
What people in the 19 eighties 19 nineties realized after this work that that they realized 2 or 3 things.
First of all, the realization was, okay, impacts are not only real, but they can have a fundamental effect on the biological and geological evolution of the Earth.

(01:00:54):
So that's kind of a fundamental thing because before that, impacts were not really even on the scene.
You know?
People didn't think about impacts of being important.
And now we realize, no.
They are important because if an impact can kill off 70% of all species and the other 30%, probably we're not very happy because their food chain was interrupted and, you know, basically, an impact of that size, 30,000 cubic kilometer of dust are thrown out into the atmosphere, and they come down very slowly.

(01:01:31):
It takes years years, and so that alters the climate.
You have acid rain.
You have the destruction of the ozone layer and everything.
Mutations form and so on and so on.
So these things have happened in the past.
That means they can happen in the future again.
Mhmm.
And, so that was the one thing.

(01:01:53):
The next thing was, well, the way the investigation was done, it's like forensics in a way.
You take a rock sample, and you kind of tease out information by studying minute amounts of metals, for example, that are scattered in there to see if you can learn from their abundance and their isotopic composition something about where they come from.

(01:02:25):
And then the third thing that kind of connects this is, okay, now what we can do is now we can go and use similar techniques on other craters and try to understand what rock type, what meteorite type formed them.
And that helps us again understand our solar system and how the early phases of the Earth and the moon happened.

(01:02:53):
So this is kind of the the knowledge based part.
And those are chemical analysis, geochemical analysis that are rather complicated that you can't really do easily remotely, but you need sophisticated laboratories for that.
And, so there are very few labs around the world, and I would say maybe 2 or 3 dozen laboratories at the most in the world that can do these types of measurements.

(01:03:25):
But what helps us, for example, I mentioned OSMIsotopes and Chromium isotopes, in in in this Cretaceous tertiary boundary material that came from the Chicxulub crater that told us that the meteorite or the asteroid that caused it was what we call a so called carbonaceous type meteorite, which was a very primitive type meteorite that has a lot of carbon in there too, a lot of water, and that hasn't been altered very much since the formation of the solar system for a half 1000000000 years ago.

(01:04:00):
But then subsequent measurements of the composition of the impact in body through these secondary features in the terrestrial rocks then, and other craters showed us there's other types of of meteorites too, or asteroids that make craters.
So that tells us something about what what caused the impacts back then, where did the material come from, and all these things.

(01:04:27):
And now we can also jump on the moon if you want.
Wait.
So before you before you jump there, I'd like to know because I've I've what I've read, and you're going to give me probably a better understanding of this.
What types of media rights are there if we're to classify them?
Are there 5 different types?
There are 9 different types.
Are there 2 basic types?
How do you
Right.
Types?
There are 3 basic types, and then there are some subgroups.

(01:04:51):
Okay.
Basic types are stony meteorites, iron meteorites, and stony iron meteorites.
So and, the stony meteorites are the largest group, makes up something like on the order of 95% or more than 95% of all meteorites are, stony meteorites, and there are subgroups.

(01:05:15):
There are what we call undifferentiated meteorites and what we call differentiated meteorites.
So what does that mean?
Differentiated means they were hot enough at one point or the body in which they formed.
Remember, meteorites are fragments of asteroids.
So the asteroid in which they formed, which is could be a kilometer in diameter, could be 50 kilometers in diameter.

(01:05:42):
If it's large enough and early in the solar system, it was hotter than it is now around here.
It might have been that just like in the earth, the metal sank to the core, then you have an interface zone where metal and and rock mixes, and then you have a mantle of mostly basaltic type material, and maybe a thin crust.

(01:06:05):
And when that object breaks apart, then the ion meteorites come from the core.
The stony iron meteorites come from the interface of the rock and the metal core, and the basaltic rocks from the outside, they make them the so called differentiated meteorites.
That is a few percent of all stony meteorites are like that.

(01:06:28):
Most of them because the asteroids were too small to be molten inside ever.
They're just primitive material that accumulated and accreted in the early solar system 4 and a half 1000000000 years ago, and they're still like that.
So they are unchanged since that time.
And, of course, you have different types of ion meteorites too because there might be a little bit of different composition in each former, so, you know, source asteroid.

(01:06:56):
They might have had a little bit of a different melting history, which makes for a little bit of a different result.
But, basically, three main types of meteorites and then the subdivision in those that have undergone some heating after its formation and have segregated into metal and other bits.

(01:07:17):
And those who have never seen any major heating event afterwards, they're still as primitive and as original as they were, 4 and a half 1000000000 years ago.
So that's the types of meteorites that we have out there.
Okay.
Because asteroids are fragments of of, meteorites are fragments of asteroids that tells us also what asteroids are out there.

(01:07:39):
Okay?
So Perfect.
What I was saying is now we can use the same method that we did on Earth and look at the craters on the moon.
And, of course, the Apollo samples, but also some of the rocks that come to the earth by themselves, so called lunar meteorites, which are thrown by impacts from the moon to the earth.
If we analyze those and we find melt rocks in there that have formed by impact, then we can look at the composition and see if we can find traces of the impactor in there that made the crater.

(01:08:10):
So we can learn that in fact, and we did learn, that the craters on the moon are made by the same types of meteorites or asteroids as the craters on the earth.
So that's not a big surprise, but in a way, it had to be done.
That measurement had to be done.
So this is where why the study of of impact craters is really interesting because it teaches us something about, first of all, early phases in the solar system, but also tells us something about what happens during such an impact that the Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary Impact, the Chicxulub crater is particularly interesting because it was so big, and the effects were so vast and widespread and had a huge effect on biology.

(01:08:56):
Now smaller impacts may only have regional effect, but they can be as devastating at least regionally.
And if an impact, even a small one like the size of meteor crater in Arizona, which results in about a kilometer sized crater, the zone of destruction is much larger than that.
The zone of destruction would be the size of a big city.

(01:09:19):
You know?
Basically, the city of Vienna or city of Washington DC could be totally destroyed by such a small impact.
And that's something that should give us pause because these small impacts are much more common than the large impacts.
So we need to think about or worry about a little bit that maybe every few 1000 years, there could be one of those small impacts that could be at least regionally devastating cause regional destruction, especially these days with the dense population almost everywhere on the surface of the Earth.

(01:09:56):
And if you have a a station on the moon, for example, you have to worry not only about the bigger impact, but even micrometeorites because there's no atmosphere that slows them down.
And even an object that is a few millimeters in diameter can cause a pretty big damn hole, in the wall of a space station out there.

(01:10:17):
And, even now, we just heard it recently, a micrometeorite hit the a mirror, one of the mirrors of the Webb Space Telescope and caused it, you know, first a little hole, but also it made it out of focus for a little bit.
They they were able to recalibrate that, but still, these things happen.
And satellites and space stations and whatever, they're constantly hit by small objects.

(01:10:41):
Well, woe the one when the larger one hits it because then suddenly the air will be out.
So Yes.
Who needs to think about these things.
You know?
But I I wanted to come now kind of transition to the second topic, the one about the supernova.
Yep.
And when if you remember, I was talking about the hypothesis that the extinction of the dinosaurs might have been caused by a supernova explosion nearby that was published in 1970, that idea.

(01:11:12):
And the measurements basically that were done later, they did not confirm that hypothesis.
There was no evidence of any supernova explosion.
However, in the meantime, people have been working on deep sea sediments more recently, and there is something that forms in the deep sea.

(01:11:38):
And I'm sure you've heard of these things, these manganese nodules or manganese crusts.
Mhmm.
They accumulate rather slowly.
And so, basically, metals that enter the ocean somehow, either through erosion from the continents or whatever volcanic eruption, other sources, they slowly precipitate if they form these crusts rather slowly.

(01:12:06):
So they grow by just a few millimeters over, tens of thousands of years or even 100 of 1000 of years.
And so there was, already about, over 20 years ago, 25 years ago, there were measurements the first measurements of an anomalous content of an isotope of the element iron with the mass of 60.

(01:12:33):
Iron 60 was found in, a couple of these manganese nodules.
And it was a layer that turned out to be about 2a half 1000000 years old.
And the people who did that, they were physicists from Germany at the time from Munich.
They interpreted and said, this I n 60 is known to form this isotope is known to form in supernova explosions.

(01:13:01):
And so maybe what we're seeing here now is actually evidence of a nearby supernova explosion where the ion was the dust that was ejected from the supernova eventually basically fell on the earth, and that isotope, that ion isotope, was still around, because it has a half life of over 2,000,000 years, so it's not something that disappears very fast.

(01:13:32):
And so here we are.
We find evidence of a supernova explosion near the Earth, and it could have been, maybe a 100, 200 light years away, so not that close that it would cause immediate biological effects from the radiation, but it would still, you know, have some problem with the ozone layer in the in the atmosphere.

(01:13:59):
That would be an immediate effect because, these these the high energy radiation, they travel very fast.
They travel basically at near light speed.
Whereas the dust comes later, maybe a few tens to a 100000 years later, and that is included and incorporated in these deep sea depositions.
And more recently, they found the similar anomaly, the similar enrichments of these I n 60 isotopes in deep sea sediments as well of the same age in several places of the planet.

(01:14:33):
So there's kind of a similarity to the study of the impact event at the cretaceous tertiary boundary because the iridium anomaly was found in many different locations of the world.
It it basically caused us to conclude that there was a global event.
And this was similar.
It's not just a global event.
It was an event that was even larger than that.

(01:14:54):
It was outside the Earth, but it affected the whole Earth.
And so there was this, this this supernova dust that was deposited on the Earth.
And very, very recently, just last year, basically, there was, work published again by researchers from Germany, from Australia, from Japan, from Austria together where they found also in the same layer evidence of this plutonium isotope that Alvarez and his colleagues had been searching for back in 1980, but didn't find it in the KT boundary, but now it was found.

(01:15:36):
And now we have pretty good evidence, in fact, not just of 1, but of 2 or 3 supernova explosions nearby the Earth that happened 1 about, 2 and a half 1000000 years ago, and the others maybe around 7, 8 1000000 years ago.
So that's much more recent than, that Kt boundary impact demand, and it didn't have quite as much of an effect on the biology because these supernova explosions fortunately were far enough away that the radiation was not so severe to affect the biology on the earth.

(01:16:18):
But that led to the hypothesis also published just a couple of years ago by researchers from the US who said, well, there was a big, explosion, a big, basically, extinction event, back, in, the Devonian times, the end of the Devonian.

(01:16:41):
Devonian?
When is Devonian?
Devonian.
Now that was, basically about 360,000,000 years ago.
So a lot longer than the cretaceous tertiary effect, but there was also a big extinction event.
The KT event is not the only extinction event in the Earth's history.

(01:17:02):
There is about half a dozen of severe extinction events in the last 500000000 years or something like that when we had multicellular life on Earth.
And the one 360000000 years ago, that was a pretty also a severe one.
And so now the idea is to look in rock samples if we find plutonium in there because that would confirm that that particular extinction event was caused by not an impact, but by nearby supernova, explosion.

(01:17:40):
That we know these things happen because we see supernova all around.
And, of course, if one happens nearby the Earth, it would have had a severe effect on the biology of the Earth because of all the radiation that hits it.
So that's kind of, So just I find that very interesting.
I don't know how much you how much you the supernova itself.

(01:18:04):
How do supernovas I I've I've learned about them.
I'm looking how do how do they form?
How big?
What are some of the pieces that I that would be valuable that you would know that I would probably not know?
So a supernova is basically what happens when a star is at the end of its life.
Yeah.
What does that mean the star is at the end of its life?

(01:18:26):
A star burns hydrogen to helium mostly because the universe consists 75% of hydrogen.
And so a star consists also of that, and that's basically the fuel that produces the energy output of a star.
Our sun in its interior converts hydrogen to helium.

(01:18:48):
And when that kind of is done, when all the hydrogens convert to helium, there is no more, radiation that is being produced, no more energy that's being produced, and the star will start to collapse.
When that happens, some other nuclear reaction might happen.
If the star is very large, it will collapse and it will basically start explosive nuclear fusion, which rips the star apart, and that is a supernova.

(01:19:19):
So at the end of its life, small stars, they kind of quietly sync together, make white dwarfs, and then fade out.
Big stars, they have a lot of mass.
Because of that mass, they collapse faster, and they start these explosive reactions that are nuclear synthetic reactions that produce among other things, the iron 60 or the plutonium 244.

(01:19:43):
And so how far how far
away would the earth be able to accumulate enough of an evidence of platinum?
No.
No.
Not platinum.
Not platinum.
Iron 60 and platinum.
60, I meant.
How much how
how Estimates are about 300 light years away from the Earth.

(01:20:08):
That's the question.
So that's but it it could be, of course, there's plenty of stars that are closer.
You know?
And it could be when one of them explodes over the period of 1000000 of years, they will happen.
Then not only do we have the dust that contains these isotopes that we can measure and that give us the evidence of the nearby supernova explosion.

(01:20:31):
But when they are closer, then also the very intense radiation from that explosion will hit the atmosphere of the Earth, and that will cause a lot of nasty effects, the immediate destruction of the ozone, but also photochemical reactions.
It will cause maybe radiation, a lot of radiation to rain down on the surface of the Earth, which actually then will almost bring us to the next topic, which is the solar eruptions and solar flares.

(01:21:03):
But let's just finish the thought about the supernova.
So there's a lot of photo reactions plus a lot of radioactivity basically coming down, which would have nasty effects on the biology of our planet.
So that's kind of and you have close by supernova explosion.
And we have lots of stars nearby, that there's even candidates, of supernova remnants.

(01:21:28):
We can look at in in, in astronomical images as, yeah, because you can measure the direction in which the stars travel and so on.
You say, yeah, that one, that could have been the one that exploded near the earth 2a half 1000000 years ago for which we have the evidence.
So that's, Yep.
That's the supernova story.

(01:21:49):
And what I find fascinating is initially, the cretaceous tertiary boundary extinction was proposed to be of supernova origin, turned out to be impact, but now we're kind of back at the supernova.
We finally found the actual evidence of supernova explosions nearby, and now we need to study if any of them had any effects on extinctions, for example, or other effects on the earth.

(01:22:15):
But that brings me kind of to the third aspect, the third point.
Those are these big explosions, not of of supernova, of stars, but the eruptions from the sun that sometimes happen.
They're called coronal mass ejections or extremely big solar flares can happen.

(01:22:40):
And that means that a lot of ionized gas suddenly gets thrown out from the sun and travels through the solar system.
If it happens that the Earth is in the way of that big gas cloud, it'll interact with our magnetic field and with our atmosphere.
And, now maybe you have heard of an event that happened in 1859, which after the person who described it was called the Carrington event.

(01:23:14):
Now that's I had not heard
I had not heard about it.
There was a big eruption on the sun, and the gas cloud basically, hit the earth.
Now 18 59, we didn't have telephones.
We didn't have pipelines.

(01:23:38):
We didn't have electrical power through power lines.
The only thing we had back then was telegraphs, And there are lots of stories of the telegraph lines burning up and telegraph operators getting burned from sparks coming out of the telegraph machinery.

(01:24:05):
Now those were basically inductive, electricity because when you have a huge kind of a a cloud of plasma that presses down our defenses, which the the magnetic field around the earth, and it starts flowing along the magnetic field lines mainly near the poles to the surface of the Earth, and it kind of presses down our magnetic field, the magnetic field of the Earth way down Yeah.

(01:24:40):
So that you can see polar lights down in the Caribbean or in the Mediterranean in Europe, which would be extremely unusual because normally you can only see near the poles or near the polar regions.
But if you start seeing polar lights, in in Texas or in Mexico, then we have a problem.

(01:25:01):
That's what happened back then.
Polar lights were seen all the way down to, equatorial regions, and that meant that there was this huge sore solar flare or or eruption from the sun that hit the the earth's atmosphere.
And because the only thing where you had cables back then, like, metallic cables that could be heated up or where where inductive electricity could form, were telegraph lines, the effects were not quite as severe.

(01:25:38):
Fast forward a little bit to 1989, there was a much smaller similar event, also a solar eruption, and it pressed down the magnetic field lines to the surface of the earth a little more, not quite as much as that current event, but more than usual.
And it caused a lot of power outages in Quebec in Canada.

(01:26:02):
And, also, what happens is it heats up pipelines.
So because of the induction that that that basically is the result of this plasma hitting the surface of the earth, then and power lines were burning up.
And so the problem is particularly in North America because most power lines are above ground.

(01:26:28):
In Europe, we're a little better protected because most power lines in the densely populated areas at least are below ground.
So then they wouldn't be subject to the induction quite as much.
But the problem is the transformer stations because they might burn up in such an event.
And so this is a danger that can happen, then I'm not gonna go in go into great detail about that because my angle is actually a slightly different one that I wanna talk about in a moment.

(01:26:57):
But the first point is
Before you get to
that other options.
Be before you get to that then, can I ask Sure?
How I I'm thinking of the moon more than I am the earth.
How often considering the moon and earth are close to one another, how often does a solar flare be large enough that could be impactful on the moon?

(01:27:20):
How often would that occur based on historical evidence?
Yes.
On the moon more often than on the earth because the earth is additionally shielded by its magnetic field.
Yep.
The moon, it might happen every every few decades, something like that that you have a really nasty effect on the earth.
Maybe only every 100, 200 years, something like that.

(01:27:41):
Okay.
Thank you.
So but the point on earth is nasty enough even though it may not happen quite as often because if you have a large enough, eruption, coronal mass ejection, solar flare, whatever causes these eruptions, then you have electrical lines that are interrupted, power that is interrupted, transformer stations that might burn up, pipelines that might burn up, and so on and so forth.

(01:28:11):
But that means if you have no power, even if it's only for a few weeks, what does that mean?
Oh, it's incredible.
We're having Internet problems just earlier.
Exactly.
Not only no Internet, no power, no water that is pumped in or pumped out.
No water.
We have a sump we have a sump pump in our house, so I know just losing that alone is is devastating.

(01:28:34):
So yeah.
Yep.
So not only that, but then you wanna go shopping.
Well, most cashiers now work only with scanning, and you can't just go there and take a piece of bread off the shelf and pay in cash.
There's still places around here where you can do that, but very few, in the United States.
I haven't seen one in a long time.

(01:28:56):
So, that there are these problems.
You know?
You wanna drive somewhere?
Well, good luck with all the electrical cars.
Won't get very far when the battery is out.
You wanna cook something at home?
Well, if you have gas, then you need a pump to to to pump it.
If you have electricity, okay, we know where that leads.
If you have a a diesel or a benzene car, you can drive as far as far as the tank filling goes, but that's it.

(01:29:21):
Hospitals after 4 or 5 days, their, generators will be out.
So the consequences are enormous of this thing, and that hasn't been thought through very much by people who should be thinking of catastrophic effects.
Oh, but it also that's that question that I asked is how often does it occur.
And when someone thinks about a 100, 200 year event, while we should be thinking about certain types of, conditions, it's very difficult for humans in general to think of something long term.

(01:29:56):
Well, but everything that happens every 100 years, you know, that it might happen tomorrow.
Right.
It's right.
I understand.
I was smiling as you were going there.
Yes.
It could be tomorrow.
But I think humans in general and I'm being very, very oh, I'm saying a lot about myself.
Humans in general are willing to kick the can down the road to say, well, it won't happen now.

(01:30:21):
You know, it'll be in 50 years, and I it won't make a difference to me.
We see that now with the dependence on oil and gas from certain locations.
Right.
That's, yeah, that's the exact that's a great example of how everybody's been kicking that down the road, and now there's a situation globally that could theoretically toss much of Europe into a severe challenge over the next year.

(01:30:47):
So, yeah, it's just something that people do.
So it as much as I can understand power, transformers, pipelines, electric cars, pumps, and gas, the human species often can't figure or can't has trouble thinking about something that'll happen next year.
That's and that's the problem.
Yes.
And I think we should be thinking about it.

(01:31:10):
And people who wanna build stations on the moon, space stations should be thinking about it even more.
We think about it all the time.
Actually, we have a meeting every week, and we talk about radiation and inclusive of what happens if we've got 8 minutes from the time in which the sun erupts to hitting the moon.

(01:31:31):
We talk about energy.
We talk about radiation.
We talk about micrometeorites.
All of these are in every single week discussion.
Yep.
So I I we're there for you.
Right.
So now let me come kind of the, the the geological or long longer term or geologic or biological longer term aspect.

(01:31:56):
When a huge the the the gas, the plasma from a huge solar flare, solar eruption, whatever, if that hits the atmosphere of the Earth, there is a reaction that goes on between the nitrogen in the atmosphere and the incoming high energy radiation that makes an isotope called carbon 14.

(01:32:24):
So the nitrogen is converted into carbon, carbon 14, and that is a radioactive carbon isotope that has a half life of a little over 5000 years.
And here comes the interesting thing.
Tree rings accumulate, of course, carbon from the atmosphere.

(01:32:46):
So trees, and you find them in tree rings.
And there were measurements that were done a few years ago, about 10 years ago, where a spike of carbon 14 was found in tree rings indicating that there was a solar superstorm that hit the Earth about, around, 775 AD.

(01:33:14):
And so that was interesting.
That meant there was a huge solar eruption, and it left its traces for us to measure.
Going back to that carrying event in 18/59, people looked and because we have the effects, and it fried up basically the, the telegraph lines and everything.

(01:33:41):
There was the technology of the day, but there was no trace of carbon 14 in 3 rings of that age.
So that effect that the event that was so memorable in our own history, recent history, well over, well, a 150 years ago or something like that, didn't leave a measurable trace And it was power

(01:34:03):
it was powerful enough to do something, yet it it wasn't powerful enough to have done what the previous 1775 777.
777.
I wrote 775.
Didn't you Yeah.
775.
So, yeah, it meant that that one must have been on a
course is that that event in 775 was maybe 10 times more powerful Right.

(01:34:28):
Than the current event, and the current event itself was scary enough.
That's exactly what I was getting to.
Yes.
It's that this was such so impact so impactful that it left a mark.
And this experience in 1959 didn't leave a mark, and it still was impactful.
Yep.
And then more, just very recently, it was basically last year as well, 2 more such huge events were discovered in 3 rings.

(01:34:59):
1 about 5,300 years, BC, and 1 about 7,200 years BC.
So these things happen.
They happened in the relatively recent history on on earth.
We have the evidence for those things by in the form of isotopes that we can measure.

(01:35:25):
And yet, I think we're not very well prepared for anything like that happening again.
And that kind of brings me to the 4th point in our little agenda here, which is the shortest and the final one.
Kind of what do we learn about, you know, from all these studies about all these astronomical astrophysical events that affect us on earth.

(01:35:52):
What do what what kind of what do we learn from that?
What does that tell us about our past and our future?
And I think the main point that or several points now not number them because, there's there's a few points that I think a few things we learn.

(01:36:13):
First of all, coming back to what I already said about, you know, how we studied meteorites and how do we be kind of learn about where they come from is there's a way how science goes, and we've learned more than once that we should just simply follow the scientific procedure, make measurements, interpret them, see if it makes predictions, see if we find any evidence, anything of what has been predicted.

(01:36:45):
If not, alter the hypothesis and so on and so forth.
And so we learn a lot from using the proper scientific method.
2nd point, I think, is or another point is that by looking back in history, we can learn a lot about how to interpret present day events or learn something about the future.

(01:37:10):
If we know how many impact events happened on the earth, we have an idea or how many solar flares hit the earth.
We know how often approximately or at least on average a particular astrophysical event happens on or near the Earth.
And we can kind of say, okay.

(01:37:32):
Is this something we need to worry about?
Now there's a there's a whole different, story out there.
You may have heard about efforts in so called planetary defense, which is now that we know that asteroids can hit the earth, can we do something about it?
Can we nudge them out of their orbit so they don't hit the earth?
There are conferences out there.
Every 2 years, there's a planetary defense conference.

(01:37:55):
Actually, we have one in Vienna next year.
The United Nations is involved in all these things.
So by by looking back at past geological events to tell us something about astronomical events, basically, we can learn about the future.
How often does this happen?
Do we need to worry about it?
Can we do something about it?

(01:38:16):
Etcetera, etcetera.
And then another thing that I find also Isn't isn't that where
isn't that where we get Harry Stamper and he hops on a rocket goes up, he gets on the middle of it, and he blasts it.
Isn't that what's supposed to happen?
Yeah.
That's the Hollywood version of it.
Yeah.
Oh, do you mean that?
I thought that was historical.

(01:38:37):
The scientific version is a little more complicated.
But, anyway but then and and the kind of I think one of the the final and more important also messages is that the studies of all these past events also tell us something about what the effects were.
How large what what happens during an impact event?

(01:39:01):
Does that destroy particular size?
Does that destroy, just the continent, or, does it affect the whole earth?
Does it cause mass extinctions?
Whatever.
How big is the effect of a solar flare on earth?
A super flare.
What what what kind of we have to study past events to make predictions about the future.

(01:39:27):
We can't just make models on the basis of nothing.
We need to base them on actual measurements.
And that's kind of where I've been trying to kind of lead through this whole story here, starting with, supernova that then we found actually an impact was to blame.
But then supernova coming back into the picture, they're not totally unimportant.

(01:39:51):
They do happen.
They have effects.
They had effects.
Even nearby explosions, eruptions from our sun, our star, have had effects on the earth.
And I think all of those should cause us to kind of think a little harder that we are sitting in the middle of the universe.

(01:40:13):
We're not isolated from the universe.
We're not isolated from the solar system.
The solar system interacts with us quite a bit, and we ignore that possible effect at our peril.
So the I appreciate all of this, and my mind is racing now.

(01:40:34):
I can hear you winding down.
And I I had a few things that came to mind that just more specific to project Moonar, more specific to our future.
I don't have them in any order.
Again, I don't have a list because I don't know where you're gonna go with the conversation.
And I'll try to articulate them in a in a way that is understandable.

(01:40:56):
The only because they're just popping into my head.
One of them is when we consider the earth and the challenges with mining, rare earth metals, certain types of activity that happens on the earth that could be dangerous or long term have long term effects.

(01:41:17):
If the cost of doing this type of activity off earth, for example, on the moon and taking something such as platinum, which I'm gonna throw some numbers out.
You'll tell me I'm completely wrong.
That's okay.
But I did some math that it said that it would take up to I worked in a rock quarry.
We dropped 22,000 tons of stone a day.

(01:41:39):
That would be the equivalent of 25 trailers going down the road, American size big semis, as well as we'd have up to 24 scows with a 1,000 ton each on them going down into New York City.
We were the number one supplier of stone.
So when I looked at mining platinum, the numbers came out that we use about 92, there were 92 tons.

(01:42:05):
That might be the number.
92 tons of platinum a year.
You have to dig about 62,000 62,000,000 tons of material to be able to get there, and it comes out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 62,000,000 Toyota Corollas that are mined every year to be able to extract that, then it has to be shipped.

(01:42:27):
My point is and I'm trying to remember the data.
It's not exactly accurate, but that's probably close enough because I imagine 4 of the trucks that we did in a year, 4, that's it, would be the amount of platinum.
And I didn't do the mass.
I just did it as a as a a rough calculation.
If we were to take the same thing and we were to go on to the moon and we were going to be able to do some type of extraction, we don't even know if we can, let's assume we could, or of any other type of metal or material, is do you think about this as a a potential solution for some of the challenges we're facing on Earth, leveraging the geological side, the the asteroids, the micro the meteorites hitting the moon and leveraging that?

(01:43:17):
Do you ever go in that direction?
Well, I think my answer would be very firm no.
That is not that doesn't make much sense for for a variety of reasons.
Okay.
So first of all, when we look at and I I mentioned that briefly early on when we were talking about the plasma probe elements, what we're mining on earth is not the average continental crust.

(01:43:45):
What we're mining on Earth are ore deposits.
Ore deposits are things that exist on Earth, but don't exist on the moon because they form most often in geological processes that operate on the earth, but not on the moon, and that are related often to water, for example.

(01:44:07):
And they form enrichments of these elements.
You don't if you want iron, you don't go out there and take an average piece of of mountain rock.
You go to where you have an iron ore
Right.
And mine that.
The same with platinum group elements.
For example, not very far from where you are, I guess, a little bit to the north in Canada, there's Sudbury.

(01:44:32):
Sudbury has huge, platinum and and other metal ores.
There are nickel ores and so on, but they are enormously concentrated that basically you can imagine it's like salt.
You have salt in the ocean.
I mean, it's it's it's maybe it's just just a comparison.

(01:44:54):
You have salt in the ocean, but you don't see the salt, and you don't take ocean water usually.
You go to where the ocean water has evaporated, and you collect the the evaporite, basically.
Yep.
But I I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah.
So you don't look at the diluted part.

(01:45:15):
You look at where it's concentrated, and the same thing happens with a lot of the metals on Earth.
So what we are mining in almost all cases is where geological processes have concentrated the the the element of interest, let's say.
You know, for lithium It
absolutely makes per it makes perfect sense.

(01:45:36):
You don't have that on the moon.
So when And, again, I
don't You have a sprinkling of material, and you would have to mine out a much larger amount of lunar rock and use very energy rich energy consuming enrichment, methods to get the metals out.

(01:46:00):
So it doesn't make any commercial or even logical sense, and then to bring them back to the earth would be superheavily expensive.
So the the reason I, again, I've not been in the beyond earth.
It's not something that I spend all of my time on.
Yet over the years, I have seen, you can't even the size of the equipment that people have imagined to do mining operations on the moon, let alone they're not calculating just to ship something that large, considering I worked in a rock quarry.

(01:46:31):
The equipment that people have put is even larger than what I was dealing with, and and that was challenging.
So when I'm seeing these images, what I I think there's and I'm saying this very nicely.
There's a delusional part of just the geo geological or the concentration challenges that would be astronomical to overcome.

(01:46:53):
Yep.
More fiction than science.
No.
And that's great because I had not, that's why I'm asking you.
I had not thought about it in that way.
I there's a there's a few images that I just saw recently that someone was proposing, and the pieces of equipment, considering we were dropping what's 22,000 tons of stone, that's a lot of stone.

(01:47:14):
Mhmm.
And we were close to 90% of all stone going into New York.
So you think of every road, every building, every, every, every was coming from our quarries.
And when I see the equipment that's being, displayed, I'm saying to myself, first of all, just the ship that's going to be tremendously challenging.

(01:47:36):
But to manage it and then to be able to do mining is one thing where you're digging it out of the ground.
The other is the processing that goes behind it.
And you need a primary, a secondary, a tertiary.
You then need to sort it into different components.
All of that requires an entire quarry.
Of course.
And if you have a breakdown in some equipment, we're not worried about supply chains on earth, you know, supply chain for some of this equipment on the moon or or elsewhere.

(01:48:04):
No.
That's why I would say we can see.
We forget that
I I had a situation where it was a group of individuals didn't wanna work as hard, so they took a stone p a a rock out of the quarry that should have been, it should have been broken up, and they didn't.
And they put it in the back of a uke, which is a large truck.
They moved it over to the primary, and they dropped it in.

(01:48:26):
And what it did is it clogged the primary.
So it took us a machine broke in the process of trying to smash it in there.
And I I was management.
They were union, so I had constraints.
We tried to put cables around it to pull it out.
1 snapped, flew up and hit.
Thankfully, the guy had a cage around him, but flew and hit the loader that was pulling it.

(01:48:49):
And, eventually, I had them mill a new piece of metal to go into a special type of, hammer that we had, and we re jury rigged that and got it out.
But that took that took about 4 hours Yep.
For me to move these people around because no one had a solution, not because I was smarter.
I just it was my job to get it running.
That's not wearing a space suit.

(01:49:11):
And that's not wearing a space suit, and that's because we did have a milling facility that we were able to do that with.
And we did have a loader around, and we did have all of those pieces.
So when you so thank you for that answer.
So if we are to then if you are to think about anything geologically or in the scope of radiation, micrometeorites, is there anything that you have said that's an epiphany for me?

(01:49:43):
This is something that someone should know about, and I I feel that there's a possibility or a direction that should be taken based upon your knowledge of the moon.
Well, you know, basically, we cover 2 topics, and you are aware of, that all these are problem.
But, you know, I I think, you know, a lot of, how should one phrase that?

(01:50:08):
A lot of these events are not very common, of course.
Right.
Right.
But if they happen, they can have disastrous consequences.
And the question is if these days, you know, back when Apollo 11 flew to the moon, the astronauts understood very well that they might not be able to come back.
I think today with our much more safety conscious, the science I went

(01:50:33):
right there as soon as you said that.
Yes.
A lot of the, risks that people took way back then, neither the astronauts nor management or whatever would be prepared to take.
And so you need to even worry about rare events more so than you would have ever had because it seems to become unacceptable that in a hostile environment, casualties might happen.

(01:51:02):
It's an interesting point because the that you brought up The first time I was meeting with not the first time.
It was the the the event that, the design of the 4 phases of the moon that was created.
I had said to Bruce, who was sitting across the table, I said, look.
When people went to space back then or beyond Earth, there was a risk.

(01:51:24):
There was a gamble.
And I said, we don't know if we send 8 astronauts or 8 individuals up to the moon, whatever their role is.
They could be functionally just a, whatever their functional role is, that 7 of them don't return.
And he didn't have a reaction in that point at that point yet.
I said, that's how explorers managed to do things back then that they don't do the same way today.

(01:51:49):
And one of the challenges we do face in what we're designing is safety concerns.
Yep.
So Yeah.
Well, that's changed in a way to less, risk, and making it more difficult for for discoveries and and, you know, people wanna fly to Mars, but

(01:52:10):
But there's a there's an irony when you say risk.
There is an irony in risk.
I was a competitive ski racer.
I did I was competitive in a few different areas.
What we do today risk wise when it comes to skiing, what we do risk wise in terms of sports, what we do risk wise in terms of so many things that are personally people jumping off.

(01:52:34):
I mean, when we grew up, if someone jumped off a pool into a pool, they were jumping off a single story home.
They're not jumping off of a 2 or 3 story home.
People today are much more risk, more willing to take risks on recreational.
Mhmm.
But we've taken that same risk factor out of this other equation, which is Yep.

(01:52:57):
Changing the future.
So Right.
Interesting.
I mean, basically, the the story was about natural risks that we're facing and that we mostly can't do much about.
You know, if you have a large asteroid or a comet hits the earth, there's very little we can do.
Yes.
That that's the and I think that goes to some people's belief that we have to be multi planetary so that we can avoid that one, extinction level event.

(01:53:28):
So well, Christian, thank you.
This was absolutely fantastic.
I learned a lot, and I I picked up things that I had, made me rethink some of my own historical comments, which are thoughts which I've said.
So I wanna take everybody I wanna thank everybody else out there who had taken time out of their day to listen in, and we both personally hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

(01:53:57):
Once again, Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we're looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations, the paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
And there's a website, www.projectmoonhot.org.
Top right hand corner, you see some videos.

(01:54:19):
You can learn some more.
And we will have a new website coming out probably within the next, month and a half to 2 months.
We've been working on it heavily for quite some time.
Christian, what is the single best way to connect to you?
I would say usually email.
My you can Google me very easily, but my email is christian.coberel@univie.ac.at.

(01:54:46):
Well, thank you very much.
And for everybody out there, we'd love to connect with you.
You can reach me personally at david@moonhut.org.
You can connect to us at Twitter project at at project moon hut.
If you want me personally, it's at goldsmith.
We're on LinkedIn.
We're on Facebook and, Instagram, so you have a means to be able to reach out to us.

(01:55:07):
That said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.
Hello, everybody.
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into ages.
You personally have just lived to experience the information age and what a ride it's been.
Now consider that you may right now be living through a transitional age into the age of infinite, an age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which were made possible through a construct where the moon and earth, as we call it, Mearth, will create a new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into this infinite future.
The ingredients for an amazing phi sci sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.
This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation.
We look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, we were named by NASA, to the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on Earth to improve why we live on Earth for all species.
If you're interested in knowing more, you can go to www.projectmoonhot.org.
And in the top right hand corner, there are several videos that you may be able to watch.
Now on to our program.
Today, we're going to be exploring a fantastic topic, transcending and understanding the effects of extraterrestrial events.
We have with us Christian Koberel, who is a professor of impact research and planetary geology at the University of Vienna, Austria.
He's been the director general of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and he is best known for his research on meteorite impact craters.
I've how are you, Christian?
I'm okay.
Thank you.
Good.
As always, we do a very brief introduction.
But yet at one point about several months ago, someone said, it's amazing how much research, David, you do for all of these podcasts.
And I said to them, I think I need to add something to the beginning of our podcast.
First of all, I don't know anything about what the guest is going to be talking about.
So let me share with you the process.
A guest is selected.
We have a conversation to see if that guest is an appropriate guest.
They end up watching some videos, the same videos that you are able to watch, and we decide and we work on developing a topic.
And then if the topic is good, we create a title.
This could take upward the longest, took over 4 hours just to create the title, finding what we wanted to talk about.
Then we're done.
Christian goes on his way.
He doesn't talk to me anytime in between.
I do absolutely no research.
The only thing I do is today or yesterday, I took out a piece of paper, 12 of them, and at the top, I put the title of the program, Christian's name.
That's it.
They're blank.
I don't know where he's going with it.
We then turn off we we meet.
We review the process.
We turn off the cameras, and now you and I, you as the guest, are gonna be learning along with me from Christian.
So I have just as much knowledge about this topic as you do.
So, Christian, do you have an outline for us?
Well, yeah.
Sort of.
Okay.
Well, let let me hear it, and I will write it down on these 12 pages.
So we're talking about basically what we can learn from studying terrestrial environments and and rocks, what we can learn about astrophysical remains.
So our place in the universe, basically.
So the first topic that I wanna talk about is impacts and what they tell us about kind of our neighborhood in the solar system.
Okay.
Next.
The next topic is bigger events, that are recorded in in Earth, rocks.
What can we learn about supernova, for example, nearby?
Those are big star explosions.
Next.
And then, you probably have heard of solar flares and solar eruptions that can cause a lot of damage, not only on the Earth, but also to our technology.
And is there any way how we can learn about past events again from studying rocks Okay.
And other things on earth?
Is there another?
And then the final one for me would be to kind of bring that all into perspective.
What do we kind of learn about our place in the solar system in the universe?
What do we learn about by studying the past?
What can we say about the future and the effects that these extraterrestrial events might have on us, on earth, on the humans?
Okay.
Perfect.
That's a great list.
So let's start off with the first one, impacts and what what we can learn, what they tell us.
So impacts.
Impacts are, something that is actually fairly common in the solar system.
Fortunately, not so common that, we have seen any big impacts on Earth.
But if you look at the moon, you see the results of impacts.
Lots of big circular features there, craters, but also the big mare.
And in recent history, we are old enough to remember that, of course.
In 1994, there was a comet that got too close to planet Jupiter, which is the largest planet in the solar system.
And the kind of the the comet, the nucleus of the comet got ripped to pieces, and each of those pieces was something like, the kilometer in diameter.
And one after the other, these pieces in the summer of 1994 hit the surface of Jupiter.
Now Jupiter doesn't have a solid rocky surface like our moon or Mars or the Earth.
It has a very, very dense atmosphere.
And so what you see is kind of a big blob in the atmosphere that disappears with time in a few weeks or a month.
But what was interesting to see, and people could see that on television because telescopes were following that all the time, and there was a spacecraft nearby that synced by pictures, of these impact effects from Jupiter to the Earth.
And what we could see is that each one of those, about kilometer size, pieces of rock and ice that hit Jupiter left a huge cloud about the diameter, the size of the Earth.
Real?
That large.
That was what, you know, everybody was really surprised about.
But, basically so a very small object because they hit the surface at very high velocity, they they create a huge effect there.
Now on a solid body, of course, the effect is not quite as huge.
So about a kilometer diameter rocky body that hits, say, the surface of the moon or the earth will make a crater that is about 20 times bigger than the impacting object, but still, I mean, that's pretty big.
So if you have a 1 kilometer diameter rock that hits the surface of the Earth, the result is a crater that is about 20 kilometers in diameter.
So What was just you probably what's the you might talk about it later, but what's the size of the, the rock that hit the earth that made the dinosaurs go extinct.
We'll come back to that.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, I can I can tell you?
It's 10 about 10 kilometers.
Okay.
Actually, that story features prominently, in a few minutes.
Okay.
No worries.
It's just come in about It It came to mind because I'm saying, okay.
If that's the size, that's fair that's a that's that's not I I'm thinking of this mushroom cloud going up, and then I'm saying, well, then how big was that other?
So okay.
10:10 kilometers to 1.
From from the study of that actual impact, or how we even got to know that there was an impact, we we we kind of learned a lot.
But let me lead to that.
We will get there in a few minutes.
So, anyway, I was just saying, you know, so if you look at the surface of the moon, for example, you have lots and lots of craters.
And, what we kind of have to realize is that people back then when they first saw these craters on the moon, they did not know that they were formed by impact.
Because on earth, craters can form through a large variety of geological processes.
Maybe the most common one is volcanism.
Volcanism causes craters of different types and shapes and sizes.
And, when, for example, Galileo Galilei in 1610 published his first observations of the surface of the moon through a telescope, he described craters, but he didn't know how they formed.
And other scientists around that time, a little later, they all said, oh, well, we have plenty of volcanoes in Italy.
There's Vesuvius, there's Etna, but then there's also the Campi Fregre, which are Calderas and so on.
And, and so they knew volcanoes and so similar features.
They look similar.
And it was interesting that in 1664, 65 approximately, And, English scientist, Robert Hooke, published a book in which he described various experiments.
So, you know, these people were polymath back then.
He was looking through a microscope, and he discovered the cell, and he did other things.
And he made an experiment where he took rocks and threw them on a muddy surface with high force.
And he said, well, the resulting, indentions, they they look actually like craters of the moon on the moon.
So it could be that something fell on the moon, but he said that's probably not very likely because as we know and that's you know, he's speaking 1664.
Yeah.
As we know, the space between the planets is empty, and that was what people knew in 1664.
I I just I just finished Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci.
So I'm I've I'm in this time zone already, and it's amazing the types of experiments these individuals have done to figure out everything.
And I I'm trying to go back in my mind to think about what it would be like to have not to not know that the moon was, deformed or changed through impacts.
I it's it's an amazing thing to think that that was not common knowledge.
Well, I mean, that's because and people can say, well, you know, who he had the right answer, but he threw it out.
Well, because, that was the knowledge of the time.
Yeah.
Minor planets or asteroids were not known yet.
The first minor planet was discovered, about a 135, 136 years later in 1801.
Meteorites were not known at the time to be of extraterrestrial origin.
Many people thought that goes back even to to, the Greeks and so on.
They thought those are concretions that form in the Earth's atmosphere either from distant volcanoes or something similar to hailstones.
Hailstones.
So they they assume that all of those would have formed because of the way the Earth shoots up volcanoes.
So, therefore, the only way that they can have that is the dissimilar thing.
That makes sense.
So this is what people thought for a long time.
And only at the beginning of 19th century did people realize through measurements that meteorites actually come from outer space, from outside the earth.
Nobody knew that.
But so Robert Hooke, basically, he have in a way, he he he made an experiment, and his interpretation was constricted by the knowledge of the time.
Yep.
And so he didn't make a wild speculation.
He actually concluded something on the basis of what he knew.
Yeah.
And so I don't think anybody can fault him for that.
No.
I think I think it's actually amazing that
But this is how science works.
Yeah?
Yeah.
He he actually came
up with an experiment.
I mean, he did something, and he analyzed it.
And the conclusion was not correct, but the approach to solving it was.
Yeah.
He
it's fascinating that
And I find it fascinating too because it kind of tells us I think it tells us 2 very important things.
First of all, it tells us how science works.
It works through experiment, interpretation, but we're constrict constrained by what we know.
What we know about us, the world, the universe, and so on.
What do we know about physics, chemistry, etcetera?
And we constantly learn more, and that leads to new interpretations, of course.
And the second thing I think is important that we learn here is the importance of of history.
We learn from history.
We learn, and we can say, okay.
This was tried, that was tried, and now, you know, now we know more, and now we can make more and better interpretations.
So that's why I think these stories are kind of interesting and important.
Yeah.
Very much so.
Okay.
So Go ahead.
Me continue with the story about of the impacts here.
So how we know?
Okay.
So as I said, in 17th century, nobody really knew that, impacts were the ones shaping the craters on the moon and the surface of the moon.
And, of course, nobody was even thinking about the Earth because you didn't see so many craters on the Earth.
And if you did see any, well, most of them were volcanoes.
So let's fast forward a a few 100 years and go to the beginning of 20th century.
At the beginning of 20th century, there was a relatively young mining zone.
Because you made a comment, so I wanna make sure I didn't miss something.
You said they didn't realize that meteorites came from an external source until 19th century.
How did they what what was the what was the who who came up with this concept that it was?
And or because it sounds like we're missing it.
We go to 20th.
Well, okay.
So, meteorites, were observed to fall, of course, all the time.
But as I said, you know, people thought they were thrown out from volcanoes far away or just, condensed in the atmosphere.
Okay.
It
so what was necessary was that somebody, not just one person, but several people observe a meteorite or several meteorites to fall so they can reconstruct their path through the atmosphere and see where it came from actually.
And this happened at the beginning of 19th century.
There was a large meteorite fall, several meteorites.
Meteorite broke up into several pieces, but so several meteorites, you know, big fireballs on the sky were observed in Northern France, and it was such a huge event that many, many rocks fell down.
It was such a big event that the French Academy of Sciences sent a young mathematician and astronomer, from Paris to investigate.
The guy's name was Biot.
And, he interviewed lots of people and basically had a lot of eyewitness reports and that helped him to reconstruct the trajectory of various meteorites in the atmosphere.
And because he had, for each of those, various observers that were in different points on the earth, he could triangulate, basically.
So each person said, okay.
I see I saw this meteorite, this big fireball in front of the background of these and these and these stars, and somebody else on a little slightly different angle.
And if you have at least 3 positions from which you observe, you can actually reconstruct the trajectory.
And it turned out, whoops, it comes at very high speed, and it comes from outside the atmosphere.
So this was the first time, there was basically a measurement, so to say, that showed us that meteorites came from outside the atmosphere and not from any nearby volcano or something like that.
So there were other investigations then during 19th century, but that, you know, concerns small bodies.
Yep.
And so by the end of 19th century, basically, everybody or even by the middle of 19th century, everybody in science and then whatever, they they agreed.
So okay.
Meteorites, you know, these small, fist size or or baseball size objects that fall down.
Okay.
They come from outer space.
But nobody made the connection to craters yet.
Okay.
And that's kind of the next important step.
So that's the 20th century.
Yeah.
And this is now where we get into the 20th century.
Now there's a crater, that has been known, of course, but, again, people didn't know how it formed, that is not far from Flagstaff that is a little bit, east of Flagstaff.
And now we know it under the name media creator or under the name of the person who first studied it.
It's Beringer Crater because there was this young mining engineer, Daniel Morrow Beringer, who had heard that around this crater, which by the way back then was called Coon Butte, because, obviously, there was lots of coons that were sending themselves in the rim of the crater.
But, anyway, so he had heard that around that crater, people had found a few years earlier, big chunks of iron that turned out to be iron meteorites.
Well, by big, I mean, also the the biggest one is maybe the size of a of a big suitcase or something like that, you know, but most of them small.
So lots of fragments of ion meteorites found around that crater.
And interestingly enough, at that time, the boss of the US Geological Survey, the scientific director, sent somebody to investigate to see if that crater might have been formed by, these meteorites.
And the conclusion was, well, probably not because there's lots of volcanic craters nearby.
There are volcanic sunset crater, for example, is close by.
That's a volcano not far away, few kilometers away.
So it concluded maybe it was kind of a gas explosion crater.
But bearing our thought a few years later, I said, that that sounds strange.
His opinion was that in fact, there is an even larger piece of the meteorite and what is found around the crater is just little fragments.
And the big main meteorite that made the crater is still buried underneath the crater floor.
And what he want to do is he wanted to drill into that and then mine it out because iron meteorites contain not just iron and some nickel, but they also contain fairly large amounts of, like, the platinum group elements.
Those are elements that are rare on the surface of the earth, but are much more common in meteorites, in all types in almost all types of meteorites.
Even most stony meteorites have abundances of platinum group elements and other rare metals.
Rare
metals.
I'm gonna I'm gonna push it.
One of the stories I had heard about very early in project Moon Nut's journey, because I have not been a person who's engaged in the beyond Earth ecosystem at all, was that, I did learn about this platinum and that someone had or data that I had found, I don't know where it was.
I can't remember today.
They said that for every 100, meteorites that have hit the moon, 3 of them each have more platinum in them than we've used in the entire history of humankind.
Well, I I can't redo that calculation.
But it but it was amazing that the data was that there's so much platinum, and Yep.
We we look
Basically, you know, so there's not just platinum, but there's the so called platinum group elements, which are 6 elements that are all similar.
There's also palladium and rhodium and osmium and iridium and and and platinum, of course.
Well, well, my
similar chemically, very similar elements.
But in meteorites
Well, so let me just let me so
So I'm 1,000 more abundant than in rocks and mirrors.
So that's Okay.
That's it.
That's it.
There's a more there's so that platinum on a meteor is so there's so much as relative to what we would find on Earth that we mine platinum out of ancient meteorites.
No.
No?
No.
No?
That that would be going a little too far.
Okay.
No.
The point is that, of course, if you look at a meteorite, a stony meteorite, then what you have is basically the building the rim the remnant.
Meteorites are fragments of asteroids, and asteroids are basically what is left over from the formation of the solar system.
So Earth, the moon, Mars, Venus, everything formed by lots and lots of rocks that were thrown together early 4 and a half 1000000000 years ago.
And some of those rocks are left, and they are the meteorites or the asteroids.
If you Okay.
If an asteroid breaks up, you have a meteorite.
Okay.
So that's kind of so what we when we study meteorites, their composition is very similar to the composition of the bulk Earth.
Now the keyword here is bulk.
Because Earth is a huge planet and it's hot in the interior, it's segregated.
The metal went to the core, and the rocky bits are on the outside.
And so the Earth as a whole has a huge amount of platinum, iridium, osmium, whatever else, but it is irregularly distributed.
So it's all almost all in the core of the earth, and there's very little left at the crust, basically, at the surface.
So this is why when a meteorite falls down, it has a 100,000 times more platinum, iridium, osmium, whatever than the Earth crust.
Okay.
But the Earth as a whole is plenty.
Right.
That that's
the Earth
That's great.
Thank you.
Ores.
Thank you.
So we can mine these ores.
Yep.
And that's what we've been doing.
And it's still a lot cheaper to mine the ores on the earth than to fly to an asteroid and try to mine out the platinum and iridium there.
Yeah.
So that won't happen anytime in the near future as far as
I'm concerned.
It's the crust that has minimal amount of platinum on it.
But when you get one of these meteorites, you're talking a 100 times more platinum.
100000 times.
100 100000 times more platinum.
Wow.
However,
it's still not very much.
It's still like a 1,000 of a percent, you know, or something like that.
So very little in in total.
So that's the point, but still a lot more than on the earth surface.
Yep.
That's what we need to compare.
Yep.
I get it.
I part of the story
Yeah.
As well later on in a few minutes.
That'll be important for the story because this is where the dinosaurs will come in.
So hold on a few minutes.
That's okay.
I'm I'm I'm always if you listen to podcast, I ask a lot of questions and we go on tangents.
So great.
Of course.
Otherwise, it get boring.
Just me talking.
Yeah.
Anyway, so this guy, Barringer, you know, so he thought back in 1905, he thought, well, there's a big meteorite buried underneath the surface of the crater floor.
The the one that made that big crater, the crater is about little over a kilometer in diameter.
And, he was gonna mine it out because it has all these rare metals, and he'll get rich from that.
That was the theory.
Because at that time, nobody actually knew how craters formed from meteorite impact, That was a hypothesis, but, unfortunately, it turned out that was not really the case.
Because what he did not know, but which was developed the the the understanding of what happens when a large asteroid or meteorite hits the surface of the earth was only the first publications that only came out in the 19 tens 19 twenties.
And what these people, there were 3 2 or 3 separate groups of people who were working on these things.
And what they basically said or calculated was because an asteroid hits the surface of the Earth at such high speed.
Those of us who still remember from physics, from school, the equation for a kinetic energy, which is 1 half times the mass times velocity squared.
So if you have something traveling at high velocity and you square that, a huge amount of energy is being released at that point.
I I did do the physic I did do the physics.
I don't remember it.
So
it's a simple equation, but Yes.
Half of the mass times the velocity squared, that's kinetic energy.
So, anyway, so that means you have a a a a body coming from outer space, And because that's the way how celestial mechanic works, they encounter the earth with a velocity of somewhere between 10 70 kilometers per second.
So that is fast.
Yes.
And you take that velocity and you square it.
So a huge amount of energy is being released within a split second, and that leads to something like an explosion, and that forms the crater.
And people didn't realize that earlier on.
This is why no one made the connection with all the craters on the moon and everywhere else, because nobody understood how much energy is really involved.
And that brings us back to the point that I made a little bit earlier, how much larger the resulting crater is compared to the impacting body.
And so in this case, a kilometer size crater was actually made by an ion meteorite only about 50 meters in diameter.
So like a big house.
So his interpretation would be it would be a kilometer wide, but it's actually a lot smaller.
So he had the right idea just like Hooke, you know, basically back then.
Barringer had the right idea.
It was an impact, but he grossly overestimated the size of the body that made a crater like that because, again, he didn't know that the physics that made us kind of understand what happened during an impact was only developed 10, 20 years later.
And so then it was kind of clear that these little fragments of ion meteorites, well, they were just the little pieces that kind of came off the object before it hit the ground.
But the main object, 95 or 98% of the object, when it hit the ground, and this the next thing what happens is because of that enormous amount of energy, the meteorite or asteroid, whatever you wanna call it, that hits the ground is more or less not just broken to pieces, but it's vaporized.
So it's it's gone.
Mhmm.
And it's small because it is the huge energy that makes the crater in in the first place.
So this is where Beringer kind of was right and wrong at the same time, but, of course, you learn in a way by doing.
So so No.
He was not
If I was to take a jump and I'm thinking about the moon, because there's no atmosphere, there's no vaporization, there's no explosion.
It would be more like the mud.
Right?
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No?
The the atmosphere is actually irrelevant in this case.
Okay.
Hitting the circuit the object that hits the surface, it vaporizes because it gets so hot.
It
does the same thing on the moon then?
Of course.
The same thing on the moon.
And even better because even smaller objects are not in the earth atmosphere.
Small objects like meteorite size, you know, if you say centimeters to maybe a meter in diameter, they will be slowed down by the atmosphere.
Yeah.
But they won't make a crater at the end because by the time they hit the surface, they're too slow.
Yep.
If the big objects that basically they a kilometer, an object that's a 100 meters in diameter, it says, poof, the atmosphere.
I don't care.
Poof.
I'm through it already.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Mhmm.
And then hits
the surface of the ground with almost the same speed, as it was traveling in space.
On the moon, even an object a centimeter in diameter is not slowed down, but will hit the surface and make it greater than 20 centimeters in diameter.
Okay.
Yep.
So and the object itself, because of the high speed at which it travels and the enormous amount of energy is being released, will go will get so hot that it's vaporized.
So if you take any anything, if you take a rock and heat it up, atmosphere or not around, doesn't matter, it will vaporize.
It will turn into vapor.
Everything turns into vapor.
Ion turns into vapor at high temperature.
So it's, it's just the temperature.
It's not
what it's called.
That's the chemistry.
That's the chemistry side of it.
Part of physics, actually, in this case.
Yeah.
But it's not chemistry when you're doing reactions?
Yeah.
The chemistry is when you have reactions.
But if you just heat something up, it's just physics.
Oh, okay.
I'm trying to remember back of where I was to I took this in university and hey.
Look at we were I was in the stone age when I tell you this.
Anyway, so this is what happened at the beginning, the early decades of 20th century.
Yeah.
People finally started to understand what happens during an impact event.
Huge amount of energy, high temperatures, the object that comes in is vaporized, and because of the explosion and the shock waves and everything, it makes a crater that is about 20 times in diameter.
Now people still did not some people still did not think that this was something that happened a lot because if you look around on Earth, well, how many craters do you actually know?
How many craters do you see?
Not that many.
And on the moon, well, there is plenty.
And still astronomers, even into the first half of the 20th century, they were still thinking, well, most of those craters probably are of volcanic origin.
And it really took more and more studies.
And finally, the investigation of the moon from from space, from satellites, and bringing back rocks that convinced everybody that, really, those are all impact craters.
So more or less, every crater we see on the surface of the moon is an impact crater.
And we see on the moon so many more impact craters than on the surface of the Earth for two main reasons.
The first reason is that on Earth, all the craters that form and there are as many craters forming on the surface of the Earth as do on the surface of the moon because we're sitting in the same area of the solar system and the same number of big objects hit the surface of the moon and the Earth.
But on Earth, we have a lot of active geology going on.
There is erosion going on through the atmosphere, through the water.
There is no water.
There's no atmosphere in the moon, so that doesn't change anything.
If you look at mountains and not just the impacrated mountains, they are eroded away.
The Appalachian Mountains, for example, 900000000 years ago, were as tall and as big as the Himalaya is now.
So, that is how wear and tear more or less wears down the rocks on the surface of the earth.
So you have an impact created forms, but within relatively short time because of plate tectonics, because of volcanism, because of erosion, it is either covered up or kind of sand blasted, eroded away through the action of water and and wind and and atmosphere and so on.
So that's why we don't see too many on the Earth.
And the second thing is that the the moon, also shows all the impacts all the way back basically to its formation because the moon hasn't been geologically active for a long time.
So we have many more recorded in the moon or many more preserved, let's say, on the moon than we would have on the surface of the Earth.
So this is why even in the second half of the twentyth century, many even geologists didn't think that impact cratering is something all that important on the surface of the Earth, but in fact, it is.
And so now here we come to the story of the dinosaurs.
And this is what everybody is interested in, of course, is dinosaurs and how did they disappear from the surface of the Earth.
And that was kind of known for a long time to paleontologists, the dinosaurs.
They all just disappeared about 65000000 years ago, and it was not only the dinosaurs that disappeared, but many, many other species just disappeared, plants, other animals, etcetera.
And, about over 70% of all species that lived on the surface of the Earth back then were made extinct suddenly.
Yeah.
And this is what paleontologists knew for a long time, but nobody knew why.
And so here was an interesting hypothesis that was published around 1970.
There was a couple of of scientists who said, well, maybe there was a nearby supernova explosion.
And the extreme radiation from that supernova explosion, a lot of hard X rays and gamma rays and and all kinds of nasty stuff that would hit the surface of the atmosphere of the Earth, and, that could cause the extinction of, of a large group of animals within a very short time.
Yeah.
Possible.
But you need to find evidence for it.
And so a little bit later, about 10 years later, there were, some, American scientists, led by Walter Alvarez, who is now at the University of Berkeley.
Back then, he was at Lamont, and then moving to Berkeley, but he worked with his father who was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Louis Alvarez.
And what they were interested in was actually something different.
They didn't.
They were not really that interested in the dinosaurs at that time, but they wanted to know kind of how long does it take for certain rocks to be deposited.
Because a lot of rocks that we have now that form mountains were actually deposited on Earth and ocean floors, small little bits and pieces of of of rock flour accumulating on the ground.
And it's interesting to kind of know how long does it take if you stand in front of a big rock, face and you have a 100 meters of rocks there.
You say, did they take 10000 years or 10,000,000 years or a 100000000 years for these rocks to be deposited from the bottom to the top?
And so they were working on that, and they were studying rocks that were of the age of the Cretaceous, which is what is before 65000000 years old.
And then the rocks afterwards at the time, they had the name tertiary rocks.
Mhmm.
In between these two rock units, there is a thin layer of clay minerals, interestingly enough.
So that's something altered.
That there was something before, but difficult to know what it was before.
But there was only, like, a centimeter or 2 thick, the layer.
And they were doing some chemical analysis, and what they wanted to do is they u they wanted to use the influx of extraterrestrial dust, which rains down small tiny little dust rains, rain down permanently on the surface of the Earth.
And because coming back to what we just discussed a few minutes ago, extraterrestrial dust contains a lot of platinum group elements compared to the surface of the earth.
So you can use platinum group elements as like a proxy as a as a as an indicator how much extraterrestrial dust was accumulating on the surface of the Earth.
If you have very little extraterrestrial dust in a particular rock, that means it is highly diluted.
So that means it came down relatively it was it was acute the rock was accumulating relatively fast.
If you have a lot of extraterrestrial material in a particular rock, that means that rock was accumulating very slowly.
So it could accumulate a lot of extraterrestrial material in there.
And this was all and this is this is ubiquitous.
You found this all over the world.
Your Earth, I'm assuming.
Everywhere.
Yes.
Everywhere.
Yep.
Everywhere and and every age.
You know?
Because the exothermic dust rains down all the time.
Yep.
Anyway, so, they were trying to measure and because platinum itself is not so easy to measure, the element iridium is easier to measure, but it's the same.
You know?
It comes down with the same, extras, so they were measuring the amount of the iridium in normal rock units, to may to kind of try to determine how fast did they form.
And by chance, they also included that very thin layer of rocks between the cretaceous age rocks and the tertiary age rocks.
And what they found in there was a huge surprise.
They found a lot of iridium in there, a huge amount of iridium, which would have meant basically that there is a lot of extraterrestrial dust in there, which could have meant that that rock is this thin layer was deposited very, very slowly over a period of maybe 10,000,000 years or 20,000,000 years, but that's impossible because the rocks above and below, there's other ways to date them too.
Yeah.
Actually, that layer must have deposited relatively fast.
So there was a contradiction here.
Now then they thought, hey.
Wait a minute.
That layer, that's the actual layer that indicates where the dinosaurs become extinct.
So maybe that measurement of the high iridium tells us something about how the dinosaurs became extinct.
Now one possibility would have been that maybe that supernova hypothesis that was published 10 years earlier, there's something to it because maybe the iridium could have come from a nearby supernova, but then you would also have to find a relatively large amount of plutonium.
There's a particular plutonium isotope that is formed also in supernova explosions, and it has the mass 244, so it's called plutonium 244.
Yep.
And so they tried to find plutonium in their little rock sample from that little layer in between the cretaceous and the tertiary rocks.
We call it the cretaceous tertiary boundary, and they didn't find any plutonium in there.
And so they said, okay.
So it's not a supernova.
So where else could it come from?
Well, an impact.
Asteroids, like we know from meteorites, contain a lot of iridium and platinum and everything else.
So then they measured all the other platinum group elements as well, their abundances, and what they found was that the relative abundances, so the abundance ratios of these elements relative to each other were identical to what has been measured in meteorites.
And so they concluded, they said, a large asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter to explain all the amount of Iridium found around the earth could explain what happened at the end of the Cretaceous 65000000 years ago, and the environmental effects from that impact was enough to alter the climate and lots of other things on the surface of the Earth that leads then to the extinction of the dinosaurs and of all the other species that went extinct around that time.
So if I get this straight and I never had thought about it this way, I well, if I was to make an assumption based upon what I think I would have thought about, I would have thought that they had found a crater and then did it backwards.
But what what it sounds like and you tell me if I'm wrong.
It sounds like what happened was they've this made this discovery, and then they said, where did this thing hit?
And then they searched for it.
It was the opposite that I would have thought.
Precisely.
And you're you're entirely correct.
And this is what, of course, threw a lot of people off.
Yeah.
They didn't see it.
They found it in this little layer, and now they're saying where on the planet is this?
Because when you think about it, if you have an impact that's large enough, a lot of material is thrown into the atmosphere and then comes down all over the Earth.
You need a large impact for that.
And so that was, of course, the idea.
You find these layers of boundary rock between cretaceous and tertiary age rocks, aged 65000000 years.
You find them all over the planet.
There are these rock units in rock sections where you find this boundary everywhere around the world.
You find them in in the US.
You find them in Canada.
You find them in New Zealand.
You find them in Spain, in Italy, in Austria, in in India.
You know?
Wherever you wanna look at, where we have rocks of that age, you'll find that boundary layer.
And in that boundary layer, everywhere around the world, you will find high amounts of these extraterrestrial metals.
Cool.
So that was the status 1980.
In no way, that was known, indeed, at that time.
Wow.
Okay.
They published that paper in the journal science, and it caused a huge sensation,
of course.
Yep.
And it was the reaction was quite interesting because remember I said that even in the second half of the twentyth century, a lot of people working in the geosciences had never heard of impacts before.
So here was a group of people, a geologist, 2 chemists, and a Nobel Prize winner in physics that postulated that one of the most significant episodes, in Earth history, namely the extinction of the dinosaurs, was caused by the extraterrestrial event.
Many people thought that was the famous deus ex machina solution, something invoking something extraterrestrial when there were perfectly good terrestrial causes, to cause extinctions.
Maybe yes, but none of these terrestrial causes would explain the extraterrestrial platinum group elements Right.
In these samples around the world.
Mhmm.
This is what these guys found, and this is where they based their they they basically made a measurement and said, okay.
We don't find plutonium, so it can't be a supernova, but we do find all these other things.
So the best explanation for that is an impact because we know that meteorites carry all these elements in there.
And, of course, then mainly paleontologists, they said, impact, never heard of.
What nonsense.
Yeah?
On the other hand, mineralogists and geochemists, people who have, let's say let's not forget it's 1980.
These people have been studying lunar rocks that were brought back to the earth from 1969 onwards.
And they said, oh, that's interesting.
That's a reasonable explanation.
Great measurements, great interpretation.
So in the geosciences, there was this kind of divide from people who have been working on geochemistry and mineralogy and maybe have been working on lunar rocks.
And, of course, mineralogist also work on meteorites, and they said, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
We understand that.
Make make sense.
Logical.
Makes sense.
What's fascinating to me and this is it's 1980.
Yeah.
It's Not
that long ago.
It's not that long ago.
I I had this impression in my mind that and I graduated from from, the American High School, went to university in 81, is that this has been around for a very long time, and it's obviously not.
So I'm I'm kinda shocked at how how new this is.
This is this is, going back to Hook and and his experiment.
It's almost that realization of something.
Wow.
I would've I would've if you had asked me that question and I had would've won a a €1,000,000, I would've lost a €1,000,000.
Oh, pity we didn't.
So and, indeed, you know, a lot of the people who were skeptical said, well, you have an interesting story here, but there must be a huge crater somewhere.
So where is it?
And, of course, no crater was known at the time, and it's also interesting.
In 1980, less than a 100 craters had been identified as of meteorite origin on the surface of the Earth.
Today, we know a little more than 200 craters.
So even that, you know, that is not a large number.
If you look at the surface of the moon and you see millions of impact craters, that's because on the earth, they are eroded away or covered up.
That's the point.
Yeah.
So people were saying, okay.
Maybe.
Yeah.
But where's the crater?
Now there was a very interesting measurement that was made about 4 years later, and that was when a researcher named Bruce Bohor who worked for the US geological survey.
He found in the same boundary layers around the world, he made a mineralogical study.
So these guys made a chemical study basically or geochemical study.
But this guy looked at what minerals are in there, and what he found was tiny little quartz crystals that had a very strange phenomenon that you would not normally see in quartz crystals.
They had some lamellae that cross when you look at it under the microscope, very high magnification microscope.
These quartz crystals were crisscrossed by lamellae, and these lamellae were known only to form during impact on Earth.
What is lamellae?
What is lamellae?
A lamellae is basically if you just imagine a quartz crystal that has, like, Venetian blinds over that's.
Yeah.
Yep.
So, basically, lines that cross that crystal.
And these lines, they form they're actually planes that go because what we do is make a thin section of the rock.
So it looks like 2 dimensional, but in fact, three-dimensional.
You can do it in the electron microscope too, and then you see 3 dimensions.
So you see planes, that go through it.
When you look at that from just in a cup, then it looks like lamellic.
Anyway, so this form because of the high shock pressure during an impact in it.
Now pressure in shock pressure is not necessarily the same thing.
When you take a pressure, you apply a pressure long term.
If you put your your hand down on the surface of the table and press down, that's pressure.
But if you only hit the surface of the table for a split second and then withdraw again, that would be shock.
So you still have the shock, the high pressure, but only for a split second, and that makes a little difference in the effects.
So in this case, we have known from known impact craters on Earth like that one in in, in in in Arizona near Flagstaff that quartz crystals, when they are subjected to a very brief high pressure shock effect, they form these interesting lamellae, but nowhere else.
So if you have any static pressure, like you have, when you have rocks that are subjected to high pressure deeper in the earth, or even if you have a volcanic eruption that is not of high pressure enough, they don't form.
You know?
The quartz crystals look just the same as they normally look.
And so this this guy, this mineralogist, he said, in these rocks that form the tertiary boundary around the world, we don't only see the high amount of extraterrestrial material in their platinum metals, but also we have evidence for shock, and that forms only when a big meteorite hits the surface of the earth on earth.
So this was published also in science, and he found that all over the world in all these rocks.
And, of course, other people confirmed that they found it too.
And so now was even more evidence that there was an impact demand, but still, where the heck is the crater?
And that took some more investigating.
And, of course, you can then look and say, okay.
If you had an impact somewhere, if you get closer, it's the same with volcanoes, of course.
If you have an an impact or anything else that throws stuff out from a crater and deposits it somewhere else, the closer you are to the source, the thicker the deposit will be.
And the farther away you go, the thinner it will be.
Yeah.
So that boundary layer all around the world, no matter if you look, as I said, in in Spain, in New Zealand, in Austria, in South Africa, is maybe 1 or 2 centimeters thick.
Only if you get to the southern part of the US and the Caribbean, it gets to be maybe 10, 20, 30 centimeters thick.
So, basically, We're getting close to the place where the impact might have happened.
And then in, geophysical studies, people found a circular anomaly underneath the surface on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
And there was the circular anomaly about 200 kilometers across, but it was covered on the surface by about 1 kilometer thick layer of younger rocks.
So that structure was not directly accessible, but the Mexican oil company Pemex had been drilling exploration wells in that area before already in the 19 sixties.
And people now went back to the these these rocks
There would be.
Okay.
And they found that in that structure, actually, there were a few drill cores taken.
And then they looked at them and they said, here it is.
There's the equipment.
So I can imagine I can imagine the people at Pemex saying, wait.
Wait.
Wait.
We we still have the core samples.
Right.
And they're running back saying, I I can't believe it because there many of them will be geologists, and they lay them out, and there it is.
I can imagine that happening.
That was kind of a spectacular thing that happened in the early nineties only.
So, really, only 30 years ago.
So it took over 10 years when the evidence was already there that there was an impact to go around and say, hey.
Where is it?
Or where was it?
And now we know.
And now this structure has been studied in great detail and drilled and drilled by scientific organizations and so on.
So now we know very well.
There is the crater.
It's 200 kilometers in diameter.
It was the largest impact event of the last, at least, 100, 150000000 years on earth, and it had devastating consequences.
And so, you know, I find this this whole story really interesting because of the many links that there are.
That, you know, first of all, you find something, a hint of something, but you actually start looking because you had the idea there might have been a supernova explosion.
But then when you get look at the data as something totally different Yeah.
Then you don't find the source of that for another 10 years.
People who who have studied lunar rocks were the first to accept the hypothesis and so on and so forth.
Now never mind.
There are still a few people out there even in the geosciences, that say now it was not the impact.
It was some volcanism in India that happened around the same time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was volcanism in India, but it happened spread out over a much longer period of time, and that doesn't, of course, eject platinum group elements that are extraterrestrial.
There's by the way, not just the abundances that help us understand that there's extraterrestrial material in there, but there's also isotopes isotopic ratios of some of these elements that are different between terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials.
And clearly, the osmium, for example, or chromium in that boundary layer, there is extraterrestrial material, love extraterrestrial material in there.
So we know how much there was.
We know there was an impact from the shock minerals and all these things.
So this is basically 99.9% of all scientists now accept that there are a few people who, I guess, I don't know what their motivations really are.
But
Some people don't see things.
Yeah.
Some people just have their own ideas.
Yep.
They have their own ideas.
We'll leave it at that.
But, anyway, so that's kind of the story.
Wow.
And what I just wanna conclude that part with, if there was the longest part.
You know, the other two parts are shorter.
Yep.
That's okay.
3.
This was great because my my through through my journey with Project Moon, there are different types of experiences, and I've not really focused on this type of category.
And the the reason it's important is we're talking about the moon hot.
We're talking about the moon and the and the connection between them.
We do talk about the solar flares and radiation challenges.
So all of these things come together as something that fits into what's necessary to understand.
It's very relevant for Very relevant.
Our understanding of not only how the moon or the earth formed, but also kind of what can we expect in the future, and what do we need to worry about.
Yep.
That's exactly we we talk about solar flares.
We talk about micrometeorites.
We talk about the the challenges that we could face on Earth, on the moon, in in project Moon Hut, in variety of different categories of work we're doing.
So, yes, this is something that's why when I think you might not when we if you remember, I know you remember.
We were having the conversation, and I kind of pulled back thinking maybe there's nothing here.
And then you hit me really hard with, no.
This is this.
This is this.
And I it was one of those moments, which, again, a lot of individuals never get a podcast.
I said, I wanna explore this.
I wanna find what's here that I'm missing.
And that's if I'm assuming you remember, there was a pullback on my side.
Yeah.
I remember.
And you came back and you hit me, and I said, okay.
Let's explore this because there's something that I need to know.
So I appreciate your persistence right through my my wall that
I put up.
Sometimes one one doesn't see, the connections between things, and it takes a little longer.
It
that's why some of these interview scenarios can take several hours because I'm trying to figure out how that connects to what I'm thinking.
It's not just an interview.
There's actually an application that we're looking for.
There's actually a need basis.
It's not just to get a person on, and it's not just about a name.
And then when we went that next step, it was wow.
Okay.
Now these things are there's some value that could be generated here.
So, no, this is fantastic.
I love the story.
Alright.
Alright.
Anyway, so what we what we now know and what let's let's go back again a few years.
What people in the 19 eighties 19 nineties realized after this work that that they realized 2 or 3 things.
First of all, the realization was, okay, impacts are not only real, but they can have a fundamental effect on the biological and geological evolution of the Earth.
So that's kind of a fundamental thing because before that, impacts were not really even on the scene.
You know?
People didn't think about impacts of being important.
And now we realize, no.
They are important because if an impact can kill off 70% of all species and the other 30%, probably we're not very happy because their food chain was interrupted and, you know, basically, an impact of that size, 30,000 cubic kilometer of dust are thrown out into the atmosphere, and they come down very slowly.
It takes years years, and so that alters the climate.
You have acid rain.
You have the destruction of the ozone layer and everything.
Mutations form and so on and so on.
So these things have happened in the past.
That means they can happen in the future again.
Mhmm.
And, so that was the one thing.
The next thing was, well, the way the investigation was done, it's like forensics in a way.
You take a rock sample, and you kind of tease out information by studying minute amounts of metals, for example, that are scattered in there to see if you can learn from their abundance and their isotopic composition something about where they come from.
And then the third thing that kind of connects this is, okay, now what we can do is now we can go and use similar techniques on other craters and try to understand what rock type, what meteorite type formed them.
And that helps us again understand our solar system and how the early phases of the Earth and the moon happened.
So this is kind of the the knowledge based part.
And those are chemical analysis, geochemical analysis that are rather complicated that you can't really do easily remotely, but you need sophisticated laboratories for that.
And, so there are very few labs around the world, and I would say maybe 2 or 3 dozen laboratories at the most in the world that can do these types of measurements.
But what helps us, for example, I mentioned OSMIsotopes and Chromium isotopes, in in in this Cretaceous tertiary boundary material that came from the Chicxulub crater that told us that the meteorite or the asteroid that caused it was what we call a so called carbonaceous type meteorite, which was a very primitive type meteorite that has a lot of carbon in there too, a lot of water, and that hasn't been altered very much since the formation of the solar system for a half 1000000000 years ago.
But then subsequent measurements of the composition of the impact in body through these secondary features in the terrestrial rocks then, and other craters showed us there's other types of of meteorites too, or asteroids that make craters.
So that tells us something about what what caused the impacts back then, where did the material come from, and all these things.
And now we can also jump on the moon if you want.
Wait.
So before you before you jump there, I'd like to know because I've I've what I've read, and you're going to give me probably a better understanding of this.
What types of media rights are there if we're to classify them?
Are there 5 different types?
There are 9 different types.
Are there 2 basic types?
How do you
Right.
Types?
There are 3 basic types, and then there are some subgroups.
Okay.
Basic types are stony meteorites, iron meteorites, and stony iron meteorites.
So and, the stony meteorites are the largest group, makes up something like on the order of 95% or more than 95% of all meteorites are, stony meteorites, and there are subgroups.
There are what we call undifferentiated meteorites and what we call differentiated meteorites.
So what does that mean?
Differentiated means they were hot enough at one point or the body in which they formed.
Remember, meteorites are fragments of asteroids.
So the asteroid in which they formed, which is could be a kilometer in diameter, could be 50 kilometers in diameter.
If it's large enough and early in the solar system, it was hotter than it is now around here.
It might have been that just like in the earth, the metal sank to the core, then you have an interface zone where metal and and rock mixes, and then you have a mantle of mostly basaltic type material, and maybe a thin crust.
And when that object breaks apart, then the ion meteorites come from the core.
The stony iron meteorites come from the interface of the rock and the metal core, and the basaltic rocks from the outside, they make them the so called differentiated meteorites.
That is a few percent of all stony meteorites are like that.
Most of them because the asteroids were too small to be molten inside ever.
They're just primitive material that accumulated and accreted in the early solar system 4 and a half 1000000000 years ago, and they're still like that.
So they are unchanged since that time.
And, of course, you have different types of ion meteorites too because there might be a little bit of different composition in each former, so, you know, source asteroid.
They might have had a little bit of a different melting history, which makes for a little bit of a different result.
But, basically, three main types of meteorites and then the subdivision in those that have undergone some heating after its formation and have segregated into metal and other bits.
And those who have never seen any major heating event afterwards, they're still as primitive and as original as they were, 4 and a half 1000000000 years ago.
So that's the types of meteorites that we have out there.
Okay.
Because asteroids are fragments of of, meteorites are fragments of asteroids that tells us also what asteroids are out there.
Okay?
So Perfect.
What I was saying is now we can use the same method that we did on Earth and look at the craters on the moon.
And, of course, the Apollo samples, but also some of the rocks that come to the earth by themselves, so called lunar meteorites, which are thrown by impacts from the moon to the earth.
If we analyze those and we find melt rocks in there that have formed by impact, then we can look at the composition and see if we can find traces of the impactor in there that made the crater.
So we can learn that in fact, and we did learn, that the craters on the moon are made by the same types of meteorites or asteroids as the craters on the earth.
So that's not a big surprise, but in a way, it had to be done.
That measurement had to be done.
So this is where why the study of of impact craters is really interesting because it teaches us something about, first of all, early phases in the solar system, but also tells us something about what happens during such an impact that the Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary Impact, the Chicxulub crater is particularly interesting because it was so big, and the effects were so vast and widespread and had a huge effect on biology.
Now smaller impacts may only have regional effect, but they can be as devastating at least regionally.
And if an impact, even a small one like the size of meteor crater in Arizona, which results in about a kilometer sized crater, the zone of destruction is much larger than that.
The zone of destruction would be the size of a big city.
You know?
Basically, the city of Vienna or city of Washington DC could be totally destroyed by such a small impact.
And that's something that should give us pause because these small impacts are much more common than the large impacts.
So we need to think about or worry about a little bit that maybe every few 1000 years, there could be one of those small impacts that could be at least regionally devastating cause regional destruction, especially these days with the dense population almost everywhere on the surface of the Earth.
And if you have a a station on the moon, for example, you have to worry not only about the bigger impact, but even micrometeorites because there's no atmosphere that slows them down.
And even an object that is a few millimeters in diameter can cause a pretty big damn hole, in the wall of a space station out there.
And, even now, we just heard it recently, a micrometeorite hit the a mirror, one of the mirrors of the Webb Space Telescope and caused it, you know, first a little hole, but also it made it out of focus for a little bit.
They they were able to recalibrate that, but still, these things happen.
And satellites and space stations and whatever, they're constantly hit by small objects.
Well, woe the one when the larger one hits it because then suddenly the air will be out.
So Yes.
Who needs to think about these things.
You know?
But I I wanted to come now kind of transition to the second topic, the one about the supernova.
Yep.
And when if you remember, I was talking about the hypothesis that the extinction of the dinosaurs might have been caused by a supernova explosion nearby that was published in 1970, that idea.
And the measurements basically that were done later, they did not confirm that hypothesis.
There was no evidence of any supernova explosion.
However, in the meantime, people have been working on deep sea sediments more recently, and there is something that forms in the deep sea.
And I'm sure you've heard of these things, these manganese nodules or manganese crusts.
Mhmm.
They accumulate rather slowly.
And so, basically, metals that enter the ocean somehow, either through erosion from the continents or whatever volcanic eruption, other sources, they slowly precipitate if they form these crusts rather slowly.
So they grow by just a few millimeters over, tens of thousands of years or even 100 of 1000 of years.
And so there was, already about, over 20 years ago, 25 years ago, there were measurements the first measurements of an anomalous content of an isotope of the element iron with the mass of 60.
Iron 60 was found in, a couple of these manganese nodules.
And it was a layer that turned out to be about 2a half 1000000 years old.
And the people who did that, they were physicists from Germany at the time from Munich.
They interpreted and said, this I n 60 is known to form this isotope is known to form in supernova explosions.
And so maybe what we're seeing here now is actually evidence of a nearby supernova explosion where the ion was the dust that was ejected from the supernova eventually basically fell on the earth, and that isotope, that ion isotope, was still around, because it has a half life of over 2,000,000 years, so it's not something that disappears very fast.
And so here we are.
We find evidence of a supernova explosion near the Earth, and it could have been, maybe a 100, 200 light years away, so not that close that it would cause immediate biological effects from the radiation, but it would still, you know, have some problem with the ozone layer in the in the atmosphere.
That would be an immediate effect because, these these the high energy radiation, they travel very fast.
They travel basically at near light speed.
Whereas the dust comes later, maybe a few tens to a 100000 years later, and that is included and incorporated in these deep sea depositions.
And more recently, they found the similar anomaly, the similar enrichments of these I n 60 isotopes in deep sea sediments as well of the same age in several places of the planet.
So there's kind of a similarity to the study of the impact event at the cretaceous tertiary boundary because the iridium anomaly was found in many different locations of the world.
It it basically caused us to conclude that there was a global event.
And this was similar.
It's not just a global event.
It was an event that was even larger than that.
It was outside the Earth, but it affected the whole Earth.
And so there was this, this this supernova dust that was deposited on the Earth.
And very, very recently, just last year, basically, there was, work published again by researchers from Germany, from Australia, from Japan, from Austria together where they found also in the same layer evidence of this plutonium isotope that Alvarez and his colleagues had been searching for back in 1980, but didn't find it in the KT boundary, but now it was found.
And now we have pretty good evidence, in fact, not just of 1, but of 2 or 3 supernova explosions nearby the Earth that happened 1 about, 2 and a half 1000000 years ago, and the others maybe around 7, 8 1000000 years ago.
So that's much more recent than, that Kt boundary impact demand, and it didn't have quite as much of an effect on the biology because these supernova explosions fortunately were far enough away that the radiation was not so severe to affect the biology on the earth.
But that led to the hypothesis also published just a couple of years ago by researchers from the US who said, well, there was a big, explosion, a big, basically, extinction event, back, in, the Devonian times, the end of the Devonian.
Devonian?
When is Devonian?
Devonian.
Now that was, basically about 360,000,000 years ago.
So a lot longer than the cretaceous tertiary effect, but there was also a big extinction event.
The KT event is not the only extinction event in the Earth's history.
There is about half a dozen of severe extinction events in the last 500000000 years or something like that when we had multicellular life on Earth.
And the one 360000000 years ago, that was a pretty also a severe one.
And so now the idea is to look in rock samples if we find plutonium in there because that would confirm that that particular extinction event was caused by not an impact, but by nearby supernova, explosion.
That we know these things happen because we see supernova all around.
And, of course, if one happens nearby the Earth, it would have had a severe effect on the biology of the Earth because of all the radiation that hits it.
So that's kind of, So just I find that very interesting.
I don't know how much you how much you the supernova itself.
How do supernovas I I've I've learned about them.
I'm looking how do how do they form?
How big?
What are some of the pieces that I that would be valuable that you would know that I would probably not know?
So a supernova is basically what happens when a star is at the end of its life.
Yeah.
What does that mean the star is at the end of its life?
A star burns hydrogen to helium mostly because the universe consists 75% of hydrogen.
And so a star consists also of that, and that's basically the fuel that produces the energy output of a star.
Our sun in its interior converts hydrogen to helium.
And when that kind of is done, when all the hydrogens convert to helium, there is no more, radiation that is being produced, no more energy that's being produced, and the star will start to collapse.
When that happens, some other nuclear reaction might happen.
If the star is very large, it will collapse and it will basically start explosive nuclear fusion, which rips the star apart, and that is a supernova.
So at the end of its life, small stars, they kind of quietly sync together, make white dwarfs, and then fade out.
Big stars, they have a lot of mass.
Because of that mass, they collapse faster, and they start these explosive reactions that are nuclear synthetic reactions that produce among other things, the iron 60 or the plutonium 244.
And so how far how far
away would the earth be able to accumulate enough of an evidence of platinum?
No.
No.
Not platinum.
Not platinum.
Iron 60 and platinum.
60, I meant.
How much how
how Estimates are about 300 light years away from the Earth.
That's the question.
So that's but it it could be, of course, there's plenty of stars that are closer.
You know?
And it could be when one of them explodes over the period of 1000000 of years, they will happen.
Then not only do we have the dust that contains these isotopes that we can measure and that give us the evidence of the nearby supernova explosion.
But when they are closer, then also the very intense radiation from that explosion will hit the atmosphere of the Earth, and that will cause a lot of nasty effects, the immediate destruction of the ozone, but also photochemical reactions.
It will cause maybe radiation, a lot of radiation to rain down on the surface of the Earth, which actually then will almost bring us to the next topic, which is the solar eruptions and solar flares.
But let's just finish the thought about the supernova.
So there's a lot of photo reactions plus a lot of radioactivity basically coming down, which would have nasty effects on the biology of our planet.
So that's kind of and you have close by supernova explosion.
And we have lots of stars nearby, that there's even candidates, of supernova remnants.
We can look at in in, in astronomical images as, yeah, because you can measure the direction in which the stars travel and so on.
You say, yeah, that one, that could have been the one that exploded near the earth 2a half 1000000 years ago for which we have the evidence.
So that's, Yep.
That's the supernova story.
And what I find fascinating is initially, the cretaceous tertiary boundary extinction was proposed to be of supernova origin, turned out to be impact, but now we're kind of back at the supernova.
We finally found the actual evidence of supernova explosions nearby, and now we need to study if any of them had any effects on extinctions, for example, or other effects on the earth.
But that brings me kind of to the third aspect, the third point.
Those are these big explosions, not of of supernova, of stars, but the eruptions from the sun that sometimes happen.
They're called coronal mass ejections or extremely big solar flares can happen.
And that means that a lot of ionized gas suddenly gets thrown out from the sun and travels through the solar system.
If it happens that the Earth is in the way of that big gas cloud, it'll interact with our magnetic field and with our atmosphere.
And, now maybe you have heard of an event that happened in 1859, which after the person who described it was called the Carrington event.
Now that's I had not heard
I had not heard about it.
There was a big eruption on the sun, and the gas cloud basically, hit the earth.
Now 18 59, we didn't have telephones.
We didn't have pipelines.
We didn't have electrical power through power lines.
The only thing we had back then was telegraphs, And there are lots of stories of the telegraph lines burning up and telegraph operators getting burned from sparks coming out of the telegraph machinery.
Now those were basically inductive, electricity because when you have a huge kind of a a cloud of plasma that presses down our defenses, which the the magnetic field around the earth, and it starts flowing along the magnetic field lines mainly near the poles to the surface of the Earth, and it kind of presses down our magnetic field, the magnetic field of the Earth way down Yeah.
So that you can see polar lights down in the Caribbean or in the Mediterranean in Europe, which would be extremely unusual because normally you can only see near the poles or near the polar regions.
But if you start seeing polar lights, in in Texas or in Mexico, then we have a problem.
That's what happened back then.
Polar lights were seen all the way down to, equatorial regions, and that meant that there was this huge sore solar flare or or eruption from the sun that hit the the earth's atmosphere.
And because the only thing where you had cables back then, like, metallic cables that could be heated up or where where inductive electricity could form, were telegraph lines, the effects were not quite as severe.
Fast forward a little bit to 1989, there was a much smaller similar event, also a solar eruption, and it pressed down the magnetic field lines to the surface of the earth a little more, not quite as much as that current event, but more than usual.
And it caused a lot of power outages in Quebec in Canada.
And, also, what happens is it heats up pipelines.
So because of the induction that that that basically is the result of this plasma hitting the surface of the earth, then and power lines were burning up.
And so the problem is particularly in North America because most power lines are above ground.
In Europe, we're a little better protected because most power lines in the densely populated areas at least are below ground.
So then they wouldn't be subject to the induction quite as much.
But the problem is the transformer stations because they might burn up in such an event.
And so this is a danger that can happen, then I'm not gonna go in go into great detail about that because my angle is actually a slightly different one that I wanna talk about in a moment.
But the first point is
Before you get to
that other options.
Be before you get to that then, can I ask Sure?
How I I'm thinking of the moon more than I am the earth.
How often considering the moon and earth are close to one another, how often does a solar flare be large enough that could be impactful on the moon?
How often would that occur based on historical evidence?
Yes.
On the moon more often than on the earth because the earth is additionally shielded by its magnetic field.
Yep.
The moon, it might happen every every few decades, something like that that you have a really nasty effect on the earth.
Maybe only every 100, 200 years, something like that.
Okay.
Thank you.
So but the point on earth is nasty enough even though it may not happen quite as often because if you have a large enough, eruption, coronal mass ejection, solar flare, whatever causes these eruptions, then you have electrical lines that are interrupted, power that is interrupted, transformer stations that might burn up, pipelines that might burn up, and so on and so forth.
But that means if you have no power, even if it's only for a few weeks, what does that mean?
Oh, it's incredible.
We're having Internet problems just earlier.
Exactly.
Not only no Internet, no power, no water that is pumped in or pumped out.
No water.
We have a sump we have a sump pump in our house, so I know just losing that alone is is devastating.
So yeah.
Yep.
So not only that, but then you wanna go shopping.
Well, most cashiers now work only with scanning, and you can't just go there and take a piece of bread off the shelf and pay in cash.
There's still places around here where you can do that, but very few, in the United States.
I haven't seen one in a long time.
So, that there are these problems.
You know?
You wanna drive somewhere?
Well, good luck with all the electrical cars.
Won't get very far when the battery is out.
You wanna cook something at home?
Well, if you have gas, then you need a pump to to to pump it.
If you have electricity, okay, we know where that leads.
If you have a a diesel or a benzene car, you can drive as far as far as the tank filling goes, but that's it.
Hospitals after 4 or 5 days, their, generators will be out.
So the consequences are enormous of this thing, and that hasn't been thought through very much by people who should be thinking of catastrophic effects.
Oh, but it also that's that question that I asked is how often does it occur.
And when someone thinks about a 100, 200 year event, while we should be thinking about certain types of, conditions, it's very difficult for humans in general to think of something long term.
Well, but everything that happens every 100 years, you know, that it might happen tomorrow.
Right.
It's right.
I understand.
I was smiling as you were going there.
Yes.
It could be tomorrow.
But I think humans in general and I'm being very, very oh, I'm saying a lot about myself.
Humans in general are willing to kick the can down the road to say, well, it won't happen now.
You know, it'll be in 50 years, and I it won't make a difference to me.
We see that now with the dependence on oil and gas from certain locations.
Right.
That's, yeah, that's the exact that's a great example of how everybody's been kicking that down the road, and now there's a situation globally that could theoretically toss much of Europe into a severe challenge over the next year.
So, yeah, it's just something that people do.
So it as much as I can understand power, transformers, pipelines, electric cars, pumps, and gas, the human species often can't figure or can't has trouble thinking about something that'll happen next year.
That's and that's the problem.
Yes.
And I think we should be thinking about it.
And people who wanna build stations on the moon, space stations should be thinking about it even more.
We think about it all the time.
Actually, we have a meeting every week, and we talk about radiation and inclusive of what happens if we've got 8 minutes from the time in which the sun erupts to hitting the moon.
We talk about energy.
We talk about radiation.
We talk about micrometeorites.
All of these are in every single week discussion.
Yep.
So I I we're there for you.
Right.
So now let me come kind of the, the the geological or long longer term or geologic or biological longer term aspect.
When a huge the the the gas, the plasma from a huge solar flare, solar eruption, whatever, if that hits the atmosphere of the Earth, there is a reaction that goes on between the nitrogen in the atmosphere and the incoming high energy radiation that makes an isotope called carbon 14.
So the nitrogen is converted into carbon, carbon 14, and that is a radioactive carbon isotope that has a half life of a little over 5000 years.
And here comes the interesting thing.
Tree rings accumulate, of course, carbon from the atmosphere.
So trees, and you find them in tree rings.
And there were measurements that were done a few years ago, about 10 years ago, where a spike of carbon 14 was found in tree rings indicating that there was a solar superstorm that hit the Earth about, around, 775 AD.
And so that was interesting.
That meant there was a huge solar eruption, and it left its traces for us to measure.
Going back to that carrying event in 18/59, people looked and because we have the effects, and it fried up basically the, the telegraph lines and everything.
There was the technology of the day, but there was no trace of carbon 14 in 3 rings of that age.
So that effect that the event that was so memorable in our own history, recent history, well over, well, a 150 years ago or something like that, didn't leave a measurable trace And it was power
it was powerful enough to do something, yet it it wasn't powerful enough to have done what the previous 1775 777.
777.
I wrote 775.
Didn't you Yeah.
775.
So, yeah, it meant that that one must have been on a
course is that that event in 775 was maybe 10 times more powerful Right.
Than the current event, and the current event itself was scary enough.
That's exactly what I was getting to.
Yes.
It's that this was such so impact so impactful that it left a mark.
And this experience in 1959 didn't leave a mark, and it still was impactful.
Yep.
And then more, just very recently, it was basically last year as well, 2 more such huge events were discovered in 3 rings.
1 about 5,300 years, BC, and 1 about 7,200 years BC.
So these things happen.
They happened in the relatively recent history on on earth.
We have the evidence for those things by in the form of isotopes that we can measure.
And yet, I think we're not very well prepared for anything like that happening again.
And that kind of brings me to the 4th point in our little agenda here, which is the shortest and the final one.
Kind of what do we learn about, you know, from all these studies about all these astronomical astrophysical events that affect us on earth.
What do what what kind of what do we learn from that?
What does that tell us about our past and our future?
And I think the main point that or several points now not number them because, there's there's a few points that I think a few things we learn.
First of all, coming back to what I already said about, you know, how we studied meteorites and how do we be kind of learn about where they come from is there's a way how science goes, and we've learned more than once that we should just simply follow the scientific procedure, make measurements, interpret them, see if it makes predictions, see if we find any evidence, anything of what has been predicted.
If not, alter the hypothesis and so on and so forth.
And so we learn a lot from using the proper scientific method.
2nd point, I think, is or another point is that by looking back in history, we can learn a lot about how to interpret present day events or learn something about the future.
If we know how many impact events happened on the earth, we have an idea or how many solar flares hit the earth.
We know how often approximately or at least on average a particular astrophysical event happens on or near the Earth.
And we can kind of say, okay.
Is this something we need to worry about?
Now there's a there's a whole different, story out there.
You may have heard about efforts in so called planetary defense, which is now that we know that asteroids can hit the earth, can we do something about it?
Can we nudge them out of their orbit so they don't hit the earth?
There are conferences out there.
Every 2 years, there's a planetary defense conference.
Actually, we have one in Vienna next year.
The United Nations is involved in all these things.
So by by looking back at past geological events to tell us something about astronomical events, basically, we can learn about the future.
How often does this happen?
Do we need to worry about it?
Can we do something about it?
Etcetera, etcetera.
And then another thing that I find also Isn't isn't that where
isn't that where we get Harry Stamper and he hops on a rocket goes up, he gets on the middle of it, and he blasts it.
Isn't that what's supposed to happen?
Yeah.
That's the Hollywood version of it.
Yeah.
Oh, do you mean that?
I thought that was historical.
The scientific version is a little more complicated.
But, anyway but then and and the kind of I think one of the the final and more important also messages is that the studies of all these past events also tell us something about what the effects were.
How large what what happens during an impact event?
Does that destroy particular size?
Does that destroy, just the continent, or, does it affect the whole earth?
Does it cause mass extinctions?
Whatever.
How big is the effect of a solar flare on earth?
A super flare.
What what what kind of we have to study past events to make predictions about the future.
We can't just make models on the basis of nothing.
We need to base them on actual measurements.
And that's kind of where I've been trying to kind of lead through this whole story here, starting with, supernova that then we found actually an impact was to blame.
But then supernova coming back into the picture, they're not totally unimportant.
They do happen.
They have effects.
They had effects.
Even nearby explosions, eruptions from our sun, our star, have had effects on the earth.
And I think all of those should cause us to kind of think a little harder that we are sitting in the middle of the universe.
We're not isolated from the universe.
We're not isolated from the solar system.
The solar system interacts with us quite a bit, and we ignore that possible effect at our peril.
So the I appreciate all of this, and my mind is racing now.
I can hear you winding down.
And I I had a few things that came to mind that just more specific to project Moonar, more specific to our future.
I don't have them in any order.
Again, I don't have a list because I don't know where you're gonna go with the conversation.
And I'll try to articulate them in a in a way that is understandable.
The only because they're just popping into my head.
One of them is when we consider the earth and the challenges with mining, rare earth metals, certain types of activity that happens on the earth that could be dangerous or long term have long term effects.
If the cost of doing this type of activity off earth, for example, on the moon and taking something such as platinum, which I'm gonna throw some numbers out.
You'll tell me I'm completely wrong.
That's okay.
But I did some math that it said that it would take up to I worked in a rock quarry.
We dropped 22,000 tons of stone a day.
That would be the equivalent of 25 trailers going down the road, American size big semis, as well as we'd have up to 24 scows with a 1,000 ton each on them going down into New York City.
We were the number one supplier of stone.
So when I looked at mining platinum, the numbers came out that we use about 92, there were 92 tons.
That might be the number.
92 tons of platinum a year.
You have to dig about 62,000 62,000,000 tons of material to be able to get there, and it comes out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 62,000,000 Toyota Corollas that are mined every year to be able to extract that, then it has to be shipped.
My point is and I'm trying to remember the data.
It's not exactly accurate, but that's probably close enough because I imagine 4 of the trucks that we did in a year, 4, that's it, would be the amount of platinum.
And I didn't do the mass.
I just did it as a as a a rough calculation.
If we were to take the same thing and we were to go on to the moon and we were going to be able to do some type of extraction, we don't even know if we can, let's assume we could, or of any other type of metal or material, is do you think about this as a a potential solution for some of the challenges we're facing on Earth, leveraging the geological side, the the asteroids, the micro the meteorites hitting the moon and leveraging that?
Do you ever go in that direction?
Well, I think my answer would be very firm no.
That is not that doesn't make much sense for for a variety of reasons.
Okay.
So first of all, when we look at and I I mentioned that briefly early on when we were talking about the plasma probe elements, what we're mining on earth is not the average continental crust.
What we're mining on Earth are ore deposits.
Ore deposits are things that exist on Earth, but don't exist on the moon because they form most often in geological processes that operate on the earth, but not on the moon, and that are related often to water, for example.
And they form enrichments of these elements.
You don't if you want iron, you don't go out there and take an average piece of of mountain rock.
You go to where you have an iron ore
Right.
And mine that.
The same with platinum group elements.
For example, not very far from where you are, I guess, a little bit to the north in Canada, there's Sudbury.
Sudbury has huge, platinum and and other metal ores.
There are nickel ores and so on, but they are enormously concentrated that basically you can imagine it's like salt.
You have salt in the ocean.
I mean, it's it's it's maybe it's just just a comparison.
You have salt in the ocean, but you don't see the salt, and you don't take ocean water usually.
You go to where the ocean water has evaporated, and you collect the the evaporite, basically.
Yep.
But I I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah.
So you don't look at the diluted part.
You look at where it's concentrated, and the same thing happens with a lot of the metals on Earth.
So what we are mining in almost all cases is where geological processes have concentrated the the the element of interest, let's say.
You know, for lithium It
absolutely makes per it makes perfect sense.
You don't have that on the moon.
So when And, again, I
don't You have a sprinkling of material, and you would have to mine out a much larger amount of lunar rock and use very energy rich energy consuming enrichment, methods to get the metals out.
So it doesn't make any commercial or even logical sense, and then to bring them back to the earth would be superheavily expensive.
So the the reason I, again, I've not been in the beyond earth.
It's not something that I spend all of my time on.
Yet over the years, I have seen, you can't even the size of the equipment that people have imagined to do mining operations on the moon, let alone they're not calculating just to ship something that large, considering I worked in a rock quarry.
The equipment that people have put is even larger than what I was dealing with, and and that was challenging.
So when I'm seeing these images, what I I think there's and I'm saying this very nicely.
There's a delusional part of just the geo geological or the concentration challenges that would be astronomical to overcome.
Yep.
More fiction than science.
No.
And that's great because I had not, that's why I'm asking you.
I had not thought about it in that way.
I there's a there's a few images that I just saw recently that someone was proposing, and the pieces of equipment, considering we were dropping what's 22,000 tons of stone, that's a lot of stone.
Mhmm.
And we were close to 90% of all stone going into New York.
So you think of every road, every building, every, every, every was coming from our quarries.
And when I see the equipment that's being, displayed, I'm saying to myself, first of all, just the ship that's going to be tremendously challenging.
But to manage it and then to be able to do mining is one thing where you're digging it out of the ground.
The other is the processing that goes behind it.
And you need a primary, a secondary, a tertiary.
You then need to sort it into different components.
All of that requires an entire quarry.
Of course.
And if you have a breakdown in some equipment, we're not worried about supply chains on earth, you know, supply chain for some of this equipment on the moon or or elsewhere.
No.
That's why I would say we can see.
We forget that
I I had a situation where it was a group of individuals didn't wanna work as hard, so they took a stone p a a rock out of the quarry that should have been, it should have been broken up, and they didn't.
And they put it in the back of a uke, which is a large truck.
They moved it over to the primary, and they dropped it in.
And what it did is it clogged the primary.
So it took us a machine broke in the process of trying to smash it in there.
And I I was management.
They were union, so I had constraints.
We tried to put cables around it to pull it out.
1 snapped, flew up and hit.
Thankfully, the guy had a cage around him, but flew and hit the loader that was pulling it.
And, eventually, I had them mill a new piece of metal to go into a special type of, hammer that we had, and we re jury rigged that and got it out.
But that took that took about 4 hours Yep.
For me to move these people around because no one had a solution, not because I was smarter.
I just it was my job to get it running.
That's not wearing a space suit.
And that's not wearing a space suit, and that's because we did have a milling facility that we were able to do that with.
And we did have a loader around, and we did have all of those pieces.
So when you so thank you for that answer.
So if we are to then if you are to think about anything geologically or in the scope of radiation, micrometeorites, is there anything that you have said that's an epiphany for me?
This is something that someone should know about, and I I feel that there's a possibility or a direction that should be taken based upon your knowledge of the moon.
Well, you know, basically, we cover 2 topics, and you are aware of, that all these are problem.
But, you know, I I think, you know, a lot of, how should one phrase that?
A lot of these events are not very common, of course.
Right.
Right.
But if they happen, they can have disastrous consequences.
And the question is if these days, you know, back when Apollo 11 flew to the moon, the astronauts understood very well that they might not be able to come back.
I think today with our much more safety conscious, the science I went
right there as soon as you said that.
Yes.
A lot of the, risks that people took way back then, neither the astronauts nor management or whatever would be prepared to take.
And so you need to even worry about rare events more so than you would have ever had because it seems to become unacceptable that in a hostile environment, casualties might happen.
It's an interesting point because the that you brought up The first time I was meeting with not the first time.
It was the the the event that, the design of the 4 phases of the moon that was created.
I had said to Bruce, who was sitting across the table, I said, look.
When people went to space back then or beyond Earth, there was a risk.
There was a gamble.
And I said, we don't know if we send 8 astronauts or 8 individuals up to the moon, whatever their role is.
They could be functionally just a, whatever their functional role is, that 7 of them don't return.
And he didn't have a reaction in that point at that point yet.
I said, that's how explorers managed to do things back then that they don't do the same way today.
And one of the challenges we do face in what we're designing is safety concerns.
Yep.
So Yeah.
Well, that's changed in a way to less, risk, and making it more difficult for for discoveries and and, you know, people wanna fly to Mars, but
But there's a there's an irony when you say risk.
There is an irony in risk.
I was a competitive ski racer.
I did I was competitive in a few different areas.
What we do today risk wise when it comes to skiing, what we do risk wise in terms of sports, what we do risk wise in terms of so many things that are personally people jumping off.
I mean, when we grew up, if someone jumped off a pool into a pool, they were jumping off a single story home.
They're not jumping off of a 2 or 3 story home.
People today are much more risk, more willing to take risks on recreational.
Mhmm.
But we've taken that same risk factor out of this other equation, which is Yep.
Changing the future.
So Right.
Interesting.
I mean, basically, the the story was about natural risks that we're facing and that we mostly can't do much about.
You know, if you have a large asteroid or a comet hits the earth, there's very little we can do.
Yes.
That that's the and I think that goes to some people's belief that we have to be multi planetary so that we can avoid that one, extinction level event.
So well, Christian, thank you.
This was absolutely fantastic.
I learned a lot, and I I picked up things that I had, made me rethink some of my own historical comments, which are thoughts which I've said.
So I wanna take everybody I wanna thank everybody else out there who had taken time out of their day to listen in, and we both personally hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.
Once again, Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we're looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations, the paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
And there's a website, www.projectmoonhot.org.
Top right hand corner, you see some videos.
You can learn some more.
And we will have a new website coming out probably within the next, month and a half to 2 months.
We've been working on it heavily for quite some time.
Christian, what is the single best way to connect to you?
I would say usually email.
My you can Google me very easily, but my email is christian.coberel@univie.ac.at.
Well, thank you very much.
And for everybody out there, we'd love to connect with you.
You can reach me personally at david@moonhut.org.
You can connect to us at Twitter project at at project moon hut.
If you want me personally, it's at goldsmith.
We're on LinkedIn.
We're on Facebook and, Instagram, so you have a means to be able to reach out to us.
That said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

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