Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Will an Asteroid Kill You?

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

Could humans go the way of the dinosaurs: extinction by space rock? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th. season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their

courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some of the jobs you might get at NASA have really awesome sounding titles. I heard you can work at NASA and be called

a spaceship commander. Yeah, or Even better, you could be the head of planetary defense. Are you serious? Is that like a real title? Absolutely. Wait, so what do we need to defend against? Like rogue planets? Evil planets? We're not expecting an attack from Mars,

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

Hello, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And this is Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Today, we're talking about a pretty big question when it comes to humanity, which is, asteroid going to come and kill us all. So, grim stuff. Grim stuff, but also important. I mean, you might brush this off as irrelevant,

but we know from some pretty recent scientific history, 65 million years ago, the dinosaur extinction was caused very likely by an asteroid impact. Just the other day. Just the other day, in geologic terms. So it could happen to us. That's right. And so since we're all concentrated on this one planet,

you know, all of our humanity's eggs are in one basket, almost literally, it's a reasonable question to ask So Daniel went out and asked people on the street Are they concerned about an asteroid's killing us all? Here's what they said Well, maybe there's a possibility I mean it's quite possible But there has to be certain things to happen

In order that take place, you know You've got to have holes in the ozone You've got to have meteorites coming You've got to be able to project it You've got to know I mean we have the technology so we can stop it I think there's a chance yeah Are you worried about it?

I read that it's a low probability, but every day that goes by, the probability compounds so that there's a high chance now. But honestly, it's whatever. Like, if it happens, it happens, you know? It's all the question of probability, but there's a finite possibility.

So it seemed like a lot of people were aware of the danger, But a lot of people also sort of put it off. They're like, well, it's a possibility, but they don't think about it, right? There's like a fascinating dissonance there. They don't seem that concern. Yeah. Like, I got other stuff to worry about it. I got gas in my car or am I going to, you know, is a self-driving Uber going to run me over?

Yeah. They seem to be more worried about that. They seem to be very pragmatic. Like, I know the probability small, so I'm not going to worry about it as much as I'm going to worry about, you know, getting run over by a car. Yeah, there's like hierarchies of worry. You know, it's like, that's on the list of things I should worry about, but I don't actually have time. to worry about. And maybe if I just ignore it, it'll go away. Right. Sort of that list of problems. And then some people seem to have just like this super confidence in scientists and

engineers. They're like, I know it could kill us all, but I think we probably have the technology and they're probably working on it. I love that slash I'm terrified by it. I love it because I love that they're like, yeah, scientists are pretty capable. I mean, in the movies, all it takes to solve this problem is like a couple pots of coffee and a musical montage and the scientists have an answer, right? I love that idea. Don't forget the chalkboard, you know, here's the solution. It's always at least one musical montage, though. I'm terrified, though, because it means that they're like, well, I don't have to worry about it. We don't have to do anything. I'm sure science has it covered. And as you're going to learn in today's episode, there certainly

are some vulnerabilities there. There's a possibility that an asteroid if it comes could wipe us out, even if we do see it coming. It's non-zero, the probability. It's non-zero. It's definitely on the list of things you should worry about but probably don't have time to do anything about anyway. Right, right. Okay, so what is the probability then that we're going to get hit by an asteroid?

Seven. Seven out of one. The probability is fascinating. It's sort of unknown. And you have to think about what is the kind of thing that's going to hit us, right? So we're talking about rocks, right? And when you look out into space, you see the bright stuff.

You see the stars. You see the moon. you see things that give off light. There's other stuff out there that's dark that you don't see unless it happens to reflect light, it'll be like shining from moonlight or sunlight or something. So there's a huge member of rocks that are still out there in the solar system

and in the universe, and that's what we're talking about, like a big rock slamming into the earth. Yeah, and I thought that was super interesting to find out that when people see in movies, like, oh, we're going to get him by an asteroid, it's usually like this thing that comes from the void of space that's going to hit us out of the blue. But the truth is, apparently that we're, like, surrounded by asteroids.

There's, like, gazillions of asteroids that were, like, hanging around us, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's rocks everywhere in our solar system. And you have to understand, like, how our solar system came to be. You know, our solar system is, like, gravity slowly over billions of years pulling together rocks and rubble and dust into larger pieces, right? Right. Like, how do you form a star?

You get a big ball of gas and you wait a billion years. and gravity eventually pulls it together and compresses it and compresses it so much that it turns to like a fusion bomb, right? That's how powerful gravity is over long times, right? Given enough time, you can pull anything together. But it doesn't get everything. So there's still, you know, enough rocks left over to make Earth and enough bits left over to make Jupiter. And not all those bits get pulled into a planet. And that's why you have things like the asteroid belt, which has a huge number of rocks in it. They're like the crumbs from for making the planets, right?

That's right. Somebody ate a cake and the Asteroid Belt are there crumbs left over and they didn't sweep up. Yeah, or like, you know, when you're making like meatballs or bright or something and you like, you grab some and you like, you pat it down and you make something, but there's always all these little bits lying around. That's right. And I usually wiped down my counter, but whoever made the solar system didn't. And for scale, like, I look this up and if you added up like all of the rocks in the asteroid belt, it's like, you know, 1-25. fifth of the size of the moon so most of the stuff in the solar system wait that's it yeah yeah it's four percent of the moon if you add up all the stuff in the asteroid belt all that stuff i thought it was

like thicker and and more massive yeah and fascinatingly some of them it's mostly a few big rocks like half of the stuff in the in the asteroid belt is just four really big rocks but there's a lot of rocks out there how many rocks are there no is there an estimate like um Well, there's, we don't know the number of rocks in total because you can't count the really tiny ones. Like, we know the big one. We know a few big ones. And as they get smaller and smaller, there are more and more. And as they get really small, they get really numerous.

And then they're basically impossible to see and impossible to count. And the thing to understand there is that obviously the biggest rocks are the more dangerous. And the smallest ones are less dangerous. And so we're mostly worried about the biggest rocks. Right, right. And some of those rocks are pretty big. Like, we need to worry about the rocks in our solar system that we're, like, hanging out with. Like, I was thinking, like, an analogy is that, like, we're in the toilet, right?

And this toilet is swirling around, and we're, like, this little pebble on it. Is this your personal toilet model of the solar system? Yes. I think Copernicus rejected that, didn't he explicitly? Yeah, I don't think they had toilets back then. You're right. All right, go ahead. So, yeah, so it's like we're swirling around and we're this little ball,

but there's all these other little balls swirling around us, and we're just hoping that in this swirling around, none of them are going to hit us. It's like this chaotic giant thing, right, isn't it? That's right. And I want to talk a little bit more about that, but first, a quick break. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously.

suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person

to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets.

With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right, so let's think of this whole thing.

system as this big swirling mass. I think that's a fair analogy. I mean, a toilet bowl makes it sound like everything is cycling towards the center, which we're hopefully not going to get flushed into the sun. Right, right. But you're right, everything's been swirling around. And in the beginning, I think there was a lot of bumping, right? There was a big

disorganized mess and it swirled together. And the bumping is how we got planets and stars and all that kind of stuff. But now, billions of years later, the Earth is at least 4 billion years old. Billions of years later, things have been swirling around for a long time. And Things that we're going to bump together and form together mostly have.

Things have settled down. Yeah, we're sort of in the, you know, happy middle ages of the solar system. The end of the flush. We're waiting for the big flush to come. Yeah, so the interesting thing is that there are rocks in our solar system, which if they hit the Earth could do serious damage. Like the biggest rock in the asteroid belt is 950 kilometers across, which is huge.

It's enormous. That's like, what, like Florida? I don't know, but the one that killed the dinosaurs was about 10 kilometers across. No way. So, yeah, 950 kilometers across, it's like a planet buster. So there's definitely stuff in our solar system, which if it hit us, could do serious damage. So maybe you're right, that's a surprise to people. Yeah, yeah.

It's like we're living with them. It's like your roommate could kill you at any time. More like your neighbor, but, you know, that's sort of something we're accustomed to. You know, you try not to look in their windows too much and get too worried about it. But yeah, you never know when your neighbor's going to smash into you and cause an explosion the size of a nuclear warhead, yeah. Let's talk about the spectacular grim stuff.

Like, what's the probability of surviving an asteroid hitting us? Right, yeah. And that again depends entirely on the size. For example, there are asteroids hitting the earth all the time. like things that are you know less than a meter in size these rocks are hitting the earth all the time but the earth is big and these asteroids are small and every time you look up it's in the night sky and you see a shooting star that is a rock hitting the earth that's an asteroid we have something like a windshield right we have this this atmosphere which protects the earth and it protects us from

various cosmic rays but also from space rocks because what happens when a rock hits the atmosphere It's sort of like, I don't know, like an elephant hitting a waterbed or something, right? It impacts and it gets and it pushes the air out of the way, but it gets heated up by all that air. It's going so fast. The air feels like this giant jet that strips it away, right? Yeah, exactly. Like in all those movies, when spaceships are re-entering atmosphere, that's because of all the friction from the air on the spaceship. And spaceships usually have like nice protection, fancy tiles or something that,

protect the astronauts from being burnt to a crisp. But a space rock is just a rock. And sometimes it's made of ice or rubble or whatever. It doesn't have that. And so usually they burn up in the atmosphere. And that's what shooting stars are. So we're constantly being hit by very small ones, which we couldn't have seen in advance because they were too small,

but they don't do any damage. So air is good. Air is good for lots of reasons. Yeah, but there's a good thing we have it. Yeah, but then about one every five years or so, you get a rock that's like five meters in size. And a rock 5-featers in size has a lot of kinetic energy to it, right? It's been traveling through space for a long time.

By the time it hits the Earth, it's been pulled in by a gravitational field. It has about as much energy as the nuclear bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. It's a lot of energy. So a 5-meter asteroid is about like the size of a minivan or school bus? Yeah, yeah. It's about a school bus. And it blows up. And about once every five years, one of those hits the Earth and makes

a pretty spectacular explosion. Now, most of the Earth, of course, is covered in water and we're not, like, imaging all the atmosphere simultaneously, and these things can happen in the upper atmosphere, because you might be thinking, hmm, I think I'd notice if somebody blew up a nuclear bomb every five years. But these kind of things can happen,

and we don't necessarily notice them. Really? To five years ago, we had an Hiroshima-style asteroid hit us? The odds are that sometime in the last five years, there's a good chance that a pretty big rock hit the atmosphere and burned up upon entry, leaving as much energy as a Hiroshima explosion, yeah.

And the energy isn't quite as concentrated. It's not as focused in one spot as the Hiroshima explosion. But yeah, it can leave a substantial amount of energy. Like by the time it reaches the ground or the ocean, it has that much energy? Yeah, I think in order to reach the ground, that's about the threshold. About five meters. And remember, there was a pretty big explosion over Russia in 2013, in Chellier-Insk. Yeah. I've seen the videos on YouTube. Yeah, everybody saw the videos.

It just happened like one morning. Huge explosion in the sky, like an enormous bomb. And everybody was shocked, and like a thousand people, I think, were hurt when that happened. And nobody saw it coming, right? Like, there was no warning. The warning was when it appeared in the atmosphere. And it just blew up. And that's exactly what happened.

And I think little bits of it might have reached the ground, but mostly it exploded in the atmosphere. Wow. So if it had been like twice the size, somebody could have been hit by an asteroid. Yeah, absolutely. And the bigger they get, the more dangerous they get. If it gets big enough, then it's, you know, it can explode in the atmosphere and leave huge clouds of dust and rubble and all sorts of stuff. And it can, when it hits the ground, it can throw up enormous clouds of dust and rubble. And that's where the danger really lies.

Like, not necessarily even, are you actually hit by a rock? Like, being actually physically hit by the rock from space is a tiny fraction of the danger. One of the real dangers is just that it, like, covers the sun. and causes a, you know, I guess you would call it like a... Environmental catastrophe. Environmental catastrophe. I was looking for like, Asteroidal winter or something. Asteroidal winter.

Asteroidal winter, yeah. We are coining new science term. We have the toilet bowl universe and the asteroid winter. You almost want to be hit by an asteroid large, you know, so that you die instantly and you don't. die from this like agonizing post-apocalyptic environmental disaster well i guess you can choose how you go i mean if the asteroid hits the earth and you get vaporized immediately like it just hits your city huge explosions you know your entire city is destroyed um you know you can make like a crater

like a thousand kilometers wide or something you could die instantly and you might prefer that because what comes next is like a cold long winter you know where all the crops die and only people who stockpile a lot of lentils in their basement are going to survive. But also, if it hits the water, you have a whole other problem, which is like massive tsunamis, right? I mean, imagine, go back to like our space cow hitting a waterbed, or I guess we were talking an elephant or something. Like, if a big rock hits the ocean, you might think, oh, great, that's going to absorb the impact. Well, yeah, it's going to absorb the impact, and it's going to absorb it in form of a huge wave, right? Like, you know, a wave's a kilometer high could wash over the planet. It's crazy.

But it depends on the size, right? So we're getting pelted all the time by little ones as they get bigger, they get more and more dangerous, and at some point it's like end of the world. That's right. I think if they get big enough, then we're talking planet killers, you know, something that starts off super

volcanoes, you know, like rips open the earth's crust and releases the magma and the lava that's underneath. And we're talking about not just tsunamis and not just earthquakes and not just the sky full of dust, but also massive ocean of lava covering the ground

and so that's pretty serious stuff but you know that's unlikely that requires a really really big rock you know and I looked at some numbers here also in like a 5 kilometer wide rock carries 100 zeta jewels that's 10 to the 23

joules all right and so for comparison is that a lot? That's a lot like an average American uses about 10 to the 11 jewels in a year and all of humanity uses like 10 to the 20 joules in one year. So that one collision carries like a thousand years worth of energy for humanity. So it's a huge amount of energy in a big collision like that. But again, remember,

the really big ones are rare. Like they estimate, for example, that a rock 5,000 meters wide, that's what we're talking about here, is like every 20 million years or so. But we could be at the end of that lifespan. So that's the thing. It's like there's rocks of all kinds of sizes out there from little ones to big ones and the bigger they are, the less likely we are to get the less common they are but the more destructive they are.

That's exactly right. So it's kind of like this kind of opposing curves like bigger but less likely but more dangerous. That's right. Bigger is less common but more dangerous. It's absolutely true and there's another piece of good news

which is the bigger they are the more likely we are to see them right and to spot them, which means we might have some idea about whether they're coming or not. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. How do we see them? And, like, what's NASA doing about it? People seem to have

all this great confidence in scientists. And I'm going to lay it all out on NASA. I have a lot of friends at NASA, so you guys are awesome. So, like, what are they doing about it? How do they see them? Yeah, they have a dedicated team. They're called, like, the planetary defense force or something and are they really called that yeah i think so the near-earth objects planetary defense team

aren't they called the near-ear earth objects group yeah neo near-earth objects is what they study and they basically just use telescopes and they scan the sky um and they look for rocks and you have to spot these things at the right time when the sun is reflecting off of them so that we can see them on earth because they don't glow right they're dark rocks and and the rocks respond differently to Some of them respond in this kind of lighting condition, and that kind of lighting conditions is different brightness. So you basically just have to pay attention all the time and notice one. And if you get a few pictures of it, the more pictures of it you can get,

the more you can know its size and its direction. And if you know its size and its direction, then you can plot its course into the future. You can say, oh, I think I know where this rock is and which direction it's going. And like which orbit it's in, right? Yeah. You can use my model of the solar system and understand where it's going to be and where we're going to be,

and then they can project forward. And the more measurements they have, the tighter that band of uncertainty is, like the tighter their projection is for where that rock is going to be over the next year or decade or century, and they can plot Earth's movements, and they can say whether or not we're in the clear or not.

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

And so they've seen these rocks go around the sun a few times, and they get better and better measurements. And so they can make better and better predictions. And that's why it's easier to see the big ones, right, because they reflect more light and they're just easier to spot. So it's good that the big ones, the more dangerous ones, are the easiest ones to see. It'd be scary if the smaller ones were dangerous because they're basically invisible. Right. So that's like the planetary defense strategy, right? It's just like, look out, try to spot them before they hit us.

Yeah, step number one is figure out, is one going to hit us? And at this point, they've looked out into the solar system. They've been watching for a while, and they're pretty confident that they've seen all the ones that pose really any danger. All the ones that could do really any danger to the planet or to a significant civilian. population, all the ones above a kilometer in size, for example. They think they know all of our neighbors that could kill us. We think we sort of have a check on that. Yeah, they think they've seen them.

Like we have a registry of them. Yeah, but, you know, there could always be one hiding. Like, they've only seen what they've seen. They, by definition, haven't seen what they haven't seen. They can say, well, we've been looking. And so if it had been there, we probably would have seen it. But, you know, it could, it only takes one, right? It only takes one to break their model of how they should be

seeing these things, like be hiding somehow. But yeah, they've seen all those big ones, and they've plotted those trajectories. And they're pretty confident that in the next hundred years, at least, none of those big neighbors are going to hit us. Yeah, I've seen those plots. They're crazy. They're like a picture of the solar system. And so we're on this orbit around the sun.

But then there's like hundreds of rocks, right? They have to keep track of their orbits. So it's like a huge mess, this model, right? It's like our orbit, but then like the orbits of like a hundred things going in all kinds of elliptical shapes and hopefully we don't intersect one of those ellipses, right? That's right. Yeah. And the thing to understand also is that the system is a little chaotic, right? As we said, we've been driving around this toilet bowl for billions of years and things are mostly stable, but if some rock comes from outer space, you know, from deep and away from the solar system and gives just a little nudge to what to some other rock that, rock could bump into a third rock. Yeah, gravitationally, right? Yeah, gravitation. You don't even have to bump. Just, like, affect the orbits of one thing that could affect the orbit of another thing, which affects

the orbit of another thing. And this could, you know, cascade and kind of cause like a pile-up, basically, which could knock one of these things out of orbit. And, you know, then it could change its trajectory. So it's, it's a difficult problem from a sort of chaos theory point of view that a little perturbation could totally change the answer. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. But first, a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in a lot of data.

evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

right comets oh that's something different yeah that's something different and it's part of our solar system but some of these things have really long periods like really long orbits like a hundred years or 200 years which means they could be on a trajectory to hit the earth in 50 years but we just wouldn't see them right now because they're so far out there and they've never come by the earth while we've had astronomy i mean we've only been looking at the sky for you know a few hundred years we only had modern telescopes for decades. So if there's a planet killer out there that's headed towards Earth and just hasn't come by in the last seven decades or so, we might not have seen it.

So we'll only see it when it's closer to us. Yeah. And you might think, well, that seems improbable. Like I just invented that story, right? But it actually happened once. And it happened only like, was it, 25 years ago? It happened that a comet came into our solar system out of the blue. Yes, and smashed into a planet.

Out of the black. Out of the black. That's right. Ooh, I like that. That's an awesome title for a book, Out of the Black. Yeah, Comet Shoemaker Levy came out of the black and whizzed into the solar system, very high speed. And the other thing is these comets are moving really fast. By the time they come close to the sun, they're going much, much faster than any asteroid. And it came, and it whizzed around the sun, and it actually got broken up by tidal forces into a bunch of like 23 pieces. And this was really awesome because we could see. that it was going to hit Jupiter, you know, months and weeks before it happened. Like they saw it coming to the solar system, they'd recognized it, they plotted this trajectory.

They're like, wow, it's going to hit Jupiter. Awesome. So nobody thought like, hey, maybe we should warn potential people in Jupiter instead of like, hey, let's make some popcorn and watch this awesome explosion. What are we going to do? What are we going to like send him a message? Like, watch out. Duck! Four! The amazing thing was that it broke into 23 pieces, which means that we got to see 23 different impacts of comet onto Jupiter. And the thing is that space is big, right?

So, like, you think it was impossibly improbable that this thing would come out of the blue and hit a moving planet that's moving pretty fast around the sun. But it actually happened. It actually happened, yeah. And Jupiter's not a small target, right? And it has a lot of gravity. And so you don't have to get that close before Jupiter.

or like sucks you in and that's how it got so big right accumulated stuff by pulling it in but there's something I love about the shoemaker levy story first of all this amazing stuff like each of the impacts when it hit created a fireball bigger than the earth like wow and we could see it from here like I remember watching this through telescopes you could see the impact in these enormous fireballs really yeah so you were like paying attention because I don't remember this happening what um yeah but you were you were you were near a telescope watching like a feed. Yeah, I was a nerd in high school and

we had telescopes. Were you? Really? Yeah, absolutely. That's so hard to believe. I know, I'm so cool now, right? That's why it's so difficult for you to imagine. I was totally a nerd in high school and we had these telescopes and everybody around the world was watching. It was a fascinating, like, I thought the whole Earth was transfixed, you know?

Apparently everybody but Jorge was paying attention. I had, I was interested in other things in high school. Well, the guys and girls at NASA named the bits of the common, they named it the A, the B, the C pieces, right? And then they started a hit

and, you know, the first one hit Jupiter and they called it the A spot and like where the A hit. And then the B hit, they called the B spot, right? They got all the way up to, you know, the F spot and then they were like, uh, oops, what are we going to call an F one? And so they had the F spot and then the G

impact site, right? And then the H spot again. Oh, that's funny. And it's funny. And it's funny because that the G spot is kind of a, it probably sort of only came about not that long before the 80s, right? Yeah, I think that was a cultural thing in the 80s also. So it's sort of cosmically cultural, space-based, and also human-based. But the lesson there is not that, you know, Jupiter has a G-spot that we should all search out, but the lesson is that these things happen.

And if it happened in the last 30 years, that means it's not that unlikely. it could happen again, right? So we should be on the lookout for comets. It's good that NASA's been looking at asteroids, but comets are a real danger. So keep funding NASA. Keep funding NASA, right. So the question should really be,

is an asteroid going to kill us all? It's like, is a comet going to kill us all? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Is a comet going to kill us all is a fair question that we don't know the answer to because we can't possibly see all the comets because some of them are so far away and we haven't seen them in a while.

Well, so now that I'm concerned, what can we do people seem very confident about scientists we've all seen Armageddon and we've seen Bruce Willis deflect an asteroid for us what can we actually do it's like is that for real

well you just sit back drink your coffee and watch the people and NASA go to work right just wait for that musical montage and then you get your solution yeah the short answer is duct tape and duct tape and like spare parts yeah you got to push up your glasses up your nose

a few times and you know then you get to the answer the short version of the answer is the earlier you see it the better like you're much better off seeing something which is going to hit the earth in six months or a year than something that's going to hit the earth next week and the reason is that you have two options really one is deflect and the other is destroy

deflect or destroy those are the two options if we know something's coming at us we can deflect or destroy it yeah right we're coming with great titles for science fiction novels we have into the black and deflect or destroy, right? The idea behind

deflect is these things are traveling really fast and the earth is also moving really fast. So if you could just nudge it a tiny bit like a year in advance, it would totally change his trajectory

and it could miss the earth by a few minutes. And that's all it takes, right? It just has to fly by instead of smacking into us. Earth is not that easy a target to hit. It's like putting a thread through a needle.

Yeah. It's such a small thing so that if you can make it go off a little bit, it'll totally miss the eye of the needle. Yeah, it's like a sniper shooting a thread through a needle from a mile away. And if somebody pushes him very slightly or nudges the tip of his rifle,

then he's going to miss. And so if you can spot this thing a long time in advance and somehow deflect it, then you can be safe. But, you know, how are you going to do that? So how would you do that, yeah. Yeah, you'd have to build a rocket to go up there and visit it somehow. one thing you could do is

just bump into it like send something which literally bumps into it and deflects it. Another thing you could do it's called a gravity tractor which is an awesome name is you just send something up there

which hangs out next to it and its gravity gently pulls on it over a long period of time a few weeks or months and changes its trajectory. Yeah. Gravity traffic.

Like hey what's up I'm standing next to you. Come here, give me a hug. Give me a hug. Come here, come here, come here. yeah so that's one option okay yeah so those to deflect you know somehow if you could change its trajectory a little bit you could save all of our lives okay but you have to know way in advance like you have to see it coming yeah and you have to be able to get there and we don't have great technology there i mean we have

pretty slow rockets it would take a long time to get something to mars for example and so to get something to like jupiter even if you see it coming we'd need much much faster rockets and so people or have ideas for, you know, like plasma-based rockets. It could be much faster to deflect this stuff. But we don't have the technology. Like, if we saw tomorrow a comet that was going to hit the Earth in a year, we're not like ready to launch with some awesome rocket that could do this. It would take us years to develop that rocket.

It's just not a priority right now. That's option A deflected. Option B is destroy. Destroy it, right? So you think, oh, let's just send up a nuke, right? But what happens if you're, if the asteroid or the comet is like about to hit the Earth, like tomorrow, and you send up a nuke? to blow it up. Well, you're just going to create like a thousand tiny bombs instead of one huge

bomb, right? And that's a thousand radioactive tiny bombs. It doesn't really help you because it still delivers all that energy onto the earth. So you have to blow it up far enough in advance that then the pieces are going to miss the earth. And also it depends on like, what is it made out of? Is it a loosely held ball of rubble in which case blowing it up doesn't really change very much? or is it a tightly bound rock in which case blowing it up could fracture it and then you get two rocks each of which passed just on the side of the earth

like it depends a lot of those details you have to be lucky you have to be lucky and you have to get it early enough so you can't just sit here and say oh we'll blow it up when it gets here right that's not a good idea that might as well just blow yourself up

all right so let's recap let's see isn't asteroid going to kill us all and first we learned that we're surrounded by our asteroids There's a bunch of them in our own solar system, and if we're going to get hit by one, it's going to come from our own solar system most likely. That's right.

And there's even other stuff we didn't talk about, like there's the stuff outside beyond Neptune and the stuff further out there that we didn't even touch on. We just talked about the stuff in the asteroid belt, which is the closest. Those are the ones we've seen. Yeah. Okay.

But the bigger they are, the more likely they are to kill us, but also the bigger they are, the more likely that we have seen them, and we know they're there and we're tracking them. That's right. And all the big ones in the solar system that are potentially planet killers or human extinction makers, we've seen those guys. And we're pretty sure that the next 100 years is clear. That's, you know, according to the good work done by our pals at NASA. But even more dangerous could be a comet more than an asteroid because those could come out of the blue and we won't see him coming. Out of the void. Out of the void. Let's go. Generic term there. And so it's a comet, which you may be more worried about. Yeah. And comments are more worrisome because they're potentially going faster and they're harder to spot. We wouldn't necessarily have seen them. And we have an example of one hitting a planet just in the last few decades. So it's not just a crazy science fiction idea. So the strategy is look out and make sure that we see them early enough so we can do things like deflected or destroy. That's right. So we should definitely keep funding NASA because it's only because of NASA and their worldwide partners that we have any idea of what's out there. But we also desperately need to.

to get crack in on some defense systems, you know, building things that can go out there and protect us in case this happens. Or, you know, another strategy is like, let's spread the human eggs out of just this basket

onto some others because it's very unlikely that, like, Earth and Mars are both going to be hit by an asteroid simultaneously. So if we could, like, get humans... Colonize other planets. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff we should be working on. Well, cool. I feel great now. I think it's fascinating. that most people go through their lives and don't worry about these existential threats, right? Because you can't. There's nothing that you can do about it. It's not like if you spent five minutes of your day working on this problem, it's going to help humanity or something, right?

But it is important that we all think about this when it comes to time to like funding science and basic research and NASA, because that's when we can do something about it. When we support candidates that support basic research, that's when you're helping the planetary defense system. Right. Well, technically everything's an existential crisis to you, right? like getting hit by a truck, that's a pretty existential crisis for you. You wouldn't worry if I got hit by a truck for it? Yeah, no, I stay up late every night, worried about you, Daniel.

I'm sorry. Please be careful when you cross the street, please. I'll look up from my phone, I promise. All right, well, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for listening to us worry about the end of the world and keep your eyes on the sky. Yeah, look out for the void. watch out for the void

Do you have a question you wish we would cover? Send it to us. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, one word, or email us to feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X-1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors,

so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back-to-school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.