Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Death from the Skies! (featuring Phil Plait)

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Phil Plait about some of the ways space could wipe us all out, or at least really mess up our infrastructure. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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quite a long time. But don't worry, we're limiting our conversation today to threats from space that we can do something about, kind of. So hopefully this episode won't keep you tossing and turning in bed too much tonight. All right, here we go. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith, and I sometimes stay up at night, wondering if things are going to kill my kids. And my question of you today, Kelly, is how much do you share those concerns with your kids?

Do you lead them to believe that the world is a safe and fuzzy place? Or do you want them to understand the truth? I fall somewhere in between. I talk to them about bullies at school. Like, there will always be bullies. Let's be honest about that. How do you deal with those sorts of things? But I will tell her about wars that have happened in the past and I have mentioned nuclear weapons because I was writing about them so much.

And she overheard Zach and I talking about them. But I don't think I would specifically be like, and what about meteoroids? I think we just enjoy the, you know, bright lights in the sky. and then I kind of leave it at that. So somewhere in between. What about you? I try to share everything with my kids. And I try to tell them that science is our way to understand the universe better,

which means knowing the wonderful things and also knowing the existential threats and potentially developing the technology to save ourselves. So try to end on a positive note. So my oldest is 10. Your kids are both older than that. When your kids were 10, were you this honest with them? Or did you sort of like scale up? I believe in total honesty with my kids.

I answered their questions about reproduction and Santa Claus and everything whenever they ask them. Yes. And so far, they're not serial killers. So we'll see what happens. Oh, solid. So I wouldn't have guessed that. My daughter, she said, is there Santa Claus? And I said, do you really want to know?

And she said, no. And we left it at that. And so I think she knows. And then I sat her down and we had the where new babies come from talk. And at the end, I had like drawn diagrams because I'm like, I'm a biologist. And at the end, she was like, mom, this was awful. Well, sorry, maybe your funny father should have done it instead of your biologist mother. But anyway, I'm honest about some things, I guess.

All right. Well, then welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe in which we talk about all of the amazing things in the universe. The things that can kill you, the things that probably won't kill you. And the things that we're working very, very hard to stop from killing you. We want to think about all of those amazing things. We want to explain them. We want to understand them. We want to marinate in the joy of them because, hey, it's a wonderful universe.

And today we have a death from the sky's expert joining us, Dr. Phil Plate. We're excited about that. But we wanted to know first, what do the people on the street think is most likely to kill us when those risks are coming from space? So let's hear what they had to say. That's right. I walked around a sunny Irvine and asked folks, what thing in space is most likely to hurt us down here on Earth. Here's what people had to say. Radiation?

Asteroid. Satellite. Like an asteroid, like a big rock. Like a planet that falls or something? I don't know. Aliens. The sun coming too close? Biological.

Biological things, like microscope. Extra-gastrial. Yeah, just things that are not meant to be here. Cool. All right. What do you think the chances are they need that happening? In our lifetime? Not likely.

Later? Yeah. A meteor? Meteor. What do you think the chances are of that happening? Very slim, because the universe is so vast, especially our Milky White Galaxy, but I'm thinking it probably could happen. I mean, we get meteor showers, I mean, I guess. So I think that's the biggest problem.

Radiation? What makes radiation in space? Sun. One of those comets falls down may create a fire or if it's a big stone it could destroy what's underneath. underneath you think that's likely no not for a while you don't worry about it too much no the problem is here we don't see the skies because of the pollution some parts of the world you can see the comments move at night but here we don't so you better find out and tell us asteroids anything else gamma rays gamma rays what makes gamma rays

distant supernovals solar flares space debris from like satellites and stuff a meteor radiation from the sun should it decide to have a fart? I mean if the sun, you know, really got over and it exploded, but that's a pretty far out there chance, so, but that would be a little catastrophic, I think. Yeah, no. So how worried are you guys about it?

Not very. Not at all. You can't change, but you can't change. I think I'd be more worried about an earthquake, but... Yeah. I mean, it would be fun if aliens came and we could visit, but I'm sure they would look at us and go... I'm not so sure they're not here already. Probably stuff that we put up there in the first place. asteroids as well.

Radiation from the sun. I can only imagine what it was like for someone to have you walk up to them and be like, how is space going to kill you? And did they think you're a crazy person? But anyway, we had some pretty interesting answers. Aliens came up more than I thought. I didn't expect an answer to include the word fart. Maybe you interviewed a biologist without knowing it.

What did you think about these answers? I thought there were a pretty good summary of things to worry about. My favorite answer was the unknown. Because the more we learn about the universe, of course, the more we understand how little we know, which means there could be things out there that are dangerous or amazing or both that we haven't even yet discovered. Yeah, but there's still plenty of things to worry about. Don't worry. And let's start talking to our, here's what you should worry about experts. So let's get started with our interview.

All right. So Dr. Phil Plate is an astronomer, author, sci-fi dork, TV. documentary talking head, a science enthusiast, and my husband and I have known him for years so I can also say he's a genuinely wonderful human being. He writes the bad astronomy newsletter, and today he's going to tell us about ways space could kill us. Welcome to the show, Phil. Thank you. And hey, you didn't mention that I'm acknowledged in a Hugo Award-winning science book. Right. We gave you the credit for any mistakes that we make, and you were a really great sport about that. Right. Well, yeah, I found that to be very funny. Zach and Kelly, of course, wrote a city on Mars, and I basically told him it

was all wrong, and so they made fun of me in the book. That's right. That's how much we appreciate the opinion. Yeah. I think that's pretty much all the steps that happened there. Yeah, pretty much. How's Virginia treating you today? Humidly. Humidly, is that a, is that an adverb? It's actually quite nice this week, but it's been really hot and humid. And I lived in Colorado. I'm used to hot. The summers there get baking, but we don't keep a lot of water in the air there. And I grew up in Virginia, so it's weird coming back. All the smells and the sounds. It's like, oh, yeah, I remember that. And the spiders. It's nice. So when Virginia is nice, it, like, approaches California weather, for example? Sure. I lived in California, too, so look, I can get into it. Yeah, so Daniel and I

have an ongoing debate about whether Virginia or California is better, and I am 100% in the Virginia side. Do you want to weigh in? There's no debate. all weather is measured by how close it is to California. That's the metric. Depends on where you are in California. I've been to Sacramento in the summer and let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. That's not a great place to be in the summer.

I have a no true Scotsman approach to that, though, and that's basically not California. Oh, when I lived in California, I was in Davis, which is like, yeah, right outside of Sacramento. But everyone should follow Phil's Instagram account because he posts great photos of the amazing birds and moths and butterflies that we have out here, which, I think pretty much seals the deal for Virginia. Yeah. That's all squishy stuff, though. I don't really understand any of that. Oh, you don't have to.

It's like, ooh, pretty bug. And I figure, you know what, Kelly will tell me what it is. Well, no matter how good the weather is down here, we're actually here today to talk about the weather in space and how bad that can get. Oh, oh, smooth. Very good. Thank you for getting me back on track,

because, you know, if you give me a chance to talk about moths, that's the avenue I'm going to go down. I know. I know. All right, so Phil, you wrote, great book that I read back when it came out and then I had the pleasure of rereading this weekend. And you start the book by talking about meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites. And I got to tell you, every time I write about these things, I have to look up the difference because it does not stick in my thick school. So can we start there? What's the difference between these three?

The difference is a definition. And definitions are, I wouldn't say squishy, but I I wouldn't cleave unto them very closely in science because they get you in trouble. When you see a shooting star in the sky, a blaze of light, whipping across the sky really quickly, that phenomenon is called a meteor. That is the luminous glow. The object doing the glowing, besides the air, is a little tiny piece of rock or metal or something like that. And that is called the meteoroid. And so if you think of it like asteroid, it's the solid bit.

if it hits the ground it's called a meteorite and then this is where things get difficult because what if you catch it and it doesn't touch the ground what if it hits an airplane and you're sitting on the airplane and they rescue you and everybody's fine in this scenario

but it never hits the ground is it still a meteorite and if you ask a meteoritisist which is a real thing about this they'll just glare at you it's like asking an astronomer about astrology it's basically a shut up you kind of a look Yeah. But that's in general what those three things are. And what about the ocean? If it splashes down in the water, is it a meteorite? Then it's a meteorological find.

Trying to think of a good pun there. There's an opportunity there, but we're missing it. Yeah, I would assume that if it hits anything and then you're holding it in your hand, it's a meteorite. But then at some point we're going to go into space and we're going to catch up with these things and be able to pluck them out of space and then what is it? it never really hit anything. So this is what I mean. When you start getting into the nitty-gritty of definitions, you always get in trouble. Yeah, yeah. Nature doesn't care that humans like to categorize things. Yes. But the most important jargon term in the book, or perhaps the most

important jargon term I've ever seen that I hadn't heard of before is pancaking. Yes. But what does pancaking mean? Because it made me smile. It's a real thing and it's descriptive, actually. So you have a rock out in space and it's just floating around out there. And then it's doing its own thing or the sun and then it looks up and it's like oh look at this gigantic blue planet in my way as it approaches earth or really any planet that has an atmosphere it's moving extremely quickly and we are talking about oh 20 kilometers per second so 70,000 kilometers an hour 40,000 miles an hour or whatever I don't know how many furlongs per per second that is but you know you can do the math and when it encounters our atmosphere a couple of weird things happen and by

weird, I mean, these go against what we're used to living on Earth and just walking around and being humans. One is that rock we think of as being solid, but it's not. If you compress it, it can change its shape without shattering if you apply the pressure the right way. The other thing is that the atmosphere, which, you know, you can walk through, run through, do whatever, is actually pretty thick. And when you're traveling through it faster and faster, the amount of air resistance you feel

goes up extremely rapidly. And so if you stick your hand out the window of a car that's driving down the highway, you feel that wind. It's pretty strong. Well, now imagine, instead of going 100 kilometers an hour down the highway, you're doing 70,000 kilometers an hour through the atmosphere, that's a lot of pressure. And it compresses the rock, and the rock flattens perpendicular to the direction of travel. You're basically squishing it with the air, and it forms a flattened disc, and that's called pancaking. And eventually, and by eventually, I mean, in a very small fraction of a second, that will cause the rock to break, to crumble. And now instead of one meteoroid, you have lots of little meteoroids, and they're all making their own little

way through the atmosphere burning up as they do it. I'll add that contrary to common perception, it's not friction through the atmosphere that heats these things. There's actually not a lot of friction, they're compressing the air in front of them very, very rapidly. And when you compress a gas, it heats up. That's a really basic ninth grade chemistry lesson. You compress a gas, it gets hotter. And when you compress it a lot, it gets really, really hot. So that's what's happening. These things are heated up by the compression of the air in front of them. It melts off the rock. A lot of it. It vaporizes and leaves that trail behind it, which for some reason scientists call a train, not a trail, a train, Why are these words so similar because we like to confuse people, I think? And then eventually it burns up. And this whole thing usually happens in under a second or two. So the energy goes from the kinetic energy of the, I'm going to say the wrong word, meteoroid, which is then compressing the air in front of it.

And I was really into what you were saying about how compressing something heated up. Because to me, that was always a little bit of brain scramble in chemistry. Like, why is compressing something heated up? And the way I finally thought about it was like if you're pressing on something, like you put gas in a box and you squeeze it, you're adding energy. You're like bouncing those particles in another direction. You're turning them around earlier and earlier. But in this scenario, it's the meteoroid doing that, right? So it's like the meteoroid itself is compressing the air in front of it using its kinetic energy to heat up that air and then that air heats up the meteoroid and vaporizes it.

So it's like, that's fascinating. That's basically it. And the amount of kinetic energy is huge. Kinetic energy depends on the mass of the object that's moving and its velocity squared. Right. So even a little tiny thing, the size of, say, a grape, when it's moving at 70,000 kilometers an hour and sometimes faster, that has a lot of energy. And you're decelerating it from that speed to essentially zero a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, not very fast when it finally slows down and air resistance doesn't slow it anymore. falls at terminal velocity. So you're dropping this thing from 70,000 kilometers per hour to zero

in a couple of seconds. It's a vast amount of energy that you're extracting from this thing. It actually heats the air so much, the air glows, too. So you're melting the meteoroid, you're vaporizing it and heating up the air. The air gets excited and little elements in it and start giving off light. And you see this thing zipping across your sky. And the bigger the piece, the more energy it gets, the brighter it gets, and the faster the piece, the more energy it has. The upper limit to the velocity typically depends on orbital speeds around the sun. If you have something orbiting the sun opposite the Earth, then it hits us head on. And so it's moving twice as fast as something that has to catch up to us, roughly.

And so those tend to have more energy. And does more energy mean it's more likely to vaporize in the atmosphere or that it's more likely to make it to Earth and kill us? Gosh, that's a good question. And that all depends on size, roughly, and a composition. So, like, when you go out and see a meteor shower, like in the August Perseids or the Geminids, a favorite of mine in December, these are great meteor showers. These are little bits of rock that come off a comet. And we found out, because we visited comets now, that the rocks on these things are incredibly fragile. They're very friable, as they say. If you were in a pick up a rock on a comet, you could crush it in your hand easily. It would be like less structural integrity, if I can borrow a Star Trek term, than like styrofoam. So you can just crush this thing. And so this stuff burns up really, really easily. Now, a lot of asteroids are made of rock and metal. And metal is a lot tougher. And turns out that, weirdly, although metal asteroids are far more rare than rock asteroids, most of the meteorites we find are metal

because they make it to the ground better. So I have a bunch of metal meteorites. I collect them. And so I've got a pile of them someplace in the house. I still haven't unpacked. It's been a year. And at some point, I'll have them up on display. And they're cool.

They're black from the heat of their passage. They're very dense because they're metal. They can have beautiful crystal patterns when you cut them open. It's a really fun thing to collect meteorites, although it's now extraordinarily expensive and I don't do it anymore. I did it when it was a lot easier. Now I can't afford it anymore. When our daughter was born,

you gave us one and a coprolite, which we still had. That's right. Yeah. The copper light was your wedding, I think. Oh, that makes sense. If I'm not mistaken, I gave that to you both, because it seemed appropriate. Right. Fossilized dinosaur poop.

From an iguanadon. They're both cherished items in our home. But anyway, meteorids can come from chunks of comets or chunks of asteroids. Are those the two places that it comes from? Yes. Okay. Got it. And how often do these things make it to Earth?

All the time. The Earth is hit by a lot of this stuff all the time. And I've seen different numbers that are off by a factor of 10, but they tend to average out to between 50 and 100 tons per day. And that's a lot. I mean, when you first hear that, you're like, oh, my God. Yeah. That's a disaster.

And it's like, well, here we are. We're not commonly hearing about, you know, houses getting wiped out by asteroid impacts. It's made up of little tiny pieces and there are zillions of them and it's spread out over the earth, which is, you know, this immense planet with a lot of surface area, three quarters of which is water, poles people tend not to live at. So, you know, we don't see a lot of this stuff coming in. And since most of it is small, it's not a big deal. Once a month, on average, you get something bigger about the size of an easy chair. And when those things come in, that's usually terrifying.

Pieces might hit the ground. It might not. It might totally burn up. But it's so bright, it can shine almost as bright as the sun. And if you're out at night and you're just like, do, do, do, to do doing your thing. And then all of a sudden the sky lights up around you. It's amazing. And you can find zillions of videos of this on YouTube.

It's kind of amazing to me that this happens so often, but like people getting hit. You can name the people. It happens so rarely. Like Ann Hodges had a really bad day. You talked about her in your book. What happened to her? Yeah, Ann Hodges lived in Silakaga, Alabama. Do I have that right, Alabama?

In the 1950s, I believe she was a renter in a house. And a chunk of rock punched through the roof and landed, it hit her dresser, as I recall. I believe it hit her radio and destroyed it, bounced off and whacked her on the side. And there are photos of her online. You can see it where she has a bruise that's about the size of a dinner place. on her side. It's really astonishing. And people say, my God, she was hit by a meteorite. And it's like, well, she wasn't hit directly by a meteorite. And it wasn't moving thousands of kilometers an hour when it hit her. It was in free fall. It probably slowed down to, like I said, a couple hundred kilometers

an hour, you know, highway speeds and then fell. And it's dense enough. It's a chunk of rock to pierce the roof and hit her. And, you know, it's still moving. You don't want to have somebody, you know, whip a rock at you as hard as they can. But that's what, basically happened and it left a huge bruise on her side and the reason i mentioned that she's a renter is because the person who owned the house claimed that the meteorite was theirs and she said it was hers and there were lawsuits and everything and it was a mess and there are laws about this now and i'm of the opinion it's like yeah you know if i own the house but it hit my renter might want to split the money maybe that's the thing to do yeah i don't think back

then they were worth as much as they are now. But yeah, if you were hit by a meteorite and you could prove it and it's not, you know, a hoax or a fraud or something, that chunk of rock would be worth a fortune. You'd be set. Well, the thing that makes me think of is, is this an opportunity for the courts to weigh in on whether it's a meteoroid or a meteorite, you know, because it didn't hit the ground, right? Hit the dresser and, you know, lawyers love definitions. I feel that the way the courts are going these days, I am so happy to let them declare what

is scientific and what isn't now. Or I could walk into a lava lake. That might be more fun. I bet Clarence Thomas has undisclosed gifts of meteorites from donors. That's my guess. I bet he doesn't. Actually, I don't know if I'd take that bet because if I bet on the yes, he does, I would make sure to send him one and then I'd win. Very strategic. I like it. But I think there's something fascinating you mentioned about how these larger ones are rarer. There's like some basic math there that when you look out in the universe is like fewer bigger things and more small things, right? And that sort of protects us, that like mathematics protects us. Because as you say, there's zillions of tiny particles and little bits of dust hitting the earth, but the bigger stuff,

the stuff that can actually hurt us is much rarer. Right. That's just a law of nature. If you take a rock in your backyard and whack it with a hammer and it cracks, you'll get two big pieces and a couple of medium-sized, you know, slivers and then a ton of dust, right? So that's always what happens with nature when you form things a certain way. You get a handful of big things and a ton of little things. And our atmosphere protects us from most of that stuff. You know, if you don't have an atmosphere, you know, look at the moon. The moon is literally saturated in craters in some spots where if a chunk of rock hits the moon, it'll actually erase more craters than it will create. So they're everywhere. And who knows how many billions of craters there are. There are over a

million bigger than about a mile across. So, I mean, that's a lot. And that's a mile. That's, you know, a couple of kilometers. That is an immense crater. And if you start talking about ones that are the size of, you know, a parking lot or a dinner plate, there may be hundreds of billions of them. I wouldn't even know how many. But our atmosphere protects us from the little guys. And so you tend to get a smallest crater on Earth because you need a certain sized chunk of rock to be able to make it through our atmosphere and impact the ground. The other problem there is we have erosion where the moon doesn't really. The moon has erosion. It's just very slow. But on Earth, we have an atmosphere. We have wind. We have water. And the craters get erased over short periods of time

unless they land in interesting places like Arizona where there's a meteor crater. I've been there. That's an amazing place. Or the crater is so huge. that it can last a couple of billion years and we've seen evidence of those as well but we only know of a couple of hundred on earth because of erosion and that's because our atmosphere protects us so yeah it takes something a few meters across

like look at the one in Russia in 2013 came in over a Chelyabinsk town of about a million people and lit up the sky it was brighter than the sun made a shockwave that shattered windows those videos are incredible that thing was 19 meters across So 60 feet, so the size of a house, and it was very crumbly rock.

This was not like a chunk of quartz that you'd find in your backyard. This was something that if you, you know, you punched it, it would disintegrate. And it came in, burned up. I can't remember the exact numbers, 20, 30 kilometers above the surface, and slowed down so violently that it released all of its kinetic energy as a burst of light and sound, which is an explosion. And so this thing blew up, created an immense, shockwave and that thing touched down and that's what shattered all those windows so you know if that

had been made a metal it would have made it to the ground and done some real damage imagine what it must have been like to see one of those things 10,000 years ago when you have no understanding of the cosmos or your place in it or how anything works i mean talk about like inventing a religion or a spiritual moment right need to change my loinclose if i saw one now i'd crap my pants are you kidding that's that's terrifying i love that we went to the same place I don't know if you caught that. I said I'd need to change my loincloth. And you said, there you go.

That's a better line. You can use that one. Edit me out there. Let's leave them both. All right. So this would all be petrifying, but let's take a quick commercial break and then we'll talk about if there's anything that we can do about it. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming. conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you, go blank yourself, right?

It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, just suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denial is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job. a place or even a relationship.

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To start the conversation, visit talkaboutvaping.org. Brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. Hello, puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertainment? listening experience in podcast land. Jeopardy truthers who say that you were given all the answers believe in... I guess they would be Kenspiracy theorists.

That's right. Are there Jeopardy truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like, they gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix.

Listen on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And we're back. Okay, so Phil and I both agreed we'd soil ourselves if we saw a giant meteoroid coming towards us. Phil, is there anything that

we can do about this? How much advance notice do we need? What are our options here? Nothing. Oh, wait, no, that's not right. Thanks for joining us today. Sorry, I'm thinking five years ago. A few years ago, there's nothing you could do. Our first warning would be you'd look up and see this bright light in the sky and go, hey, what's that? And before you could finish that sentence, you're in a lot of trouble. When it comes to small ones, like to Chelyabinsk, one from 2013 that blew up over Russia, again, not much we can do because that's so small that objects like that are incredibly faint. And it's very difficult to spot them far enough in advance that we can do anything about it.

Now, for bigger ones, and we're talking about ones that might have a global impact, these are ones that are 100 meters across or bigger, the size of a football stadium or larger. Those we're starting to get a handle on. We have a lot of big telescopes, and step one is to find them, and we have telescopes searching the skies. We're doing a decent job about that. NASA's about to launch, in a few more years, a spacecraft that's going to scan the skies and really do a good job of finding all of these smaller objects. It's called NEO Sentinel, near-Earth object Sentinel.

It's a very cool mission. But where are these things coming from? I mean, we have telescopes looking for stuff, but tell us about where these things are from. Are they just coming from deep, deep space like Omuamua? Are they coming from our own backyard? Are they falling off the moon? Like, what's the source of these things? Oh, the vast majority of them are coming from our solar system.

They're coming from comets, and that tends to be smaller stuff, or they come from the asteroid belt because the asteroid belt has all these big rocks in it. Some of them are, you know, hundreds of kilometers across. They occasionally whack into each other, create show. shrapnel and then that stuff goes off on its own orbit around the sun and eventually hits us or Jupiter or Mars or the moon. So that's where most of this stuff is coming from. Some of it is on very elliptical orbits so it gets very close to the sun and that means that if it's coming from that direction we can't see it. That's because it's, you know, the sun's up during the day and that

makes it hard to observe. The beauty of this NASA mission is that it's going to be in an orbit closer to the sun and we'll look back toward the earth and we'll be able to see. see some of these objects that are coming in from that direction. We also need telescopes that sort of orbit ahead and behind us so that we can scan the whole sky. But that's sometime in the future. But in the meantime, you know, we're going to find the vast majority of these things. The next step is, well, what are you going to do about it? And for a long time, we weren't sure. Then in 2005, we hit a small comet with a spacecraft, slammed into it. That was the deep impact mission, apparently a coincidence that it was that the movie had the same name.

Didn't they slam it with a piece of metal like the size of a washing machine or something? Yeah, it was a piece of copper. And they did that on purpose because when you get this flash of light and all this gas, all this material vaporizes, you can analyze to see what's in it. And, you know, if you see a lot of copper, you ignore that. You say that's from our impactor. Everything else is part of that rock that we hit. So that was pretty clever, actually.

Yeah. Well, I always thought that was a fun variation and, like, throw the kitchen sink at it. And like, no, throw the washing machine at it. You know, it's like that. Throw, you know, thousands of melted down pennies, I think is how that worked. I actually don't know where they got the copper from. That would be an interesting thing to find out. It may have come for Virginia.

Virginia has a lot of copper. We're used to. A couple of years ago, NASA launched this mission called the double asteroid redirect test, and they slammed a spacecraft into the moon of an asteroid because asteroids can have moons. even though this asteroid called Didomos is small, and I don't have the number off the top of my head, it's a few hundred meters across. They discovered it has a moon, which they called dimorphos, and that was upsetting to me. I wanted them to call it Epididemos because of course you did. Because, A, funny, epididimos, but also it's correct.

Epi means external or outside of, and so it's a moon outside of the asteroid. Nobody likes my puns. I love them, Phil. Thank you. I appreciate that. And so they slammed the spacecraft into the moon because we knew how far the moon was from the main asteroid and how long it took to orbit. And by hitting it, you could directly measure how much the orbit was changed. If you hit just a plain old asteroid orbit in the sun, you have to wait months and years before you can really see how much it's bad up or slow down.

But with the moon, it was almost instantaneous. And they found out that it had a 12-hour orbit that changed by about a half an hour. which was way more than they expected, which is good news, because that means that if you see a hundred meter wide rock heading towards Earth and we hit it with a spacecraft, we can divert it. And the earlier you do this, the better, right? It's not like you're attaching a rocket to this thing and shooting it off at high speed. You're changing the velocity a little bit. And so the earlier you do that, the more time it has to move out of the way.

So really what you want to do is identify these things decades in advance and then do this. This mission was amazing because they did. it. Not just that it worked. I mean, we figured it might work if it hit. But it hit. That was amazing. That's not an easy thing to do to hit a target that small when you're screaming across space at thousands of kilometers an hour. And it worked perfectly. It was an amazing mission. It's always easier to like knock a sniper's rifle than to like swat the bullet out of the air, you know, when it's almost hit you. But it takes some planning, right? Like they thought about this. NASA doesn't work quickly. This is probably like a 10-year mission to go up there and knock this moon. We're

not going to have that much time if we see a rock coming. We're lucky enough to spot it on its way. And we have months. What plans do we have to like scramble and melt down more pennies or whatever to save the earth? Like, does Virginia have enough copper for that? I don't know. That sounds like a good movie. Send in your pennies to save the earth. It depends. You got to remember, everything's in motion, and I mean that literally, there's all these things, there are millions of these objects orbiting the sun. Some of them we know about, and we actually know about most of the ones that get close to the Earth that are big enough to do serious damage. We're doing really well at finding them, categorizing them and saying, okay, if they're not going to hit us for the next

hundred years, we're not going to sweat them. And every month, there are a few more that come onto the list that are like, well, these are getting a little closer than I'd like. Typically, as you observe them more and more and the orbit gets defined better, we realize they're going to miss. And if you think about it, the analogy I like is an outfielder in baseball. And you're standing there. You're an outfielder. You got your glove and you're standing there. And you're looking to see the pitcher throw the ball. And as soon as the batter hits the ball, you have one second to look at the asteroid, to look at the baseball. and then you have to close your eyes, and then now catch it, you know, six, seven, ten seconds later.

Well, you can't. You only got a glimpse of where it was headed. You only have a general vague idea. But if you keep your eye on the ball, you can, you know, maneuver and figure it out and get a, you really, really get a beat on it and then catch it. It's the same thing with asteroids. If you observe them for a day or two, that orbit's very fuzzy. You don't really know where it's going, but you observe them over and over and over again. You refine that orbit more and more accurately. And that would be great if the moon didn't exist. If Jupiter didn't exist, but the planets and everything, they're pulling on these things. So even when you know the orbit, you've got to keep observing all of them to be able to predict them in the future. That was going to be my question.

Like, isn't the system fundamentally chaotic? Like, you get a little bit small mistake here is going to lead to a large mistake down the road. Is that what limits our predictions to like 100 years, 50 years instead of like a million years? Well, what you call chaotic, I call job security. Yeah, I mean, no, you're absolutely right. We could observe an asteroid tonight. observe it for the next 10 years, nail down its orbit, wait 10 years, and then it's like, oh, it's not where we thought it was going to be. It's like, oh, yeah, it's in an orbit that

brings it near Jupiter, and the gravity of that beast yanked it into a new orbit. So that's why you've got to keep observing these things. And the amount of time you need in advance depends on a lot of stuff, including how big it is. If it's a big monster, you might need 30 or 40 years after you move it for it to move into a safe orbit. Or you might just need that much advanced warning because, look, you know, just hitting it with a single spacecraft's not going to do it. We might have to hit it repeatedly. We might have to detonate a nuke near it. It's not Armageddon. You don't dig a hole into an asteroid and blow it up. That turns your one problem into millions of slightly smaller problems. It's not a great solution. But if you blow up a nuke

next to it, it'll vaporize the surface material, which then expands very rapidly. rapidly and acts like a rocket and pushes on the asteroid. The only problem is blowing up a nuke in space is literally illegal. It's against international law. So we'll have to figure it out. You know, if we're going to save the Earth, maybe, maybe people will be able to suspend that law. But even then, it's like there are a lot of things you have to do to have this sort of infrastructure in place and we don't. So if we saw something hitting our way that's going to hit us in say less than 10 years, there may not be much we can do about it. If you think about governments trying to coordinate on a 10-year time scale, I think you should just, like, figure out where you're going to bury yourself and call it a day. There's no way it's going to happen. Oh, and it's more complicated than that even, because imagine now just to pick to governments, let's say China in the U.S. And China builds the navigation system and we have the rockets. And so we launched this thing and it hits the rock, but not dead center. It hits it like just off center. And it turns out the path gets changed just so much that instead of hit. hitting China, it hits the U.S. Oh, huh.

Accidentally. There's a lot of issues here that have to be ironed out. Yeah, geopolitically, everything gets complicated when it has to do with space. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to try to combat this East Coast negativity with a little California sunshine. I mean, aren't there other things that we can do other than just like hitting it with a rock or nuking it? I read about some folks in Santa Barbara working on lasers to like ablate one side of these things to make it more refined.

or also to release some gas. Do you think those things are realistic at all? Kind of. These things have never been tested. But one thing is to, yeah, you launch a satellite, maybe something that has enormous solar panel, so it gets a lot of electricity, and that can power a powerful laser, and you aim it at the asteroid and vaporize the surface, and that takes the place of the nuke. And, you know, instead of a gigantic explosion now, you're more gently vaporizing the surface, and very slowly pushing on the rock that way. that should work, but it would take a lot of time, and we don't really have that technology yet.

People are working on it, but I don't know if we have it. A simpler one is to simply paint one half of the asteroid white, and sunlight has a pressure. It's quantum mechanics, it's very complicated, but sunlight hitting an asteroid actually does apply a very gentle force. And asteroids spin, usually slowly, but not always. So if you paint it, one half of it white, or in stripes, like an orange peel, every other orange peel is black and one's white on the asteroid.

As it spins, you wind up getting this force that as applied on the asteroid that can push it into a new orbit. But that is incredibly slow. If we have a hundred years warning, something like that might work. Otherwise, yeah, we're kind of have to resort to these more violent things. The other one which I quite like is quite elegant is a gravity tractor or a gravity tug where you have a spacecraft that's massive. and you kind of park it next to the asteroid and very, very low thrust engines then move the spaceship and the gravity of the spaceship pulls on the asteroid. And the math of this works.

If you just let the spaceship sit there, the asteroid and the spaceship will gravitationally attract each other and they'll crash into each other slowly. Chaos for the wind, right? This is using chaos in our favor. Kind of, yeah. I mean, in this case, you're just very slowly, very gently, just caressing. asteroid, just nudging it using the force of gravity, which is very weak. And again, that's quite slow. But if you have a few years, that would work. And that technology exists. We do have

spacecraft with very low thrust engines. So that is something the B612 Foundation, which is a wonderful group of scientists and engineers, are investigating using an ion drive, a low thrust drive, to tug an asteroid out of the way. Super cool. So I promised at the intro before you were on here that we were going to talk about threats that we could do something about. And I'm wondering if maybe I didn't completely deliver on that promise, because these are things that we could maybe do something. How optimistic are you if there was something coming towards us that we could solve the problems? Or does it completely depend on what it is and how big it is and how fast it is? Well, it's kind of like getting rid of fossil fuels and replacing it with solar power, right? 50 years ago, that would have been a

joke because solar panels were very expensive and there weren't that many, but over time, the price has dropped. And so now the growth is becoming almost exponential. And there's a kind of a crossover curve between the use of solar panels going up and the use of fossil fuels going down. And so it's similar to that, right? Our technology is getting better. We're getting better at finding these things. We're getting better at thinking about how to get rid of them. Our technology for building rockets is better. And it's a matter of time. We're kind of throwing the dice here. I would say, and this is just a seed of the pants estimate, don't put any money on this or anything. But I would say that If we do not get hit by a large asteroid in the next 100 years, I think we will probably have

the technology in place to prevent any large impact forever. What does that mean? You know, is chelyab being so large one? Well, if it were made a metal, it would have been bad. And so those happen every 10 to 25 years, every 50 years. So we might get a couple of big ones between now and then. But I'm not talking about those because those really are kind of small. I'm talking about ones 100 meters across or bigger.

Right now it's not. but eventually our technology will be good enough that those will no longer be a threat. So I'm feeling pretty good about my grandkids then. Sure. It means we're also sort of in the most terrifying period of history, right? Because until now, we didn't really understand how dangerous the cosmos was

and that it could at any moment rain down death upon us. And in 100 years, we'll be protected from that. But there's like this window between understanding the danger and being able to do anything about it that we realize, oh my gosh, we're basically naked in the face of death from space. Yeah, it's a death from the sky's season we're living in the middle of right now. Yeah, you know, it wasn't that long ago where this threat wasn't taken seriously, even in my

lifetime. But then with the dinosaur killer, when that in the 80s was starting to be understood that that was caused by an asteroid impact, yeah, people started taking it more seriously. And then after Comethmaker Levy, I think people were also like, wow, the stuff actually can happen like in our lifetimes. That's right. That was a big comet that broke apart and hit Jupiter. It broke apart into like dozens of pieces and hit it over and over again. And the mushroom cloud from the explosions could be seen from Earth. I saw the black scars. I mean, Jupiter doesn't have a surface, but that material from the explosion settled down on the tops of clouds. And it was visible for weeks and months. And I saw it through a small telescope. It was pretty terrifying.

On that note, try not to get too scared. We're going to take a break. And we'll be right back with something else to worry about. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it

if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship.

I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps and their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welterah. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them.

Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Puzzlers, let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy Truthers, who say that you were given all the answers, believe in... I guess they would be Kenspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy-truthers?

Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like. They gave you the answers, and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix.

Listen on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone, or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further.

The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources. is available for you at loveyourmind today.org. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the Movie Pass era, where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero cents, and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet.

On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of Movie Pass the company that he founded, His story is wild that it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us.

When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back and we are trying to keep an optimistic point of view about the future of humanity. I've had kids.

I know Kelly's had kids. And so we're voting with our gametes that humanity will survive. and it will be worth being alive on Earth for many years to come. Let's hope that science doesn't prove that wrong. We're here talking to Phil Platt about the dangers from space, and we've talked about the dangers that meteorites, meteorites, and meteor everythings can do to us. Now let's talk about something much brighter.

Oh, wow. That's a good segue. Now, let's talk about the sun. Okay, first of all, don't look at the sun. Just it's amazing that I have to say this sometimes. but that big giant glowing thing in the sky, don't look at it. It's going to hurt you. It gives off light that is so intense. It can actually damage your retina. And so the sun is the source of all warmth and light on the earth, but it's also dangerous just in that sort of trivial way. And it turns out it's dangerous in a lot of other ways. It's fundamentally a star. And stars have a lot of power. The amount of energy the sun generates in its core. And I believe, if I get this number of, right it is a hundred billion one megaton nuclear bombs every second a hundred billion one megaton bombs every second yes it's a lot of energy and you don't want to get too close to it and the sun is

immense it is very very big it is 860,000 miles across 1.4 million kilometers and that is a lot of room for a lot of danger and the problem here is in the form of magnetism magnets you think magnets you have a horseshoe magnet in school and you put it under piece of paper and you shake iron filings on it, and you get those really cool patterns. And it turns out magnets are super dangerous when they're a million miles across. The sun generates a magnetic field that's very powerful. Inside, it's basically under its surface. It's extremely complicated.

There are two reasons it's complicated. One is that magnetism is unbelievably complicated. Daniel, Jackson, did you have to do? Jackson? I have nightmares of cross products and integrals. Absolutely. Yeah, I can see your eyelid twitching. Oh, my God.

This is a grad school level electromagnetism book that I got my PhD 30 years ago and I still get sweat on my bra when I think about it. It was the hardest course. My qualifying exam was given to me by J.D. Jackson.

And he asked me questions about rotating spheres of charge and I just about melted into a magnetic puddle. Oh, I would again walk into a lava lake rather than do that. The equations that govern magnetism are unbelievably complex, and you start with very simple concepts, and it immediately jumps into

ridiculous amounts of calculus and super advanced calculus. So that's one reason. The other thing is that the sun is a giant ball of ionized gas. It's very hot. The electrons are stripped off the atoms inside of it, and that by itself is very complex. The motions inside the sun. It's hot in the center, cooler at the surface. hot material rises, the cool air sinks, and that's hydrodynamics, which is another extremely

complicated field of physics. So if you mix these two, it's nuts, it's really hard. So simplifying, because you got to, the sun makes these magnetic fields inside of this material that's rising and falling. It gets to the surface, and you can think of it as like a magnet with all these magnetic field lines coming out of it, like those drawings you see of like the donut-shaped lines around the earth. And you get thousands or tens of thousands, maybe millions of them inside the sun, all like that. And they're rising and falling all the time. And when they get to the surface, they prevent, basically the magnetic field lines from one spot versus the next, this other tower over there rising and falling. Those magnetic field lines can connect and interfere with each other

and they trap the gas in them and then the gas can't fall back down into the sun. So you've got this cooling material sitting on the surface of the sun. Cooler material, not as hot, doesn't emits as much light, so you get a dark spot on the sun, a sunspot. So a sunspot is a magnetic phenomenon. But sometimes those magnetic field lines get really tangled up and they have a huge amount of energy involved in them. Whenever you talk about magnetism, everything is an analogy and I hate that because it's not always accurate, but it's not a bad way to think of it. So imagine you take something like a really, really, really strong spring and it's really, really hard to bend and yet you bend it and you bend it as tightly as you can. So it's now forming a loop.

And then somebody takes a blow torch and blows off the top of it. What happens? Well, that thing's going to snap. And it's going to snap so hard, it could kill you. It's going to release a lot of energy. And it's the same thing with these magnetic field lines. They have a huge amount of energy stored in them. They tangle up.

They can snap and release that energy. And when they do, you can get a solar flare. And that can release millions of megatons, a billion megatons of energy all at once. Gamma rays, x-rays, all this high-energy radiation, subatomic particles moving it just under the speed of light. These go flying out into space, they can come to Earth. We have enough time? We got like four more hours, right?

So this is what we call space weather. This material comes scream into Earth, interacts with our magnetic field. These particles then get funneled into our atmosphere where they hit the molecules and atoms in our air, blow off their electrons, and when those electrons recombined, the atoms glow, and we get an aurora. So that's where the aurora comes from. from this stuff from the sun, which is great until you get a really powerful storm. And then you start getting interactions between the magnetic field of this material coming from the sun, the Earth's magnetic field. It generates currents, electric currents in the Earth itself.

This can overload power grids, take down high transmission lines. And this happened in Canada, in Quebec, in 1989, a powerful solar storm connected with the Earth, created a huge current under the granite in Canada and North America and the United States. And there was so much that it overloaded power lines in Quebec at a blackout that lasted for several days because once you blow a transformer, you're screwed. It takes a long time to repair those things. A really big storm from the sun could cause widespread blackouts over most of North America. We're more susceptible to it because of geology, but there's no place on the planet that's

really safe. Now, the sun doesn't do this very often. We see in the historical record that, yeah, there have been some big storms from the sun that could do this. But they happen every few centuries or something like that, maybe every few thousand years. But 1859 was the first one ever seen. And it's because we had the technology at that point to detect it. Then in 2012, another one that was that powerful also erupted off the sun, but it missed us. So, you know, take those two as an average. It's 160 years, something like that between them? That's not long enough for me, because if those things hit us, huge power outages,

they can blow out satellites and basically erase our technological civilization. You describe these things as solar storms, which makes me think of storms on Earth, which are notoriously hard to predict even like a week out. Is the same physics making it difficult to predict solar storms? You know, are we struggling to understand what's going on inside the sun, which limits our ability to predict how often these things bubble up and create these crazy conditions on the surface? That's right. And it's a good analogy. If you live in the Midwest and they say there's a tornado warning, I can never keep these right. I think a warning is when conditions are good for tornado formation. And a tornado watch is when one is seen. I may have that backwards.

Kelly is saying I have that backwards. Okay. But either way, I mean, you can use radar and look at the clouds and say, well, conditions are good. And then somebody sees one. And it's like, okay, this is trouble. It's the same sort of thing with the sun. The way we can see the magnetism in the sun, There are several different ways to see it, but one obvious one is just looking at sunspots and a lot of these sunspots are very magnetically active and you observe them with special kinds of telescopes, which can measure the kind of magnetic activity they have because they are different kinds. And some kinds are more prone to storming than others. We have one on the sun facing us right now is re-record this that I was looking at and I'm like, hmm, it's not a powerful sunspot, but it's pretty active. and it's doing stuff on the sun's surface. There's all kinds of activity going on around the sunspot.

It may not flare. It's hard to really say. But then we have astronomical satellites in space that observe the sun, telescopes on the ground that observe the sun. And when a flare goes off, we get a warning. And if it's a big one, we have a few hours, which is usually all you need. The military can shut down satellites. The electrical grids can divert electricity from one place to another. The real problem here for power is that we built our grid in the 50s, and the population of the United States was like under 100 million people, something like that.

Now we have three times as many people, the grid, these power lines, which were never used at capacity until recently, have full flow through them. And if you add more electricity to them, they heat up, they can melt, they can snap. And so that's the problem. You have to redirect electricity so that areas with a lot of traffic will get their electricity from different places. still, it's kind of half-assed, and it would be better if our grid had more substations, more lines, more insulators. Even better would be if we get our power locally, like solar panels on your house. Then you don't really have to worry about stuff like this as much, because your power won't get interrupted, because if the grid goes down, it's like,

I got power, I'm good. And so the reason things were so bad in Canada in the 80s was because they didn't turn off the power because they didn't know it was coming because we didn't have detection. That was part of it, but also it's the geology of the area. There are places where it's easier to create a flow. It's called a geomagnetic induced current, or GIC. And there's some places on Earth where you get bigger currents than others. And the North American plate, basically, is a really, really happy place to make electricity. Bad for us.

But if you get a really big solar storm, it affects us more than other places. So that's bad. So it's a confluence of events there. You know, we can't prevent the sun from doing anything. It's the sun. A hundred earths can fit across the width of a sun. You could fill it with a million earths. It is an immense object.

So we're not telling it what to do. All we can do is change how we defend ourselves from them. And so if we gird the grid, which is a great bumper sticker idea, if we put money into infrastructure, we can prevent a lot of the problems for happening. If we go to more local sources of electricity, and that could be cities even using solar power or houses using solar power, the more local you are, the better. Battery storage is a good thing, too, because then if the grid goes down, you still have power for a while. So we can't prevent the sun from doing it. All we can do is prevent ourselves from suffering

the worst of it. And that's something we absolutely can do. We just have to make up our minds and open up our wallets. Well, I'm glad we're managing to end on a high note. So I partially delivered on that promise. Oh, let's talk about nearby supernova. No, no, no, no, no, no. Done. All right, But the final high note we're going to talk about is your incredible recent book, Under Alien Skies, which the asteroid chapter I totally laughed at and enjoyed this scenario. The chapter on Saturn was absolutely beautiful. Well, thank you. Yeah. Tell us all about Under Alien Skies.

What's the premise and where can folks get it? So Under Alien Skies was an idea I got a long time ago. I wrote an article for Astronomy magazine in the 1990s kids. Ask your grandparents about the 90s. And the idea was because I would take my telescope out to public places and show people things. And a question I got a lot was, you know, if I look at a picture from Hubble, which was up even then, you know, would it look like that if I were there? When I looked through a telescope and I were looking at Saturn, what would it look like if I were there? And it turns out that that's an interesting question because some things, you look at a picture of the moon, you know, what you see is what you get.

But when you look at a picture of a galaxy or a gas cloud, a nebula, they're very different if you were up closer even inside them versus what you would look at from outside them. And so that was sort of the idea. Then I realized if I want to write a book, I really have to talk about what it's like to actually be there. And so I wrote a chapter on the moon. And it's all about you are now on the moon. What do you experience? You know, there's no air. The sun is up for two weeks at a time

and sets for two weeks at a time. What does the earth look like? What does the landscape around you look like? What's low gravity like? And so I had a chapter on the moon and Mars. A late comer to that idea was writing about asteroids and comets because as we learn more about them, it turns out it's not at all what you expect.

It's not at all like the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact if you've seen those. These are very, very fragile objects. And if you approach to an asteroid and tried to land on it, it's a good chance you'd fall straight through the surface. It would be like jumping into a ball pit. And that cracked me up. I was not expecting that to be true until we sent a probe to an asteroid to actually grab a sample and come back.

And when that probe touched down, it started sinking into the surface. And so each chapter of this book starts with a little science fiction-y-like short story of somebody or you being at this place and experiencing it. And that chapter opens with an astronaut who is, I'm going to land on this asteroid and basically sinks into it and has to be rescued by their. partner. That cracked me up. I was like, oh, that would be me. I would make that mistake. Oh, yeah, me too. It was fun to write about us because it's not just, you know, then Saturn and Pluto and then what's it like to orbit red dwarf star, a very small, cool red dwarf star, a binary system like Star Wars, Tatooine is a binary star. And it turns out there's all kinds of things going on with that that you don't expect. And then I didn't expect. I did do a lot of math for

this book. A lot. It's not in the book. It's all hidden. It's all hidden in my descriptions, but I had to think back to some stuff I did in grad school and work out some, a couple of equations from first principals. That was exciting, something I haven't done in 30 years. I used the equation from grad school that I still remembered and then did it, and it's like, well, that number's not right. So then I had to go, well, how did we get this equation? So I had to re-derive it.

It took a couple of days. Then I just wound up writing about how that works. So it was fun, you know, getting near a black hole, watching stars form, being in the side of a star cluster. It was fun because of the science, but it was more fun because of my imagination. You know, I'd lie in bed at night before going to sleep and think, oh, so I'm floating over this thing, you know, and just what would I see? Just not think about it, just kind of experience it in my head.

And, you know, I'm turning and what would happen if this happened. And that became so much fun. And then I've got to put all of that in the book and describe it and tell the truth about this stuff versus the misconceptions that a lot of us have. So it was hugely fun to write. I think the fun that you were having really came through. It read like something that had been fun to write. And so it was fun to read.

Well, thank you. Yeah. All right. So if somebody wants to, first of all, they can buy your book anywhere and you read the audiobook. Yeah, I narrated Under Alien Skies, which was fun. It's the first time I've ever done that. I tried to do that for my last book, but they were like, no, we're going to get a pro.

But now I've done Crash Course Astronomy and a bunch of TV shows and stuff. And I was like, come on. I got this. And they auditioned. And they were like, oh, yeah, sure, go ahead. So I did it. And it was tremendous. It was really great because the story has a lot of personal anecdotes in it.

So that was a lot of fun to do. Awesome. And so if folks want to find other, you mentioned crash course astronomy, which you did, you do all kinds of awesome stuff. So if anybody wants to keep in touch with the various things that you do, how would they do that? Let's see. Underalionskies.com is where you can get the book. My other books are on Amazon, Death from the Skies and Bad Astronomy.

Also, two to the seventh nerd dizzes, a book I wrote with Zach Wienersmith, a series of nerd insult. It's 128 of them. Classic. And these are all available where you get books. Crash Course Astronomy is a 46 part. Crash Course, like John and Hank Green. I did that for them on Astronomy. That's on YouTube.

And you can find me, just type Phil Plate into whatever search engine you like these days. And you'll find me. I'm on Blue Sky and Instagram and the Fediverse and all the usual places. All right. On that note, thanks so much for coming, Phil and chatting with us about the various ways that we might all die in the near term. and what we can maybe sort of do about it or our grandkids can do about it. It's been a lot of fun.

Just too. There's so many more. Oh, my gosh. That's right. Yes, check out Death from the Skies if you want to really not be able to sleep at night. Thanks very much, Phil. Thank you, Kelly. Thanks, Daniel.

Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us.

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