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

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

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: The Earth sits in a cosmic shooting gallery, and the
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: universe has us dead in its crosshairs. Feeling nervous yet
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: This is a quote from doctor Phil plates two thousand
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and eight book Death from the Skies. On today's show,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Daniel and I have the distinct pleasure of interviewing Phil
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: about why space could annihilate humanity or at least make
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: our lives super duper uncomfortable for quite a long time.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: But don't worry. We're limiting our conversation today to threats
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: from space that we can do something about, kind of,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: So hopefully this episode won't keep you tossing and turning
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: in bed too much tonight. All right, here we go.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Hi.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist and a professor you see, Irvine.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Weener Smith, and I sometimes stay up at
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: night wondering if things are gonna kill my kids.
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: And my question for you today, Kelly, is how much
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: do you share those concerns with your kids?
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Do you lead them to.
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: Believe that the world is a safe and fuzzy place
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: or do you want them to understand the truth.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: I fall somewhere in between. I talk to them about
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: bullies at school, Like, there will always be bullies, let's
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: be honest about that. How do you deal with those
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: sorts of things? But I will tell her about wars
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: that have happened in the past, and I have mentioned
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: nuclear weapons because I was writing about them so much
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and she overheard Zach and I talking about them. But
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I don't think I would specifically be like, and what
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: about meteoroids. I think we just enjoy the bright lights
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: in the sky and then I kind of leave it
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: at that, so somewhere in between what about you.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: I try to share everything with my kids, and I
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: try to tell them that science is our way to
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: understand the universe better, which means knowing the wonderful things
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: and also knowing the existential threats and potentially developing the
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: technology to save ourselves. So trying to end on a
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: positive note.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: So my oldest is ten. Your kids are both older
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: than that. When your kids were ten, were you this
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: honest with them or did you sort of like scale up?
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: I believe in total honesty with my kids. I answered
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: their questions about reproduction and Santa Claus and everything whenever
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: they asked them. Yes, And so far they're not serial killers.
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: So we'll see what happens.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Oh solid, So I wouldn't have guessed that. My daughter,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: she said, is there Santa Claus? And I said, do
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: you really want to know? And she said no, and
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: we left it at that, and so I think she knows.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: And then I sat her down and we had the
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: where do babies come from?
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Talk?
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: And at the end I had like drawn diagrams because
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm a biologist. And at the end she
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: was like, Mom, this this was awful. Well sorry, maybe
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: your funny father should have done it instead of your
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: biologist mother. But anyway, I'm honest about some things. I
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: guess us.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: All right, Well, then, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe,
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: in which we talk about all of the amazing things
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: in the universe, the things that can kill you, the
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: things that probably won't kill you, and the things that
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: we're working very very hard to stop from killing you.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: We want to think about all of those amazing things.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: We want to explain them, we want to understand them,
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: we want to marinate in the joy of them, because hey,
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: it's a wonderful universe.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: And today we have a death from this guy's expert
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: joining us doctor phil Plate. We're excited about that, but
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: we wanted to know first, what do the people on
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: the street think is most likely to kill us when
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: those risks are coming from space? So let's hear what
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: they had to say.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: I walked around a sunny irvine and asked folks, what
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: thing in space is most likely to hurt us down
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: here on Earth. Here's what people had to say.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: A creation, uh, asteroid SATOI like an asteroid, like a
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: big rock, like a planet that follows. I don't know, aliens,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: the Sun coming too close.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Biologically logical things like microscope.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just things that are not meant to be here.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: Cool? All right?
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: What do you think the chances already to happen in
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: our lifetime?
• 4:10
  Speaker 4: Not likely?
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: Pretty safe medior meteor Okay, what do you think the
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: chances are of that happening?
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: You gotta be slim because the universe is so vast,
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: especially our Milky Way galaxy, But thinking it probably could happen,
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: I mean we get meteors, you know, meta showers, everything.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: I guess is that would think that's the biggest problem. Radiation?
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: What makes radiation in safe? Sun?
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: One of those comets falls down, may create a fire,
• 4:41
  Speaker 4: or if it's the big stone, it could destroy what's underneath.
• 4:43
  Speaker 4: Do you think that's likely. No, not for a while.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: You don't worry about it too much.
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: No, The problem is here we don't see the skies
• 4:53
  Speaker 4: because of the pollution. Some parts of the world you
• 4:55
  Speaker 4: can see the commets move at night, but here we don't.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: You better find out than the asteroids anything else. Gamma rays,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: gamma rays, what makes gamma rays? Distant supermodents, solar flares,
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: space debris from like satellites.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: And stuff, a meteor radiation from the Sun. Should it
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: decide to have a little heart, I mean, if the Sun,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: you know, really got over and it exploded.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: But that's a pretty far out their chance. But that
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: would be a little catastrophic, I think, yeah. Non.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: So how worried are you guys about it?
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: Not very not at all. You know, you can't change,
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: but it can't change. I think I'd be more worried
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: about an earthquake. But yeah, I mean, if we thought
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: if aliens came and we could visit, but I'm sure
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: they would look at us and go, that's sure.
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: They're probably stuff that we put up there in the
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: first place.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Asteroids as well, radiation in the sun. I can only
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: imagine what it was like for someone to have you
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: walk up to them and be like, how is space
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: gonna kill you? And I like, did they think you're
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: a crazy person? But anyway, we had some pretty interesting answers.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Aliens came up more than I thought. I didn't expect
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: an answer to include the word fart. Maybe you interviewed
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: a biologist without knowing it. What did you think about
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: these answers?
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: I thought there were a pretty good summary of things
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: to worry about. My favorite answer was the unknown, because
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: the more we learn about the universe, of course, the
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: more we understand how little we know, which means there
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: could be things out there that are dangerous or amazing
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: or both that we haven't even yet discovered.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's still plenty of things to worry about.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: Don't worry, and let's start talking to her. Here's what
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: you should worry about, experts. So let's get started with
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: our interview, all right, So, doctor Phil Plait is an astronomer, author,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: sci fi dork, TV documentary talking head, a science enthusiast,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: and my husband and I have known him for years,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: so I can also say he's a genuinely wonderful human being.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: He writes the Bad Astronomy newsletter, and today he's going
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: to tell us about way space could kill us.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the show, Phil, Thank you, and hey, you
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: didn't mention that I I'm acknowledged in a Hugo Award
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: winning science for right.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: We gave you the credit for any mistakes that we make,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: and you were a really great sport about that.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Right. Well, I found that to be very funny. Zach
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: and Kelly, of course, wrote a city on Mars, and
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: I basically told him it was all wrong, and so
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: they made fun of me in the book.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: That's right. That's how much we appreciate the opinion.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's pretty much all the steps that
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: happened there.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, pretty much pretty much. How's Virginia treating you today?
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: Humidly? Humidly? Is that a is that an adverb? It's
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: actually quite nice this week, but it's been really hot
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: and humid. And I lived in Colorado. I'm used to hot.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: The summer's there get baking, but we don't keep a
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: lot of water in the air there, and I forgot
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: I grew up in Virginia, so it's it's weird coming back,
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: all the smells and the sounds.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh yeah, I remember that, and the spiders.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: It's nice.
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: So when Virginia is nice, it like approaches California weather
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: for example.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Sure, I lived in California too, so look I can
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: get into it. Yeah.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: So Daniel and I have an ongoing debate about whether
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Virginia or California is better. And I am one hundred
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: percent in the Virginia side. Do you want to weigh in?
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: There's no debate. All weather is measured by how close
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: it is to California. That's the metric.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Depends on where you are in California. I've been to
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: Sacramento in the summer, and let me tell you something.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: Let me tell you something. That's not a great place
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: to be in the summer.
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: I have a no truth Scotsman approached that, and that's
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: basically not California.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Oh. When I looked at California, I was in Davis,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: which is like, yeah, right outside of Sacramento. But everyone
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: should follow Phil's Instagram account because he posts great photos
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: of the amazing birds and moths and butterflies that we
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: have out here, which I think pretty much steals the deal.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: For Virginia.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's all squishy stuff. Though I don't really understand
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: any of that.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Oh you don't have to.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: It's like, ooh, pretty bug. And I figure, you know what, Kelly,
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: I'll tell me what it is.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: Well, no matter how good the weather is down here,
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: we're actually here today to talk about the weather in
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: space and how bad that can get.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Oh oh, very good. Thank you for getting me back
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: on track, because you know, if you give me a
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: chance to talk about moths, that's the avenue I'm going
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: to go down.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: So I know.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: All right. So, Phil, you wrote this great book that
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: I read back when it came out, and then I
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: had the pleasure of rereading this weekend. And you start
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: the book by talking about meteors, meteoroids and meteorites. And
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: I got to tell you, every time I write about
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: these things, I have to look up the difference because
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: it does not stick in my fixed goull. So can
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: we start there? What's the difference between these three?
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: The difference is a definition, and definitions are I wouldn't
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: say squishy, but I wouldn't cleave unto them very closely
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: in science, because they get you in trouble when you
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: see a shooting star in the sky, a blaze of
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: light whipping across the sky really quickly. That phenomenon is
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: called a meteor That is the luminous glow. The object
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: doing the glowing besides the air is a little tiny
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: piece of rock or or something like that, and that
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: is called the meteoroid. And so if you think of
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: it like asteroid, it's the solid bit. If it hits
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: the ground, it's called a meteorite. And then this is
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: where things get difficult, because what if you catch it
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: and it doesn't touch the ground. What if it hits
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: an airplane and you're sitting on the airplane and they
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: rescue you and everybody's fine in this scenario, but it
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: never hits the ground, is it still a meteorite? And
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: if you ask a meteoriticist, which is a real thing,
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: about this, they'll just glare at you. It's like asking
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: an astronomer about astrology. It's basically a shut up you
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: kind of a look. But that's in general what those
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: three things are.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: And what about the ocean. If it splashes down in
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: the water, is it a meteorite, then.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: It's a meteorological find I'm trying to think of a
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: good pun there.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: We're missing it.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would assume that if it hits anything and
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: then you're holding it in your hand, it's a meteorite.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: But then at some point we're going to go into
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: space and we're going to catch up with these things
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: and be able to, you know, pluck them out of space,
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: and then what is it? It's it never really hit anything.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: So this is what I mean. When you start getting
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: into the nitty gritty of definitions, you always get in trouble.
• 11:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, nature doesn't care that humans like to categorize things. Yes,
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: But the most important jargon term in the book, or
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: perhaps the most important drugon term I've ever seen that
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: I hadn't heard of before, is pancaking. Yes, what does
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: pancaking mean? Because it made me smile.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: It's a real thing and it's descriptive. Actually. So you
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: have a rock out in space and it's just floating
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: around out there, and then it's doing its own thing
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: orbiting the Sun, and then it looks up and it's like, oh,
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: look at this gigantic blue planet in my way. As
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: it approaches Earth or really any planet that has an atmosphere,
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: it's moving extremely quickly and we are talking about, oh,
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: twenty kilometers per second, so seventy thousand kilometers an hour,
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: forty thousand miles an hour whatever. I don't know how
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: many furlongs per per second that is, but you know
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: you can do the math. And when it encounters atmosphere,
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: a couple of weird things happen, And by weird, I
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: mean these go against what we're used to living on
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Earth and just walking around and being humans. One is
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: that rock we think of as being solid, but it's not.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: If you compress it, it can change its shape without
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: shattering if you apply the pressure the right way. The
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: other thing is that the atmosphere, which you can walk through,
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: run through, do whatever, is actually pretty thick, and when
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: you're traveling through it faster and faster, the amount of
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: air resistance you feel goes up extremely rapidly. And so
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: if stick your hand out the window of a car
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: that's driving down the highway, you feel that wind it's
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: pretty strong. Well, now imagine instead of going one hundred
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: kilometers an hour down the highway, you're doing seventy thousand
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: kilometers an hour through the atmosphere. That's a lot of pressure,
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: and it compresses the rock and the rock flattens perpendicular
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: to the direction of travel. You're basically squishing it with
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: the air, and it forms a flattened disc and that's pancaking.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: And eventually, and by eventually, I mean in a very
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: small fraction of a second, that will cause the rock
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: to break to crumble. And now instead of one meteoroid,
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: you have lots of little meteoroids, and they're all making
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: their own little way through the atmosphere, burning up as
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: they do it. I'll add that, contrary to common perception,
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: it's not friction through the atmosphere that heats these things.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: There's actually not a lot of friction. They're compressing the
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: air in front of them very very rapidly. And when
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: you compress a gas, it heats up. That's a really
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: basic ninth grade chemistry lesson. You compress a gas, it
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: gets hotter, and when you compress it a lot, it
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: gets really really hot. So that's what's happening. These things
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: are heated up by the compression of the air in
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: front of them. It melts off the rock, a lot
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: of it. It vaporizes and leaves that trail behind it,
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: which for some reason scientists call a train, not a
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: trail a train. Why are these words so similar because
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: we like to confuse people, I think. And then eventually
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: it burns up, and this whole thing usually happens in
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: under a second or two.
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: So the energy goes from the kinetic energy of the
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: I'm gonna say the wrong word meteoroid, yes, which is
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: then compressing the air in front of it. And I
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: was really into what you were saying about how compressing
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: something heats it up, because to me that was always
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: a little bit of a brain scramble in chemistry, like
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: why is compressing something heated up? And the way I
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: finally thought about it was like, if you're pressing on something,
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: like you put gas in a box and you squeeze it,
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: you're adding energy. You're like bouncing those particles in another direction,
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: You're turning them around earlier and earlier. But in this scenario,
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: it's the meteoroid doing that right. So it's like the
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: meteoroid itself is compressing the air in front of it,
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: using its kinetic energy to heat up that air, and
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: then that air heats up the meteoroid and vaporizes it.
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: So it's like, yes, that's fascinating.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: That's basically it and the amount of kinetic energy is huge. Yeah,
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: kinetic energy depends on the mass of the object. That's more,
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: and it's velocity squared. So even a little tiny thing
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: the size of say a grape, when it's moving at
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: seventy thousand kilometers an hour and sometimes faster, that has
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: a lot of energy. And you're decelerating it from that
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: speed to essentially zero a couple one hundred kilometers an hour,
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: not very fast when it finally slows down and air
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: resistance doesn't slow it anymore, and then it just falls
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: at terminal velocity. So you're dropping this thing from seventy
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: thousand kilometers per hour to zero in a couple of seconds.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: It's a vast amount of energy that you're extracting from
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: this thing. It actually heats the air so much the
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: air glows too, so you're melting of meteoroid, vaporizing it
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: and heating up the air. The air gets excited and
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: a little elements in it and start giving off light,
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: and you see this thing zipping across your sky. And
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: the bigger the piece, the more energy it gets, the
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: brighter it gets, and the faster the piece, the more
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: energy it has. The upper limit to the velocity typically
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: depend on orbital speeds around the Sun. If you have
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: something orbiting the Sun opposite the Earth and it hits
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: us head on, and so it's moving twice as fast
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: as something that has to catch up to us roughly,
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: and so those tend to have more energy.
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: And as more energy mean it's more likely to vaporize
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: in the atmosphere, or that it's more likely to make
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: it to Earth and kill us.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Gosh, that's a good question. And that all depends on
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: size roughly and a composition. So like when you go
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: out and see a meteor shower like in the August
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: Perseids or the Geminids a favorite of mine in December,
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: these are great meteor showers. These are little bits of
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: rock that come off a comet. And we found out
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: because we visited comets now that the rocks on these
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: things are incredibly fragile. They're very friable. As they say,
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: if you were to pick up a rock on a comet,
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: you could crush it in your hand easily. It would
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: be like less structural integrity if I can borrow a
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: star trek term than like styrophoam, so you can just
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: crush this thing. And so this stuff burns up really,
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: really easily, and a lot of asteroids are made of
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: rock and metal, and metal is a lot tougher and
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: turns out that weirdly, although metal asteroids are far more
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: rare than rock asteroids, most of the meteorites we find
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: are metal because they make it to the ground better.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: So I have a bunch of metal meteorites. I collect them,
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: and so I've got a pile of them someplace in
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: the house. I still have an unpacked. It's been a year,
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: and at some point I'll have them up on display
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: and they're cool. They're black from the heat of their passage.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: They're very dense. Because they're metal, they can have beautiful
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: crystal patterns when you cut them open. It's a really
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: fun thing to collect meteorites, although it's now extraordinarily expensive,
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: and I don't do it anymore. I did it when
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: it was a lot easier. Now I can't afford it anymore.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: When our daughter was born, you gave us one and
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: a copper light, which we still had.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: That's right, Yeah, the copper light was your wedding I think, oh,
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: that makes sense, if I'm not mistaken. I gave that
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: to you both because it seemed to right, fossilized dinosaur.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Poop from an iguanadon. They're both cherished items in our home.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: But anyway, meteoroids can come from chunks of comets or
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: chunks of asteroids. Are those the two places that it
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: comes from? Yes, okay, got it? And how often do
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: these things make it to Earth?
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: All the time? The Earth is hit by a lot
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: of this stuff all the time, and I've seen different
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: numbers that are off by a factor of ten, but
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: they tend to average out to between fifty and one
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: hundred tons per day. And that's a lot. I mean,
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: when you first hear that, you're like, oh my god, Yeah,
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: that's a that's a disaster. And it's like, well, you know,
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: here we are. We're not commonly hearing about, you know,
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: houses getting wiped out by asteroid impacts. It's made up
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: of little, tiny pieces and there's zillions of them, and
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: it's spread out over the Earth, which is, you know,
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: this immense planet with a lot of surface area, three
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: quarters of which is water. Polls people tend not to
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: live at, so you know, we don't see a lot
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: of this stuff coming in. And since most of it
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: is small, it's not a big deal. Once a month
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: on average you get something bigger about the size of
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: an easy chair. And when those things come in that's
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: usually terrifying. Pieces might hit the ground, it might not,
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: it might totally burn up, but it's so bright. It
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: can shine almost as bright as the sun. And if
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: you're out at night and you're just like dude, doo
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: doo dooo, doing your thing, and then all of a
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: sudden the skylights up around you, it's amazing. And you
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: can find zillions of videos of this on YouTube.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: It's kind of amazing to me that this happens so often.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: But like people getting hit, you can name the people.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: It happened so rarely. Like Ann Hodges had a really
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: bad day. You talked about her in your book What
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: happened to her?
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Ann Hodges lived in Silacaga, Alabama, And do I
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: have that right Alabama in the nineteen fifties. I believe
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: she was a renter or in a house and a
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: chunk of rock punched through the roof and landed. It
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: hit her dresser, as I recall, I believe it hit
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: her radio and destroyed. It bounced off and whacked her
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: on the side. And there are photos of her online
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: you can see it where she has a bruise that's
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: about the size of a dinner plate on her side.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: It's really astonishing. And people say, my god, who was
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: hit by meteorite? And it's like, well, she wasn't hit
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: directly by a meteorite, and it wasn't moving thousands of
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: kilometers an hour when it hit her. It was in
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: free fall. It probably slowed down to, like I said,
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, you know, highway speeds,
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: and then fell and it's dense enough it's chunk of
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: rock to pierce the roof and hit her and you
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: know it's still moving. You don't want to have somebody,
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: you know, whip a rock at you as hard as
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: they can. But that's what basically happened, and it left
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: a huge bruise on her side. And the reason I
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: mentioned that she's a renter is because the person who
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: owned the house claimed that the meteorite was theirs, and
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: she said it was hers, and there were lawsuits and everything.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: It was a mess, and there are laws about this now.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: And I'm of the opinion it's like, yeah, you know,
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: if I own the house, but it hit my renter
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: might want to split the money. Maybe that's the thing
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: to do. I don't think back then they were worth
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: as much as they are now. But yeah, if you
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: were hit by a meteorite and you could prove it
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: and it's not you know, a hoax or a fraud
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: or something, that chunk of rock would be worth a fortune,
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: you'd be set. Well.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: The thing that makes me think of is is this
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: an opportunity for the courts to weigh in on whether
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: it's a meteoroid or a meteorite? You know, because it
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: didn't hit the ground right hit the dresser, and you know,
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: lawyers love definitions.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: I feel that the way the courts are going these days,
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: I am so happy to let them declare what is
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: scientific and what isn't now or I could walk into
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: a lava lake. That might be more fun.
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: I bet Clarence Thomas has undisclosed gifts of meteorites from donors.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: That's my guess.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: I bet he doesn't. Ually I don't know if I
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: take that bet, because if I bet on the yes
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: he does, I would make sure to send him one
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: and then I'd win.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: Very strategic.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: I like it, but I think there's something fascinating. You
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: mentioned about how these larger ones are rareer. There's like
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: some basic math there that when you look out in
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: the universe is like fewer bigger things and more small things, right,
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: And that sort of protects us, that like mathematics protects
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: us because you say, there's zillions of tiny particles and
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: little bits of dust hitting the earth, but the bigger stuff,
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: the stuff that can actually hurt us, is much rarer.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Right. That's just a law of nature. If you take
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: a rock in your backyard and whack it with a
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: hammer and it cracks, you'll get two big pieces and
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: a couple of medium sized you know, slivers, and then
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: a ton of dust. Right. So that's always what happens
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: with nature. When you form things a certain way, you
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: get a handful of big things and a ton of
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: little things. And our atmosphere protects us from most of
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: that stuff, you know, if you don't have an atmosphere,
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: you know, look at the moon. The moon is literally
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: saturated in craters in some spots where if a chunk
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: of rock hits the moon, it'll actually erase more craters
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: than it will create. So they're everywhere, and who knows
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: how many billions of craters there are. There are over
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: a million bigger than about a mile across, So I
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: mean that's a lot, and that's a mile, that's you know,
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: a couple of kilometers. That is an immense crater. And
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: if you start talking about ones that are the size
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: of you know, a parking lot or a dinner plate,
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: there may be hundreds of billions of them. I wouldn't
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: even know how many. But our atmosphere protects us from
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: the little guys, and so you tend to get a
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: smallest crater on Earth because you need a certain sized
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: chunk of rock to be able to make it through
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: our atmosphere and impact the ground. The other problem there
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: is we have erosion where the Moon doesn't. Really the
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Moon has erosion, it's just very slow. But on Earth
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: we have an atmosphere, we have wind, we have water,
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: and the craters get erased over short periods of time,
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: unless they land in interesting places like Arizona, where there's
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: a meteor crater. I've been there. That's an amazing place.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Or the crater's so huge that it can last a
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: couple of billion years, and we've seen evidence of those
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: as well. But we only know of a couple of
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: hundred on Earth because of erosion, and that's because our
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: atmosphere protexas. So yeah, it takes something a few meters across,
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: like look at the one in Russia in twenty thirteen.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Came in over chel Yabinsk town of about a million
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: people and lit up the sky. It was brighter than
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: the sun, made a shock wave that shattered windows. Those
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: videos are incredible. That thing was nineteen meters across sixty feet,
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: so the size of a house, and it was very
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: crumbly rock. This was not like a chunk of quartz
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: that you'd find in your backyard. This was something that
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: if you punched it, it would disintegrate. And it came in
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: burned up, I can't remember the exact numbers, twenty thirty
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: kilometers above the surface and slowed down so violently that
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: it released all of its kinetic energy as a burst
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: of light and sound, which is an explosion. And so
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: this thing blew up, created an immense shock wave, and
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: that thing touched down and that's what shattered all those windows.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: So you know, if that had been made of metal,
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: it would have made it to the ground and done
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: some real damage.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: Imagine what it must have been like to see one
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: of those things ten thousand years ago when you have
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: no understanding of the cosmos or you're placing it, or
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: how anything works. I mean talk about like inventing a
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: religion or a spiritual moment.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: Right, need to change mylin crew that if I saw
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: one now, I'd crack my pants. Are you kidding? That's
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: just terrifying.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: I love that we went to the same place. I
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: don't know if you caught that. I said I'd need
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: to change my loincloth and you said.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a that's a better line. You can use
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: that one. Edit me out there, leave.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Them both all right, So this would all be petrifying.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: But let's take a quick commercial break and then we'll
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: talk about if there's anything that we can do about it.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: And we're back. Okay. So Phil and I both agreed
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: we'd soil ourselves if we saw a giant meteoroid coming
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: towards us. Phil, is there anything that we can do
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: about this? How much advance notice do we need? What
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: are our options here?
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: Nothing? Oh? Wait, no, that's not right. Thinking five years ago,
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: a few years ago, there's nothing you could do. Our
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: first warning would be you'd look up and see this
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: bright lightness sky and go hey, what's that? And before
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: you could finish that sentence. You're in a lot of trouble.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: When it comes to small ones like to chill Yabinsk
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: one from twenty thirteen that blew up over Russia. Again,
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: not much we can do because that's so small. That
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: objects like that are incredibly faint and it's very difficult
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: to spot them far enough in advance that we can
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: do anything about it. Now, for bigger ones, and we're
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: talking about ones that might have a global impact. These
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: are ones that are one hundred meters across or bigger
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: the size of a football stadium or larger. Those we're
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: starting to get a handle on. We have a lot
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: of big telescopes and step one is to find them,
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: And we have telescopes searching the skies. We're doing a
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: decent job about that. NASA's about to launch in a
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: few more years a spacecraft that's going to scan the
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: skies and really do a good job of finding all
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: of these smaller objects. It's called ANEO Sentinel Near Earth
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: Objects Sentinel. It's a very cool mission.
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: But where are these things coming from? I mean, we
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: have telescopes looking for stuff, But tell us about where
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: these things are from. Are they just coming from deep
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: deep space like Omuamula? Are they coming from our own backyard?
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: Are they falling off the Moon?
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: Like?
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: What's the source of these things?
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, the vast majority of them are coming from our
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: Solar system. They're coming from comets and that tends to
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: be smaller stuff. Or they come from the asteroid belt,
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: because the asteroid belt has all these big rocks in it.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: Some of them are hundreds of kilometers across. They occasionally
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: whack into each other create shrapnel, and then that stuff
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: goes off on its own orbit around the Sun and
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: eventually hits Us or Jupiter, or Mars or the Moon.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: So that's where most of this stuff is coming from.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Some of it is on very elliptical orbits, so it
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: gets very close to the Sun and that means that
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: if it's coming from that direction, we can't see it.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: That's because it's you know, the Sun's up during the
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: day and that makes it hard to observe. The beauty
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: of this NASA mission is that it's going to be
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: in an orbit closer to the Sun and we'll look
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: back toward the Earth and we'll be able to see
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: some of these objects that are coming in from that direction.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: We also need telescopes that sort of orbit ahead and
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: behind us so that we can scan the whole sky.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: But that's sometime in the future. But in the meantime,
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: you know we're going to find the vast majority of
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: these things. The next step is what are you going
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: to do about it? And for a long time we
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: weren't sure. Then in two thousand and five, we hit
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: a small comet with a spacecraft sam into That was
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: the Deep Impact Mission. Apparently a coincidence that it was
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: that the movie had the same name.
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: Didn't They slam it with a piece of metal like
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: the size of a washing machine or something.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a piece of copper, and they did
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: that on purpose because when you get this flash of
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: light and all this gas, all this material vaporizes, you
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: can analyze to see what's in it. And you know,
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: if you see a lot of copper, you ignore that,
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: you say that's from our impactor. Everything else is part
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: of that rock that we hit. So that was pretty clever.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: Actually, well, I always thought that was a fun variation
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: and like throw the kitchen, think at it, like, no,
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: throw the washing machine at it.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: It's like throw, you know, thousands of melted down pennies.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: I think is how that worked. I actually don't know
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: where they got the copper from. That would be an
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: interesting thing to find out. May have come from Virginia.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: Virginia has a lot of copper we're used to. A
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: couple of years ago, NASA launched this mission called the
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: Double Asteroid Redirect Test, and they slammed a spacecraft into
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: the moon of an asteroid because asteroids can have moons.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: Even though this asteroid, called Ditamos, is mall and I
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: don't have the number off the top of my head,
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: it's a few hundred meters across, they discovered it has
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: a moon, which they called dimorphose, and that was upsetting
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: to me. I wanted them to call it epididymos, because
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: of course you did, because a funny epididymos, but also
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: it's correct. Epi means external are outside of, and so
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: it's a moon outside of the asteroid. Nobody likes my puns.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: I love Phil, thank you, I appreciate that. And so
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: they slammed the spacecraft into the moon because we knew
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: how far the moon was from the main asteroid and
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: how long it took to orbit, and by hitting it
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: you could directly measure how much the orbit was changed.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: If you hit just a plain old asteroid orbit in
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: the Sun, you have to wait months and years before
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: you can really see how much it spat up or
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: slowed down. But with a moon it was almost instantaneous,
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: and they found out that it had a twelve hour
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: orbit that changed by about a half an hour, which
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: was way more than they expected, which is good news
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: because that means that if you see one hundred meter
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: wide rock heading towards Earth and we hit it with
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: a spacecraft, we can divert it. And the earlier you
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: do this the better. Right, it's not like you're attaching
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: a rock to this thing and shooting it off at
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: high speed. You're changing the velocity a little bit, and
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: so the earlier you do that, the more time it
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: has to move out of the way. So really what
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: you want to do is identify these things decades in
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: advance and then do this. If this mission was amazing
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: because they did it, not just that it worked. I
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: mean we figured it might work if it hit, but
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: it hit that was amazing. That's not an easy thing
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: to do to hit a target that's small when you're
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: screaming across space at thousands of kilometers an hour. And
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: it worked perfectly. It was an amazing mission.
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: It's always easier to like knock a sniper's rifle than
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: to like swat the bullet out of the air. You
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: know when it's almost hits you. But it trus some planning,
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: right like they thought about this. NASA doesn't work quickly.
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: This is probably like a ten year mission to go
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: up there and knock this moon. We're not going to
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: have that much time. If we see a rock coming,
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: we're lucky enough to spot it on its way and
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: we have months, what plans do we have to like
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: scramble and melt down more pennies or whatever to save
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: the Earth? Does Virginia have enough copper for that?
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: I don't know. That sounds like a good movie. Send
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: in your pennies to save the Earth. It depends. You
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: got to remember everything's in motion, and I mean that literally,
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: there's all these things. There are millions of these objects
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: orbiting the Sun. Some of them we know about, and
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: we actually know about most of the ones that get
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: close to the Earth that are big enough to do
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: serious damage. We're doing really well at finding them, categorizing them,
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: and saying, Okay, if they're not going to hit us
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: for the next hundred years, we're not going to sweat them.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: And every month there are a few more that come
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: onto the list that are like, well, these are getting
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: a little closer than i'd like. Typically, as you observe
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: them more and more and the orbit gets defined better,
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: we realize they're going to miss. You think about it.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: The analogy I like is an outfielder in baseball and
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: you're standing there. You're an outfielder, you got your glove
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: and you're standing there and you're looking to see the
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: pitcher throw the ball. And as soon as the batter
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: hits the ball, you have one second to look at
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: the asteroid, to look at the baseball, and then you
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: have to close your eyes and then now catch it,
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: you know, six ten seconds later, well you can't. You
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: only got a glimpse of where it was headed. You
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: only have a general, vague idea. But if you keep
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: your eye on the ball, you can, you know, maneuver
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: and figure it out and get you really really get
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: a beat on it and then catch it. It's the
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: same thing with asteroids, If you observe them for a
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: day or two, that orbit's very fuzzy. You don't really
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: know where it's going. But you observe them over and
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: over and over again, you refine that orbit more and
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: more accurately. And that would be great if the Moon
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: didn't exist, if Jupiter didn't exist. But the planets and everything,
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: they're pulling on these things. So even when you know
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: the orbit, you've got to keep observing all of them
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: to be able to predict them in the future.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: That was going to be my question, like, isn't the
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: system fundamentally k Like you get a little bit small
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: mistake here is going to lead to a large mistake
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: down the road. Is that what limits our predictions to
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: like one hundred years fifty years instead of like a
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: million years.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: Well, what you call chaotic I call job security. Yeah,
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: I mean, you're absolutely right. We could observe an asteroid tonight,
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: observe it for the next ten years, nail down its orbit,
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: wait ten years, and then it's like, oh, it's not
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: where we thought it was going to be. It's like, oh, yeah,
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: it's in an orbit that brings it near Jupiter and
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: the gravity of that beast yanked it into a new orbit.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: So that's why you've got to keep observing these things.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: And the amount of time you need an advance depends
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: on a lot of stuff, including how big it is.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: If it's a big monster, you might need a thirty
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: or forty years after you move it for it to
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: move into a safe orbit, or you might just need
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: that much advance warning because look, you know, just hitting
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: it with a single spacecraft's not going to do it.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: We might have to hit it repeatedly. We might have
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: to detonate a nuke near it. It's not armageddon. You
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: don't dig a hole into an asteroid and blow it up.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: That turns you one problem into millions of slightly smaller problems.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: It's not a great solution. But if you blow up
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: a nuke next to it, it'll vaporize the surface material,
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: which then expands very rapidly and acts like a rocket
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: and pushes on the asteroid. The only problem is blowing
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: up a nuke in space is literally illegal. It's against
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: international law. So we'll have to figure it out. You know,
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: if we're going to save the Earth, maybe maybe people
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: will be able to suspend that law. But even then,
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: It's like, there are a lot of things you have
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: to do to have this sort of infrastructure in place,
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: and we don't. So if we saw something heading our
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: way that's going to hit us and say less than
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: ten years, there may not be much we can do
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: about it.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: If you think about governments trying to coordinate on a
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: ten year timescale, I think you should just like figure
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: out where you're going to bury yourself and call it
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: a day. There's no way it's going to happen.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, and it's more complicated than that, even because imagine
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: now just to pick two governments. Let's say China in
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: the US, and China builds the navigation system, and we
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: have the rockets, and so we launched this and it
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: hits the rock but not dead center. It hits it
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: like just off center. And it turns out the path
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: gets changed just so much that instead of hitting China,
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: it hits the US.
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: Oh accidentally.
• 36:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of issues here that have to
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: be ironed out.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Geopolitically, everything gets complicated when it has to do
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: with space.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, I'm going to try to combat this East
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: Coast negativity with a little California sunshine I mean, aren't
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: there other things that we can do other than just
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: like hitting it with a rock or nuking it. I
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: read about some folks in Santa Barbara working on lasers
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: to like oblate one side of these things to make
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: it more reflective, or also to release some gas. Do
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: you think those things are realistic at all?
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: Kind of these things have never been tested. But one
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: thing is too. Yeah. You launch a satellite, maybe something
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: that has enormous solar panels, so it gets a lot
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: of electricity, and that can power a powerful laser, and
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: you aim it at the asteroid and vaporize the surface,
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: and that takes the place of the nuke, you know,
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: instead of a gigantic explosion. Now you're more gently vaporizing
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: the surface and very slowly pushing on the rock. That way,
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: that should work, but it would take a lot of time,
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: and we don't really have that technology yet. People are
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: working on it, but I don't know if we have it.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: A simpler one is to simply paint one half of
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: the asteroid white, and sunlight has a pressure. It's quantum mechanics.
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: It's very complicated, but sunlight hitting an asteroid actually does
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: apply a very gentle force, and asteroid spin usually slowly,
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: but not always so. If you paint it one half
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: of it white or in stripes like an orange peel,
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: every other orange peel is black and one's white. On
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: the asteroid as it spins, you wind up getting this
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: force that is applied on the asteroid that can push
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: it into a new orbit. But that is incredibly slow.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: If we have one hundred years warning, something like that
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: might work. Otherwise, Yeah, we're kind of have to resort
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: to these more violent things. The other one, which I
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: quite like is quite elegant, is a gravity tractor or
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: a gravity tug, where you have a spacecraft that's massive
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: and you kind of park it next to the asteroid
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: and very very low thrust engines then move the spaceship
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: and the gravity of the spaceship pulls on the asteroid,
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: and the math of this works. If you just let
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: the spaceship sit there, the asteroid in the spaceship will
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: gravitationally attract each other and they'll crash into each other slowly.
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: Chaos for the wind, right, this is using chaos in
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: our favor kind of.
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, in this case, you're just very slowly,
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: very gently just caressing the asteroid, just nudging it using
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: the force of gravity, which is very weak. And again
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: that's quite slow, but if you have a few years,
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: that would work, and that technology exists. We do have
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: spacecraft with very low thrust engines, so that is something
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: the B six twelve Foundation, which is a wonderful group
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: of scientists and engineers, are investigating using an ion drive,
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: a low thrust drive to tug an asteroid of the way.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: Super cool.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: So I promised at the intro before you were on
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: here that we were going to talk about threats that
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: we could do something about. And I'm wondering if maybe
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: I didn't completely deliver on that promise, because these are
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: things that we could maybe do something. How optimistic are
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: you if there was something coming towards us that we
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: could solve the problems or does it completely depend on
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: what it is and how big it is and how
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: fast it is.
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of like getting rid of fossil fuels
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: and replacing it with solar power. Right fifty years ago,
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: that would have been a joke because solar panels were
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: very expensive and there weren't that many. But over time
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: the price has dropped and so now the growth is
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: becoming almost exponential, and there's a kind of a crossover
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: curve between the use of solar panels going up and
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: the use of fossil fuels going down, And so it's
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: similar to that, right. Our technology is getting better. We're
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: getting better at finding these things, we're getting better at
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: thinking about how to get rid of them. Our technology
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: for building rockets is better, and it's a matter of time.
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: We're kind of throwing the dice here, I would say,
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: and this is just a sea of the pants estimate.
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: Don't you know, put any money on this or anything.
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: But I would say that if we do not get
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: hit by a large asteroid in the next one hundred years,
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: I think we will probably have the technology in place
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: to prevent any large impact forever. What does that mean,
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: you know, is chel Ya being's large one? Well, if
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: it were made of metal, it would have been bad.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: And so those happen every ten to twenty five years,
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: every fifty years. So we might get a couple of
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: big ones between now and then, But I'm not talking
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: about those because those really are kind of small. I'm
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: talking about ones one hundred meters across or bigger. Right now,
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: it's not, but eventually our technology will be good enough
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: that those will no longer be a threat.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: So I'm feeling pretty good about my grandkids.
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: Then sure, it means we're also sort of in the
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: most terrifying period of history, right because like, until now,
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: we didn't really understand how dangerous the cosmos was and
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: that it could at any moment rain down death upon
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: us and in one hundred years will be protected from that.
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: But there's like this window between understanding the danger and
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: being able to do anything about it that we realize,
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, we're basically naked in the face of
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: death from space.
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a death from the sky season we're living
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: in the middle of right now. Yeah, you know, it
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: wasn't that long ago where this threat wasn't taken seriously,
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: even in my lifetime. But then with the Dinosaur Killer,
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: when that in the eighties was starting to be understood
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: that that was caused by an asteroid impact, yeah, people
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: started taking it more seriously.
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: And then after Comet Shoemaker Levy, I think people were
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: also like, wow, that stuff actually can happen like in
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: our lifetimes.
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: That's right. That was a big comet that broke apart
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: and hit Jupiter. They broke apart into like dozens of
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: pieces and hit it over and over again, and the
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: mushroom cloud from the explosions could be seen from Earth.
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: I saw the black scars. I mean, Jupiter doesn't have
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: a surface, but that material from the explosion settled down
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: on the tops of clouds and was visible for weeks
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: and months, and I saw it through a small telescope.
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: It was pretty terrifying.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: On that note, try not to get too scared. We're
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: going to take a break and we'll be right back
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: with something else to worry about.
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: All right, We're back, and we are trying to keep
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: an optimistic point of view about the future of humanity.
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: I've had kids, I know Kelly's had kids, and so
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: we're voting with our game meates that humanity will survive
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: and it will be worth being alive on Earth for
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: many years to come. Let's hope that science doesn't prove
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: that wrong. We're here talking to Phil Plait about the
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: dangers from space, and we've talked about the dangers that meteoroids, meteorites,
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: meteorites and meteor everythings can do to us. Now let's
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: talk about something much brighter.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, Wow, that's a good segue. Now let's talk about
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: the Sun. Okay. First of all, don't look at the Sun.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: Just it's amazing that I have to say this sometimes,
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: but that big, giant, glowing thing in the sky, don't
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: look at it. It's going to hurt you. It gives
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: off light that is so intense it can actually damage
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: your retina. And so the Sun is the source of
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: all warmth and light on the Earth. But it's also
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: dangerous just in that sort of trivial way, and it
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: turns out it's dangerous in a lot of other ways.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: It's fundamentally a star, and stars have a lot of power.
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: The amount of energy the Sun generates in its core
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: and I believe if I get this number right, it
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: is a one hundred billion one megaton nuclear bombs every second.
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: One hundred billion one megaton bombs every second. Yes, it's
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: a lot of energy, and you don't want to get
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: too close to it. And the Sun is immense, It
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: is very, very big. It is eight hundred and sixty
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: thousand miles across one point four million kilometers and that
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: is a lot of room for a lot of danger.
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: And the problem here is in the form of magnetism. Magnets.
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: You think magnets. You have a horseshoe magnet in school,
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: and you put it under a piece of paper and
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: you shake iron filings on it, and you get those
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: really cool patterns. And it turns out magnets are super
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: dangerous when they're a million miles across the sun generates
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: a magnetic field that's very powerful inside it's basically under
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: its surface. It's extremely complicated. There are two reasons is complicated.
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: One is it Magnetism is unbelievably complicated. Daniel Jackson, did
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: you have to do? Jackson?
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: I have nightmares of cross products and integrals. Absolutely.
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I can see your eyelid twitching. Oh my god.
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: This is a grad school level electromagnetism book that I
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: got my PhD. Thirty years ago, and I still get
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: sweat on my brow when I think about it. Was
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: the hardest course.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: My qualifying exam was given to me by JD. Jackson,
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: and he asked my questions about rotating spheres of charge
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: and I just about melted into a magnetic puddle.
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: Oh. I would again walk into a lava lake rather
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: than do that. The equations that govern magnetism are unbelievably complex,
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: and and you start with very simple concepts and it
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: immediately jumps into ridiculous amounts of calculus and super advanced calculus.
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: So that's one reason. The other thing is that the
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Sun is a giant ball of ionized gas. It's very hot,
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: the electrons are stripped off the atoms inside of it,
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: and that by itself is very complex. The motions inside
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: the Sun, it's hot in the center, cooler the surface.
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: Hot material rises, the cooler sinks, and that's hydrodynamics, which
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: is another extremely complicated field of physics. So if you
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: mix these two, it's nuts. It's really hard. So simplifying
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: because you gotta the Sun makes these magnetic fields inside
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: of this material. It's rising and falling it gets to
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: the surface, and you can think of it as like
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: a magnet with all these like magnetic field lines coming
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: out of it, like those drawings you see of like
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: the doughnut shaped lines around the Earth, and you get
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: thousands or tens of thousands, maybe millions of them inside
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: the Sun, all like that, and they're rising and falling
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: all the time, and when they get to the surface
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: they prevent they basically the magnetic field lines from one
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: spot versus the next, this other tower over there rising
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: and falling. Those magnetic field lines can connect and interfere
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: with each other and they trap the gas in them,
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: and then the gas can't fall back down into the sun.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: So you've got this cooling material sitting on the surface
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: of the sun. Cooler material not as hot, doesn't emit
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: as much light, so you get a dark spot on
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: the sun, a sun spot. So a sunspot is a
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: magnetic phenomenon. But sometimes those magnetic field lines get really
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: tangled up and they have a huge amount of energy
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: involved in them. Whenever we talk about magnetism, everything is
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: an analogy, and I hate that because it's not always accurate,
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: but it's not a bad way to think of it.
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: So imagine you take something like a really really really
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: strong spring and it's really really hard to bend, and
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: yet you bend it, and you bend it as tightly
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: as you can, so it's now forming a loop. And
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: then somebody takes a blowtorch and blows off the top
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: of it. What happens, Well, I think's going to snap,
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: and it's gonna snap so hard it could kill you.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: It's gonna really a lot of energy. And it's the
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: same thing with these magnetic field lines. They have a
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: huge amount of energy stored in them. They tangle up,
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: they can snap and release that energy, and when they do,
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: you can get a solar flare and that can release
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: millions of megatons a billion megatons of energy all at once,
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: Gamma rays, X rays, all this high energy radiation, subatomic
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: particles moving it just under the speed of light. These
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: go flying out into space. They can come to Earth.
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: We have enough time, We got like four more hours, right,
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: So this is what we call space weather. This material
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: comes scream into Earth, interacts with our magnetic field. These
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: particles then get funneled into our atmosphere where they hit
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: the molecules and atoms in our air, blow off their electrons,
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: and when those electrons recombined, the atoms glow and we
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: get an aurora. So that's where the aurora comes from.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: It comes from this stuff from the Sun, which is
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: great until you get a really powerful storm and then
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: you start getting interactions between the magnetic field of this
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: material coming from the Sun the Earth's magnetic field. It
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: generates currents, electric currents in the Earth itself. This can
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: overload power grids take down high transmission lines, and this
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: happened in Canada and Quebec in nineteen eighty nine. A
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: powerful solar storm connected with the Earth created a huge
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: current under the granite in Canada and North America and
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: the United States, and there was so much that it
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: overloaded power lines. In Quebec had a blackout that lasted
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: for several days. Because once you blow a transformer, you're screwed.
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: It takes a long time to repair those things. A
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: really big storm from the Sun could cause widespread blackouts
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: over Most of North America were more susceptible to it
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: because of geology, but there's no place on the planet
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: that's really safe. Now. The Sun doesn't do this very often.
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: We see in the historical record that, yeah, there have
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: been some big storms from the Sun that could do this,
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: but they happen every few centuries or something like that,
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: maybe every few thousand years. But eighteen fifty nine was
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: the first one ever seen, and because we had the
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: tech chnology at that point to detect it. Then in
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: twenty twelve, another one that was that powerful also erupted
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: off the Sun, but it missed us. So you know,
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: take those two as an average, it's one hundred and
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: sixty years something like that between them. That's not long
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: enough for me, because if those things hit us huge
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: power outages, they can blow out satellites and basically erase
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: our technological civilization.
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: You describe these things as solar storms, which makes me
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: think of storms on Earth, which are notoriously hard to predict,
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: even like a week out. Is the same physics making
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: it difficult to predict solar storms. You know, are we
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: struggling to understand what's going on inside the sun which
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: limits our ability to predict how often these things bubble
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: up and create these crazy conditions on the surface.
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: That's right, and it's a good analogy. If you live
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: in the Midwest and they say there's a tornado warning,
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: I can never keep these right. I think a warning
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: is when conditions are good for tornado formation, and a
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: tornado watch is when one is seen. I may have
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: that backwards, Kelly is saying I have that backwards, so okay,
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: but either way, I mean, you can use radar and
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: look at the clouds and say, well, conditions are good,
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: and then somebody sees one and it's like, okay, this
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: is trouble. It's the same sort of thing with the Sun.
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: The way we can see the magnetism in the sun.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: There are several different ways to see it, but one
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: obvious one is just looking at sunspots. And a lot
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: of these sunspots are very magnetically active, and you observe
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: them with special kinds of telescopes which can measure the
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: kind of magnetic activity they have because they are different
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: kinds and some kinds are more prone to storming than others.
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: We have one on the Sun facing us right now
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: as we record this that I was looking at and
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: I'm like, hmmm, it's not a powerful sun spot, but
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: it's pretty active and it's doing stuff on the Sun's surface.
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: There's all kinds of activity going on around the sun spot.
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: It may not flare. It just hard to really say.
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: But then we have astronomical satellites in space that observe
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: the Sun, telescopes on the ground that observe the Sun,
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: and when a flare goes off, we get a warning,
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: and if it's a big one, we have a few hours,
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: which is usually all you need. The military can shut
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: down satellites. The electrical grids can divert electricity from one
• 51:08
  Speaker 2: place to another, The real problem here for power is
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: that we built our grid in the fifties and the
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: population of the United States was like under one hundred
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: million people something like that. Now we have three times
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: as many people the grid. These power lines, which were
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: never used at capacity until recently, I have full flow
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: through them, and if you add more electricity to them,
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: they heat up, they can melt, they can snap, and
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: so that's the problem. You have to redirect electricity so
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: that areas with a lot of traffic will get their
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: electricity from different places. Still, it's kind of half assed,
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: and it would be better if our grid had more substations,
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: more lines, more insulators. Even better would be if we
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: get our power locally, like solar panels on your house.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: Then you don't really have to worry about stuff like
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: this as much because your power won't get interrupted, because
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: if the grid goes down, it's like I got power,
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: I'm good.
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: And so the reason things were so bad in Canada
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: in the eighties was because they didn't turn off the
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: power because they didn't know what was coming, because we
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: didn't have detection.
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: That was part of it, but also it's the geology
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: of the area. There are places where it's easier to
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: create a flow. It's called a geomagnetic induced current or GIC.
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: And there's some places on Earth where you get bigger
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: currents than others, and the North American Plate basically is
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: a really really happy place to make electricity bad for us.
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: But if you get a really big solar storm, it
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: affects us more than other places, so that's bad. So
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: it's a confluence of events there. You know, we can't
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: prevent the sun from doing anything. It's the sun. One
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: hundred earths can fit across the width of a sun.
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: You could fill it with a million earths. It is
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: an immense object. So we're not telling it what to do.
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: All we can do is change how we defend ourselves
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: from them. And so if we gird the grid, which
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: is a great bumper sticker idea, if we put money
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: into infrastructure, we can prevent a lot of the problems
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: for happening if we go to more local sources of electricity,
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: and that could be you know, cities even using solar power,
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: or houses using solar power. The more local you are,
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: the better. Battery storage is a good thing too, because
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: then if the grid goes down, you still have power
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: for a while. So we can't prevent the Sun from
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: doing it. All we can do is prevent ourselves from
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: suffering the worst of it, and that's something we absolutely
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: can do. We just have to make up our minds
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: and open up our wallets.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad we're managing to end on a high note.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: So I partially delivered on that promise.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, let's talk about nearby supermomen Yeah.
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: Wait, the final high note we're going to talk about
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: is your incredible recent book Under Alien Skies, which the
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: asteroid chapter I totally laughed at and enjoyed the scenario.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: The chapter on Saturn was absolutely beautiful.
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tell us all about Under Aliens? Guys, what's the
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: premise and where can folks get it? So?
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: Under Alien Skies was an idea I got a long
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: time ago. I wrote an article for Astronomy magazine in
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties. Kids ask your parents about the nineties,
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: And the idea was because I would take my telescope
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: out to public places and show people things. And a
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: question I got a lot was, you know, if I
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: look at a picture from Hubble, which was up even then,
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: you know, would it look like that if I were there.
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: When I looked through a telescope and I were looking
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: at Saturn, what would it look like if I were there?
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: And it turns out that that's an interesting question because
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: some things you look at a picture of the Moon,
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: you know you see is what you get. But when
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: you look at a picture of a galaxy or a
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: gas cloud or a nebula, they're very different if you
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: were up closer, even inside them, versus what you would
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: look at from outside them. And so that was sort
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: of the idea. Then I realized, if I want to
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: write a book, I really have to talk about what
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: it's like to actually be there, And so I wrote
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: a chapter on the Moon, and it's all about you
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: are now on the Moon. What do you experience? You know,
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: there's no air, the sun is up for two weeks
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: at a time and sets for two weeks at a time.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: What does the Earth look like? What does the landscape
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: around you look like? What's low gravity like? And so
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: I had a chapter on the Moon and Mars. A
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: late comer to that idea was writing about asteroids and comets,
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: because as we learn more about them, it turns out
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: it's not at all what you expect it's not at
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: all like the movies Armageddon a Deep Impact if you've
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: seen those. These are very very fragile objects. And if
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: you approached an asteroid and tried to land on it,
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: it's a good chance you'd fall straight through the surface.
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: It would be like jumping into a ball pit. And
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: that cracked me up. I was not expecting that to
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: be true until we sent a probe to an asteroid
• 55:31
  Speaker 2: to actually grab a sample and come back, and when
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: that probe touched down, it started sinking into the surface.
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: And so each chapter of this book starts with a
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: little science fiction y like short story of somebody or
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: you being at this place and experiencing it, And that
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: chapter opens with an astronaut who is I'm going to
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: land on this asteroid and basically sinks into it and
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: has to be rescued by their partner.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: That cracked me up. I was like, Ah, that would
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: be me. I would make that mistake.
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, me too. It's fun to write about us
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: because it's not just you know, I'd then Saturn and Pluto,
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: and then what's it like to orbit red Dwarf Star,
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: a very small, cool red Dwarf Star, a binary system
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: like star Wars, Tattooine is a binary star, and it
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: turns out there's all kinds of things going on with
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: that that you don't expect, And then I didn't expect.
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: I do a lot of math for this book, a lot.
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: It's not in the book. It's all hidden, it's all
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: hidden in my descriptions. But I had to like think
• 56:27
  Speaker 2: back to some stuff I did in grad school and
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: work out some a couple of equations from first principles.
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: That was exciting, something I haven't done in thirty years.
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: I used the equation from grad school that I still
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: remembered and then did it and it's like, well, that
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: number's not right. So then I had to go, well,
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: how did we get this equation? So I had to
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: redrive it. It took a couple of days. Then I
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: just wound up writing about how that works. So it
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: was fun, you know, getting near a black hole, watching
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: stars form, being in the side of a star cluster.
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: It was fun because of the science, but it was
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: more fun because of my imagination. You know. I'd lie
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: in bed at night going to sleep and think, oh,
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: so I'm floating over this thing, you know, and just
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: what would I see? Just not think about it, just
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: kind of experience it in my head and you know,
• 57:09
  Speaker 2: I'm turning and what would happen if this happened? And
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: that became so much fun. And then I've got to
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: put all of that in the book and describe it
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: and tell the truth about this stuff versus the misconceptions
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: that a lot of us have. So it was hugely
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: fun to write.
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: I think the fun that you were having really came through.
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: It read like something that had been fun to write,
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: and so it was fun to read.
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: Well thank you.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So if somebody wants to, first of all,
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: they can buy your book anywhere and you read the audiobook.
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I narrated under Alien Skies, which was fun. It's
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: the first time I've ever done that. I tried to
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: do that for my last book, but they were like, no,
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: we're going to get a pro. But now I've done
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: Crash Course Astronomy and a bunch of TV shows and stuff,
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: and I was like, come on, I got this and
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: said I auditioned and they were like, oh, yeah, sure,
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: go ahead. So I did it and it was tremendous.
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: It was really great because the story has a lot
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: of personal anecdotes in it, so that was a lot
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: of fun to do.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: Awesome And so if folks want to find other you
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: mentioned Crash Course Astronomy, which you did. You do all
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: kinds of awesome stuff. So if anybody wants to keep
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: in touch with the various things that you do, how
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: would they do that?
• 58:07
  Speaker 2: Let's see under Alienskies dot Com is where you can
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: get the book. My other books are on Amazon, Death
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: from the Skies and Bad Astronomy. Also two to the
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: seventh Nerd Disses, a book I wrote with Zach Winersmith,
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: a series of nerd insults, one hundred and twenty eight
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: of them less and these are all available where you
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: get books. Crash Course Astronomy is a forty six part
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: crash course. Like John and Hank Green, I did that
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: for them on Astronomy. That's on YouTube and you can
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: find me. Just type Phil Plate into whatever search engine
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: you like these days and you'll find me. I'm on
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: Blue Sky and Instagram and the fetiverse and all the
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: usual places.
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: All right, on that note, thanks so much for coming
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: Phil and chatting with us about the various ways that
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: we might all die in the near term and what
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: we can maybe sort of do about it or our
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: grandkids can do about it. It's been a lot of fun.
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: Just too There's so many more. Oh my gosh, that's right.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, check out Death from the Skies if you want
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: to really not be able to sleep at night.
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: Thanks very much, Phil, Thank you, Kelly, Thanks Daniel.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We
• 59:15
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• 59:16
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• 59:19
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• 59:25
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• 59:29
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