Fire in the Sky: Tunguska

What triggered the massive explosion over Tunguska in 1908? Join Matt, Ben, and special guest Joe McCormick as they take a closer look at one of the most mysterious catastrophes in history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
From UFOs two ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to now. Suddenly
the north sky, the sky was split into and high
above the forest, the whole northern part of the sky

(00:21):
appeared covered with fire. At that moment, there was a
bang in the sky and a mighty crash. The crash
was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky,
or of guns firing. The earth trembled. And that was
a quotation that comes to us via a researcher named

(00:42):
Leonid Kulik, who heard this account at the Nara Trading
Post in Russia. The account was read by our special
guest on the show today, uh the one the only
Mr Joe McCormick, who may recognize from forward thinking. Hello Joe, Hi, everybody.
It's an honor to be on the show of ill

(01:02):
repute such as this. Why thank you. My name is
Matt and I'm then and that makes this stuff they
don't want you to know. And today we are discussing
something extremely cool, something explosive and fiery and dangerous and deadly.
Well fortunately, as far as we know, not deadly for

(01:24):
any humans. Yes, but there were probably several animals injured
in the making of this event, so I'd say no
doubt about that. Yeah, so today we're gonna be talking
about the Tunguska event. While back, Mr Ben Boland came
up to me and he asked if I'd like to
be a guest host on stuff they don't want you
to know, and I said, only if we can talk
about the Tunguska event. That was one of many of

(01:47):
the conditions that came attached to this appearance and a
lot of paperwork. Yeah, we're glad we could make it
all happen. But this is such a fascinating topic because
we know we know the facts, and for decades afterwards
people were not sure what actually happened. But as we

(02:10):
go through the episode today, Matt, Joe and I are
going to illuminate the events a little bit by talking
about what we know in the beginning, the various theories
that were proposed, and what we believe nowadays actually happens.
So this is not one of those podcasts where you'll

(02:31):
walk away with way more questions than the answers. We
have the answer, ladies and gentlemen. Uh we have the answer,
and as Uh the Mad Hatter said to Alice, will
start at the beginning and go through the middle, and
then we'll stop at the end. Sound good, that's great.
So let's start at what exactly was the Tunguska event. Well,

(02:51):
we should start by saying what tongusca is. Okay, that's
not a word that pops up every day. Well maybe
if you're one of us, but not for most people. Okay,
So the Tungusca or the Podkamanya Tunguska, if I'm saying
that correctly, um is a region in Russia. It's actually
a region in Siberia. I believe in Siberia proper. So

(03:14):
a lot of people will say basically anything east of
the Ural Mountains is Siberia, not all Siberia. There's actually
a part of Russia that is officially Siberia, and this
includes the Tunguska region. Right spot on the pad Kaminaya,
which I am probably mispronouncing. Uh is also a river
that flows westward about nine hundred seventy six miles or

(03:37):
for everyone outside of the United States and maybe two
other countries uh undred and seventy one kilometers to a
place called the yenniseev River. Um. The name of this
river uh means Tunguska under the pebbles. There are a
couple of different Tunguscas and their tributaries of the yennizev

(03:58):
Um and it's called under the pebbles, interestingly enough, because
it flows under these pebble fields. So it's not an
open river for the entirety of its run. Yeah. And
so in this region you have some you have a
lot of forests. You also have pete bogs and swamps,
and so there's a lot of great wilderness out there.

(04:19):
Fortunately not that much civilization. Yeah, that is fortunate. It
is not exactly New York City, um as as you
may have heard about Siberia. It's a pretty isolated place, right, Matt. Yeah,
it's a difficult place for humans to live. There are
a lot the only humans that really live out there
are these uh semi nomatic herders and trappers that survive

(04:43):
off the land, and they're few and far between there.
What are they called the even key Uh. Guess we
should also do a disclaimer that uh of none of
the three of us, to our knowledge are Russian and Nol.
I don't believe you're Okay, Noel is also uh not
a native Russian speaker. Uh. But what we do know,

(05:07):
aside from mispronouncing a few things here and there, we
do know that in this isolated part of the world,
something very strange happened a little after seven am on
June in you heard the quotation, right, a massive explosion

(05:27):
the way a lot of people at the time seemed
to have described it. And and as far as we know,
there was nobody at ground zero of this. There were
there were people who were quite far away, but it
still felt the effects imminently. Uh. So people described it
as seeing a vast light in the sky, burning particles,
a sky full of fire, a second son, uh, these

(05:49):
terrifying apocalyptic visions, and then feeling things like searing heat
coming from the air, and then uh shock wave of
blasts as if the described like cannon fire. And we
also know that people from as far as forty miles
away reported some stuff about this blast. So there's no

(06:12):
argument here something definitely happened. It wasn't just a bunch
of nobody's denying that, like no, no, no, nothing to
see here, right, because it even burned people within thirteen
miles of where it happened, and there are animals that
were burned, so there are obvious effects that you could
feel and see. Yeah, there's some real into the world

(06:32):
stuff there. But as we know, as we said at
the top, uh, years past, and people weren't sure what occurred.
And in the absence of that, uh, no one was
able to say what happened. So people started saying what
they thought happened or believed had occurred. Yeah. Sure, something

(06:55):
huge happens like this, and you know, you go to
what you know or what you believe. That's kind of
what humans do something if you don't understand it, it's
just you go to your innermost beliefs. Sure. I mean,
if something like this were to have happened, say, uh,
fifty years later, you can bet I think that u

(07:15):
apology would immediately come into play. I'd say that wasn't
such a big thing back in nineteen o eight. I mean,
there were vague kind of ideas of other worldly visitations,
but they didn't have the science fiction vision of flying
saucers with energy weapons like we do today. Yeah, or
perhaps a nuclear strike something that something looks like a

(07:37):
second son burning in the air. Yeah, one might say
that again today but back then, I mean, they had
no reference point for that. They didn't have nuclear weapons actually,
right that we know of a right. So that's a
really interesting point though. So if we talk about some
of the things that people did believe, we will see
that some of these ideas came into play um decades

(08:01):
after the fact, and one of those being the idea
of extraterrestrials. So you'll you'll see claims that some sort
of extraterrestrial force either accidentally or purposely triggered this explosion um,
or that evidence of this craft or this weapon or whatever. Oh,
that's the most important part, that it was something made
by an intelligence, that it was not just from space

(08:25):
but purposely crafted and then sent here um. And then
you can also see that when people started speculating that
perhaps this was Tesla technology. Right. Yeah, so I've seen
this claim just uh, pretty low profile, it seems to me,
but around the web in various places people speculating, well,
I wonder if the Tunguska event, the giant fire in

(08:48):
the sky that was seen there was Nicola Tesla, the
famed somewhat maybe mad inventor testing his so called death ray.
Now Tesla try to disown the term death ray. He
wasn't interested in that, and he tried to distance himself
from it, but he did for many years advertised that
he was trying to create a particle beam that would

(09:12):
be used as a weapon that could end all wars. Basically,
that it would be able to repel from a great
distance any infantry invasion or a airplane attack. That it
would be a devastating weapon that would provide insurmountable defense
to every country that possessed it, right, which I think
is an interesting argument for deterrence. Right, and we see

(09:34):
it happening now. The logic of having a nuclear arsenal
is similar to the logic yeah with this particle. Really,
what he's talking about Tesla is just musually a shured destruction. Well,
it could be interpreted that way. Actually did a podcast
with Jonathan Strickland on Tech Stuff about this. I'm not
usually host of tech stuff, but I guess it with

(09:56):
him about technologies that were believed at some point might
end all wars, world peace tech. It turns out none
of those have ever worked. But so one way of
looking at weapons to end wars is this idea of
mutually assured destruction. Everybody has weapons so powerful that it's
in nobody's interest to start a war because the retaliation

(10:19):
would be devastating to you. The other idea is a
prohibitive defensive weapon, and I sometimes get the impression that's
what Tesla is thinking about. He's thinking about, Well, it's
not necessarily so much that it would be a devastating
retaliatory attack, but just that you could repel anything coming
into your border. It would be almost kind of like

(10:41):
a Tesla kind of steampunk version of the iron Dome
system that Israel employees uh supposedly to shoot down incoming rockets.
Not uh, not entirely effective, of course. But then also
if we to get global, it could be compared to
the Star Wars program if the program works. Um spoiler

(11:02):
alerts left and right, everybody. But we do know that
Tesla was involved in some innovative tech and also in
these uh in these experiments that have given rise to
so much speculation, one of course being warden Cliff Tower
and h Wardencliffe Tower. If we look at the timeline here, uh,

(11:23):
the Tonguska uh event occurred in nineteen o eight. Wardencliffe
Tower was shut down in nineteen o five it wasn't
dismantled until nineteen seventeen. So, Um, the timelines here don't
seem to work out. But of course, um, if he's
talking about the particle beam instead, then we don't really know,

(11:47):
but we we have more compelling evidence that says he
didn't have anything to do with it. Yeah, I am
not even convinced it's likely that Tesla ever really had
a particle beam. Look, I'm just gonna say if he
did have a particle beam, and I don't know if
he did, that would be the perfect place to test it. Well,

(12:09):
in the middle of nowhere, right, If you assume that
he was a relatively humane guy, he'd want to be
it would be like the nuclear tests in the desert.
You'd want to do them somewhere where nobody was living. Yeah,
and that's that's a really good point, because what if
there were some sort of group that had technology. Uh
here on my notes, I had streets of streets ahead

(12:30):
because I was watching Community earlier, and I used that
phrase at nauseum. But I don't know what that means.
It's oh man, I'll tell you later, Okay. It's just
a lame way of trying to say something's cool. Uh.
So this idea that there would be some sort of
suppressed technology that was being tested not necessarily tied to TESLA.

(12:50):
That's that's another popular idea. UM. Again, it's an idea that,
as far as we know, does not have any tangible
proof at this time. Uh. And then, of course, if
we want to get weird with it, there is the
idea of an extremely small black hole. I haven't read
a lot about this, but from what I have looked
at it doesn't seem very likely. The idea is basically

(13:13):
that a black hole shot through the Earth. So we
had a wandering, tiny black hole that was just I
don't know, floating through space, and at some point it
entered Earth's atmosphere, smashed through Earth, and exited out the
other side, I believe I it seems fairly ridiculous on

(13:34):
its face, seems like there will be more destruction. Is
something like that where to happen? I don't know well,
and I think the idea is that there would be
more evidence of it like what we'd see. It would
have had more effects at both ends of the Earth,
would have an exit wound. Honestly, we have no idea
what would happen, right, Yeah, if a black hole interact,

(13:56):
I mean sure, yeah, I'm somebody could probably run some
kind of simulation of it, but as long as they
don't do it for real. I think also the idea
of these wandering black holes all around the Earth, that
that that's basically sci fi. We have no reason to
think there's anything like that near the Earth or in
the Solar System. Yeah. I just don't go near the
center of the galaxy, that's all, because the question would
be how could it um? In nineteen eight maybe not,

(14:19):
but in two thousand and fourteen there would be ways
to find evidence of those things if they existed this
close to us. Um. There's another idea here that, as
uh an armchair folkloreist, I found fascinating and uh it
is the original local explanation for the Tunguska event that

(14:41):
depends on neither extraterrestrials nor mad science. Yeah, that's right.
We're talking about gods here, everybody. This is exciting. There's
no reason that the only mythology we should take seriously
is technological mythology. Absolutely. I mean, I'd say, let's talk
about the gods on even foot ng with with Tesla

(15:01):
and black holes and aliens. Okay, so what is the idea.
What did the locals, or at least the locals who
believed in this belief happened at the Tungusco event. Oh yeah,
well they they placed the blame of this on a
god named Og, which again I'm probably mispronouncing Od, being
a thunder god whom they believed was summoned. Uh and

(15:24):
in a visitation to the area cursed it. Uh. There's
an interesting uh shamanic chant that comes to us, translated
via Dieger Hoffman, a professor of Siberian ethnography at Hamburg University. Um,
the shaman is vasily zuncool and uh. This has a
bit of m It's kind of an invocation to o.

(15:47):
D Uh. Do you guys want to read it? Are
you ready? Oh? I don't know. Are you ready? Listener?
Because it's about to get epic in here. The God comes,
The God comes. The earth trembles in fear at the
coming of Od. The earth rises and falls beneath my
feet like waves of water. My place of purification is overthrown.

(16:10):
My lodge bulls toppling. The God comes. The God calls out,
blinding bright, his tongue lashes the sky. His roar booms
off the hills. The heavens ring with it. Ogd Is
calling his avatar from the lower world. The earth at
my feet tears open at the touch of his fiery tongue.
The god calls out, heating the gods call, the Avatar

(16:34):
arises night Walker, spawn of Darkness, beast of evil Heart
from the lower world. He arises, insatiable, all devouring as
wild dogs, tearing it entrails of their kiln. Heating the
God's call, the Avatar arises. Man, I really like that.

(16:56):
That's that is awesome apocalyptic poetry. Basically, I wish I
really wish we had more of that kind of imagery,
just colorful imagery in our mythology. I got nothing like
that here. I mean, there's some pretty there, there's some
pretty heavily and I guess the right world would be
epic or metal. There's some pretty metal parts of most religions.

(17:17):
Oh yeah, I'm just what I would say, is that
believing stuff like oh it was Aliens or oh Tesla
was testing his death ray has no poetry like that. Yeah,
So you know that's a that's a good point. Um.
And also I like the idea that what we're looking
at when we see these three different explanations is a

(17:39):
various groups of people are attempting to explain an inexplicable
event through the lens of the way they see the
world right through a framework. It also helped the place
the enormous loss of life and property in perspective. So
they thought some shaman and foolishly uh called on oak

(17:59):
d and that was the root of the problem. Now,
they didn't really talk about this for a while though, Um,
we didn't really have an investigation, certainly not nineteen o eight, right, No,
But years later we finally did. Yes, And we will
get to that in just a moment, I promise, But
first let's look at something slightly different. We are sponsored

(18:22):
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(19:27):
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in Russia like the Tunguska event, and people still aren't
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(19:47):
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All right, so let's get back to the show now. Okay,
So I guess it's time to talk about what really

(20:08):
happened in nineteen oh a. What was the Tonguska event?
We know it was an explosion, fire, heat, thunder, shock
waves from the sky. What was it in reality? Okay,
So it seems like the first scientific expedition to the
area happened in nine when Leoni Coolik hit the scene
and he was looking for a crater, because the basic

(20:31):
idea in mainstream science was this was a meteor. It
was it was a rock from space that descended, descended
into the atmosphere and hit the ground somewhere and blew up.
So massive impact event. Uh, and there might have been
then there. They're definitely still to some degree is today
debate about what the nature of this object from space

(20:54):
was it Was it an asteroid, a largely rocky body,
or was it a comet like a ball of ice
and dust. But the main ideas something from space came
into the atmosphere blew up, so he wanted to go
find where it hit. And it turns out when he
actually did get to find it, because I believe there
were multiple expeditions before he actually found it. Uh So

(21:18):
once he got to the area, it was not hard
to find ground zero because there were about more than
eight hundreds square miles, about two thousands square kilometers of
trees that were affected by this explosion, basically in a
bull's eye shape. So when you entered the area from
the outer circle, the forest turned into a landscape of

(21:41):
flattened trees, trees knocked flat against the ground, all outward
in the same direction, going out from the middle. Obviously,
it would be pretty easy to know what direction you
need to go. It would be amazing. I just want
to say, to walk through that. Yeah, so cool. Yeah,
And so it followed eight hundred square miles I mean yeah,

(22:05):
and as as you said, that's that's the rough estimates.
It's more than that. Yeah, I think it was more.
It was like eight hundred and twenty or eight hundred miles.
But so they proceeded inward and found towards the center
of the bulls eye scorched tree trunk standing straight up
with no branches, just stripped branches gone like charred telephone polls.

(22:29):
I mean, what on Earth? But how interesting that they
weren't knocked over the way the ones on the outside, yes, right,
But the branches are one of the biggest pieces of
evidence too, because that only occurred, um. That wouldn't occur
again that we have documentation of until Hiroshima um when. Yeah,
because of the the speed and the pressure knocked the

(22:54):
branches off before it could translate that to the trunk.
So it's like getting hit so hard that your arms
fall off before you feel it in your chest. Yeah.
So if you think about this though, what it suggests
is not an impact on the ground but an explosion

(23:18):
from above. And here's where we get to what has
become the accepted theory of the Tunguska event UH in
the years since, scientists today are pretty much all in
agreement that what happened there Something entered the atmosphere from
space and it blew up before it hit the ground.
May it just heated to the point that it completely

(23:40):
exploded and then the downward shock wave stripped and scorched
the trees below it. As the shock waves spread out,
it was it would turn horizontal in its direction and
knocked down the trees for those hundreds of miles. And
the questions that this leaves us with or things like
what would have happened if it had actually hit the ground. UH.

(24:03):
NASA has some pretty interesting information on this and and
the current theory is that this was this rock was
about a hundred and twenty feet across, and that it
was traveling at a speed in excess of thirty three
thousand miles prour about thirty three point five thousand and
UH that that it weighed two hundred and twenty million pounds.

(24:28):
Now these are all estimates, of course, based on UH,
based on the best forensic data they can pull. But
UH still, even if it that is just in the
area of the correct numbers, that that is frightening. The
craziest number was the next one, the idea that it
heated the surrounding air to forty four thousand, five hundred

(24:51):
degrees fahrenheit. That's that's yeah, well, I mean it's it's
very common for things entering the atmosphere to burn up
upon entry. You've heard about this before, and UH it's
often believed that the reason is friction, right, But that's
actually I've recently found out that's not true. That it's

(25:11):
it has to do with compression heating. So it's traveling
so fast against the thick air of our atmosphere that
it's smashing the air in front of it, uh so fast.
The air heats up to these incredible temperatures and the
thing catches on fire and the outside surfaces of it
get melted. And sometimes if it gets hot enough, and

(25:31):
if it's composed in the right way and all the
conditions are just right, it'll just explode. See that's why
when I re enter Earth's atmosphere, I go slow. It's
the long con you know what I mean. Like I
get down here safely, but it takes a month easy.
I really want to see schematics and diagreeins on how
you do that. Ben. Well, you know they say if

(25:53):
they're gonna build a space elevator, one thing that's gonna
be disappointing about it is it's gonna take you at
the very least days to get to space. Yeah, because
you can't go fast up and down this thing. It's
kind of I think that's actually that's technological limitation at
this point, But it seems like you might not want
to go fast up and down. They're probably areas where

(26:14):
you can speed up a little bit, and then you'll
have to slow down again and then speed up again.
I mean, if we're still talking human enterprise, it will
be traffic jams, people's space elevator pods will break down.
It'll be really tough to go fast, to go quickly,
even when you have the technology. But you know, maybe
we shouldn't. It reminds me a little bit of do
you guys remember Dune, How they had the force fields

(26:38):
for fighting and you couldn't the force fields would stop
a blunt trying. You guys are both staring at me.
I'm sorry, I've never read That's all right, somebody out there,
ladies and gentlemen, you guys know what I'm talking about.
But um, going back to the object at hand. Yeah,
so this is fascinating also to me. It NASA believes

(27:01):
that it exploded at at a height of twenty eight
thousand feet, which okay, so I'm just trying to understand
this thing that weighs millions of pounds at least according
to NASA, explodes that high up in the sky and
it's still is able to wreak such massive destruction on
the ground. Yeah, that to me is terrifying, and it

(27:23):
does make you think about nuclear weapons tests and other
times nuclear weapons have been used and exploded in the sky. Yeah. Well, well,
as with many great natural explosions, science communicators often have
to frame it in terms of how many atomic bombs
or how many hydrogen bombs? Uh? They did, I believe
this the same quote you got from NASA did that.

(27:44):
They said basically that the explosion of this object from
space released the energy equivalent to quote A hundred and
eighty five Hiroshima bombs, which just foggles the mind. Uh.
And again that that further reinforces how astonishing it is.
Is a point that you made earlier, Joe, that no

(28:06):
one died as far as we know. As someone might
have that we don't know about, but there's there's no
record that I could find that anyone any person was killed.
I'm sure lots of animals were. So what what then? Uh?
What then do we we arrive at when the in
the ongoing debate over what sort of space rock this is,

(28:27):
Slash was, Well, there are arguments that it was a comet,
and there are arguments that it was an asteroid rocky meteorite,
and there are arguments in both directions. I believe the
favored hypothesis these days is that it was a rocky
rocky meteor and an asteroid type body based on fragments

(28:49):
that have now been found and analyzed by which, of
course we mean rocky as in composed of rock, not
as in the original records that lay or became the
Rocky franchise sent sent to us from space, which I
would be okay with, but you know I'd be surprised. Okay.

(29:10):
So here's my question. I don't want to sound like
a dumb dum over here, but from what I what
I was looking at, there doesn't seem to be any
kind of crater. Right we at the center of the
Bullseye area. There are trees standing up. There's not an
impact crater or anything. No, So I just want to
understand better why why it was. Why the thought is

(29:31):
that it was a rocky crater or a rocky asteroid
from fragment I mean, because that it exploded and burned
with such energy. I believe the thinking is that there
there were no huge fragments left to leave a gigantic crater.
I did read there there's one lake near the area
that some people wonder. I wonder if a very small
fragment of the of the meteor impacted here. Maybe it

(29:56):
was just like a few feet wide, impacting with high
energy and created the greater that's now this lake. But
I don't think that's very well established. It's just kind
of a theory. Lake doesn't hold water all right, Um.
And there are fragments all over the place. Also, you
you could see what happened to this in dust that
you can find all over the place. So I mean

(30:19):
it this mass, A lot of it landed on the
surface of the Earth, but just not not not in
a piece big enough that you can usually tell. But yeah,
they found they found traces of whatever this thing was
all over the place, and the peat bogs in the
Tunguska area under it, there are samples of rocks that

(30:41):
appear to be meteoric in origin. Um. And I believe
I've also read that there were layers of of cosmic dust,
the kind of dust you would find after a large
impact from space, found in ice cores around the area
dating back to about the time. So it seemed pretty
straightforward that this was an object from space maybe a

(31:04):
comment more likely a rocky meteor. And so are you
are you saying it probably wasn't the gods probably wasn't.
The gods probably wasn't Tesla, probably wasn't aliens or a
black hole. But that makes it no less creepy because instead,
what we walk away with is the idea that there
are things out there in space that with pretty regular

(31:27):
frequency are going to come into our atmosphere, and they're
that big, and they come in with that much speed
and energy. And if something like the Tunguska event were
to happen over say a major city, I mean, that's
game over. Yeah, and it could, uh, it could easily.
There's some geopolitical dangers there as well, because depending upon

(31:50):
which city it hits, uh and which countries they are
allies or rivals with, uh, than it could escalate immediately. Yeah.
I would say we have much better ability now to
predict impacts us Like now we have NASA's Near Earth
Object Program that tracks all of the objects within range
of Earth that we that are large enough for us

(32:13):
to detect. Yes, so I mean we're we're somewhat better
prepared than we were in nineteen o eight. But that's
that's comparing, of course, Uh, that's comparing a little bit
better vision and no real protection to uh, no vision
and no real protection. I mean, well, no, actually we
do have a very important line of defense. Bruce Willis

(32:37):
is still that's right, keep forgetting um okay, Well, once
he passes on, we we are truly naked to the
fury of the universe, of the uncarrying, dark, inky void.
But but there's there's some other things here, because uh,
let's let's explore this just a little bit. Uh. I

(32:57):
can't remember who wrote this very strange theory that was
entirely speculative about um, maybe impact events being the most
lethal threat to intelligent life on planets and said, hey,
maybe the reason that we have never heard from some
other intelligent life out there in the vast chasms of

(33:20):
time and space is because, uh, no intelligent life can
survive on a planet long enough to involve that kind
of technology before something some impact even occurs and blows
the house of cards down. Yeah. Well, that that's one
of those many possible solutions to the so called Fermi paradix,

(33:40):
the paradox of Okay, so, if we can set up
a kind of basic probability of guessing how many alien
civilizations we'd expect to see out there, again, all the
variables we plug into this our guesses, so there's really
no way to know. But you said, well, there sure
are a lot of stars and a lot of plan
it's out there. Seems like there should be some life

(34:02):
out there. We're listening and it sounds like nobody's home.
There's nothing coming in. So either you've got to say, well,
maybe a life evolving on on planets is fairly rare,
or maybe there is a lot of life, but then
becoming technologically intelligent is rare. Or maybe there's some reason
they don't want to transmit, or maybe there's some reason

(34:24):
that the universe, or at least our galaxy, is not
very kind to the life forms that do evolve, and
so the ones that do evolve, or at least have
the potential to evolve the technological capability to contact us
are smashed by asteroids before they get the chance. And
we're just pretty durn lucky to have made it this far.
And we have to remember how long it takes for

(34:46):
signals to reach fast distances. So perhaps there's somebody trying
to communicate, it's just it hasn't gotten to get it
a billion years later. God, I feel so emo right
now talking about that. But but we also know that
impact of themselves aren't the only threats, and we can
as as you said, we can predict um now more

(35:08):
than ever we have okay, prediction skills, um. But there
are things that would happen so quickly that we couldn't
stop them. If we're talking about the end of the world, right,
So what if instead of traveling at like thirty something
thousand miles per hour, your incoming event is traveling at
the speed of light. When something's traveling towards you at

(35:30):
the speed of light, you can't see it until it
hits you. Yeah, so what might travel? What? What a
killer thing might travel towards the Earth at the speed
of light? Maybe a gamma ray burst and uh the
pop quiz. They won't turn us into the Hulk or

(35:50):
she Hulk or anything like that. They will simply end
life as we know it, depending on the circumstances. Yeah,
I feel like I don't need to tell your listener
is this But that's the thing that a lot of
people get confused about in pop culture. Radiation doesn't give
you superpowers. It just kills you. Right, Yeah, so far, Okay?

(36:12):
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to be so okay. I'm
okay because you know what, I survived the massive CME
s that hit us a couple of days ago. Ah,
here we go, CME. What's that stay for? A coronal
mass ejection, my friend, happens when the Sun has these
fun little things that it happens when the Sun decides
to throw up in our general direction. Uh, just a

(36:34):
bunch of its energy and particles, charged particles, and they
just fly towards the Earth. They don't always fly towards
the Earth because you gotta imagine the scale of the
Sun to the Earth. It's pretty rare that the Earth
gets hit by a massive CME. Okay, what are the
dangers of that that? Oh, you know, it could just
fry most of our electrical grid depending on where it hits.

(36:56):
And when I say fry, I mean it could just
take out the wiring that's going along your street outside
your house. You can just fry that stuff and short
circuit anything that uses you know, like this computer that
Joe is using. Just fry all the circuits in there.
Can make even make your car not work sometimes depending
on how your car functions. I mean, Mike car does

(37:17):
a pretty good job of not working now, so but yeah,
but those things are pretty creepy, and we got hit
by two X class Uh. There were two X class
solar flares that shot off these massive CMEs a couple
of days ago. I didn't even know that. Yeah, and
they they both impacted Earth. But everything seems to be okay.
The northern lights went a little crazy, but we're okay. Well,

(37:40):
thank you atmosphere, I guess and timing and uh, we
no matter what we do at this point, technologically we
are sort of in the hands of fate or accident. Uh.
And that to me, uh and to you guys too.
I think it's one of the most surprising, frightening, and
a little bit exciting things about the world in which

(38:03):
we live. The Tunguska event has been explained pretty well
by this point. However, other impact events in the future
are a statistical certainty after you know, after some amount
of time it's going to happen. Um. The only question
is what will the magnitude be and what will our

(38:26):
level of technology be? Will we all be on the
same planet there There's some big questions that we would
like to carry forward and answer. Um. But first, Joe
have to say thank you so much for Green to
come on our show. Joe would only come on if
we agreed to uh do the chant to augd who

(38:49):
may or may not just kidding about all that I'd
love to come on and talk about all kinds of
weird stuff with you guys. That was a complete lie.
I only talk about this. Oh. I. I don't know
about you listeners, but I think I would like to
have Joe back on again. That this was a lot
of fun. Uh. Please write us and let us know,
uh if you want us to do this again, because

(39:09):
I'm down. Yeah. We Uh. We always love to hear
from you guys. As you know, our best ideas come
from our audience. If you enjoyed listening to Joe McCormick
as much as Matt and I have today, then do
go check out their podcasts Forward Thinking. Uh. This podcast
covers all of the what what would you say, Joe? Well,

(39:32):
I would say that we don't take quite as dark
an approach as you guys. Sometimes. We're typically focused on
on cutting edge technology and the Future podcast about science,
technology in the future, and and what life's gonna look
like in twenty years. So are you saying the future
is looking pretty bright? Um? I'm saying that, contrary to

(39:54):
the predominant mood these days, there's no necessary reason to
be pessimist dick about the future. You can go either way,
and I think it's perfectly reasonable to not take a
dystopian attitude absolutely, you know, because uh, you know, we
often hear about the bad stuff because that's what sells UM.
But the truth is that there there are quite a

(40:15):
few amazing innovations on the way UM in laboratories across
the world, R and D places across the world. I mean, heck, uh,
if Ray Kurzwild turns out to be right, I'm not
even gonna say it. I know that gets under some
people's skin there, But do check out Joe's show. If
you would like to write to us, or if you

(40:36):
have a question for Joe, we'd love to hear from you.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. We have a website that I need to
get back to updating. And uh, if you want to
suggest a topic for us to cover in the future,
either just Matten myself or the three Ami goes back
in the studio again. We want to hear from you
because all our best suggestions come from our listeners. Um oh,

(40:58):
I need to what's our email addressing? Oh yeah, you
can email us. We are conspiracy at how stuff works
dot com. From more on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon,
visit test tube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can
also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at

(41:20):
conspiracy stuff