Protecting Earth from Asteroids

How can humanity escape the fate of the dinosaurs? Find out when Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, co-founder of the B612 foundation, devoted to protecting Earth from asteroids. With co-host Eugene Mirman.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I also serve as the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, right here in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History. And we're featuring my interview this week with Rusty Schweickart. He's an Apollo 9 astronaut, a genuine Apollo-era astronaut, and he's been hell-bent on trying to prevent humans from going extinct. Preventing Armageddon by trying to deflect asteroids.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, I need some comedic help in this one. So Eugene Mirman, welcome back onto StarTalk.

• 0:51Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you, thanks for having me.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you been up to before we get cosmic... So I just read, like, in the news that you released, like, a nine album comedy track.

• 1:02Eugene Mirman?

  I released a nine-volume album that's also seven LPs, and you can buy it in the formats of...

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  LP, what year is this? What are we talking about here?

• 1:08Eugene Mirman?

  2015. Vinyl is getting more popular.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you have comedy for audio files?

• 1:13Eugene Mirman?

  Comedy for audio files, exactly. And there's the volume of sound effects, there's all sorts of stuff.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I'll have to look for it. I didn't believe it when I saw it.

• 1:21Eugene Mirman?

  It's true. Everything about it is true.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything that I've read is true. Gosh. So Rusty founded what's called the Beast 612 Foundation, and it's private, not-for-profit, and all it's trying to do is protect Earth from killer asteroids. That's all it's trying to do.

• 1:39Eugene Mirman?

  Are there, like, how many? How common is this?

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are squillions of them.

• 1:46Eugene Mirman?

  No, no, there's tons, but how many are killer?

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, we don't know. That list, well, we know, the worst of them out there, we know where they are and how many there are. But that might not be the biggest problem. Because for every one that would render us all extinct, there are 10 others where they could just totally wreak havoc with civilization.

• 2:06Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so...

• 2:07Eugene Mirman?

  Both sound bad.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Now Rusty Schweickart, he was an Apollo nine. People, that's a forgotten Apollo mission. Apollo eight were the first people to leave Earth and go to the moon. They didn't land, but they went to them, took that famous photo of Earthrise over the moon.

• 2:24Eugene Mirman?

  They went near the moon?

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, they went and orbited the moon. But Apollo nine stayed in Earth orbit to test more apparatus before Apollo ten actually went to the moon and also didn't land. And then Apollo eleven, they landed. So what people forget is, these weren't just single missions boldly going where no one has gone before, from the beginning to the end of the trip. Every piece of that was tested and verified so that we can protect human life and make it a fun discovery.

• 2:55Eugene Mirman?

  Glad they did. They did it safely. Not the way I would have gone to the moon.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's now retired, of course, as an astronaut, and he's a business executive. And he's worked in satellites and telecommunications. So he's sort of stayed and he's had a foot in the satellite world. And he's also founder and past president of the Association of Space Explorers. Do you know who that is? That's an exclusive club.

• 3:18Eugene Mirman?

  I think it's only people who've explored space or people who'd like to.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, none who wants to.

• 3:24Eugene Mirman?

  So it's like, it's like less exclusive than presidents of the US, but more exclusive?

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Uh, no, yes, yeah, because there are only how many?

• 3:32Eugene Mirman?

  Forty-four.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever the number is, right. And this is in like 500 and something. And it's international, of course.

• 3:38Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

• 3:40Eugene Mirman?

  Great. Cosmonauts, too.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he co-founded B-612 Foundation back in 2002, along with a friend and colleague of mine, Pete Hutt, who is an astrophysicist. And he's also brought on the US astronaut Ed Liu, another friend and colleague. These are all astrophysicists coming to bear on this.

• 4:00Eugene Mirman?

  Who've also been in space.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Ed Liu's been in space, but not Pete Hutt, not Pete Hutt. And there's also another one of my colleagues, Clark Chapman, who's a planetary scientist. So you have all the right people who know how to think about the solar system and protect us from it. So let's go to the first clip of this interview that I held with Rusty Schweickart and just see where he's coming from and why.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  B612 really came out of, actually out of an ASE meeting, Association of Space Explorers meeting where Franklin Chang-Dias, you met Franklin? Yeah, Mr. Innovative Propulsion Guy. Right, Vazmer engine. Vazmer engine, plasma engine. It's a plasma, magnetoplasma engine. And at one meeting Franklin gave us a lecture on the status of his Vazmer engine development. And at the end of his presentation, we're all saying, you know, what do you use it for, Franklin? How do you see and envision using this incredible, unique breakthrough engine? And among the things he threw out was pushing an asteroid. And we kind of looked at each other and said, that could be useful. And we had a lunch. After the lunch, all of us looked at each other and said, hey, if anybody picks this

• 5:05Speaker 02

  up and does anything with it, let's all call one another. And so Ed Liu was giving a lecture at Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies in 2001 and got together with Pete Hutt, who was up there, astrophysicist. I was there at that time. You were there? Yeah. Attended his talk. They got talking about it and they decided in the end to call a meeting at Johnson Space Center that Ed hosted in the fall of 2001, in October, this was after 9/11. The issue was, we all knew, the people who were there were very sensitive to and aware that we were finding more and more asteroids, and yet nobody was doing anything about, what do you do about it? Sooner or later, we're going to find one with our address on it. It's a collision course.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, at some point, you were going to find it, but nobody's even thinking about that. The two immediate questions were, number one, can anything be done about it? And we took about two days and it was clear that, yeah, if you knew about it early enough, yeah, you could do something about it. And then the second question was, can we do anything to bring that something about? That was, you've got to form an organization, you can't just do it by thinking. So that was the origin of B612 Foundation. Cool. And we named it B612 because in Ed Liu's kitchen afterward, he and Pete and I were sitting around, you know, drinking beer and we're saying, what the heck did we call this thing? And Pete said, I think that the Little Prince, number one, the Little Prince came from an

• 6:31Speaker 02

  asteroid, but I think it had a name. And so we went on, before Google, we went on the internet and Pete sure enough found that it was B612, was the Little Prince's asteroid, and so we decided to name it. That is so cute. Cute, yeah.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  B six twelve. That's the cutest thing you ever heard. So, uh, the author of The Little Prince is Antoine Senna Schupere, who's a, a, a, a highly literate, poetic even, uh, aviator. So he got to get, describe his experiences back in the day when very few people ever flew, or saw what a cloud looks like from above. And so he's written some of the most compelling statements about what it is to explore and to go where you haven't been. And a little bit of that is in, is in The Little Prince.

• 7:21Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause he's, he hangs out on an asteroid. So then it's a little obscure and you gotta be sort of child book literate.

• 7:27Eugene Mirman?

  Been explained.

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's, it has been explained.

• 7:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, uh, so, yeah, uh, have you ever worried about getting hit?

• 7:35Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, I, I kind of, I'm glad to know. I figured someone like Rusty was out there figuring something out.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you hoped that you expected that to be the case?

• 7:45Eugene Mirman?

  It was like, I'm a little worried, but some people who have a better sense of it are probably like, oh, I think I have a plan. Though I didn't think the plan, it sounds like their plan is to attach engines to asteroids and fly them away.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't have a plan yet. It's an idea. It's an idea. Yeah.

• 7:57Eugene Mirman?

  Right. We have, we have ideas for plans. Cause if you blow it up, more little parts will come and destroy all of them.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So there are complications in almost all of these scenarios, but, uh, I don't know if, if, if viewers, uh, know the difference between a meteor, meteorite and meteoroid. Do you know the difference between all that?

• 8:13Eugene Mirman?

  I think one is one that has already crashed and destroyed Russia and one that is on its way to destroy.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the difference.

• 8:20Eugene Mirman?

  I think one is one that's on earth and one is that's heading toward.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So a meteorite, yeah, after you, after it hit and you pick it up, it's a meteorite.

• 8:27Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And I, by, by the way, I think there are too many words for this stuff. It's, it's, it's unnecessary, but we have it anyway. So here they are. So if you pick it up and it fell from the sky, it's a meteorite.

• 8:39Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While you observe it, moving through the atmosphere.

• 8:43Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a meteor.

• 8:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And usually it's going so fast, it, it's rendered a glow.

• 8:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As its kinetic energy converts to thermal energy.

• 8:50Eugene Mirman?

  Shooting star, but it isn't really a star.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no. It's, yeah, it's, it's not like a shooting star. It is what a shooting star is describing.

• 8:57Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And of course it's not a, or a falling star. That's a, it's fun to watch what things get named because they're reminders of how much, how little we knew about what the hell we were talking about.

• 9:05Eugene Mirman?

  Right. Yes. It was named when people were just like, I wonder what that is. I think we're being attacked by stars.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Falling, they're falling out of the sky. There's also a part of the Bible in, in Revelations where it describes one of the signs of the end of times is the stars fall from the sky and land on earth.

• 9:23Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, and then the first time people noticed, I guess, meteors, they must have been like, oh, this is the end of times. And they were like, wait a second, no, it's not.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, somebody figured out it was not. And, uh, the, one of the most famous ones of recent past, the, uh, Russia's got both of them. One happened in, in two thousand thirteen and, uh, was it February, just earlier in the year?

• 9:43Eugene Mirman?

  Blew up in the sky or it?

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it was a sky blast and the shockwave shattered, uh, shattered windows and people got lacerated, but from the, from the, yeah, about sixteen hundred people. I call it the, the Band-Aid, uh, because no one died, but what an awesome shot across a bow that is.

• 9:58Eugene Mirman?

  Right, that made people go like, Rusty, what's our plan?

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the plan?

• 10:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that happened near the town of, uh, Chelyabinsk in the Urals, uh, of, uh, the, the western edge of Siberia. And one back in nineteen oh eight, Tunguska, that's a real famous one. Another air blast, but it incinerated ten thousand square kilometers of forest. The air blast and the energy from it did that.

• 10:22Eugene Mirman?

  Why aren't we weaponizing this?

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that area, that ten thousand square kilometers that got destroyed by, uh, the Tunguska blast. It's about the size of the San Francisco Bay area. And so that, that's bad. I mean, if, if, if you can incinerate trees in, in Siberia, then we're all at risk.

• 10:42Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right, yes, then it would also probably hurt a city.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If those things had better aim, that's just what, what, what would happen.

• 10:49Eugene Mirman?

  If we, if there was an even more vengeful god.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, uh, what do you do with these? Do you blow them up? Do you deflect them? And the?

• 10:56Eugene Mirman?

  You reroute them?

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's what deflecting would be, is a rerouting essentially.

• 11:00Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I guess I think of deflecting as away from earth and rerouting as like, I hate that guy.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, well, the, the, in space, it, it, it's tantamount to the same thing.

• 11:09Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so one, uh, interesting question is if you go to deflect it, suppose you fail, it's gonna hit like the United States, let's say. And then we go deflect it and then it doesn't deflect completely.

• 11:21Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it hits.

• 11:21Eugene Mirman?

  Goes to like Ottawa, not Montreal, let's not get crazy, but it's like Ottawa and that's not good either.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's find out what kind of thinking Rusty has already done on this subject. Check it out.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  In order to eliminate the risk to everyone, there are nations who will have to accept a temporary increase in their risk in order to enable that elimination of the risk for everyone. You can't avoid that. When you deflect an asteroid, you shift the risk profile from where it was going to impact across a bunch of countries on the way to getting that impact point entirely off the Earth in either that direction or

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The opposite direction, right?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  And therefore, you've got this geopolitical binary decision to make. Do we make it pass in front of the Earth or do we make it pass behind the Earth?

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I have NASA and I'm the big man on campus because I got all the rocket engines, and I'm going to push it so that it doesn't hit the United States.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How are you going to tell me to not do that?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Well, by having this a collective decision of the international community. And we don't know, again, we do not have the answers. It's not as if the ASE, in taking this to the United Nations, had the answers. We have the questions that they've got to face. And we're rubbing it in their nose.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they might not have thought about this because they don't know about orbits or anything.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  They will not have thought about it. And what we're doing is clarifying the nature of the decision that somebody is going to have to make. And because it involves nations across the whole planet, it's got to be the collection, the international collection of nations.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Now, how you do that? You've only hit one problem. Who does it? If one side of the line goes across Russia and the other end of the line goes across the United States, which way do you push it when you got the US and Russia as the big dogs, right? But it's got to be a collective decision. And you base that, let's say, a possible criteria, which we've identified is...

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't even think of one, other than that it's our rockets.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. Well, cost. It could be very cheap to move it one direction, very expensive to move it the other. It could be that it takes less time to move it across one way,

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cost and time, good.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  the other way. It could be...

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could be that the other country's my enemy.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  It could be that the popu... No, no, because we're all, we have to make this collectively. So there aren't enemies.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  We're all together in this thing.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How nice for you to think that.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  We are. We really are. The other one is integrate the population on that red line one way and integrate the population on the red line the other way.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Integrate mathematically, not culturally.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, integrate mathematically, right.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say integrate a population. Normally, that doesn't mean perform mathematics.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Add up.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Add up.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say after me.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Some.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Add up.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Sigma people, right?

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that, that's a sensible.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Some impact.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an interest, I wouldn't, that's so obvious and I'm embarrassed I didn't think of that.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Or maybe it's not that, maybe it's not the integrated number.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You reduce the cost of.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Maybe it's big city along this short leg and no cities along the big, the long leg. Even though the total number is greater. So, there are all different kinds of criteria. This is what I refer to as the meat, which has to be hung on the bones, the skeleton, that we have created in the United Nations now.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a carnivore right there, if he's talking about hanging meat.

• 14:40Eugene Mirman?

  So he wants to, so what he says integrate, he doesn't mean like the people from one city move to the place of another?

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And mate with other people, no, no, that's not what he's talking about.

• 14:49Eugene Mirman?

  He means, what does he mean exactly?

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in calculus, if you want to add up a, the behavior, if you want to add up the value of a, of a curve line, of a function, over some parameter.

• 15:02Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You integrate over that parameter. And so he's being calculus fluent in a conversation that I was having with him.

• 15:08Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:09Eugene Mirman?

  I'm glad that he knows calculus, which is one of the things that I'm glad about him.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so, so you know, the B six twelve now, that's not what, so much what they go under, they go under the name the Sentinel Mission.

• 15:19Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And their priorities have changed over the, over the years because, uh, yeah, we want to deflect it, but that takes a lot of money right now. Let's at least catalog everything that could do damage. And we didn't have really good ways to do that.

• 15:34Eugene Mirman?

  So now they have a list of?

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's a, it's, it's a list in progress.

• 15:38Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, but yeah, no, not a fi, I understand that it's not complete, but meaning they're collecting a list of potential dangers.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so they're trying to, uh, collect, uh, data on discover and catalog at least ninety percent of the asteroids larger than about a hundred and forty meters. And by the way, asteroids normally hang out between Mars and Jupiter.

• 15:56Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the asteroid belt.

• 15:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But some of them are rogue and they cross Earth orbit, so those are the near Earth objects.

• 16:03Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a separate cat, subcategory of asteroids that this is designed to at least try to find. Then when you have one that headed our way directly and you can confirm that, that'll, I think that motivate, that'll motivate.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, I mean, the Russia one was, was, was, uh, that was pretty terrifying.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I saw the footage on that and it was, it was great. So now you can ask, speaking of how terrifying it is.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what, how much power they, that some of these have the collision energy of a thousand nuclear weapons of such as what was dropped on Hiroshima. So you might ask, if you have the power to deflect, to deflect it to save us.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have the diabolical power to deflect it and destroy on purpose?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So that we, we.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Do. Well, we have to ask Rusty, even though I'm gonna say, yeah.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Check it out. Let's see what he says. If you build the power to deflect an asteroid out of harms way, it's been argued that if you're diabolical, you can do the opposite.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take a harmless asteroid and.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Called the deflection dilemma.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deflection dilemma.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Right. And it was written up by Steve Ostrow and Carl Sagan and others, right? And it is for fairly technical reasons.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People working in your organization?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  No, it is, what do you call it? A chimera?

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, chimera. All right.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  It's a chimera. It sounds like it's right, but it's not right at all. And here's the reason. If you wanna wipe out a city, you gotta use a rock that's something like 30 to 40 meters in diameter. How often does that happen? That one comes close enough to the earth that you might be able to move it to hit the earth? Once every 300 years? That's not much of a weapon, right?

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in 300 years, we want, we'll take you out, but let's have coffee for the.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  If it doesn't happen to be in the right orbit where that red line happens to go over the enemy you have today.

• 17:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Then you gotta make new enemies so you can hit them with a rock, right?

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the rock lines up with the country you have to hit.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  It's not real.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you choose your foreign policy then?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Build your foreign policy around the, that happens to an asteroid. So the deflection dilemma is not a dilemma.

• 18:02Eugene Mirman?

  Right. It's much easier to use missiles.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. We, we already can send a missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile from any, between any two points on earth within 45 minutes.

• 18:11Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So to wait around for an asteroid, what are, what are you doing?

• 18:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right. And no one will think it was an accident because they'll see you moving it. You can't be like, oops, that engine.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that paper that he was referring to, that was co-authored by Carl Sagan, uh, came out in 1994. And here, I got the title here. The deflection dilemma. Use versus misuse of technologies for avoiding interplanetary collision hazard.

• 18:33Eugene Mirman?

  Why was it called, I'm very paranoid?

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's the subtitle. Oh, yeah.

• 18:39Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, yeah. Subtitle, "I'm very paranoid." And forget about regular missiles.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, of course, asteroids have plenty of other uses. Imagine, you know, mining and things like that.

• 18:50Eugene Mirman?

  Right. Because we can go and get all their gold.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, get all the gold and no one's going to fight you for it. Right.

• 18:53Eugene Mirman?

  Well, if you go that, that's true. If you go far enough.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the asteroidarians.

• 18:58Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. And other stuff. You can get, can you mine and bring back to Earth? Or is there virtually nothing that's worth that?

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah. So, that's a great question. So, to move things around in space is much cheaper than bringing it back down to Earth.

• 19:10Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, it might be that when you mine, you're doing it for other activities that you would be conducting in space.

• 19:18Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, right, right. You wouldn't be getting all the platinum bring here. You'd be getting it to build a platinum bridge to the moon.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somewhere.

• 19:23Eugene Mirman?

  Just as an example of a thing you might try to do.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What interstate number that would be. Uh, when we come back, uh, let's find out how much this kind of mission would actually cost. Because that has to matter at some point on StarTalk.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm with my co-host Eugene Mirman. Eugene.

• 19:55Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've been talking about protecting Earth from asteroids. By the way, asteroids took out the dinosaurs and allowed us to rise up and become something more ambitious.

• 20:05Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe there'd be some sort of human slash dinosaur that would rise once we were just...

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. So, asteroids, they can be bad for you if you're alive at the time.

• 20:12Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And good for you if you survive it and then you have more biologically ambitious.

• 20:19Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Species in mind.

• 20:20Eugene Mirman?

  We could easily become winged.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, to get a handle on this, we're featuring my interview with NASA Apollo 9 astronaut, Rusty Schweickart. And what I had to find out, I had some sense of it, but I needed to know, what would a mission to deflect an asteroid actually cost? And he is founder of the B-612 Foundation and the Sentinel Mission.

• 20:44Eugene Mirman?

  Right. Which originally we wanted to just put a little prince on an asteroid.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So, let's see what he says about the cost.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  An actual deflection mission, you're probably talking a billion dollars. Okay, total, something like five hundred million to a billion dollars.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's well under our funding radar. We could write a check tomorrow for that.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Well, an impact, even a relatively small one, would cost you probably a hundred billion dollars.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  For example, Apophis, which is two hundred and eighty meters, which is a medium-sized asteroid. There was a cost model made for an impact.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And that was, um, came out to be about four hundred billion dollars.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this an ocean impact with tsunami taking out the west coast?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The big cities of the west coast and the expensive homes. How much is that, four hundred billion?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Four hundred billion dollars.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Total damage profile, and that's almost true whether it hits in the ocean or whether it hits on land. It's not.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, land is bad.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  It is sensitive, but not.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ocean is also bad, yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're both bad. But that's the magnitude of letting something hit of that size compared with a billion dollars to prevent it from hitting.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a no-brainer?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  So it's a no-brainer.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, a billion dollars, hey, we'd piss that in Washington, so.

• 21:59Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, though, though it's funny, because as if like, there'd be like, well, it's gonna hit this town and it's like one billion to save the town, but.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the problem is, it, it, yes, it's not just a thing that hits a thing.

• 22:12Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a thing that hits a thing and creates havoc.

• 22:15Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a huge radius beyond the actual impact point.

• 22:19Eugene Mirman?

  It hap- but they almost all do, or there'd be, or no, they, they wouldn't. I guess it could be like Russia. So, so stopping the one that hit Russia wouldn't have been worth it. Is that, is that what he's saying?

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 22:30Eugene Mirman?

  It kills like eight people.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm just saying, if you hit a thing.

• 22:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll destroy the thing, but you'll also destroy huge areas surrounding it.

• 22:37Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right. If it hits the ocean, it'll destroy.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A- a- and the land. I mean, it doesn't, it either, it's gonna have devastating effects for far beyond the spot that gets to show that it has the crater.

• 22:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And this is one of the great revelations of computer simulations of the consequences of impacts on global climate, on.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On our, our transportation chains, our, our communication outlets. So it'll basically completely disrupt civilization.

• 23:08Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he mentioned asteroid Apophis. That's, its official name is nine nine nine four two Apophis. Named after the Egyptian god of death and darkness.

• 23:17Eugene Mirman?

  Seems fair, even though it's only medium sized.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, yeah, so it's about the size of a stadium.

• 23:21Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a, you know, a, a, a professional football stadium.

• 23:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And.

• 23:26Eugene Mirman?

  Or rock stadium. I like that you've decided what happens at this stadium.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, uh, it was not built for rock concerts, so I think I'm legitimate in that, in that claim.

• 23:37Eugene Mirman?

  All right.

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, uh, that one is, is, we, we have our eye on that one because that's gonna make a close approach on April thirteenth in the year twenty twenty nine.

• 23:44Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow. So we have like a, a thing that we might try to deflect.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if you had any testing of your apparatus, that would be a way to do it. Because it's, it's, we know it's not gonna hit. So you can sort of poke it and see what happens and play with it.

• 23:59Eugene Mirman?

  We wouldn't accidentally turn it to hit us.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would hope not.

• 24:02Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, uh, that April thirteenth, you know what day of the week that is?

• 24:05Eugene Mirman?

  I'm guessing it's a Friday.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a Friday.

• 24:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a smart guy.

• 24:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm, I'm one of the best guest estimators we have in America.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so that would be a, a, that would be a valuable, uh, testing ground.

• 24:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To, for any of ideas.

• 24:21Eugene Mirman?

  And give us enough time.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and it's right, it's, I brought the right amount of time, so it's about fifteen years away.

• 24:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. So. Even I could build it by that point. And I don't know anything about engineering.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's find out, uh, Rusty's thought about the difference between hitting the ocean and hitting land.

• 24:36Eugene Mirman?

  And. Yeah.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, out of the box, you might think hitting the ocean is worse because it sends a shockwave throughout the ocean. You have tsunami hitting every place that touches the ocean.

• 24:46Eugene Mirman?

  I'm gonna wait to hear what Rusty thinks before I decide which I think is worse.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:51Eugene Mirman?

  So we'll see.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out where he takes us.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's worse, hitting the ocean or hitting land?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Depends on the size of the asteroid. If it's a big asteroid, which, and I'm just gonna arbitrarily say, let's say, over 250 meters in diameter, something like that, 200, 200.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apophis would count?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, Apophis would count, right. It's worse if it hits in the ocean, okay? And, and the reason for that's interesting, it's an interesting scientific reason, because if you think of something like an airburst, the energy with distance goes down as the inverse cube of the radius or the distance. In water, which is two dimensional, it goes down with the inverse square. So the energy that's deposited in the water ends up going much, much further before it dies out.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the inverse cube is because in airburst, the energy is diluting into a spherical volume.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas, basically, the ocean is flat and horizontal.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it only goes into two dimensions.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  And the energy transfer into the water is quite efficient. So you got basically the same amount of energy to radiate, and water, you end up with over the horizon problems that people don't even know.

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. Yeah, this, I mean, this is way more complicated than you think.

• 25:59Eugene Mirman?

  Right, so it's if it's very big, water is worse, if it's a little small, air is worse?

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, uh, air is better. I mean, we're talking about what?

• 26:06Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, yeah, yeah. I'm like, from the point of the, uh, view of the asteroid, that's trying to really make things very bad for humanity. Yes.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so, uh, so, here's what's interesting to me.

• 26:19Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Movies that do it right typically show asteroids hitting the ocean.

• 26:23Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, you know, more than, nearly three quarters of Earth's surface is ocean.

• 26:27Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, the movie Deep Impact did just that, it hit the ocean. They still wanted to destroy New York, but you get to do it with a tidal wave.

• 26:36Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a tsunami wave. And so, but movies like Armageddon, where the-

• 26:41Eugene Mirman?

  Well, they sent miners to drill, and then they played the Aerosmith song, it's just different.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did they play Aerosmith's song, like? Is that because his daughter is in the movie?

• 26:50Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, well, I think their, their only number one hit is-

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Liv Ullman, Liv Tyler?

• 26:53Eugene Mirman?

  Is like, uh, sort of ballad for that movie.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 26:56Eugene Mirman?

  Now you know, listeners of StarTalk.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, so there's an interesting, um, uh, cross pollination in the research that one would do with the consequences of an asteroid hit, depositing energy into the world, burning things, and, uh, climate change as a general exercise, and if something happens in one place on Earth, what effect does it have elsewhere?

• 27:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, it's a, it's a fascinating challenge, and it has a lot of the same, uh, uh, problems with making accurate predictions going forward. What do your models tell you about the orbit?

• 27:34Eugene Mirman?

  You're gonna have to crash some asteroids into a few cities, just to kinda get a really good idea-

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to find out.

• 27:39Eugene Mirman?

  Of how to stop it better.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it so big that it, we better if it hit the land than if it hit the ocean, ocean? So, all of these calculations-

• 27:45Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, where do we deflect it to? And we, can we deflect it away from Earth or that might not be-

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ideally, but it might be too late that you can't, and so maybe you can then push it to another spot-

• 27:53Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Earth. So, um, so I talked to Rusty about increasing the, this is sort of the accuracy of these predictions, so we can actually have an actionable statement to, on which to base our behavior. Let's check it out.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  You may have to launch four or five deflection missions, only to find when you get up there, that it's not gonna hit anyway. Okay, because when you get there, then you get a really accurate trajectory on that-

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what we really need is some way to put LoJack on each of these asteroids, so it can report back to us where exactly it is in space.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, but let me get into numbers here. Now, you're talking a million asteroid, put a LoJack on, now fly a million missions to these things just to put the thing, no, no, no, no. You wait until the work from the ground indicates that it is a potential threat, then you send an observer mission to get the accuracy-

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then, yeah, so it's a transponder, I guess is what you call them.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it broadcasts where it is, and then we can know with high accuracy, and then we don't have these uncertain paths where it might hit Earth. That shrinks down that error circle, right?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  You get something on the order of fifty times better accuracy. You reduce the uncertainty in your knowledge that you get from ground-based telescopes by about a factor of fifty.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's important.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  It is, because it makes a difference between is it going to hit or not. It may still be several hundred or even a thousand kilometers uncertainty on the earth.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're evacuating towns and townships, that helps.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Knowing nowadays you see hurricane maps where they show

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the possible paths.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Hurricane maps are great because they show

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're learning how to read those now.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  People understand there's a probability. It may go this way, it may go that way.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and they change the color as you come off the center line.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  And from day to day, there's more data and they change a little bit. So people are gradually with the national weather system getting to understand that we don't know these things and can't know these things for sure. And in fact, we're much better in space because you're dealing basically with gravity.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's pure gra- yeah, it's not the chaos of the atmosphere or the ocean.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so these, these are complex

• 30:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  issues that, like, we're glad people in charge have

• 30:11Eugene Mirman?

  Of their own organization. I'm glad a bunch of astro- astronauts were like, wait a second, this might be bad.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we should also be glad he knows calculus.

• 30:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To go back to that point on it. And now, just to quantify some of this, the, the, the explosion over Chayebings,

• 30:28Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  uh, that was an asteroid about seventeen meters across.

• 30:31Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was stony, made of stone. There, there are several kinds of asteroids.

• 30:35Eugene Mirman?

  What are some of the different?

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, well, there's a metallic. So you get asteroids typically from a planet that never fully formed.

• 30:43Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it got

• 30:46Eugene Mirman?

  So sorry.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and then there's such activity out there, it ends up getting shattered. But while the planet is trying to form, it's in a kind of a liquid state and, or a fluid state. And when you're in that state, the heavy things fall to the middle and the light things float to the top. So then, when it begins to harden, you have a center with a ready-filtered supply of heavy elements like platinum and iridium and gold and iron.

• 31:12Eugene Mirman?

  Are, are metallic asteroids particularly more dangerous?

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, uh, well, because they will completely come through the atmosphere. It's hard to bust them apart just colliding with us. So, so there are different kinds of asteroids are out there and it makes for fascinating different Uncertainties, but what kind of damage it would make?

• 31:31Eugene Mirman?

  Right, so the scariest form of asteroid would be the core of an unformed planet?

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that one is just get the hell out of the way.

• 31:38Eugene Mirman?

  So we would try to then move Earth?

• 31:42Eugene Mirman?

  Superman would have to push Earth out of the way.

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, something Batman could not conceive of doing.

• 31:48Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Superman or Archimedes?

• 31:51Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, either one of the, whichever one we have access to.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Archimedes, you know, my favorite quote of his, what does he say?

• 31:58Eugene Mirman?

  You can't push the Earth out of the way of a moving asteroid?

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he would have said differently, he would have said, well, I'll quote him directly, "Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world." You want people like that around under situations such as this.

• 32:11Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Archimedes was badass, just so you know, in case you didn't.

• 32:14Eugene Mirman?

  I did not think he wasn't. He was the Batman of the old days.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, and so in that meteor that fell over Chelyabinsk, they calculate how much energy that was, and it was about 20 times the energy of the bomb over Hiroshima. And, so here's the difference, of course, that bomb over Hiroshima killed, you know, 50,000 people, 20,000 people.

• 32:37Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And later from radiation sickness, and so, so how come nobody died in Chelyabinsk?

• 32:44Eugene Mirman?

  I'm also curious.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You might ask, yeah.

• 32:45Eugene Mirman?

  I am asking.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, the one in Chelyabinsk exploded 20 miles above Earth's surface. When you're going 40,000 miles an hour, however thin Earth's atmosphere is at that altitude, it's as though it's hitting a brick wall. So the explosion is the abrupt encounter with Earth's atmosphere, causing an air blast. So now all that energy dilutes into a 20-mile radius sphere before it hits the ground. And so the shockwave was still significant, but it wasn't so bad that everyone died.

• 33:20Eugene Mirman?

  And it was, wait, how many miles again, 20?

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  20 miles out, but-

• 33:23Eugene Mirman?

  And Hiroshima, how far was that up?

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, half a mile up.

• 33:26Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, yes.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very big.

• 33:27Eugene Mirman?

  We were also trying to hurt them.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's how it was calculated. It wasn't accidentally detonated that high up.

• 33:32Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the kind of calculation you do in warfare.

• 33:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know why? They didn't want to drop it too low, explode it too low, because then half the energy would just go and make a crater.

• 33:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And too high, it would become to dilute.

• 33:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's the optimum, again, it's a military calculation.

• 33:45Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Done with the cold, dispassionate, uh, way that they do these things.

• 33:50Eugene Mirman?

  The war is.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the way war is, war with industrialized nations.

• 33:54Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, you, you calculate that and you figure the maximum damage to people and

• 34:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  things would happen at about a half a mile up. And so, that's what they did. So, my point is-

• 34:06Eugene Mirman?

  I hope asteroids don't find that out.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, the metallic asteroids would get deeper in the atmosphere and possibly even collide.

• 34:13Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, it's, it's, we want to know-

• 34:16Eugene Mirman?

  Would colliding be worse than exploding a half mile up?

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 34:20Eugene Mirman?

  It would?

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Yeah, but the metal holds itself together so well that it'll, it generally will survive. So, so, the biggest surviving meteors on Earth are metal.

• 34:28Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've got two of them in, you know-

• 34:31Eugene Mirman?

  You have two of them.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I-

• 34:32Eugene Mirman?

  You have two of them.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I-

• 34:33Eugene Mirman?

  Do you ever, like, secretly chip a little away and bring it home? Like, I have one of the two, a little of the two meteors, or meteorites.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, so, Eugene, we gotta, we gotta wrap up this segment, but when we come back, uh, more of my interview with Rusty Schweitzer, and we're gonna find out, uh, how, do we treat asteroid impacts like any other large natural, natural disaster? What's the thinking on that? Because clearly, we have thought about other natural disasters. How different would asteroid strikes be from that? When StarTalk continues.

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Welcome back.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm here with my co-host Eugene Mirman and we've been featuring my interview with former NASA astronaut, Apollo astronaut that is, Rusty Schweickart, and co-founder of the B-612 Foundation and what they now call themselves the Sentinel Mission. And it's very Google-able, by the way, if you want to...

• 35:35Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds like something you can totally look up and verify.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, asteroids, I don't think enough people are thinking about asteroids.

• 35:43Eugene Mirman?

  Well, how close, how close are some of the near misses? Like, how close are some of the ones that have almost hit?

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's just put some numbers on this. We got, our crack team of researchers got this. So, consider that less than 1% of the million asteroids larger than 40 meters have been identified. Now, you might say, "Well, 40 meters, that's nothing." Except, that's not what matters. The size is not so much what matters. It's how much energy does it carry? Because that energy, kinetic energy, the energy of motion, once the asteroid hits and is no longer moving, where's the energy go?

• 36:17Eugene Mirman?

  It goes, it explodes?

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It explodes. It goes in, destabilizes the object, it explodes, it burns forests, it makes a crater, it kills people, knocks over buildings. So, all of this is going on in an asteroid. And so, the smaller you get, the smaller is your threshold of wanting to track, the fewer, the lower percentage of the total we've actually recovered.

• 36:39Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's out there. And so, another problem is, you can find an asteroid when it gets close and just misses us, but then, if you want to keep tracking it, it goes farther away from us, and then it's so dim you can't track it. And you have to hope you find it on its next time around.

• 36:53Eugene Mirman?

  Is it orbiting, are asteroids...

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's orbiting the sun.

• 36:57Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's orbiting the sun.

• 36:58Eugene Mirman?

  Even an asteroid that might hit us?

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even an asteroid that crosses Earth's orbit is orbiting the sun.

• 37:03Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. And of course, most of them cross our orbit when we're not there.

• 37:06Eugene Mirman?

  Right. When we're not looking.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we're not...

• 37:08Eugene Mirman?

  When we're sleeping. When the Earth is asleep, asteroids...

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But when you cross the street, trucks have been on that street, but they're not hitting you because you're crossing them at a different time.

• 37:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though you're in the same place.

• 37:18Eugene Mirman?

  You've really planned your street crossing quite well. And asteroids don't have that level of planning.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. And so, you can end up just getting hosed by them. And so, just, just something to keep in mind. And, so, the near ones, so we have a list of the ones that come nearby. By the way, there's upwards of a half a dozen asteroids that we're tracking... That come within a few earth moon distances.

• 37:42Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, but meaning, so how far is the moon?

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we call those close, close approaches.

• 37:46Eugene Mirman?

  How far is the moon?

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a quarter, quarter million miles away.

• 37:48Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's, that's not how you should think about it. Think about it as, remember the schoolroom globe?

• 37:53Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's maybe a foot across.

• 37:55Eugene Mirman?

  I do.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, ask yourself, if that is the actual earth in your hands, and the moon is actually your fist, which is about the right size ratio, where would you have to put the moon to be the right distance from earth?

• 38:07Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, seven miles away, I don't know, I'm making up a number.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About thirty feet away.

• 38:12Eugene Mirman?

  I was really making it up.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not right next to it as, as school books typically show, because they would have to fit it on a page. About thirty feet away. So if an asteroid comes and it's twice the moon distance, or four times, I don't, you know.

• 38:25Eugene Mirman?

  Sixty feet, eighty feet, a hundred.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't, to me, those are not buzz cuts. If you come within our, what's called

• 38:31Eugene Mirman?

  Between the moon.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cis lunar space, that's the official name of it. That's what the military calls the new high ground, basically. Then, yeah, that's what I'm.

• 38:39Eugene Mirman?

  How often does that happen? That sounds much scarier.

• 38:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get that maybe a few times a year.

• 38:44Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and, I don't know the latest numbers, but last I checked, it was a few times a year. And Apophis on Friday the thirteenth in the year twenty twenty nine, will come so close that it will dip below our communication satellites.

• 38:59Eugene Mirman?

  Here's a question.

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll be the first, it'll be the first.

• 39:01Eugene Mirman?

  Didn't Rusty say we're fifty times off our measurements potentially? Or the, if like, if we went into space, we'd be fifty, have a, and put a, you know, tagged it, we would be fifty times more accurate.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, easily.

• 39:13Eugene Mirman?

  So aren't we potentially super inaccurate about where this asteroid coming for us will be?

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The good thing about it is that we can quantify that ignorance.

• 39:22Eugene Mirman?

  How does that work? That's something we need to find out.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you do is you just have a wider uncertainty path that you must.

• 39:29Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I see, you just go, so it's like a hurricane where you go like, it'll be in this range, but you know it's not actually gonna go to France or something.

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And data, exactly, it's not gonna make a bank of turn and go to the Bahamas.

• 39:38Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's going, if it's land fell.

• 39:41Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so this is how you would do that.

• 39:44Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, so, uh, the, so Apophis is gonna come within our communication satellites, those are twenty-three thousand miles up. So to me, that's fighting, that, that.

• 39:53Eugene Mirman?

  Will it disrupt our texting and our swiping right and left?

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't, I don't remember if it's metallic or not, but I, not likely.

• 40:01Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would make everyone swipe right.

• 40:03Eugene Mirman?

  We should find out if it's metallic, those sound a lot worse.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be funny, if it made everyone swipe right.

• 40:08Eugene Mirman?

  Exactly, by accident it created hundreds of marriages.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The asteroid marriage, that's cute.

• 40:15Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, you know, we've, we have had to deal with natural disasters in the history of the world. And I wondered how different would this be from those? And I, I checked with Rusty to see what he says. So a question for you, this asteroid that struck over Russia, a thousand people needed Band-Aids.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, fifteen hundred.

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the glass broke in their face. Why is that any different from a hurricane or a volcano? People get injured, we don't go bat crazy over it. I mean, we do, but not in some kind of so organized a way as you are suggesting to deflect asteroids in the future. Why not view the occasional asteroid strike as another natural disaster? And we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and get over it?

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Well, the reality is we are going to do that for the ones that are too small for us really to detect ahead of time. And Chelyabinsk objects.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was such, was just such an object.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was just such an object. We're never really going to be, we will find some of them. Make no, no mistake, we'll find, but we're never going to get anywhere near the total population of objects that size. So we're ninety-nine percent of the time that we get hit by something that's, let's say, thirty meters or smaller, we're not going to know about it ahead of time. But above that, where you can do serious damage, like wipe out a city, we can know about those ahead of time, we can predict an impact coming, and we can deflect it if we know about it early enough.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in this enterprise, there are the ones you know we can deflect, the ones that are too small you can't see, those come under the category of all the other natural disasters. We just have to, you need disaster recovery.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  And the lower part, the lower region of the ones that you can find, but are going to cost too much to deflect, you're going to use.

• 42:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's so many of them, they're so small?

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Yes, because they're so small, it is cheaper to evacuate the impact zone than it is to try and deflect them. It's probably not purely economic.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  You're going to have real geopolitical components to that decision. But in the work we've done with the UN, we have identified that this threshold or this break, this line, has to be defined by the nations of the world.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it's gotta be defined geopolitically.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  It's not a, it's not a technical decision.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, the more he talked, the more I thought we were just screwed. Because there was too much, there's too much that-

• 42:44Eugene Mirman?

  Too many factors.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Too many factors. It's not just bat the thing out of the sky.

• 42:48Eugene Mirman?

  But basically, the little ones are like, just like regular natural disasters. But the big ones could destroy mankind.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, and so-

• 42:56Eugene Mirman?

  So those we should really stop.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the one over Chaya Binks, I said was about seventeen meters across. That one, we, we, by the time you know that's in our atmosphere, it's too late.

• 43:05Eugene Mirman?

  And there's nothing, is there anything you can fly into it or anything?

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That low?

• 43:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because-

• 43:10Eugene Mirman?

  It's traveling it.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not only the speed, is if you break a thing into two pieces, now you have to evacuate two locations instead of one. If they're split and they keep separating. And you haven't reduced its energy. It's all about the energy.

• 43:24Eugene Mirman?

  Right, the energy is still there.

• 43:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The energy is still there. Even if you break it into a million pieces, the energy is still there. They might explode at higher up and be a little less damaging.

• 43:33Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But nonetheless, the energy gets-

• 43:35Eugene Mirman?

  And there's no option where you slow it down or catch it with some sort of gigantic-

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lasso it.

• 43:40Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Lasso it.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, something has to be holding the net. See-

• 43:44Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, or, uh-

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what are you gonna attach the net to?

• 43:47Eugene Mirman?

  Rockets that are leaving Earth.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 43:50Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe a giant sheet with rockets on every corner, an opposite parachute.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, yeah, so these, these, these are, for me, fascinating frontier, uh, challenges on this.

• 44:03Eugene Mirman?

  So does he have an actual plan of how it'd be stopped? Or he's gonna go, "UN, we're in serious danger."

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, see, he's hosted conferences where they invited engineers to come up with solutions.

• 44:12Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And some people are, who are the kind, "Look, we got the nukes in the silo. Let's blow the sucker out of the sky." You know, you got some of the, you got some of those people.

• 44:20Eugene Mirman?

  But that's a bad idea, right?

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's, you know, we're really good at blowing stuff up here in the United States. But less good at knowing where the pieces fall after you've done so. Whereas a deflection mission, you, you can, you can judge how well you're doing while the mission is in progress.

• 44:39Eugene Mirman?

  Right, but we also, would it be, make sense to blow something up in space or no?

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you can get it early enough and completely blow it to smithereens so that when it does hit Earth, they're just harmless meteors falling through the sky, it'd be a hell of a meteor shower.

• 44:54Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you could, yes.

• 44:56Eugene Mirman?

  So that might make sense, but once it gets to Earth...

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you knew you would accomplish that, if that's what you're betting on, I don't know that that's the right way to do it.

• 45:02Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right. It's not a great plan.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:05Eugene Mirman?

  I don't recommend it. That isn't my recommendation after hearing all the evidence.

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you want to know who's, who's really gonna lead this? Is it Rusty? Are there countries, you know, there's a whole other geopolitical layering on this.

• 45:17Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forgetting the science. Just who's accountable for something that could hit one country versus another? I ask that of Rusty. Let's find out.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  What's really left, frankly, is taking responsibility. And the question is, with everything else going on, why should I, as a president or congressman or whatever, why should I add this to the list?

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eighty-eight percent of Congress gets re-elected every two years.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  But the fact of the matter is, the public, as they come to understand this, with Shelly Obinsk and other, you know, the next ones that are gonna hit, they're gonna understand at some point, they're gonna get, that it's not expensive to do this. Because the image in everybody's head is, this has got to be terribly expensive. It's not. It's less than one-half of one percent of NASA's budget to do it up in gold. So you're not talking displacing the whole national space program.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why doesn't NASA have such a program?

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Because NASA has no responsibility for public safety.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  NASA is to do space science and exploration. This is neither space science nor exploration, it is public safety.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the naivete of the founding documents.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  It is, and we have made recommendations to the Congress, change NASA's Space Act to make them responsible for this one and only cosmic natural hazard. And they have not done it, nor has any nation in the world yet assigned this kind of explicit responsibility. And that's what's gotta be done.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, the more I talk to him, the more you just want to kiss your ass goodbye. You know? It's like if one of these gets found.

• 46:52Eugene Mirman?

  So he wants NASA to have responsibility.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If not NASA, then whom? And if not now, then when?

• 46:58Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I don't know. I guess it would be MSNBC would be a bad choice. They barely do any space exploration.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hardly any.

• 47:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly. And I can't think of a band that would be good. U2, maybe. They would probably.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, there's another, there's another layering of challenge here. That some asteroids that have less density that we measure than what we know is the density of the rock that it contains. And so that tells us maybe it's a pile of rocks.

• 47:26Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when we calculate the bulk density, we're adding in all the space between the rocks. Having it come out less than what we think it should be. If that's the case, how do you deflect a pile of rocks?

• 47:36Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know. A rock eating monster?

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. If you, if you attach a retro rocket to one of the bits of it, then it could just pull one of those rocks away and leave all the rest, not all.

• 47:44Eugene Mirman?

  Would you maybe blow those up?

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. So these are the challenges that confront the deflection engineer, right? It's not a, and is, is the thing strong enough to move one piece of it and have all the rest of it follow? That's really what it comes, what it comes down to.

• 47:59Eugene Mirman?

  Gravitationally, you mean?

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so one of the great ones is gravitationally. That way you're not tugging on one piece versus another. So that is Eugene, the frontier of our species' survival in this world. And you're from Russia and all these like hitting Siberia, so maybe.

• 48:15Eugene Mirman?

  Well, Russia's very, very big.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that why?

• 48:17Eugene Mirman?

  So that's probably, I think, why they get hit a lot. It's like they're the ocean of land.

• 48:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a good, I like that analogy. So Eugene, we gotta, we gotta wrap it up. Uh, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 48:26Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you for scaring me about asteroids.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, at the end of these programs, I bid you to keep looking up.