Asteroooooid De-FENSE!

There’s no question that millions of asteroids are circling the Earth at incredible speed and every one of them is just dying to get a chance to smoosh our planet and wipe out life in the universe once and for all. But Earth has an ace up its sleeve: Us! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:47Speaker 02

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 0:57Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too with their laser blaster. Yeah, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I was reminded today of the asteroids joke from the movie Vacation.

• 1:12Josh Clark?

  I don't, I don't remember that one.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  It's when they go visit Cousin Eddie and the two boys are hanging out. Anthony Michael Hollen, the cousin. And he's talking about, you got Pac-Man something, you got asteroids. And I think he says something like, no, but my dad does. And sometimes he can't even sit on the toilet or something like that. Dumb, dumb joke.

• 1:33Josh Clark?

  That is a dumb joke. That's a Chevy Chase level joke.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Oh, he didn't write that. It was John Hughes.

• 1:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think Chevy Chase maybe contributed that one.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Okay. I know your lifelong grudge against Chevy Chase continues.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it really does. Unabated.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:53Josh Clark?

  So we are talking about asteroids, not hemorrhoids, I think is what they were getting at, right?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:59Josh Clark?

  And they are small rocky bodies. That's the point here. These are essentially two different things, Chuck. They're either ancient pieces of the, like, early universe.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12Josh Clark?

  That were meant to become planets, but never did. So they disappointed their parents tremendously. Or they're smashed remnants of early planets, right? Whatever they are, they're big or sometimes small chunks of rock floating around in our solar system, most of the time trapped between Jupiter and Mars in an asteroid belt. But every once in a while, one of them gets spit out. And by God, there is a non-zero chance that thing is headed right toward Earth, ready to kill you and everything you love.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that is a deep impact in Armageddon. Weren't those the two movies?

• 2:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah, at the same time.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that happened a few times back then. Back in the good old days of movie making. But there are, and they probably said some of this stuff in the movie, who knows? There are more than 1.8 million known asteroids. And they can be, you know, 30, 35 feet in radius. They could be several hundred kilometers in radius.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  The ones that we worry about are the 25,000 near-Earth asteroids. And we discover about 1,100 of those every year. So, you know, those are the ones that we keep an eye on. And as you'll see, we have plans for, potentially.

• 3:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The reason we want to keep an eye on them is because they sometimes can fall into orbit or fall through an orbit and interact with a planet, whether it's Earth, the moon. If you look at all the craters on the moon, those are from former asteroid strikes. And so one of NASA's big roles is to monitor these asteroids that are near Earth and classify them even further if they pose a threat. We'll get into that. But NASA's carrying on a several hundred-year-old tradition of discovering new asteroids that started in the 1770s, the swinging 70s.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's crazy when you look at the year when some of these discoveries were being made, like how far ahead of stuff they were. Super impressive. And there was an astronomer named Johann Bode. And they discovered a, through math, a mathematical sequence that you're gonna, I'm gonna make you explain it. I'm just kidding.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  That explained the distances from the sun for all known planets. And when they were doing their calculations, they were like, wait a minute, there seems to be one missing here in the calculation. Like, there should be something, like a planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. And eventually, well, they started to search for it. And in 1801, an Italian astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi found a faint body that he called Ceres. And I guess we should explain, like, what these planetimals were and kind of what happened back then, right?

• 5:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the planetimals, which is, it's an okay word, I guess.

• 5:09Josh Clark?

  They were, they were either forming into planets and didn't, like I said, or they were broken up from other chunks of planets. And when they came near Jupiter, Jupiter is so immense and its gravitational pull is so strong. How strong is it? It actually can break stuff into other planets just from orbiting around it. So these asteroids have been broken into smaller and smaller pieces. But the one that remained the largest, Ceres, is so big that it makes up one-third of the total mass of the entire asteroid belt. 1.8 million known asteroids, one-third of the mass of all of them is just Ceres. That is an asteroid we do not want coming anywhere near us, Chuck.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I think Ceres is Latin for problem, problematic. Potentially problematic. All right, I got there.

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did you say how big it was? 620 miles across? A thousand kilometers across? So that is very large. There had been five asteroids, you know, there's something called asteroid watch, which is exactly what you think it is.

• 6:14Josh Clark?

  It's a watch made of asteroids.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Oh, shoot. There were five asteroids on that list in December 22 alone. Two were thought to be about the size of a commercial jet. And earlier in 22, there was one that was two and a half times the height of the Empire State Building. And it flew, the closest it's got in 200 years to planet Earth in 2022, which was 1.2 million miles. So everyone can now breathe a sigh of relief.

• 6:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that sounds like a really far distance. And it is pretty far. It's further than the moon is. But for an asteroid, that's close. It's close enough that NASA keeps them on what's called its close approaches list. And I said, oh, there's a close approaches list. Let me go check that out. And most of these, these are like, you know, airplane-sized meteors or asteroids, millions of miles away, and as close as they're gonna get. But Chuck, there's one. There's one that's coming. April, on April 13th, 2029, Apophis, A.P.O.P.H.I.S.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:20Josh Clark?

  375 meters in diameter.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  That's big.

• 7:23Josh Clark?

  It's going to come within 20,000 miles of planet Earth.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That's relatively close.

• 7:30Josh Clark?

  That's closer than some of the satellites we've launched in orbit around Earth are. It's gonna come really close. And NASA was like, calm down, everybody. There's basically no chance of it hitting Earth for the next 100 years. They added that kind of quietly on the end.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Great.

• 7:49Josh Clark?

  So look out on April 13th, 2029 for some end of the world parties that are gonna be bitchin'.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I bet. I mean, they did come out and say like, hey, something bigger than 400 meters is, could collide with Earth about every 160,000 years. So it's not a matter of if, but when. And it could be 100,000 years from now. But, you know, at some point, it's happened before and we'll talk about some of those events. And it will happen again. And the idea is that NASA is just gonna keep an eye out and hopefully thwart anything in the near future.

• 8:25Josh Clark?

  That's the hope, for sure. One of the ways that they do it is by launching space telescopes to keep an eye on these things. And not only are they using them to track, they're using them to discover new ones. Because, like you said, I think Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a planetesimal that he named Ceres, and he noticed that it was way darker than the other planets. And one of the reasons why is that asteroids reflect far less visible light than planets do, than other celestial bodies. So they've created infrared space telescopes to keep track of them. And these are turning up an alarming number of near-Earth objects that we didn't realize were there before.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, I mean, we're throwing around a lot of terms. Near-Earth object is one. There's also a PHA, potentially hazardous asteroid. So this near-orbit surveyor has been, you know, infrareding around, spotting these PHAs, writing them down, probably not writing them down. It's probably digital, I would guess.

• 9:23Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And basically, anything over 460 feet or 140 meters in size that has an orbit that will bring them as close as 4.6 million miles. So they're really like, they're really pushing it out there. Those are the ones that are potentially hazardous.

• 9:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that are ending up on the close approaches list, too. So, yeah, there's all sorts of, the other thing, too, is there's different lists. There's different definitions for what's close. There's different definitions for what size we need to keep an eye on. But essentially what they're saying is there are some out there that could be close enough that we really need to track.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:04Josh Clark?

  And that we eventually may need to actually do something about this. So let's start thinking about that today because we might need a decade's worth of heads up to do something about it. And I say, Chuck, that we take a break and come back and talk about that after the break.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 10:43Josh Clark?

  Hey everybody. YouTube Premium takes something you already love, YouTube, and makes it even better. The content, the creators, the feeling of finding exactly what you're into for every mood and moment of your day. Like, for example, let's say you want to learn to cook, but you don't have time to go take cooking classes across town. Well, you can find tons of instructional cooking videos, all without ads, on YouTube Premium.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  That's right. Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube. A YouTube Premium subscription gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, including, but not limited to, ad-free, so we're talking about uninterrupted videos, background play, so background play lets you keep listening with your screen locked, and offline downloads. You can download your videos to watch anywhere, even without Wi-Fi connection.

• 11:30Josh Clark?

  That's pretty awesome. And Smart Downloads automatically downloads videos by your favorite creators, so even if you forget to download it ahead of time, Premium has you covered. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  So, we're back. I want to make a quick, not a correction, but maybe clear something up. That Near Earth Orbit Surveyor is not launched yet. I think they said September 27 was like the earliest it could get out there. But they had something for 25 years, another space telescope called the NeoWise. And so, it's not like, nothing was going on.

• 12:23Josh Clark?

  No, and I think you said that there was like, it discovers, we discover 1,100 new ones every year?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  That's new asteroids, like overall new asteroids, yeah.

• 12:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, I think those are near Earth asteroids even.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Oh, were they? Okay. But not potentially hazardous. There's so many distinctions.

• 12:41Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly. There's this, and this, and this, and they're all subclasses. It's really the potentially hazardous ones that we need to keep an eye on.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:48Josh Clark?

  But NeoWise is how we started discovering so many every year.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 12:53Josh Clark?

  And I think these guys were like, um, we really should start doing something about that. There are some, there's, here's another subclass. This is one of my favorites. It's a subclass of potentially hazardous asteroids that are extinction-class asteroids.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:09Josh Clark?

  The kind that are so big that they could conceivably wipe out all life on Earth, which makes them an existential risk, by the way.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  That's right. What Busta Rhymes would call an extinction-level event.

• 13:24Josh Clark?

  Is that one of Busta Rhymes' songs?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  That's one of his records.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay. That sounds like a Busta Rhymes record, for sure.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know if that, there may have been a song called that, but yeah. Ely.

• 13:35Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I'm not going to say it like Busta Rhymes.

• 13:40Josh Clark?

  Please.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. But extinction class is anything bigger than 6.2 miles or 10 kilometers in diameter. And that's basically like, hey, if this thing hit Earth, could possibly destroy all of life. There are, we, there are four of these that are PHAs, so four extinction-class asteroids that are potentially close enough to one day cause us a problem, even if that day is 100,000 years from now.

• 14:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And not just cause us a problem, cause bacteria a problem. Like, everything on Earth would die if one of these hit it, you know?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. But who cares about bacteria?

• 14:16Josh Clark?

  Exactly. The chances are very small, obviously. And I think NASA's like, we've got 90% of the near Earth asteroids at least half a mile wide tracked, and they, they stopped taking questions before anybody could be like, what's up with the other 10%?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:37Josh Clark?

  Right? They rushed offstage. And they're like, none of that 90% are, have a significant chance of hitting Earth. But there is a non-zero chance, which means we really need to keep an eye on these things. There could be some bigger ones out there that we don't know about. And it doesn't have to be an extinction-class asteroid for us to want to do something about it. They gave an estimate of what would happen if a mile-wide, I think you said a six-mile-wide would be extinction class. This is one-sixth of an extinction-class one. What would happen if it hit the planet, Chuck? What would happen?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a few scenarios. If it's a mile-wide asteroid, and it comes in cooking at 30,000 miles an hour, that would be about a 1 million megaton bomb. You probably don't even know what that means. So, so let's lower the stakes a little bit, make it a little more relatable.

• 15:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Let's say it was the size of a house. An asteroid the size of a, oh, I don't know. Let's call it an 1,800-square-foot home.

• 15:44Josh Clark?

  Two-story, one-story?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Eh, let's go with two-story. Maybe a basement, subterranean basement.

• 15:48Josh Clark?

  Ranch, Dutch Colonial Revival?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Dutch Colonial, at 30,000 miles an hour, hits the Earth. It would be equal to the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. It would completely flatten any kind of reinforced concrete building about a half a mile from where it hit, and any wooden structure up to a mile and a half out is just gone so.

• 16:09Josh Clark?

  Right. That's one the size of a house, Chuck. I want to go back and point out that there are, I think, five or six airplane-sized, like jet, like air, commercial aircraft-sized asteroids that are passing by Earth today and tomorrow. Today's September 1st, and tomorrow's September 2nd that we're recording this. So like, if it was even bigger than, say, a house, or a commercial airliner, say like a 20-story building, that would be roughly something like 20 to 50 megatons' worth of explosion. I saw that the most powerful nuclear warhead in the United States arsenal is 1.4 megatons. This is potentially

• 16:53Josh Clark?

  50 megatons, which is the same size as the Tsar Bomba, which is the, far and away, the largest nuclear warhead ever exploded on Earth, and it was just a test.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  That's right. If you want to wipe out almost everything on Earth, it would have to be about seven, an asteroid seven to eight miles, or 11 to 12 kilometers, big.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  It would, there would be a dust plume. Basically, you know, we would experience something like a nuclear winter. It would block out the sun, raise temperatures to scorching heats.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Almost everything would be destroyed, but potentially, some stuff might live. I think they said it would have to be an asteroid 60 miles or 96 kilometers wide to completely wipe out every, like, bacteria that you were talking about. Everything on Earth would die.

• 17:44Josh Clark?

  Like unquestionable. There's just no way something would survive. Although, life tends to surprise us, you know?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Life finds a way.

• 17:52Josh Clark?

  Right. Can't you just see like, a couple bacteria just jumping right at the moment of impact, like an elevator going down, and surviving?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  That's right. And, you know, we're going to detail some past events, kind of like the one 66 million years ago, that most people agree that was an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, and a lot of other things. It was a global mass extinction event. About 75% of all species were killed off. And we discovered this in 1978. We discovered, along the Mexican Gulf Coast, these geologists were doing an underwater survey for an oil company, and were like, there's a weird arc-like formation on the seabed here, north of the Yucatan Peninsula. And they're like, buddy, this is an underwater, underground crater

• 18:43Speaker 01

  between 112 and 124 miles in diameter.

• 18:47Josh Clark?

  That's a big crater, for sure.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  It's a very large crater.

• 18:51Josh Clark?

  So, by the way, I mentioned this in a little more detail in The End of the World. That's one of my favorite things to talk about, is this insane event in, that took place in a moment in Earth's history. Just talking about it, and like, all the little details of what happened as a result are just mind-boggling to me.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  And what episode was that?

• 19:13Josh Clark?

  That was, I don't remember.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:15Josh Clark?

  So I guess they're gonna have to listen to all 10.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 19:19Josh Clark?

  But this was the Chicxulub Impactor, is what they called whatever it was that hit the Earth. And I think, I don't know if you said it could have been a comet, could have been an asteroid, but it seems pretty clear that it was definitely an asteroid that did this.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The iridium is kind of the giveaway. Iridium is in the Earth's crust, but it's like asteroids are just loaded with iridium. And the Chicxulub Impact Crater, you know, landed, I think it was named after a village near there where it hit. And it left the crater, and it also scattered iridium all over the planet, because all over planet Earth, in geologic layers that mark 66 million years ago, the end of the Cretaceous period, there's really high levels of iridium. So, if you're still on the comet train, you're probably missing out on the good parties, would be my guess.

• 20:10Josh Clark?

  I agree. So, a couple of things about this. They think now, just basically by crunching some numbers, that it was this Chicxulub Impactor, this asteroid, was about 8.7 miles in diameter.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  That's big.

• 20:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it is. That it produced an explosion or an impact, or a blast, I guess you'd call it, equal to about 100 million megatons. That's 20, 30 times the total megatonnage of all of the nuclear weapons and all the nuclear arsenals in the world today, all going off at once in one place. And they figured out that, right when it hit, since it hit in what's now the Gulf of Mexico, or part of it, that it just created all sorts of chaos, not the least of which was a tidal wave that formed within five seconds of impact, right?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. A 15-mile, 15-mile-high tidal wave.

• 21:11Josh Clark?

  So nuts.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Okay, I mean, I feel bad for all the animals. Like, can you imagine just being a stegosaurus, just grazing around, and all of a sudden, it's just over?

• 21:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Everything?

• 21:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I can. That's why I think that I find this so fascinating. I can just imagine this stuff happening. I can imagine like a sauropod getting carried away on that 15-mile-high tidal wave, going [BLEEP].

• 21:40Speaker 01

  For real. I feel bad for that. What'd you say it was?

• 21:43Josh Clark?

  Uh, sauropod. I believe that's one of the flipper ones.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Okay, the flipper guys.

• 21:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  They, I'm sure they were into ways, but nothing like that.

• 21:52Josh Clark?

  No, not like that.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  So, all the rock and seawater would have been vaporized. It's gonna obviously kick up all kinds of debris, geologic debris, that's gonna come back down to Earth, like what goes up must come down.

• 22:05Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And that produced friction that set off what's called the heat pulse throughout the atmosphere. That, basically, that's what killed off all the surface dwelling life. And then the after effects are sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere raining down as sulfuric acid.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  The acidity of the planet and the oceans as a whole, like, changes in a, in a instant, basically.

• 22:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the ocean acidity increased a hundredfold very, very quickly. That is a really quick, really big rise in acidity. So that killed a lot of stuff off immediately, right? There was just, like, plankton doesn't like stuff that's acidic. And so, we've got a food web, which means if you kill off stuff like plankton or ferns on the surface, it's going to have an extended cascading effect on the rest of life. And that's what happened, not just from the acidity, but also from the nuclear winter that followed. Because remember, like you said, what comes up, or what goes up must come down, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it comes down immediately.

• 23:09Josh Clark?

  So a lot of that vaporized rock floated as dust in the atmosphere and blocked the sun for god knows how long. And a nuclear winter set in, and it was, it was an extended one.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they estimate that it took about 30,000 years for the Earth to just be Earth again.

• 23:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  It's a long time.

• 23:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that really, really knocked Earth off of its, um, good mood.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It's, it's charted course. Well, I mean, I don't know if you can say, like, bright side or anything, but, uh, it allowed mammals to fill in a lot of niches that were vacated. The mammal diversification after this was just bonkers.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Birds, obviously, humans probably would have never evolved had it not been for this event, so, you know. Bright side?

• 23:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'd call it a bright side, for sure, for us at least.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't have this podcast.

• 24:01Josh Clark?

  No, and you know what? Nothing alive today would know that this even happened if we hadn't evolved, so, pow.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, good, good point.

• 24:10Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, so even though there's, there's a silver lining that humans evolved as a direct result of the KPG extinction event, we wouldn't want it to happen while we're around, because we'd be the dinosaurs this time, right?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 24:24Josh Clark?

  But, unlike the dinosaurs, we have things like nuclear weapons. We have brains, we're spacefaring, well, you know, I guess that was pretty dinosaurist.

• 24:36Josh Clark?

  We're a spacefaring species too, which means we can actually get out there and meet the asteroid where it's at and deal with it there. So you put all this stuff together, and it's actually becoming a lot clearer that we could conceivably deal with an asteroid that we figured out was headed for Earth to mess stuff up.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  That's right. So the first thing, obviously, that you might think is nuclear bomb, and that is a reasonable thought, uh, because we have all seen those two movies. And that could work.

• 25:06Josh Clark?

  I've actually not seen either of those movies.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 25:09Josh Clark?

  Well, wait a minute.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  I saw both of them.

• 25:11Josh Clark?

  Is one of them, does one of them feature Taileon standing on a beach where their dad is like, a tidal wave's about to kill them both?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  I think that was Deep Impact.

• 25:21Josh Clark?

  Okay, then I, I guess I, was Morgan Freeman president? Although that doesn't really narrow it down for disaster movies from the 90s.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Bet your sweet bippy he was president in Deep Impact.

• 25:29Josh Clark?

  I guess I have seen that one, then.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, I mean, you know, they both were what they were. Like, fairly fun summer movies, like, not great cinema, but not, like, terrible. Armageddon was a, I don't know which one did better. I feel like Armageddon probably did better, or maybe I'm just thinking because of the Aerosmith song.

• 25:45Josh Clark?

  I was gonna say, you can chalk it up to Aerosmith if it did.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Oh, Bruce Willis, poor Bruce Willis. It makes me sad every time I think about him.

• 25:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Uh, all right, so, um, nuclear bombs is a reasonable assumption. And like I said, uh, it depends on how big the asteroid is. If it was smaller, a nuclear bomb could just take care of that one and blow it into a million tiny pieces.

• 26:08Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Uh, but those are the ones that aren't really a threat to the Earth. Like, the ones that are big enough to be a threat to the Earth, like, hitting it with a nuclear bomb wouldn't even work, because it would, the, the, the pieces of it would still be big enough to be a problem.

• 26:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, even if, so NASA was like, let's think this through. If we went out to an asteroid and we landed on the asteroid and we drilled into it and put a nuclear warhead in there and blew it up, or maybe we just left one on the surface, who knows? What would happen? And they were like, it would basically break it into a large, like, smaller chunks, but still really problematic chunks, and it might not, um, blast them all off of their, off of course for Earth, right? So they're like, I don't think blowing up asteroids is a very good way to approach this, but that doesn't mean that we can't use the world's nuclear arsenals for a really good noble purpose and use nuclear warheads in a different way. And what they figured out is that something called a standoff explosion,

• 27:07Josh Clark?

  where you set these things off near an asteroid on one side of it, that actually could have a pretty pronounced effect on dealing with an asteroid headed for Earth.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the idea there is, obviously, just blow it off its course. Uh, there was a report in 2007 from NASA that said, planting a nuclear bomb, uh, either on the surface or under the surface would, would fracture it, and it's gonna be an issue. So that was like, sort of official confirmation that that wasn't the best plan. So, uh, in 2005, I think Congress said, all right, NASA, do your, do your thing. Uh, we need some, like, real plans.

• 27:46Josh Clark?

  We, we just saw Armageddon.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they just saw Armageddon. And in 2007, they presented the ideas at what was called, uh, the Planetary Defense Conference in DC. And they said, all right, uh, like Josh Clark will one day say, I think the best idea is to try and nudge these things off course. At least away from the United States. No, like, completely off course from, from planet Earth.

• 28:11Josh Clark?

  Sure, because a nuclear winter affects everybody. I, I think that was the slogan of the Planetary Defense Conference.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and on the back it said, don't be a dinosaurist.

• 28:20Josh Clark?

  That's right. So this staggered explosion, where you set off a bunch of nuclear explosions, uh, like, all in one place, just off of the surface of, um, an asteroid, would actually sear it, and it would vaporize a bunch of the asteroid, and it would push the asteroid in the opposite direction.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like exhaust almost, right?

• 28:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it'd go, pew, and shoot off somewhere else. That is essentially the only explosive technique that, uh, seems to be endorsed by the scientific community that we could conceivably do. The staggered explosion technique. Most of the other ideas are not explosive, which is why they don't get as much press, but they do seem to be even more viable. They all basically fall into the kinetic impactor deflection category. The KID cat is what I call it.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  The kid cat?

• 29:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's even better. And essentially what it is, is trying to, trying to figure out how to use a spacecraft as a cue ball hitting an eight ball, the asteroid being the eight ball, and sending the eight ball off into a different, um, trajectory.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, into the corner pocket, hopefully. Um, and that's basically what they're trying to figure out. It's like, how many remote controlled spacecrafts would we have to, to ram an asteroid with to knock it off its course? Is that an idea that could work? And they're like, yeah, potentially, sure. Uh, and then they're like, eh, that's kind of hard, though. That's, uh, I think they likened it to shooting at a speeding cannonball with a bullet. So, the ESA, the European Space Agency, said, all right, we got a plan called the, we'll call it the Don Quixote. And we're gonna get two spacecraft out there. One's gonna land on that asteroid and analyze it for a while, and give us all sorts of data points to where we can make sort of a more pinpointed strike

• 30:15Speaker 01

  in just the right place to maximize it, so we're not just throwing cue balls at this thing. Uh, or, we could just have an unmanned probe, just park it in orbit and shoot lasers at it. Because Star Wars is a thing, guys. I don't know if you've seen that.

• 30:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and people are like, where are you gonna get your lasers, bucko? That requires a lot of energy. And somebody said, uh, I have a witty retort. How about we put a bunch of mirrors on the space probe and concentrate a beam of sunlight and use that as a laser? And that shut those critics up real fast.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, what was the, oh, what was the sunbeam laser years ago that the Mythbusters tested that we?

• 30:55Josh Clark?

  Archimedes ray?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  That's right, Archimedes death ray. So something sort of like that. Not a bad idea. Uh, and it's sort of the same thing, is, is it, uh, that laser's gonna heat up. It's not like it shoots it and it blows it up. It just heats it up and bits of steam start popping off as the laser hits it, and that creates, again, like, an exhaust, like a jet almost moving it in a different direction.

• 31:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, or like, um, when somebody is in a manned spacecraft and they're using, like, the little boosters. They're not called boosters, they're called, um, I just had it. Yeah, or you're just like, you're, you know, evening out, or something like that.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Thruster? Boosters? No?

• 31:35Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:36Josh Clark?

  And you're creating, with this beam of sunlight, this Archimedes death ray,

• 31:41Josh Clark?

  little, little thrusters within the rock as this gas, like, vaporizes and explodes, and all of them start pressing the, or pushing the asteroid in a different direction. None of this is going to happen. We should say, none of this will happen in any kind of rapid way. We're talking, pushing this asteroid with a beam of sunlight, such a minute fraction of a minute fraction of a nanometer, that, um, it will take years and years and years and years to actually have the effect that we're looking for, which is why we said earlier, we need to start planning for this stuff now and know what we're going to do, because we might need 30 years of lead time to be successful in moving the asteroid off course

• 32:25Josh Clark?

  using some of these totally viable solutions that we have today.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, another idea was like, maybe we should just park a probe in its orbit and just leave it there. And if you have enough time, it might, like Jupiter did, it might have a gravitational pull that will pull that asteroid, again, off its course just enough to where in, like, 30, 40 years, 50 years, it ends up, uh, in a completely different place.

• 32:50Josh Clark?

  Pretty neat, huh?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  And they call that a gravitational tractor.

• 32:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  I love, I love that, like a tractor beam.

• 32:56Josh Clark?

  For sure. Um, I saw somewhere, uh, 20-ton, uh,

• 33:03Josh Clark?

  Probe, essentially, working as a gravitational tractor, could move a 60 million ton asteroid in less than a year.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 33:13Josh Clark?

  It is, especially considering this is just something that's messing with its gravity just by orbiting around it. I mean, that's like, you know, Dollar Tree version idea. Like, you don't have to do anything. You just send a probe up there and get it into orbit around the asteroid. Done.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I'm glad you didn't say Timu.

• 33:32Josh Clark?

  What is that?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Oh, that's the, that's the big thing to call the cheap version something, the Timu version. I think it's a Chinese company that does knockoff stuff.

• 33:41Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  So, everything is like, you're, you're Timu, like, if you look like somebody, you're, you're Timu Ryan Gosling.

• 33:49Josh Clark?

  I gotcha.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  That kind of thing.

• 33:51Josh Clark?

  Well, there's a non-zero chance I would have said that had I known about that, me.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's, I love how out of touch you are sometimes with some of that stupid stuff.

• 34:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I definitely am kidding.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  You're like, you're better for it, you know?

• 34:04Josh Clark?

  Well, thanks.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Dollar Tree is better.

• 34:05Josh Clark?

  I appreciate that. I mean, I don't think the Gen Z listeners agree, but I appreciate that.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  So, we should talk about Project NEAR because the, the question here toward the end of this thing is like, how worried should we be? And the answer is not super worried. Like, in our lifetime, and like I said, it could be thousands and thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years that this is gonna happen.

• 34:29Josh Clark?

  Or 100 years.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Or 100 years. You and I don't need to sweat it, pal. I'm 55 years old.

• 34:35Josh Clark?

  Who cares?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I'll be lucky to make it till 80. And people are like, what about your, your child, Chuck? I'm not gonna be around. I'm not even gonna know.

• 34:44Josh Clark?

  Exactly. What do you care?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  I'm just kidding, of course. But Project NEAR, capital N-E-A-R, what does that stand for? Do you know?

• 34:53Josh Clark?

  Near Earth Asteroid.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Rolodex?

• 34:59Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Okay. That was the, Project NEAR was the first spacecraft to orbit a small body of the solar system. And it launched in 1996, in February of that year. And at first, it flew by the asteroid Matilda, or Matilde, June 1997. It came within 753 miles, or a little over 1,200 kilometers of its surface, kept going, and eventually orbited an asteroid called 433 Eros in February of 2000.

• 35:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it went psych Matilde and headed on to Eros.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  And Eros is a big deal because it's a big asteroid, right?

• 35:35Josh Clark?

  It is a big asteroid. Just orbiting Matilde, I think, was like a first time thing, like, just to see that they could do it. So, they put it into orbit around Eros, 433 Eros. And it was, it's a potato-shaped, 21-mile-long, eight-mile-wide asteroid.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  What, like a baker, new potato?

• 35:55Josh Clark?

  Russet.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Russet, okay.

• 35:57Josh Clark?

  Everything I saw said Russet.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Okay, I got you.

• 36:01Josh Clark?

  And it's, I mean, it's a ways away from us. So, it's a great little test asteroid. But what they did was they put NEAR, the NEAR spacecraft, in orbit around Eros for about a year, just kind of, just to make Eros a little nervous, like, what's this thing? Four miles over the surface, which is, I mean, like, if you're a high-altitude skydiver, you might be diving, skydiving onto Eros from that, that height. It was just kind of circling it for a year. And then it's like, you know what? I'm going to go down and get on Eros. And it did.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  That's right. And it got data, measured its gravity, took some nice pictures, mapped it out, of course, and made some chemical measurements of the surface. So, they're basically proving in real time, like, hey, this is something we have proven that we can do. I think it was in orbit for about a year when it landed on it, and was sending back good data until it completely just froze, like, the extreme cold just destroyed how it could communicate.

• 37:04Josh Clark?

  Yes. And so, one of the big things about NEAR is that it, it satisfies that thing that the European Space Agency pointed out, which was like, you really need data on this thing before you actually shoot a probe at it to, to knock it off course. And so, NEAR proved, okay, great, we can send a probe to send back data on it that will need to shoot a probe in exactly the right place. So, that was a big deal.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:29Josh Clark?

  Then they came up with the DART test. DART, we don't have to make up the name for. We understand what the acronym stands for.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. And it is a robotic spacecraft they launched a few years ago, I guess, five years ago, geez, time's flying, November 2021.

• 37:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And its mission, they were like, beep, beep, beep, programmed to slam into an asteroid, dimorphose, at 4.1 miles per second, and see if we can change its orbit. And they did, and it did.

• 38:05Josh Clark?

  Yes. Now, remember I said, we're talking like, just minute little amounts that it's moving it. But when, if you, it adds up over time. So, what they figured out, and this is just amazing, that there are people here on Earth that can talk about the orbit of an asteroid being moved this, this slightly. But they figured out that DART, when it hit it, it knocked it off of its course at a rate of 11.7 microns. That's one-tenth the width of a human hair per second, which is a crazy small amount. But, over the course of a year, all of those microns per second add up to about 360 meters a year. So, it

• 38:49Josh Clark?

  depends on how far you need to move the thing out of orbit. If you have a decade or two heads-up time, you could just do that. So, everybody, I just want to make sure this is getting through. We have shown, as of 2022, that we can handle asteroids that are coming near Earth. Isn't that amazing? That makes this an amazing time to be alive, don't you think?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I think so. And just that little nudge, I, I believe it was former President of the United States, one Barack Obama, who talked about making change, and how you might not feel like you're making change when you're making change. But I believe he likened it to a, a big ship in the ocean. And he said, if you just get that thing a couple of inches in another direction, in 10 and 20 years, you'll be surprised about where that ship ends up.

• 39:37Josh Clark?

  Wow. I was not expecting an Obama quote.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Just substitute asteroid and outer space, and it's the same sort of idea.

• 39:47Josh Clark?

  I think that's what he was really saying. If you read between, between the lines, he was talking about the DART project.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  That's right. And then he said, don't be a dinosaur. Peace out.

• 39:57Josh Clark?

  I should say, by the way, just to be specific, that one-tenth of a human hair, the width of a human hair, that's if you're using salon selectives. If you're not, it's probably, your hair's a little thinner.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the more body, right?

• 40:11Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. That's my experience.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  I knew there was gonna be a Hair Girth joke coming.

• 40:18Josh Clark?

  Well, since Chuck figured out that there's gonna be a Hair Girth joke, I, I think that that means listener mail's coming up, don't you?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think Hair Girth might rival Diarrhea Planet as one of the worst band names you could think of.

• 40:30Josh Clark?

  I wonder if there's one. I'm gonna look it up while you figure out what, what listener mail we're gonna read.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Can't wait to hear. People are gonna actually listen to listener mail for change, just so they can hear.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Hey, guys. First of all, I love the show. I was born in 1970, so I relate to many of the things you guys randomly reminisce about during each episode. This morning, I dragged myself out of bed early to go for a run before work. My back was stiff, my throat was a little sore. But I resisted the temptation to have a handy excuse not to run. I got dressed, put on my earbuds, and I looked at my app to see if there were any good podcast episodes to listen to. And I gleefully saw your episode on Terry Fox. I remember seeing that movie several times on HBO before I even joined cross-country in junior high. What an inspiration he was for Canadians and Americans and all humans alike. So, thanks for this great episode and for being in my ear during many, many runs in the last several years. And that is from Jim.

• 41:23Josh Clark?

  Thanks a lot, Jim. That was a good one. And that was a, a good episode. I, we haven't heard from enough Canadians to keep me from being nervous about it still, but I feel like it was a good one.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I imagine if you're debating on whether or not to go for a run, and you see that pop up, you're like, I've gotta go for the run.

• 41:40Josh Clark?

  Exactly.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  You know?

• 41:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you're, yeah, for sure. You just be like, I feel a little slack for not.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  That's right. So, Terry Fox, continuing to inspire. I love it.

• 41:48Josh Clark?

  Very nice. Who is that from?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  That's Jim.

• 41:51Josh Clark?

  Thanks a lot, Jim. I appreciate that. Chuck appreciates it. Jerry does, too. And before I tell you where to send your own email to, I want to tell everybody that if you have a band, and you want to name it Hair Girth, you will have zero competition out there. You'll be the only band named Hair Girth as far as the internet reports.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Wow. And you know what? I just Googled it in quotes, just to see if Hair Girth is a term. And the only thing you see is like, Hair, comma, Girth, and Rude Awakenings by somebody named Michael Nader.

• 42:24Josh Clark?

  Oh, Mike Nader said that?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Please tell me you're kidding.

• 42:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I am.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Okay. I guess it's a book, so yeah, book, book plug.

• 42:32Josh Clark?

  Okay. Well, way to go, Mike Nader. Does it say the name of the book?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  That's it. Hair, Girth, and Rude Awakenings. Childhood, Fatherhood, and the Chaos in Between by Michael Nader.

• 42:42Josh Clark?

  Awesome.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  It's released 2014. It's out there. It's a short, 112 pages.

• 42:46Josh Clark?

  Ooh, that's a slim tome. That's great.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:48Josh Clark?

  A brisk read.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, Anthony Jeselnik, pay attention. He should be in your book club list.

• 42:54Josh Clark?

  Awesome. Well, if you've read any of Michael Nader's work, that would be fantastic to let us know how it was. We'll let everybody else know. And if you want to just send us an email for any reason at all, you can send it off to [email protected].

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.