Death from the Skies! (featuring Phil Plait)

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Phil Plait about some of the ways space could wipe us all out, or at least really mess up our infrastructure. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
The Earth sits in a cosmic shooting gallery, and the
universe has us dead in its crosshairs. Feeling nervous yet
This is a quote from doctor Phil plates two thousand
and eight book Death from the Skies. On today's show,
Daniel and I have the distinct pleasure of interviewing Phil
about why space could annihilate humanity or at least make

(00:26):
our lives super duper uncomfortable for quite a long time.
But don't worry. We're limiting our conversation today to threats
from space that we can do something about, kind of,
So hopefully this episode won't keep you tossing and turning
in bed too much tonight. All right, here we go.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist and a professor you see, Irvine.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
I'm Kelly Weener Smith, and I sometimes stay up at
night wondering if things are gonna kill my kids.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
And my question for you today, Kelly, is how much
do you share those concerns with your kids?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Do you lead them to.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Believe that the world is a safe and fuzzy place
or do you want them to understand the truth.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
I fall somewhere in between. I talk to them about
bullies at school, Like, there will always be bullies, let's
be honest about that. How do you deal with those
sorts of things? But I will tell her about wars
that have happened in the past, and I have mentioned
nuclear weapons because I was writing about them so much
and she overheard Zach and I talking about them. But
I don't think I would specifically be like, and what

(01:43):
about meteoroids. I think we just enjoy the bright lights
in the sky and then I kind of leave it
at that, so somewhere in between what about you.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
I try to share everything with my kids, and I
try to tell them that science is our way to
understand the universe better, which means knowing the wonderful things
and also knowing the existential threats and potentially developing the
technology to save ourselves. So trying to end on a
positive note.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
So my oldest is ten. Your kids are both older
than that. When your kids were ten, were you this
honest with them or did you sort of like scale up?

Speaker 3 (02:15):
I believe in total honesty with my kids. I answered
their questions about reproduction and Santa Claus and everything whenever
they asked them. Yes, And so far they're not serial killers.
So we'll see what happens.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Oh solid, So I wouldn't have guessed that. My daughter,
she said, is there Santa Claus? And I said, do
you really want to know? And she said no, and
we left it at that, and so I think she knows.
And then I sat her down and we had the
where do babies come from?

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Talk?

Speaker 1 (02:45):
And at the end I had like drawn diagrams because
I'm like, I'm a biologist. And at the end she
was like, Mom, this this was awful. Well sorry, maybe
your funny father should have done it instead of your
biologist mother. But anyway, I'm honest about some things. I
guess us.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
All right, Well, then, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe,
in which we talk about all of the amazing things
in the universe, the things that can kill you, the
things that probably won't kill you, and the things that
we're working very very hard to stop from killing you.
We want to think about all of those amazing things.
We want to explain them, we want to understand them,
we want to marinate in the joy of them, because hey,

(03:21):
it's a wonderful universe.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
And today we have a death from this guy's expert
joining us doctor phil Plate. We're excited about that, but
we wanted to know first, what do the people on
the street think is most likely to kill us when
those risks are coming from space? So let's hear what
they had to say.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
I walked around a sunny irvine and asked folks, what
thing in space is most likely to hurt us down
here on Earth. Here's what people had to say.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
A creation, uh, asteroid SATOI like an asteroid, like a
big rock, like a planet that follows. I don't know, aliens,
the Sun coming too close.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Biologically logical things like microscope.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, just things that are not meant to be here.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Cool? All right?

Speaker 3 (04:06):
What do you think the chances already to happen in
our lifetime?

Speaker 4 (04:10):
Not likely?

Speaker 3 (04:11):
Pretty safe medior meteor Okay, what do you think the
chances are of that happening?

Speaker 2 (04:16):
You gotta be slim because the universe is so vast,
especially our Milky Way galaxy, But thinking it probably could happen,
I mean we get meteors, you know, meta showers, everything.
I guess is that would think that's the biggest problem. Radiation?

Speaker 3 (04:33):
What makes radiation in safe? Sun?

Speaker 4 (04:35):
One of those comets falls down, may create a fire,
or if it's the big stone, it could destroy what's underneath.
Do you think that's likely. No, not for a while.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
You don't worry about it too much.

Speaker 4 (04:49):
No, The problem is here we don't see the skies
because of the pollution. Some parts of the world you
can see the commets move at night, but here we don't.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
You better find out than the asteroids anything else. Gamma rays,
gamma rays, what makes gamma rays? Distant supermodents, solar flares,
space debris from like satellites.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
And stuff, a meteor radiation from the Sun. Should it
decide to have a little heart, I mean, if the Sun,
you know, really got over and it exploded.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
But that's a pretty far out their chance. But that
would be a little catastrophic, I think, yeah. Non.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
So how worried are you guys about it?

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Not very not at all. You know, you can't change,
but it can't change. I think I'd be more worried
about an earthquake. But yeah, I mean, if we thought
if aliens came and we could visit, but I'm sure
they would look at us and go, that's sure.

Speaker 4 (05:38):
They're probably stuff that we put up there in the
first place.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
Asteroids as well, radiation in the sun. I can only
imagine what it was like for someone to have you
walk up to them and be like, how is space
gonna kill you? And I like, did they think you're
a crazy person? But anyway, we had some pretty interesting answers.
Aliens came up more than I thought. I didn't expect
an answer to include the word fart. Maybe you interviewed

(06:03):
a biologist without knowing it. What did you think about
these answers?

Speaker 3 (06:07):
I thought there were a pretty good summary of things
to worry about. My favorite answer was the unknown, because
the more we learn about the universe, of course, the
more we understand how little we know, which means there
could be things out there that are dangerous or amazing
or both that we haven't even yet discovered.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, but there's still plenty of things to worry about.
Don't worry, and let's start talking to her. Here's what
you should worry about, experts. So let's get started with
our interview, all right, So, doctor Phil Plait is an astronomer, author,
sci fi dork, TV documentary talking head, a science enthusiast,

(06:44):
and my husband and I have known him for years,
so I can also say he's a genuinely wonderful human being.
He writes the Bad Astronomy newsletter, and today he's going
to tell us about way space could kill us.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Welcome to the show, Phil, Thank you, and hey, you
didn't mention that I I'm acknowledged in a Hugo Award
winning science for right.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
We gave you the credit for any mistakes that we make,
and you were a really great sport about that.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Right. Well, I found that to be very funny. Zach
and Kelly, of course, wrote a city on Mars, and
I basically told him it was all wrong, and so
they made fun of me in the book.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
That's right. That's how much we appreciate the opinion.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, I think that's pretty much all the steps that
happened there.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, pretty much pretty much. How's Virginia treating you today?

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Humidly? Humidly? Is that a is that an adverb? It's
actually quite nice this week, but it's been really hot
and humid. And I lived in Colorado. I'm used to hot.
The summer's there get baking, but we don't keep a
lot of water in the air there, and I forgot
I grew up in Virginia, so it's it's weird coming back,
all the smells and the sounds.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
It's like, oh yeah, I remember that, and the spiders.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
It's nice.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
So when Virginia is nice, it like approaches California weather
for example.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Sure, I lived in California too, so look I can
get into it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
So Daniel and I have an ongoing debate about whether
Virginia or California is better. And I am one hundred
percent in the Virginia side. Do you want to weigh in?

Speaker 3 (08:06):
There's no debate. All weather is measured by how close
it is to California. That's the metric.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Depends on where you are in California. I've been to
Sacramento in the summer, and let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something. That's not a great place
to be in the summer.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
I have a no truth Scotsman approached that, and that's
basically not California.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Oh. When I looked at California, I was in Davis,
which is like, yeah, right outside of Sacramento. But everyone
should follow Phil's Instagram account because he posts great photos
of the amazing birds and moths and butterflies that we
have out here, which I think pretty much steals the deal.
For Virginia.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, that's all squishy stuff. Though I don't really understand
any of that.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Oh you don't have to.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
It's like, ooh, pretty bug. And I figure, you know what, Kelly,
I'll tell me what it is.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
Well, no matter how good the weather is down here,
we're actually here today to talk about the weather in
space and how bad that can get.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Oh oh, very good. Thank you for getting me back
on track, because you know, if you give me a
chance to talk about moths, that's the avenue I'm going
to go down.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
So I know.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
All right. So, Phil, you wrote this great book that
I read back when it came out, and then I
had the pleasure of rereading this weekend. And you start
the book by talking about meteors, meteoroids and meteorites. And
I got to tell you, every time I write about
these things, I have to look up the difference because
it does not stick in my fixed goull. So can

(09:27):
we start there? What's the difference between these three?

Speaker 2 (09:30):
The difference is a definition, and definitions are I wouldn't
say squishy, but I wouldn't cleave unto them very closely
in science, because they get you in trouble when you
see a shooting star in the sky, a blaze of
light whipping across the sky really quickly. That phenomenon is

(09:51):
called a meteor That is the luminous glow. The object
doing the glowing besides the air is a little tiny
piece of rock or or something like that, and that
is called the meteoroid. And so if you think of
it like asteroid, it's the solid bit. If it hits
the ground, it's called a meteorite. And then this is

(10:11):
where things get difficult, because what if you catch it
and it doesn't touch the ground. What if it hits
an airplane and you're sitting on the airplane and they
rescue you and everybody's fine in this scenario, but it
never hits the ground, is it still a meteorite? And
if you ask a meteoriticist, which is a real thing,
about this, they'll just glare at you. It's like asking
an astronomer about astrology. It's basically a shut up you

(10:34):
kind of a look. But that's in general what those
three things are.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
And what about the ocean. If it splashes down in
the water, is it a meteorite, then.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
It's a meteorological find I'm trying to think of a
good pun there.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
We're missing it.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah, I would assume that if it hits anything and
then you're holding it in your hand, it's a meteorite.
But then at some point we're going to go into
space and we're going to catch up with these things
and be able to, you know, pluck them out of space,
and then what is it? It's it never really hit anything.
So this is what I mean. When you start getting
into the nitty gritty of definitions, you always get in trouble.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, nature doesn't care that humans like to categorize things. Yes,
But the most important jargon term in the book, or
perhaps the most important drugon term I've ever seen that
I hadn't heard of before, is pancaking. Yes, what does
pancaking mean? Because it made me smile.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
It's a real thing and it's descriptive. Actually. So you
have a rock out in space and it's just floating
around out there, and then it's doing its own thing
orbiting the Sun, and then it looks up and it's like, oh,
look at this gigantic blue planet in my way. As
it approaches Earth or really any planet that has an atmosphere,
it's moving extremely quickly and we are talking about, oh,

(11:48):
twenty kilometers per second, so seventy thousand kilometers an hour,
forty thousand miles an hour whatever. I don't know how
many furlongs per per second that is, but you know
you can do the math. And when it encounters atmosphere,
a couple of weird things happen, And by weird, I
mean these go against what we're used to living on
Earth and just walking around and being humans. One is

(12:09):
that rock we think of as being solid, but it's not.
If you compress it, it can change its shape without
shattering if you apply the pressure the right way. The
other thing is that the atmosphere, which you can walk through,
run through, do whatever, is actually pretty thick, and when
you're traveling through it faster and faster, the amount of

(12:31):
air resistance you feel goes up extremely rapidly. And so
if stick your hand out the window of a car
that's driving down the highway, you feel that wind it's
pretty strong. Well, now imagine instead of going one hundred
kilometers an hour down the highway, you're doing seventy thousand
kilometers an hour through the atmosphere. That's a lot of pressure,
and it compresses the rock and the rock flattens perpendicular

(12:54):
to the direction of travel. You're basically squishing it with
the air, and it forms a flattened disc and that's pancaking.
And eventually, and by eventually, I mean in a very
small fraction of a second, that will cause the rock
to break to crumble. And now instead of one meteoroid,
you have lots of little meteoroids, and they're all making

(13:14):
their own little way through the atmosphere, burning up as
they do it. I'll add that, contrary to common perception,
it's not friction through the atmosphere that heats these things.
There's actually not a lot of friction. They're compressing the
air in front of them very very rapidly. And when
you compress a gas, it heats up. That's a really
basic ninth grade chemistry lesson. You compress a gas, it

(13:37):
gets hotter, and when you compress it a lot, it
gets really really hot. So that's what's happening. These things
are heated up by the compression of the air in
front of them. It melts off the rock, a lot
of it. It vaporizes and leaves that trail behind it,
which for some reason scientists call a train, not a
trail a train. Why are these words so similar because

(13:59):
we like to confuse people, I think. And then eventually
it burns up, and this whole thing usually happens in
under a second or two.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
So the energy goes from the kinetic energy of the
I'm gonna say the wrong word meteoroid, yes, which is
then compressing the air in front of it. And I
was really into what you were saying about how compressing
something heats it up, because to me that was always
a little bit of a brain scramble in chemistry, like
why is compressing something heated up? And the way I

(14:26):
finally thought about it was like, if you're pressing on something,
like you put gas in a box and you squeeze it,
you're adding energy. You're like bouncing those particles in another direction,
You're turning them around earlier and earlier. But in this scenario,
it's the meteoroid doing that right. So it's like the
meteoroid itself is compressing the air in front of it,
using its kinetic energy to heat up that air, and

(14:48):
then that air heats up the meteoroid and vaporizes it.
So it's like, yes, that's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
That's basically it and the amount of kinetic energy is huge. Yeah,
kinetic energy depends on the mass of the object. That's more,
and it's velocity squared. So even a little tiny thing
the size of say a grape, when it's moving at
seventy thousand kilometers an hour and sometimes faster, that has
a lot of energy. And you're decelerating it from that

(15:14):
speed to essentially zero a couple one hundred kilometers an hour,
not very fast when it finally slows down and air
resistance doesn't slow it anymore, and then it just falls
at terminal velocity. So you're dropping this thing from seventy
thousand kilometers per hour to zero in a couple of seconds.
It's a vast amount of energy that you're extracting from

(15:35):
this thing. It actually heats the air so much the
air glows too, so you're melting of meteoroid, vaporizing it
and heating up the air. The air gets excited and
a little elements in it and start giving off light,
and you see this thing zipping across your sky. And
the bigger the piece, the more energy it gets, the
brighter it gets, and the faster the piece, the more

(15:55):
energy it has. The upper limit to the velocity typically
depend on orbital speeds around the Sun. If you have
something orbiting the Sun opposite the Earth and it hits
us head on, and so it's moving twice as fast
as something that has to catch up to us roughly,
and so those tend to have more energy.

Speaker 3 (16:15):
And as more energy mean it's more likely to vaporize
in the atmosphere, or that it's more likely to make
it to Earth and kill us.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Gosh, that's a good question. And that all depends on
size roughly and a composition. So like when you go
out and see a meteor shower like in the August
Perseids or the Geminids a favorite of mine in December,
these are great meteor showers. These are little bits of
rock that come off a comet. And we found out

(16:43):
because we visited comets now that the rocks on these
things are incredibly fragile. They're very friable. As they say,
if you were to pick up a rock on a comet,
you could crush it in your hand easily. It would
be like less structural integrity if I can borrow a
star trek term than like styrophoam, so you can just
crush this thing. And so this stuff burns up really,
really easily, and a lot of asteroids are made of

(17:06):
rock and metal, and metal is a lot tougher and
turns out that weirdly, although metal asteroids are far more
rare than rock asteroids, most of the meteorites we find
are metal because they make it to the ground better.
So I have a bunch of metal meteorites. I collect them,
and so I've got a pile of them someplace in

(17:27):
the house. I still have an unpacked. It's been a year,
and at some point I'll have them up on display
and they're cool. They're black from the heat of their passage.
They're very dense. Because they're metal, they can have beautiful
crystal patterns when you cut them open. It's a really
fun thing to collect meteorites, although it's now extraordinarily expensive,
and I don't do it anymore. I did it when
it was a lot easier. Now I can't afford it anymore.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
When our daughter was born, you gave us one and
a copper light, which we still had.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
That's right, Yeah, the copper light was your wedding I think, oh,
that makes sense, if I'm not mistaken. I gave that
to you both because it seemed to right, fossilized dinosaur.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
Poop from an iguanadon. They're both cherished items in our home.
But anyway, meteoroids can come from chunks of comets or
chunks of asteroids. Are those the two places that it
comes from? Yes, okay, got it? And how often do
these things make it to Earth?

Speaker 2 (18:21):
All the time? The Earth is hit by a lot
of this stuff all the time, and I've seen different
numbers that are off by a factor of ten, but
they tend to average out to between fifty and one
hundred tons per day. And that's a lot. I mean,
when you first hear that, you're like, oh my god, Yeah,
that's a that's a disaster. And it's like, well, you know,

(18:42):
here we are. We're not commonly hearing about, you know,
houses getting wiped out by asteroid impacts. It's made up
of little, tiny pieces and there's zillions of them, and
it's spread out over the Earth, which is, you know,
this immense planet with a lot of surface area, three
quarters of which is water. Polls people tend not to
live at, so you know, we don't see a lot

(19:04):
of this stuff coming in. And since most of it
is small, it's not a big deal. Once a month
on average you get something bigger about the size of
an easy chair. And when those things come in that's
usually terrifying. Pieces might hit the ground, it might not,
it might totally burn up, but it's so bright. It
can shine almost as bright as the sun. And if

(19:26):
you're out at night and you're just like dude, doo
doo dooo, doing your thing, and then all of a
sudden the skylights up around you, it's amazing. And you
can find zillions of videos of this on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
It's kind of amazing to me that this happens so often.
But like people getting hit, you can name the people.
It happened so rarely. Like Ann Hodges had a really
bad day. You talked about her in your book What
happened to her?

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah? Ann Hodges lived in Silacaga, Alabama, And do I
have that right Alabama in the nineteen fifties. I believe
she was a renter or in a house and a
chunk of rock punched through the roof and landed. It
hit her dresser, as I recall, I believe it hit
her radio and destroyed. It bounced off and whacked her
on the side. And there are photos of her online

(20:10):
you can see it where she has a bruise that's
about the size of a dinner plate on her side.
It's really astonishing. And people say, my god, who was
hit by meteorite? And it's like, well, she wasn't hit
directly by a meteorite, and it wasn't moving thousands of
kilometers an hour when it hit her. It was in
free fall. It probably slowed down to, like I said,

(20:30):
a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, you know, highway speeds,
and then fell and it's dense enough it's chunk of
rock to pierce the roof and hit her and you
know it's still moving. You don't want to have somebody,
you know, whip a rock at you as hard as
they can. But that's what basically happened, and it left
a huge bruise on her side. And the reason I
mentioned that she's a renter is because the person who

(20:52):
owned the house claimed that the meteorite was theirs, and
she said it was hers, and there were lawsuits and everything.
It was a mess, and there are laws about this now.
And I'm of the opinion it's like, yeah, you know,
if I own the house, but it hit my renter
might want to split the money. Maybe that's the thing

(21:12):
to do. I don't think back then they were worth
as much as they are now. But yeah, if you
were hit by a meteorite and you could prove it
and it's not you know, a hoax or a fraud
or something, that chunk of rock would be worth a fortune,
you'd be set. Well.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
The thing that makes me think of is is this
an opportunity for the courts to weigh in on whether
it's a meteoroid or a meteorite? You know, because it
didn't hit the ground right hit the dresser, and you know,
lawyers love definitions.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
I feel that the way the courts are going these days,
I am so happy to let them declare what is
scientific and what isn't now or I could walk into
a lava lake. That might be more fun.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
I bet Clarence Thomas has undisclosed gifts of meteorites from donors.
That's my guess.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
I bet he doesn't. Ually I don't know if I
take that bet, because if I bet on the yes
he does, I would make sure to send him one
and then I'd win.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Very strategic.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
I like it, but I think there's something fascinating. You
mentioned about how these larger ones are rareer. There's like
some basic math there that when you look out in
the universe is like fewer bigger things and more small things, right,
And that sort of protects us, that like mathematics protects
us because you say, there's zillions of tiny particles and
little bits of dust hitting the earth, but the bigger stuff,

(22:29):
the stuff that can actually hurt us, is much rarer.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
Right. That's just a law of nature. If you take
a rock in your backyard and whack it with a
hammer and it cracks, you'll get two big pieces and
a couple of medium sized you know, slivers, and then
a ton of dust. Right. So that's always what happens
with nature. When you form things a certain way, you
get a handful of big things and a ton of
little things. And our atmosphere protects us from most of

(22:55):
that stuff, you know, if you don't have an atmosphere,
you know, look at the moon. The moon is literally
saturated in craters in some spots where if a chunk
of rock hits the moon, it'll actually erase more craters
than it will create. So they're everywhere, and who knows
how many billions of craters there are. There are over
a million bigger than about a mile across, So I

(23:18):
mean that's a lot, and that's a mile, that's you know,
a couple of kilometers. That is an immense crater. And
if you start talking about ones that are the size
of you know, a parking lot or a dinner plate,
there may be hundreds of billions of them. I wouldn't
even know how many. But our atmosphere protects us from
the little guys, and so you tend to get a

(23:39):
smallest crater on Earth because you need a certain sized
chunk of rock to be able to make it through
our atmosphere and impact the ground. The other problem there
is we have erosion where the Moon doesn't. Really the
Moon has erosion, it's just very slow. But on Earth
we have an atmosphere, we have wind, we have water,
and the craters get erased over short periods of time,

(23:59):
unless they land in interesting places like Arizona, where there's
a meteor crater. I've been there. That's an amazing place.
Or the crater's so huge that it can last a
couple of billion years, and we've seen evidence of those
as well. But we only know of a couple of
hundred on Earth because of erosion, and that's because our
atmosphere protexas. So yeah, it takes something a few meters across,

(24:21):
like look at the one in Russia in twenty thirteen.
Came in over chel Yabinsk town of about a million
people and lit up the sky. It was brighter than
the sun, made a shock wave that shattered windows. Those
videos are incredible. That thing was nineteen meters across sixty feet,
so the size of a house, and it was very
crumbly rock. This was not like a chunk of quartz

(24:43):
that you'd find in your backyard. This was something that
if you punched it, it would disintegrate. And it came in
burned up, I can't remember the exact numbers, twenty thirty
kilometers above the surface and slowed down so violently that
it released all of its kinetic energy as a burst
of light and sound, which is an explosion. And so

(25:04):
this thing blew up, created an immense shock wave, and
that thing touched down and that's what shattered all those windows.
So you know, if that had been made of metal,
it would have made it to the ground and done
some real damage.

Speaker 3 (25:16):
Imagine what it must have been like to see one
of those things ten thousand years ago when you have
no understanding of the cosmos or you're placing it, or
how anything works. I mean talk about like inventing a
religion or a spiritual moment.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Right, need to change mylin crew that if I saw
one now, I'd crack my pants. Are you kidding? That's
just terrifying.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
I love that we went to the same place. I
don't know if you caught that. I said I'd need
to change my loincloth and you said.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, that's a that's a better line. You can use
that one. Edit me out there, leave.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Them both all right, So this would all be petrifying.
But let's take a quick commercial break and then we'll
talk about if there's anything that we can do about it.

(26:09):
And we're back. Okay. So Phil and I both agreed
we'd soil ourselves if we saw a giant meteoroid coming
towards us. Phil, is there anything that we can do
about this? How much advance notice do we need? What
are our options here?

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Nothing? Oh? Wait, no, that's not right. Thinking five years ago,
a few years ago, there's nothing you could do. Our
first warning would be you'd look up and see this
bright lightness sky and go hey, what's that? And before
you could finish that sentence. You're in a lot of trouble.
When it comes to small ones like to chill Yabinsk
one from twenty thirteen that blew up over Russia. Again,

(26:44):
not much we can do because that's so small. That
objects like that are incredibly faint and it's very difficult
to spot them far enough in advance that we can
do anything about it. Now, for bigger ones, and we're
talking about ones that might have a global impact. These
are ones that are one hundred meters across or bigger
the size of a football stadium or larger. Those we're

(27:06):
starting to get a handle on. We have a lot
of big telescopes and step one is to find them,
And we have telescopes searching the skies. We're doing a
decent job about that. NASA's about to launch in a
few more years a spacecraft that's going to scan the
skies and really do a good job of finding all
of these smaller objects. It's called ANEO Sentinel Near Earth

(27:28):
Objects Sentinel. It's a very cool mission.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
But where are these things coming from? I mean, we
have telescopes looking for stuff, But tell us about where
these things are from. Are they just coming from deep
deep space like Omuamula? Are they coming from our own backyard?
Are they falling off the Moon?

Speaker 2 (27:43):
Like?

Speaker 3 (27:43):
What's the source of these things?

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Oh, the vast majority of them are coming from our
Solar system. They're coming from comets and that tends to
be smaller stuff. Or they come from the asteroid belt,
because the asteroid belt has all these big rocks in it.
Some of them are hundreds of kilometers across. They occasionally
whack into each other create shrapnel, and then that stuff
goes off on its own orbit around the Sun and

(28:05):
eventually hits Us or Jupiter, or Mars or the Moon.
So that's where most of this stuff is coming from.
Some of it is on very elliptical orbits, so it
gets very close to the Sun and that means that
if it's coming from that direction, we can't see it.
That's because it's you know, the Sun's up during the
day and that makes it hard to observe. The beauty

(28:26):
of this NASA mission is that it's going to be
in an orbit closer to the Sun and we'll look
back toward the Earth and we'll be able to see
some of these objects that are coming in from that direction.
We also need telescopes that sort of orbit ahead and
behind us so that we can scan the whole sky.
But that's sometime in the future. But in the meantime,
you know we're going to find the vast majority of

(28:46):
these things. The next step is what are you going
to do about it? And for a long time we
weren't sure. Then in two thousand and five, we hit
a small comet with a spacecraft sam into That was
the Deep Impact Mission. Apparently a coincidence that it was
that the movie had the same name.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Didn't They slam it with a piece of metal like
the size of a washing machine or something.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, it was a piece of copper, and they did
that on purpose because when you get this flash of
light and all this gas, all this material vaporizes, you
can analyze to see what's in it. And you know,
if you see a lot of copper, you ignore that,
you say that's from our impactor. Everything else is part
of that rock that we hit. So that was pretty clever.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
Actually, well, I always thought that was a fun variation
and like throw the kitchen, think at it, like, no,
throw the washing machine at it.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
It's like throw, you know, thousands of melted down pennies.
I think is how that worked. I actually don't know
where they got the copper from. That would be an
interesting thing to find out. May have come from Virginia.
Virginia has a lot of copper we're used to. A
couple of years ago, NASA launched this mission called the
Double Asteroid Redirect Test, and they slammed a spacecraft into
the moon of an asteroid because asteroids can have moons.

(29:56):
Even though this asteroid, called Ditamos, is mall and I
don't have the number off the top of my head,
it's a few hundred meters across, they discovered it has
a moon, which they called dimorphose, and that was upsetting
to me. I wanted them to call it epididymos, because
of course you did, because a funny epididymos, but also

(30:18):
it's correct. Epi means external are outside of, and so
it's a moon outside of the asteroid. Nobody likes my puns.
I love Phil, thank you, I appreciate that. And so
they slammed the spacecraft into the moon because we knew
how far the moon was from the main asteroid and
how long it took to orbit, and by hitting it
you could directly measure how much the orbit was changed.

(30:41):
If you hit just a plain old asteroid orbit in
the Sun, you have to wait months and years before
you can really see how much it spat up or
slowed down. But with a moon it was almost instantaneous,
and they found out that it had a twelve hour
orbit that changed by about a half an hour, which
was way more than they expected, which is good news
because that means that if you see one hundred meter

(31:02):
wide rock heading towards Earth and we hit it with
a spacecraft, we can divert it. And the earlier you
do this the better. Right, it's not like you're attaching
a rock to this thing and shooting it off at
high speed. You're changing the velocity a little bit, and
so the earlier you do that, the more time it
has to move out of the way. So really what
you want to do is identify these things decades in

(31:22):
advance and then do this. If this mission was amazing
because they did it, not just that it worked. I
mean we figured it might work if it hit, but
it hit that was amazing. That's not an easy thing
to do to hit a target that's small when you're
screaming across space at thousands of kilometers an hour. And
it worked perfectly. It was an amazing mission.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
It's always easier to like knock a sniper's rifle than
to like swat the bullet out of the air. You
know when it's almost hits you. But it trus some planning,
right like they thought about this. NASA doesn't work quickly.
This is probably like a ten year mission to go
up there and knock this moon. We're not going to
have that much time. If we see a rock coming,
we're lucky enough to spot it on its way and

(32:02):
we have months, what plans do we have to like
scramble and melt down more pennies or whatever to save
the Earth? Does Virginia have enough copper for that?

Speaker 2 (32:13):
I don't know. That sounds like a good movie. Send
in your pennies to save the Earth. It depends. You
got to remember everything's in motion, and I mean that literally,
there's all these things. There are millions of these objects
orbiting the Sun. Some of them we know about, and
we actually know about most of the ones that get
close to the Earth that are big enough to do

(32:35):
serious damage. We're doing really well at finding them, categorizing them,
and saying, Okay, if they're not going to hit us
for the next hundred years, we're not going to sweat them.
And every month there are a few more that come
onto the list that are like, well, these are getting
a little closer than i'd like. Typically, as you observe
them more and more and the orbit gets defined better,

(32:58):
we realize they're going to miss. You think about it.
The analogy I like is an outfielder in baseball and
you're standing there. You're an outfielder, you got your glove
and you're standing there and you're looking to see the
pitcher throw the ball. And as soon as the batter
hits the ball, you have one second to look at
the asteroid, to look at the baseball, and then you
have to close your eyes and then now catch it,

(33:20):
you know, six ten seconds later, well you can't. You
only got a glimpse of where it was headed. You
only have a general, vague idea. But if you keep
your eye on the ball, you can, you know, maneuver
and figure it out and get you really really get
a beat on it and then catch it. It's the
same thing with asteroids, If you observe them for a
day or two, that orbit's very fuzzy. You don't really
know where it's going. But you observe them over and

(33:41):
over and over again, you refine that orbit more and
more accurately. And that would be great if the Moon
didn't exist, if Jupiter didn't exist. But the planets and everything,
they're pulling on these things. So even when you know
the orbit, you've got to keep observing all of them
to be able to predict them in the future.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
That was going to be my question, like, isn't the
system fundamentally k Like you get a little bit small
mistake here is going to lead to a large mistake
down the road. Is that what limits our predictions to
like one hundred years fifty years instead of like a
million years.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
Well, what you call chaotic I call job security. Yeah,
I mean, you're absolutely right. We could observe an asteroid tonight,
observe it for the next ten years, nail down its orbit,
wait ten years, and then it's like, oh, it's not
where we thought it was going to be. It's like, oh, yeah,
it's in an orbit that brings it near Jupiter and
the gravity of that beast yanked it into a new orbit.
So that's why you've got to keep observing these things.

(34:31):
And the amount of time you need an advance depends
on a lot of stuff, including how big it is.
If it's a big monster, you might need a thirty
or forty years after you move it for it to
move into a safe orbit, or you might just need
that much advance warning because look, you know, just hitting
it with a single spacecraft's not going to do it.
We might have to hit it repeatedly. We might have

(34:54):
to detonate a nuke near it. It's not armageddon. You
don't dig a hole into an asteroid and blow it up.
That turns you one problem into millions of slightly smaller problems.
It's not a great solution. But if you blow up
a nuke next to it, it'll vaporize the surface material,
which then expands very rapidly and acts like a rocket
and pushes on the asteroid. The only problem is blowing

(35:14):
up a nuke in space is literally illegal. It's against
international law. So we'll have to figure it out. You know,
if we're going to save the Earth, maybe maybe people
will be able to suspend that law. But even then,
It's like, there are a lot of things you have
to do to have this sort of infrastructure in place,
and we don't. So if we saw something heading our
way that's going to hit us and say less than

(35:34):
ten years, there may not be much we can do
about it.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
If you think about governments trying to coordinate on a
ten year timescale, I think you should just like figure
out where you're going to bury yourself and call it
a day. There's no way it's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Oh, and it's more complicated than that, even because imagine
now just to pick two governments. Let's say China in
the US, and China builds the navigation system, and we
have the rockets, and so we launched this and it
hits the rock but not dead center. It hits it
like just off center. And it turns out the path
gets changed just so much that instead of hitting China,

(36:07):
it hits the US.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
Oh accidentally.

Speaker 4 (36:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, there's a lot of issues here that have to
be ironed out.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah. Geopolitically, everything gets complicated when it has to do
with space.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah, Well, I'm going to try to combat this East
Coast negativity with a little California sunshine I mean, aren't
there other things that we can do other than just
like hitting it with a rock or nuking it. I
read about some folks in Santa Barbara working on lasers
to like oblate one side of these things to make
it more reflective, or also to release some gas. Do
you think those things are realistic at all?

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Kind of these things have never been tested. But one
thing is too. Yeah. You launch a satellite, maybe something
that has enormous solar panels, so it gets a lot
of electricity, and that can power a powerful laser, and
you aim it at the asteroid and vaporize the surface,
and that takes the place of the nuke, you know,
instead of a gigantic explosion. Now you're more gently vaporizing

(37:03):
the surface and very slowly pushing on the rock. That way,
that should work, but it would take a lot of time,
and we don't really have that technology yet. People are
working on it, but I don't know if we have it.
A simpler one is to simply paint one half of
the asteroid white, and sunlight has a pressure. It's quantum mechanics.

(37:25):
It's very complicated, but sunlight hitting an asteroid actually does
apply a very gentle force, and asteroid spin usually slowly,
but not always so. If you paint it one half
of it white or in stripes like an orange peel,
every other orange peel is black and one's white. On
the asteroid as it spins, you wind up getting this

(37:46):
force that is applied on the asteroid that can push
it into a new orbit. But that is incredibly slow.
If we have one hundred years warning, something like that
might work. Otherwise, Yeah, we're kind of have to resort
to these more violent things. The other one, which I
quite like is quite elegant, is a gravity tractor or
a gravity tug, where you have a spacecraft that's massive

(38:07):
and you kind of park it next to the asteroid
and very very low thrust engines then move the spaceship
and the gravity of the spaceship pulls on the asteroid,
and the math of this works. If you just let
the spaceship sit there, the asteroid in the spaceship will
gravitationally attract each other and they'll crash into each other slowly.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Chaos for the wind, right, this is using chaos in
our favor kind of.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, I mean, in this case, you're just very slowly,
very gently just caressing the asteroid, just nudging it using
the force of gravity, which is very weak. And again
that's quite slow, but if you have a few years,
that would work, and that technology exists. We do have
spacecraft with very low thrust engines, so that is something
the B six twelve Foundation, which is a wonderful group

(38:54):
of scientists and engineers, are investigating using an ion drive,
a low thrust drive to tug an asteroid of the way.
Super cool.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
So I promised at the intro before you were on
here that we were going to talk about threats that
we could do something about. And I'm wondering if maybe
I didn't completely deliver on that promise, because these are
things that we could maybe do something. How optimistic are
you if there was something coming towards us that we
could solve the problems or does it completely depend on
what it is and how big it is and how

(39:22):
fast it is.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
Well, it's kind of like getting rid of fossil fuels
and replacing it with solar power. Right fifty years ago,
that would have been a joke because solar panels were
very expensive and there weren't that many. But over time
the price has dropped and so now the growth is
becoming almost exponential, and there's a kind of a crossover
curve between the use of solar panels going up and
the use of fossil fuels going down, And so it's
similar to that, right. Our technology is getting better. We're

(39:46):
getting better at finding these things, we're getting better at
thinking about how to get rid of them. Our technology
for building rockets is better, and it's a matter of time.
We're kind of throwing the dice here, I would say,
and this is just a sea of the pants estimate.
Don't you know, put any money on this or anything.
But I would say that if we do not get
hit by a large asteroid in the next one hundred years,

(40:08):
I think we will probably have the technology in place
to prevent any large impact forever. What does that mean,
you know, is chel Ya being's large one? Well, if
it were made of metal, it would have been bad.
And so those happen every ten to twenty five years,
every fifty years. So we might get a couple of
big ones between now and then, But I'm not talking
about those because those really are kind of small. I'm

(40:29):
talking about ones one hundred meters across or bigger. Right now,
it's not, but eventually our technology will be good enough
that those will no longer be a threat.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
So I'm feeling pretty good about my grandkids.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
Then sure, it means we're also sort of in the
most terrifying period of history, right because like, until now,
we didn't really understand how dangerous the cosmos was and
that it could at any moment rain down death upon
us and in one hundred years will be protected from that.
But there's like this window between understanding the danger and
being able to do anything about it that we realize,

(40:58):
Oh my gosh, we're basically naked in the face of
death from space.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, it's a death from the sky season we're living
in the middle of right now. Yeah, you know, it
wasn't that long ago where this threat wasn't taken seriously,
even in my lifetime. But then with the Dinosaur Killer,
when that in the eighties was starting to be understood
that that was caused by an asteroid impact, yeah, people
started taking it more seriously.

Speaker 3 (41:21):
And then after Comet Shoemaker Levy, I think people were
also like, wow, that stuff actually can happen like in
our lifetimes.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
That's right. That was a big comet that broke apart
and hit Jupiter. They broke apart into like dozens of
pieces and hit it over and over again, and the
mushroom cloud from the explosions could be seen from Earth.
I saw the black scars. I mean, Jupiter doesn't have
a surface, but that material from the explosion settled down
on the tops of clouds and was visible for weeks

(41:49):
and months, and I saw it through a small telescope.
It was pretty terrifying.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
On that note, try not to get too scared. We're
going to take a break and we'll be right back
with something else to worry about.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
All right, We're back, and we are trying to keep
an optimistic point of view about the future of humanity.
I've had kids, I know Kelly's had kids, and so
we're voting with our game meates that humanity will survive
and it will be worth being alive on Earth for
many years to come. Let's hope that science doesn't prove
that wrong. We're here talking to Phil Plait about the

(42:36):
dangers from space, and we've talked about the dangers that meteoroids, meteorites,
meteorites and meteor everythings can do to us. Now let's
talk about something much brighter.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Oh, Wow, that's a good segue. Now let's talk about
the Sun. Okay. First of all, don't look at the Sun.
Just it's amazing that I have to say this sometimes,
but that big, giant, glowing thing in the sky, don't
look at it. It's going to hurt you. It gives
off light that is so intense it can actually damage
your retina. And so the Sun is the source of

(43:09):
all warmth and light on the Earth. But it's also
dangerous just in that sort of trivial way, and it
turns out it's dangerous in a lot of other ways.
It's fundamentally a star, and stars have a lot of power.
The amount of energy the Sun generates in its core
and I believe if I get this number right, it
is a one hundred billion one megaton nuclear bombs every second.

(43:32):
One hundred billion one megaton bombs every second. Yes, it's
a lot of energy, and you don't want to get
too close to it. And the Sun is immense, It
is very, very big. It is eight hundred and sixty
thousand miles across one point four million kilometers and that
is a lot of room for a lot of danger.
And the problem here is in the form of magnetism. Magnets.

(43:54):
You think magnets. You have a horseshoe magnet in school,
and you put it under a piece of paper and
you shake iron filings on it, and you get those
really cool patterns. And it turns out magnets are super
dangerous when they're a million miles across the sun generates
a magnetic field that's very powerful inside it's basically under
its surface. It's extremely complicated. There are two reasons is complicated.

(44:15):
One is it Magnetism is unbelievably complicated. Daniel Jackson, did
you have to do? Jackson?

Speaker 3 (44:24):
I have nightmares of cross products and integrals. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah. I can see your eyelid twitching. Oh my god.
This is a grad school level electromagnetism book that I
got my PhD. Thirty years ago, and I still get
sweat on my brow when I think about it. Was
the hardest course.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
My qualifying exam was given to me by JD. Jackson,
and he asked my questions about rotating spheres of charge
and I just about melted into a magnetic puddle.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Oh. I would again walk into a lava lake rather
than do that. The equations that govern magnetism are unbelievably complex,
and and you start with very simple concepts and it
immediately jumps into ridiculous amounts of calculus and super advanced calculus.
So that's one reason. The other thing is that the

(45:10):
Sun is a giant ball of ionized gas. It's very hot,
the electrons are stripped off the atoms inside of it,
and that by itself is very complex. The motions inside
the Sun, it's hot in the center, cooler the surface.
Hot material rises, the cooler sinks, and that's hydrodynamics, which
is another extremely complicated field of physics. So if you

(45:32):
mix these two, it's nuts. It's really hard. So simplifying
because you gotta the Sun makes these magnetic fields inside
of this material. It's rising and falling it gets to
the surface, and you can think of it as like
a magnet with all these like magnetic field lines coming
out of it, like those drawings you see of like
the doughnut shaped lines around the Earth, and you get

(45:53):
thousands or tens of thousands, maybe millions of them inside
the Sun, all like that, and they're rising and falling
all the time, and when they get to the surface
they prevent they basically the magnetic field lines from one
spot versus the next, this other tower over there rising
and falling. Those magnetic field lines can connect and interfere
with each other and they trap the gas in them,

(46:14):
and then the gas can't fall back down into the sun.
So you've got this cooling material sitting on the surface
of the sun. Cooler material not as hot, doesn't emit
as much light, so you get a dark spot on
the sun, a sun spot. So a sunspot is a
magnetic phenomenon. But sometimes those magnetic field lines get really
tangled up and they have a huge amount of energy

(46:34):
involved in them. Whenever we talk about magnetism, everything is
an analogy, and I hate that because it's not always accurate,
but it's not a bad way to think of it.
So imagine you take something like a really really really
strong spring and it's really really hard to bend, and
yet you bend it, and you bend it as tightly
as you can, so it's now forming a loop. And
then somebody takes a blowtorch and blows off the top

(46:54):
of it. What happens, Well, I think's going to snap,
and it's gonna snap so hard it could kill you.
It's gonna really a lot of energy. And it's the
same thing with these magnetic field lines. They have a
huge amount of energy stored in them. They tangle up,
they can snap and release that energy, and when they do,
you can get a solar flare and that can release
millions of megatons a billion megatons of energy all at once,

(47:17):
Gamma rays, X rays, all this high energy radiation, subatomic
particles moving it just under the speed of light. These
go flying out into space. They can come to Earth.
We have enough time, We got like four more hours, right,
So this is what we call space weather. This material
comes scream into Earth, interacts with our magnetic field. These
particles then get funneled into our atmosphere where they hit

(47:40):
the molecules and atoms in our air, blow off their electrons,
and when those electrons recombined, the atoms glow and we
get an aurora. So that's where the aurora comes from.
It comes from this stuff from the Sun, which is
great until you get a really powerful storm and then
you start getting interactions between the magnetic field of this
material coming from the Sun the Earth's magnetic field. It

(48:02):
generates currents, electric currents in the Earth itself. This can
overload power grids take down high transmission lines, and this
happened in Canada and Quebec in nineteen eighty nine. A
powerful solar storm connected with the Earth created a huge
current under the granite in Canada and North America and
the United States, and there was so much that it

(48:22):
overloaded power lines. In Quebec had a blackout that lasted
for several days. Because once you blow a transformer, you're screwed.
It takes a long time to repair those things. A
really big storm from the Sun could cause widespread blackouts
over Most of North America were more susceptible to it
because of geology, but there's no place on the planet
that's really safe. Now. The Sun doesn't do this very often.

(48:43):
We see in the historical record that, yeah, there have
been some big storms from the Sun that could do this,
but they happen every few centuries or something like that,
maybe every few thousand years. But eighteen fifty nine was
the first one ever seen, and because we had the
tech chnology at that point to detect it. Then in
twenty twelve, another one that was that powerful also erupted

(49:06):
off the Sun, but it missed us. So you know,
take those two as an average, it's one hundred and
sixty years something like that between them. That's not long
enough for me, because if those things hit us huge
power outages, they can blow out satellites and basically erase
our technological civilization.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
You describe these things as solar storms, which makes me
think of storms on Earth, which are notoriously hard to predict,
even like a week out. Is the same physics making
it difficult to predict solar storms. You know, are we
struggling to understand what's going on inside the sun which
limits our ability to predict how often these things bubble
up and create these crazy conditions on the surface.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
That's right, and it's a good analogy. If you live
in the Midwest and they say there's a tornado warning,
I can never keep these right. I think a warning
is when conditions are good for tornado formation, and a
tornado watch is when one is seen. I may have
that backwards, Kelly is saying I have that backwards, so okay,
but either way, I mean, you can use radar and
look at the clouds and say, well, conditions are good,

(50:04):
and then somebody sees one and it's like, okay, this
is trouble. It's the same sort of thing with the Sun.
The way we can see the magnetism in the sun.
There are several different ways to see it, but one
obvious one is just looking at sunspots. And a lot
of these sunspots are very magnetically active, and you observe
them with special kinds of telescopes which can measure the
kind of magnetic activity they have because they are different

(50:26):
kinds and some kinds are more prone to storming than others.
We have one on the Sun facing us right now
as we record this that I was looking at and
I'm like, hmmm, it's not a powerful sun spot, but
it's pretty active and it's doing stuff on the Sun's surface.
There's all kinds of activity going on around the sun spot.

(50:46):
It may not flare. It just hard to really say.
But then we have astronomical satellites in space that observe
the Sun, telescopes on the ground that observe the Sun,
and when a flare goes off, we get a warning,
and if it's a big one, we have a few hours,
which is usually all you need. The military can shut
down satellites. The electrical grids can divert electricity from one

(51:08):
place to another, The real problem here for power is
that we built our grid in the fifties and the
population of the United States was like under one hundred
million people something like that. Now we have three times
as many people the grid. These power lines, which were
never used at capacity until recently, I have full flow
through them, and if you add more electricity to them,

(51:28):
they heat up, they can melt, they can snap, and
so that's the problem. You have to redirect electricity so
that areas with a lot of traffic will get their
electricity from different places. Still, it's kind of half assed,
and it would be better if our grid had more substations,
more lines, more insulators. Even better would be if we
get our power locally, like solar panels on your house.

(51:50):
Then you don't really have to worry about stuff like
this as much because your power won't get interrupted, because
if the grid goes down, it's like I got power,
I'm good.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
And so the reason things were so bad in Canada
in the eighties was because they didn't turn off the
power because they didn't know what was coming, because we
didn't have detection.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
That was part of it, but also it's the geology
of the area. There are places where it's easier to
create a flow. It's called a geomagnetic induced current or GIC.
And there's some places on Earth where you get bigger
currents than others, and the North American Plate basically is
a really really happy place to make electricity bad for us.

(52:26):
But if you get a really big solar storm, it
affects us more than other places, so that's bad. So
it's a confluence of events there. You know, we can't
prevent the sun from doing anything. It's the sun. One
hundred earths can fit across the width of a sun.
You could fill it with a million earths. It is
an immense object. So we're not telling it what to do.

(52:46):
All we can do is change how we defend ourselves
from them. And so if we gird the grid, which
is a great bumper sticker idea, if we put money
into infrastructure, we can prevent a lot of the problems
for happening if we go to more local sources of electricity,
and that could be you know, cities even using solar power,

(53:07):
or houses using solar power. The more local you are,
the better. Battery storage is a good thing too, because
then if the grid goes down, you still have power
for a while. So we can't prevent the Sun from
doing it. All we can do is prevent ourselves from
suffering the worst of it, and that's something we absolutely
can do. We just have to make up our minds
and open up our wallets.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
Well, I'm glad we're managing to end on a high note.
So I partially delivered on that promise.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Oh, let's talk about nearby supermomen Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Wait, the final high note we're going to talk about
is your incredible recent book Under Alien Skies, which the
asteroid chapter I totally laughed at and enjoyed the scenario.
The chapter on Saturn was absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
Yeah, tell us all about Under Aliens? Guys, what's the
premise and where can folks get it? So?

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Under Alien Skies was an idea I got a long
time ago. I wrote an article for Astronomy magazine in
the nineteen nineties. Kids ask your parents about the nineties,
And the idea was because I would take my telescope
out to public places and show people things. And a
question I got a lot was, you know, if I
look at a picture from Hubble, which was up even then,

(54:14):
you know, would it look like that if I were there.
When I looked through a telescope and I were looking
at Saturn, what would it look like if I were there?
And it turns out that that's an interesting question because
some things you look at a picture of the Moon,
you know you see is what you get. But when
you look at a picture of a galaxy or a
gas cloud or a nebula, they're very different if you
were up closer, even inside them, versus what you would

(54:36):
look at from outside them. And so that was sort
of the idea. Then I realized, if I want to
write a book, I really have to talk about what
it's like to actually be there, And so I wrote
a chapter on the Moon, and it's all about you
are now on the Moon. What do you experience? You know,
there's no air, the sun is up for two weeks
at a time and sets for two weeks at a time.

(54:58):
What does the Earth look like? What does the landscape
around you look like? What's low gravity like? And so
I had a chapter on the Moon and Mars. A
late comer to that idea was writing about asteroids and comets,
because as we learn more about them, it turns out
it's not at all what you expect it's not at
all like the movies Armageddon a Deep Impact if you've
seen those. These are very very fragile objects. And if

(55:19):
you approached an asteroid and tried to land on it,
it's a good chance you'd fall straight through the surface.
It would be like jumping into a ball pit. And
that cracked me up. I was not expecting that to
be true until we sent a probe to an asteroid
to actually grab a sample and come back, and when
that probe touched down, it started sinking into the surface.
And so each chapter of this book starts with a

(55:40):
little science fiction y like short story of somebody or
you being at this place and experiencing it, And that
chapter opens with an astronaut who is I'm going to
land on this asteroid and basically sinks into it and
has to be rescued by their partner.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
That cracked me up. I was like, Ah, that would
be me. I would make that mistake.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Oh yeah, me too. It's fun to write about us
because it's not just you know, I'd then Saturn and Pluto,
and then what's it like to orbit red Dwarf Star,
a very small, cool red Dwarf Star, a binary system
like star Wars, Tattooine is a binary star, and it
turns out there's all kinds of things going on with
that that you don't expect, And then I didn't expect.

(56:19):
I do a lot of math for this book, a lot.
It's not in the book. It's all hidden, it's all
hidden in my descriptions. But I had to like think
back to some stuff I did in grad school and
work out some a couple of equations from first principles.
That was exciting, something I haven't done in thirty years.
I used the equation from grad school that I still
remembered and then did it and it's like, well, that
number's not right. So then I had to go, well,

(56:41):
how did we get this equation? So I had to
redrive it. It took a couple of days. Then I
just wound up writing about how that works. So it
was fun, you know, getting near a black hole, watching
stars form, being in the side of a star cluster.
It was fun because of the science, but it was
more fun because of my imagination. You know. I'd lie
in bed at night going to sleep and think, oh,

(57:01):
so I'm floating over this thing, you know, and just
what would I see? Just not think about it, just
kind of experience it in my head and you know,
I'm turning and what would happen if this happened? And
that became so much fun. And then I've got to
put all of that in the book and describe it
and tell the truth about this stuff versus the misconceptions
that a lot of us have. So it was hugely
fun to write.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
I think the fun that you were having really came through.
It read like something that had been fun to write,
and so it was fun to read.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Well thank you.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
Yeah, all right, So if somebody wants to, first of all,
they can buy your book anywhere and you read the audiobook.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
Yeah. I narrated under Alien Skies, which was fun. It's
the first time I've ever done that. I tried to
do that for my last book, but they were like, no,
we're going to get a pro. But now I've done
Crash Course Astronomy and a bunch of TV shows and stuff,
and I was like, come on, I got this and
said I auditioned and they were like, oh, yeah, sure,
go ahead. So I did it and it was tremendous.
It was really great because the story has a lot
of personal anecdotes in it, so that was a lot

(57:56):
of fun to do.

Speaker 1 (57:56):
Awesome And so if folks want to find other you
mentioned Crash Course Astronomy, which you did. You do all
kinds of awesome stuff. So if anybody wants to keep
in touch with the various things that you do, how
would they do that?

Speaker 2 (58:07):
Let's see under Alienskies dot Com is where you can
get the book. My other books are on Amazon, Death
from the Skies and Bad Astronomy. Also two to the
seventh Nerd Disses, a book I wrote with Zach Winersmith,
a series of nerd insults, one hundred and twenty eight
of them less and these are all available where you
get books. Crash Course Astronomy is a forty six part

(58:27):
crash course. Like John and Hank Green, I did that
for them on Astronomy. That's on YouTube and you can
find me. Just type Phil Plate into whatever search engine
you like these days and you'll find me. I'm on
Blue Sky and Instagram and the fetiverse and all the
usual places.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
All right, on that note, thanks so much for coming
Phil and chatting with us about the various ways that
we might all die in the near term and what
we can maybe sort of do about it or our
grandkids can do about it. It's been a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
Just too There's so many more. Oh my gosh, that's right.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Yes, check out Death from the Skies if you want
to really not be able to sleep at night.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Thanks very much, Phil, Thank you, Kelly, Thanks Daniel.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We
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