November 17, 2015 • 40 mins
You may call it "rods from god," project Thor" or a glorious "hypervelocity rod bundle," but this theoretical space weapon comes down to one devastating reality: A space-empowered nation's ability to raise a 20-foot tungsten rod up into orbit and then drop it on an enemy target with mass-accelerated force. No bombs, no lasers, just pure reentry power. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the feasibility of rod-based warfare.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Savior.
Today we're gonna talk about even more ways that humans
have devised to kill one another. In fact, I think
(00:24):
this is one of the most creative ways I've ever
heard of. Yeah, and we're talking about weapons here, a
crazy weaponized scheme that this will disguise ultimately doesn't really
hold any water, but but it's a It just shows
to what extent we'll we'll think about what are our
greatest technological achievements and then how can we use those
as a grandiose means to reign death on our enemies? Yeah? Yeah,
(00:48):
and I will get into it, but I can sort
of understand the justification for guys sitting around the room
trying to come up with all these grizzly ways to
destroy one another. Before we get into that, though, I
want to remind our audience that we are periscoping every
week now. So we did our first episode last week
as of this recording, and we are going to be
doing it every Friday at noon. You can find us
(01:11):
at Blow the mind on Periscope and Twitter and Facebook
and Tumbler, all those platforms will be letting people know
when we're periscoping, giving you a little bit of a
preview of what we're gonna be doing that week. I
think this week coming up, which will be in the
past for our listeners, Uh, we're going to be talking
about our favorite horror films and perhaps uh some of
(01:34):
our favorite gateway drug horror literature. Yeah, for for Halloween
and certainly as we we go far with you know,
it's we're having some fun with it. It's very loose,
very free form, very casual. We're just shooting the breeze
about some stuff that we're into, both on topic, uh
stuff with all your Mind material and sort of the
sort of jibber jabber on the side. Last time we
(01:54):
shot from within the podcast studio, we you know, will
hopefully be able to talk to you about what we've
recorded this week, what we're recording next week, behind the
scenes stuff, get to know with stuff. Uh yeah, so
check it out if that's your thing. And in addition
to that, we have heard and uh you know this
may or may not be true, but we've heard that
if your iTunes reviews are if you have a large
(02:18):
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Play as well, so if you're using an Android device
(02:39):
or or something else, I believe you can download or
stream right through Google Play. Now. Yeah, yeah, it's exciting,
another great way to check out the your favorite episodes.
So let's get into Let's let's get into the meat
of this episode though, which is something that's referred to
as Rods from God. And I know that sounds like
(03:00):
a horrible title for our pornography film, but it is
actually a space weapons system that has been devised and
has not actually been built to my knowledge. But but
the the idea is basically as simple as this um
space is already weaponized. Okay, so we know, like the
(03:23):
Corona was launched in the early nineteen sixties, is the
u S is for spy satellite so they could gather
information on the Soviets and their military arsenal uh Global
Positioning System, the GPS that we use in our cars
and on our phones that was originally designed to offer
navigation and timing for the U. S military. So the
idea here is that because space is becoming a an
(03:47):
area that is getting weaponized not only by the US
by but by other large nations like you know, uh,
former Soviet Union. We'll talk about China in a second,
these military teams are actually assigning the goal of trying
to find out other ways of developing technology for both
(04:09):
range and accuracy from space in the same way that
they did for land, sea and air. So space is
becoming a war zone and weaponized, right, And that's where
Rods from God came from. Yeah, a k A. Project
thor or. This is the more technical title that I like,
hypervelocity rod Bundles, not to be confused with pro wrestler
(04:31):
Rod hypervelocity bundle, um who I couldn't help but created
my own head when I was reading this, uh, but
hypervelocity rod bundle. And it all comes down to just
this single stupendous idea. As a as a superpower, I
have the ability to put things into orbit and then
bring them back down again, which is just god like
(04:53):
in terms of human technology. So god like is this
power that I don't even need to use a weapon. Theoretically,
I could just put some tongusten up there. I could
put some steel up there and then just drop it
on you, and it's reintrigud alascity would be enough to
take out an enemy encampment, to dig down into a
bump bunker and blast that out. Doesn't even need any
(05:16):
explosives or munitions, just a big beam of steel. We're
literally talking about telephone pole sized bars of tungsten or
the other one that is proposed as uranium, and I'll
get into that in a minute, but that you just drop,
uh like handing a bus to god Zilla getting him
to throw it a well. One of the alternatives you
(05:36):
wrote was death pennies from Heaven. I mean, the idea
here is essentially the same principle as that old urban
myth of the Union throw a penny off the Empire
State Building and it kills somebody, right, So it's the
same kind of principle here that that the idea being
that they would take two satellites, they'd launch them into orbit.
These two would work together several hundred miles above earth.
(05:59):
One of them is for targeting and communications back to
the ground. The other one carries a bundle of twenty
foot long tungsten rods that are one foot in diameter,
so these are pretty big. Between the time that somebody
on the ground says, uh, drop the rods, it takes
fifteen minutes for them to hit their target. They followed
(06:21):
a speed of thirty six thousand feet per second, and
when they hit they have the same destructive force as
a meteor strike. So that's essentially what we're talking about here. Uh.
The math goes like this. The energy is greater the
higher the orbit that you drop them from, right, but
so is the fall time. So in order to get
the energy the same energy of like a high explosive munitions,
(06:44):
you would need a material speed of three kilometers per second,
and to do that you have to at least get
up to an altitude of forty four hundred and sixty kilometers.
This corresponds roughly to about twelve minutes falling time, and
that I think they probably added another three minutes for
you know, I'm assuming communications and mechanics of the technology
(07:06):
and such, But that's how this idea works. You're literally
dropping telephone pole pulls of metal on people on your targets,
and it just hits so hard that it will supposedly
just create this incredible explosive impact digging down into the earth. Right,
And like you said, the idea here is that if
(07:27):
somebody like you're, you know, Osama bin Laden style target
is in a deep underground bunker, this is the way
that you get them without radiating the entire land around them. Yeah,
and again it comes back to that it's very reminiscent
of the myth of the penny off the top of
the Empire State Building, which again, as you pointed out,
wouldn't kill anybody. It's it's only a gram. It tumbles
(07:49):
as it falls, so there's too much air resistance for
it to do any damage. But even still, if you
were to throw a fifty gram nut off the Empire
State Building a roll of pennies, which is certainly more
like a rod um a bullet now you're talking, that
could actually kill somebody. And so that's the basic idea
here is just an epic death pennies from having kind
(08:09):
of scenario. And the other so I mentioned uranium. So
the tungsten and uranium, with the two materials that were
specifically listed. I originally wrote about this on a sister
site for How Stuff Works called Stuff of Genius, and
one of the readers they're actually suggested that titanium would
be better. And I don't have any inkling about materials sciences,
(08:32):
so you know, I'd love to hear from the listeners
on what they think on this. But they were saying
that basically, tungsten is flammable, so of course it's going
to burn up on re entry, which we'll talk about later,
and uranium is reactive. Uh So it seems to defeat
the purpose because the gist here is that you want
to have the same explosive impact as a nuclear weapon
(08:53):
without leaving behind radiation, right, and essentially having that kind
of high powered explosive weapon without actually having to use explosives.
Now we're talking about guys sitting around thinking up ridiculous
high tech ways to tosh out some death. Who thought
this one up? So this is guy named Jerry Cornell,
(09:13):
and you out there may be familiar with him because
he's primarily known as a science fiction author. I was
gonna say, that's that's this name ring a Bell from
Path to Sci Fi section Perusals. Yeah. So Cornell, he's
an engineer. He's a science writer. He's primarily known for
science fiction. H He has degrees in experimental statistics, systems, engineering, psychology,
(09:36):
and political science. He worked for Boeing in the nineteen
sixties and the idea was that he was going to
help develop the aerospace industry. But this is where he
came up the idea with dropping metal from outer space
to kill people. Um. I don't know if that was,
you know, on his action item list from a meeting
or something, but this is where it came up. So
the idea is a kinetic energy weapon. That's kind of
(09:59):
the herm that's used for these style weapons. It's been
around since something called the Rand Corporation proposed placing rods
on the tips of I C B M s way
back in the nineteen fifties. And we'll get back into
that later because that seems to actually be the more
plausible method of kinetic energy deployment. Yeah, attaching to the
front of an intercontinental bollistic missile. A little bit more
(10:22):
about Jerry Parnell. I want to get into though, before
we get into to the rest of the science behind
Rods of God. So he's, like I said, he's best
known as a sci fi novelist. I haven't read any
of his books, but I'm really curious about them. He
maintains a pretty active blog. Uh. He attracted attention from
politicians in the eighties. Ronald Reagan actually applauded a tract
that he wrote that was called Mutually Assured Survival as
(10:44):
space age solution to nuclear annihilation. And then he and
Newt Gingrich actually teamed up and worked together on a
novel that is so far unpublished. I want to read
this though. It's called The Faction, and here's the premise.
The Yakuza worked together with big corporations to overthrow the government,
(11:06):
and the way that they do it is by using
kinetic kill type weapons. They use Rods from God. So
he's repurposed his own idea for for this novel that
he's working on with Nuke king Rich. Unfortunately, he suffered
a stroke in he's still writing. My understanding is that
he's still active, but not as much as he used
to be. By the way, and I have not read this,
(11:27):
but apparently he wrote the novelization of the movie Escape
from the Planet of the Apes. Oh wow, Which that's so?
Is that the one that has a nuke in it
as a central theme? Is that the one with the
undergo cool letter ground stuff. Um, I always get them
mixed up. I later escape from Planet of the Apes,
the one where they go back in time and they
(11:48):
actually two Apes come to present day America and they
end up trying to convince like Congress or something like
that that they shouldn't uh, you know, proceed with war. Yeah,
that was I timed out before they really got to
that point. In my viewing, this one would be the third.
I've just looked it out. Yeah. The first one that's
Planet of the apeses we know and love it. Second
(12:09):
one is Beneath the Plant of the Apes is a
few of us know and love. But I love it
because it has those more locky in creatures that live
underground and worship the bomb. This would have been the
third one he wrote for the So, so keep in
mind that the guy who came up with this idea
and that the US government has actively worked on, and
also the weapons industry has has actively worked on, also
(12:32):
happened to work on the Planet of the Apes franchise. Uh,
and So in particular, in the last decade alone, there's
been two big reports that are public and have been
written about this. The first was in two thousand three
and it was the U. S. Air Forces Transformation Flight Plan.
And then in two thousand two that RAND Corporation again, uh,
they wrote a report called Space Weapons Earth Wars, which
(12:53):
were probably gonna reference a lot in this because we
read it for the podcast. Um and I'll link to
some of these resources on the landing page of this episode,
at least the ones that are easily accessed by everyone.
So this is a concept that people are taking seriously.
They're they're doing the math, they're doing the science. They're
trying to figure out can we drop these telephone polls
on our enemies and destroy them without irradiating them. And
(13:17):
there's one other benefit to this too. The other benefit
is that weapons like this wouldn't technically violate the nineteen
seventy two Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. So if you put
them up and you were dropping them in the way
that we're we've described, I think you could you know,
work your way around that. Now, I want to point
out that just just as this relates nicely to dropping
(13:39):
pennies off the mentire state building. There have been a
number of missile weapons that achieve the same ends, though
in a smaller scale. You know, make a payload go up,
bring it back down. Uh As for achieving enough altitude
that the descent speed weaponizes the payload, well, we have
a couple of interesting examples from the twentieth century. Um
in World War One that you saw air dropped fletchets,
(14:03):
which were essentially just look like metal arrowheads that were
dropped out the same ideas. So you dropped them from
an airplane, they can achieve enough velocity to do some
damage when they hit. Those are the things that the
X Men archangel shoots out of his wings. Yet yeah,
I feel like they flashettes show up his um as
immunition and the sci fi properties as well, Like I
(14:26):
think Gibson deployed them. Roment idea of using them as
kinnecticut like railguns or something like that is popular because
again the ideas of it's moving fast enough, there's enough
kinetic energy you don't need explosive energy. Additionally, there's something
called lazy dog bombs, and these are developed in World
War Two and deployed in Vietna and Vietnamic Korean wars,
(14:46):
sometimes called buzz bombs, sometimes called lawn darts, because essentially
that's what you're talking about, a bunch of small, unguided
kinetic projectiles. They're not technically bombs. Often they're dropped in clusters,
sometimes for a mounted casings underneath the wing of an airplane,
other other times supposedly just hurled out in a bucket,
you know, very very loose, very Hey, we're up here
(15:09):
just by virtue of being in the air at a
certain altitude, we have the kinetic advantage by throwing these
things out. So the idea itself pretty simple. But when
you take it up, when you take it up to
an orbital level, that's where you get some real, essentially
cosmic destructive possibilities. Yeah, and so this kind of reminds me,
(15:30):
I know, this is like an actual explosive munition, at
least as my understanding. But around the time of the
beginning of the war in Iraq, Uh, there was a
lot of attention being paid to the Daisy Cutter. Do
you remember that it was a specific kind of like
bunker buster type weapon, uh. And I think the attraction
was that, like it was so incredibly powerful that it
(15:52):
could defeat our enemies, and yet it wasn't as horrific
as like the nuclear bomb right in off exactly, yeah,
shocking off. So I think this is the same sort
of principle, although it's kinnectic and not explosive. UM and
I do want to take a second here too as
an aside. These are different from what you may have
(16:14):
heard about in the news lately, being referred to as
anti ship ballistic missiles or a s b M. S UM.
These have been They were something that the US actually
tested in the nineteen sixties and had two successful flights
with the Soviet Union developed them in the past, but
more recently, in January of two thousand and fourteen, China
conducted a test of a hypersonic glide vehicle that was
(16:37):
designed to carry missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers. UH.
This thing flies at mock ten. It isn't the first
time that they've developed an a s b M, but
it's thought to be like the stage, the second stage
of their program essentially, UH and the idea is that
it's very similar to this. It launches an I C
b M up into outer space and then sends that
(16:58):
back down at mock ten, so there's no satellite up there.
It just launches it up and brings it back down.
And the ideas that one of these things would hit
an aircraft carrier and just completely take it out, and
that uh they move. I think the idea here is
like that they move so quickly, uh faster than actually
like traditional munitions, that they're difficult for anti air defenses
(17:21):
to take down. So there's some concern about that. But
this is not the same not the same thing. Okay, alright,
well we're gonna take a quick break and when we
come back, we're going to get into the feasibility of
rods from God's and this is where it gets a
little more fun and ultimately where everything falls apart. All right,
(17:45):
we're back, Yeah, so let's talk about how feasible rods
from God actually are. It's nice a bunch of guys
sitting around in a room smoking cigars, talking about sci
fi ideas on how they could kill each other. Then
let's get down to the nuts and bolts of this thing.
So first of all, uh, there's some scientific reasons why
it wouldn't work. Uh. One is vaporization. So the thing
(18:07):
that that we see with with meteorites. Yeah. Uh so
even a giant tungsten rod would probably vaporize on impact. Um.
There's been some ideas that, like you could attach to
retro rockets to each one of the rods that would
slow their re entry slightly, but some the calculations basically
(18:28):
say that if you did that, the non explosive rod
would then be no more effective than the commit conventional
munitions that we already have it And you're kind of
betraying the spirit of the thing, right, because the whole
idea is I have all this technology and I can
use it to destroy up drop a big chunk of
metal lining. If we're putting rockets on that, then we're
kind of getting back into the area of just creating
(18:49):
a space missile. Yeah, and it's going to be more
expensive to which is another drawback that the physics just
wouldn't work. High velocity impact would limit the actual penetration depth.
So remember, like you know, part of the idea behind
this is to bust bunkers, right to get those underground
uh headquarters, I guess that are usually unreachable. If you
(19:11):
look at high speed photography of a bullet impacting steel
at one kilometer a second. And remember, to achieve the
rod from god uh impact, you have to hit three
kilometers per second, but just at one kilometer a second,
Apparently the jacket fragments right off of the bullet and
leaves a small crater on the on the steel that
(19:34):
it strikes. So the idea here is that like there
would be probably a similar effect on a larger scale
that the rods would chatter vaporized. They might leave a
little bit of a crater, but for the most part,
it wouldn't have the explosive impact that they're looking for.
In fact, the Sandy A Laboratory, which I didn't know
about until doing this research, it's a national security nuclear
(19:54):
weapons testing facility. They've actually confirmed predictions about this UH
looking that at that even the hardest materials will max
out their penetration capabilities at one kilometer per second. So
you go any faster than that, the tip of the
rod will probably liquefy. Uh. It will cause the penetration
depth to fall off, and then you get this situation
(20:16):
where even if they're delivered from low altitudes, they would
only deliver one ninth of the destructive energy per gram force.
As a conventional bomb. So again, what's the point of
that where we're totally losing the spirit of our beautiful,
uh death dealing device exactly. Yeah, And also keep in
(20:36):
mind too that even if the entire rod doesn't vaporize,
the tip would probably deform or something like that, which
would change their flight path considerably and you end up
striking a nearby town or something rather than the bunker
that you're trying to strike. Yeah, because each rod would
need to follow eight percies nearly vertical flight path they
wanted to reach its target. Again, assuming you don't have
(20:57):
any kind of thrusters on there that are turning into
a missile more of a guided missile anyway. So I
mean it's difficult enough to figure this out without factoring
in a rod it's partially disintegrated or warped due to
all this re entry friction. Yeah, and so this is
the thing like for me, like again, not knowing a
lot about material science, I'm wondering why tungsten is the
metal that they chose for the proposal, given that it's
(21:20):
flammable and it's you know, going to be just on
re entry alone, probably gonna catch on fire. So I'm
not quite sure, there must be a reason, though, I
would think, or maybe maybe it's literally just like a
sci fi novel pitch and just in with it. Uh So,
Actually to get to the you know, the the actual
proposal in that Rand Corporation Space Weapons, Earth Wars, the
(21:45):
authors suggest that one way that they could address this
is by quote extruding material through pores in the nose
tip of the rod for evaporation. Another option, they pitch
is abletative cooling, where the outer layer would be designed
to melt away on purpose. But again, then you get
that thing where the nose potentially deforms, and then you know,
(22:05):
it's just completely unpredictable where this thing is going to hit. Yeah,
you again, we just see it at time and time again. Here,
with just the basic physical design, it sounds like it'll
be a simple, yeah, procedure, a simple design. But even
then you have to tweak it. It's like, all right,
we gotta put thrusts on it. It needs the tip
needs to use and it needs to be reflective, and
and what what next? It needs to crew. All this
(22:27):
stuff essentially makes it untenable. Not to mention that there's
something called the absentee ratio for the satellites that are
circling around in orbit carrying all these rods. So because
satellites circled the planet every one dred minutes, they won't
always be in position to hit their target. So yeah,
I remember that whole thing, like, oh, yeah, you just
(22:48):
call it from the ground fifteen minutes later boom, right,
But no other side of the exactly, You've got to
wait for it to actually be in position to hit
the target. And satellites as we have them right now
can't really change their speeds that easily or maneuver around
in orbit because there's no atmosphere, so they might not
even work because of this. And then you know, there's
(23:10):
also the whole idea of like if you're up in
orbit again, like you have to break the atmosphere for
re entry, so you need some kind of thrust too. Yeah,
that's one thing that's important to keep in mind is that, yes,
you have to use all of this energy and effort
to get something into orbit, but then you also have
to use energy and effort to get it out of
orbit um at least to get it out of orbit
(23:31):
along the timeline that you're looking at to weaponize the thing. Yeah,
and the satellites as well. Here's another like the whole
reason why this isn't feasible, the satellites would probably be
vulnerable to ground based attacks. Right, So let's say, uh,
China puts one of these up in the in the
(23:52):
in orbit and it's floating around there. We're going to
be able to detect that and we'll probably be able
to shoot it down. Yeah. Yeah, we've been able to
bust satellites for a while, so that's yeah, that's not
even an issue. So then to improve efficiency there, they'd
have to launch even more satellites, which costs even more money.
And these things are not cheap but crazy expensive. So okay,
how expensive is it? So we know from NASA that
(24:16):
it costs ten thousand dollars per pound to put something
into orbit, no matter what the object is. Right, So
somebody actually broke down the math and I brought it
here for us today. If one of these rods weighed
point one tons and there were three tons of propellant
(24:36):
on it to stop its orbital motion, basically to give
it the thrust to get through, because that the wise,
it's just going to continue to orbit. H That means
that launching one rod would cost thirty million dollars and
you need at least ten rods per satellite. So this
is just insanely expensive. Uh. And like we said, there's
(24:58):
just you know, a lot of feasibility shoes science wise,
strategic wise, and then it's just incredibly expensive. Yeah, cost
a ton of money. And you're you're ultimately going to
have to do so many things too. You're gonna have
to turn that rod into a into a guided missile
anyway to make it work. So why I just use
a guided missile? Yeah, absolutely, And that's one of the
(25:18):
proposed solutions, right to just use an I C d
M instead. Yeah, And ultimately it goes all the way
back to that nineteen fifties rand proposal. So the idea
there was that they would attach the rods to uh
intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are the I C b M
s that you know, only a few nations actually have
access to that launched missiles around the world. The downside
(25:41):
is that these could be detected a lot easier. So
I was saying earlier about how like the kinetic drop
makes it so that they're so fast that they can
it's a lot harder for them to be detected by
anti air defenses. Um. But so here's some more math
for you to get the one kilometer per second speed
that would be needed an acceleration of thirty times that
(26:02):
of gravity. So this is something that a nominal solid
rocket motor could probably provide. It would take three point
three seconds over a distance of one point six five kilometers.
So that actually doesn't sound like all that much, right,
especially compared to what we've just been talking about with
dropping these telephone polls. But this would only cost us
a hundred thousand dollars or less, plus the cost of
(26:25):
a terminal guidance system. I don't know how much of
those run for nowadays, where it's like an iPhone, Yeah,
I think it's as the next box one. Yeah, uh
so it's cheaper, sounds like it would probably work better.
I think the disadvantages the speed factor, and and then
also that it's not coming downward exactly, it's coming at
an angle, right, so that possibly would lead to less penetration.
(26:48):
I'm not quite sure. Um. But the other proposal from
that space weapons Earth wars proposal, I would love to
just be a fly on the wall for the writing
process of that, Like the people sitting around just putting
that together for the RAM Corporation, there's no bad ideas
in brainstorming space weapon. So their ideas to try conventional
(27:12):
ordinance that delivered from space, so basically just space bombing
space rockets. Um. So the idea here is that they
would have the direct destructive force, but it would be
outward instead of downward like I was talking about earlier.
They'd be slower, but they wouldn't erod uh. And they
would require explosives in fusings. And here's the problem with
that that they'd have to survive the impact, right, but
(27:34):
then they'd also have to be able to determine their
depth penetration before they exploded. Getting back to that bunker
busting exactly. Yeah, the ideas that these got to drill underground,
so and again they're more susceptible to terminal defenses than
kinetic weapons would be. So when you put it all together,
Rods from the Gods, Operation thor whatever you want to
(27:57):
want to call it, kinetic strike force, raw, kinetic strike force,
rod bundles, Uh, it just doesn't make a lot of sense,
but it's such a captivating idea. And again I think
it comes down to just the idea that technology, our
technological advancement could be such, our power could be such
that it would be akin to having a slingshot, Like, right,
(28:18):
the the slingshot is the technology. The thing that goes
in the sling shot needs to be nothing more than
a pebble. Yeah, absolutely, I think. I think the attraction
here is like we're just harnessing the physics of the
universe essentially, right when having to build the specific devices
designed to kill I mean it is, but but you
know what I mean, Like you could put other things
(28:39):
up there too and drop them and they would kill
people as well. It's just they wouldn't be able to
do it with precision and range. Yeah, I mean statues
of Walt Disney, um, you name it, giant oscars, I
guess something of statutes for some reason, just lots of statues.
A statue of Lenin, a statue of Darth Vader. There's
something kind of nicely space opera about that. I can
imagine being the merciful Us using rods from God and
(29:02):
each rod is just a statue of me. Well, I'm
glad that you brought that up, actually, because this idea,
having come from a sci fi writer, has actually worked
its way into a lot of our popular fiction. UM
two I can think of. I first heard about this
reading the War and Ellis comic Global Frequency, which was
adapted into a television show. So he had clearly read
(29:23):
about it somewhere, and UH decided to incorporate it as
like a I think a terrorist group had access to
one of these. The other one I believe the second
G I. Joe Live Action movie, the premise was that
they were going to use kinetic weapons. I saw that
on the airplane going to or from China, so it's
pretty distracted at the time. Yeah, but yeah, there was
(29:45):
some sort of rods from God, I think, so yeah, yeah,
and I'm sure there's others. Joe brought up something he
I was talking to him about this before we went
to the studio, and he said that he thinks that
in the Mass Effect games and universe that there's like
a similar netic velocity kind of idea behind UM A
lot of the weapons, not just like ship to ship weapons,
(30:06):
but also the like guns that weapons. I think, so yeah, yeah,
So you know, the idea is really cool. It's fun
for stories, but it doesn't really it doesn't seem like
it's gonna work until we spend a couple more than
a couple million dollars to put these things in outer
space and then drop them and see what happens. All right,
(30:28):
So there you have it, rods from God. Uh, you know,
we get a little time here. Let's call over the
robot and see if we have a little listener mail.
Who in the robot is founding a little more satanic
than usually? It? Is it Carney or Arnie at this time?
I can never remember when he's possessed by the devil.
(30:48):
I don't know it's Carney, but with sixes in there,
somehow he felt it really weird. But yes, it looks
like we have. We've received a couple of new listener
mails regarding our Satanic Pack episode, which was the first
episode that we did together. Yeah. Yeah, this one comes
to us from Katie. Katie writes, and he says, so,
first off, id Or your podcast discovered it a few
(31:08):
months back, and it's been my been a wave to
keep my mind from um atrifying at my mind numbingly
boring job as an overnight grocery stalker. I listened to
the new episodes as they come out and have been
slowly working my way back through the rest of them.
My co worker hates me because I always stopped midway
through the work, take my earphones out, and insist on
educating him on topics he has absolutely no interest in. Luckily,
(31:30):
family members and roommates are much more accepting of my
need to tell people of my newfound knowledge. So Katie
goes on to mention that she just listened to the
Satanic Panic episode and uh, and she shares some some
personal family stuff here, uh, which I'm not going to
get into the details here, just because I'm not certain
she would want to share with everyone, and some of
(31:51):
the details are probably a little bit too much for
the the average listener, but she can, she continues in
the email, and say so, Obviously, when I first heard
were that this whole Satanic panic thing was most likely
mass hysteria, I was personally offended by it. I didn't
want to think that someone I cared about could have
had it, could have such a big part of her
life based on something entirely fake. I honestly skimmed the
(32:13):
article that first brought it to my attention, got angry
and closed it and never went back. When I started
your Satanic Panic episode, I had a moment of thinking
I should just skip it once I realized it was
what it was going to be about. But at this point,
you guys had kind of totally won me over, so
I decided to give it a shot. And there was
one line in there, just to throwaway line, where you
guys acknowledge that while they're most likely wasn't some huge
(32:35):
satanic craze in the seventies, that there were still some
people who are suffering horrific abuse. Hearing that kind of
wiped out my whole personal offense at the topic, and
I was able to enjoy an incredibly interesting podcast. I
honestly really like stories about mass hysterias, and this was
definitely an incredibly fascinating one, more so when I could
put aside my personal feelings and consider it in relation
(32:55):
to my story. So thank you Katie for writing in
uh it's yeah. I really appreciate listener mail in general,
but this in particular. You know, thank you Katie for
sharing your personal story with us, but also for letting
us know that you know this is something that you
weren't inclined to want to listen to, but that because
(33:16):
you know you trusted us as hosts. I'm assuming you
went ahead followed us on the journey, and we're happy
that you know, you learned what you did afterwards. Yeah,
And I guess I have two thoughts on all time.
And first of all, and that's one of the things
that's so fascinating and disturbing about the Satanic Panic scenario
is that there is this pure fantasy and pure fiction
and hit and mass hysteria. But the pain that that
(33:40):
that spiraled out from it, it was it was real. Yeah. Absolutely,
I think I said that during the episode that like,
I may not believe their stories, but I believe that
they believe in them, and that's real enough to them
that it, you know, requires us to be sympathetic as
you know, emotional human beings to the things that happened
(34:02):
to them. Uh. And and also I think it's important,
you know, we tried to do this with every episode
and with whatever we're talking about, whether it's Satanic panic
or dropping giant metal telephone polls from out of space. Uh,
there's more than one side to every story, right, And
so obviously, like you have to keep that in mind.
You want to also be open to the possibilities of whatever,
(34:23):
you know, somebody else's perspective, whether it's subjective or not.
And in the Satanic Panic situation, there were hundreds of incidents.
So we're never gonna know all the stories, you know,
We're never gonna know that how things all matched up
with one another. But you know, by and large, I
think we we covered the the hysteria part, the mass
(34:45):
media part of it fairly well. Yeah. And I also
like how Katie talked about how when we first heard
about the mass hysteria aspect of about Satanic Panic, that
she was offended, that she was turned off, and then
she but she knew coming back to it. And I
always think about that a lot when I when we're
engaging with listeners, particularly on social media, because there's always
(35:07):
gonna be somebody who who has a reaction to some
sort of article or study or material, and they're kind
of defensive about it, and maybe they're, you know, they're
they're a little up in arms. And I often think
back to times in my own life where I've come
across some new way of looking at the world, and
a lot of times there is this gut reaction. There's
something that challenges your personal history, challenges your ideology, and
(35:30):
there's a the reflex is to put the guards up,
and it takes some time sometimes to come back around
and open yourself up to this idea and put it
put yourself in a and really in a state of
open minded vulnerability to uh, to consider it. I think
that that gets down to the ethos of this show
(35:52):
overall for Joe, Robert and I is that, like the
overall quality that I'm shooting for with every episode is
that we're trying to connect to that one of looking
at the world and going, oh wow, I didn't know that,
you know, uh, and and then thinking about the thing
that you go oh wow at and kind of criticizing it, like, yeah,
oh wow, it would be really cool if you could
drop metal from outer space and destroy your enemies, right,
(36:14):
Like that's like a like a thing that it like
five year old does in the sandbox, like playing with
their toys. Right. But at the same time, like you
kind of step back and you look at the science
of it and you go, huh, well, that's a wonderful idea,
probably not feasible, probably doesn't work, but look at our
human imagination work working at this, or look at the
wonder of science that we could even begin thinking about it.
(36:36):
All right, well, what is that? What does the robot
have to looks like? It looks like he has another one.
Another one's coming out here? Hold on. Uh, this is
from Hannah and she writes in to let us know
that she's a long time listener and that she had
some thoughts that she would also like to share on
the Satanic Panic episode. Uh. It turns out that she
I'm going to read this uh verbatim. The first is
(36:57):
in response to your Satanic Panic episode. Robert and Christian
mentioned how some teenagers may have explored Satanism to shock
the authority figures in their life and find a sense
of individualism, and it reminded me of a song by
folk rock band The Mountain Goats. I'm vaguely familiar with
the Mountain Goats. I don't listen to them a lot,
but yeah, yeah, I have some friends with a real
(37:18):
big fans. Uh. So they have a song apparently that's
called the best ever death metal band in Denton. I
like the Tyble, and we're gonna have to listen to
It tells the story of childhood friends Jeff and Cyrus
and how their dream of becoming a famous death metal
band was dashed by the adults in their lives, but
all hope is not lost, says Hannah. The song ends
by saying, quote, the best ever death metal band out
(37:40):
of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you,
followed by a couple of rousing hail Satan's. In this
the hail Satan's are not so much an actual hailing
of Satan's but more of a to the people that
told them too. I kind of like that idea. Um,
I guess I'll add on to this Hannah that I'm
a big fan of the band Ghost, which is a
(38:04):
they're associated with metal, but I think they're more kind
of like a hard rock band. But the premise behind
the band is that they're supposedly uh Satanists, uh and all.
The leader of the band is a guy called Papa
Emeritus who dresses up like an anti pope with like
an upside down cross. And I've seen plenty of pictures. Yeah,
(38:24):
I mean, so it's all theatrical. It's all ridiculous. The
lyrics to the songs are supposedly about summoning Satan and
you know, worshiping him and all these things. Honestly, it's
it's it's a big circus performance. That's what I love
out of it. I love the theatricality and it's that
appeals to me. Um So I can see why this
(38:45):
song would kind of do the same thing. It sounds
to me like this Mountain Goats song might be about
a proto version of ghost Nice. All right, Well, there
you have it. Hey, you want to reach out to us,
you want to see what we're up to, you want
to explore some of these past episodes, see what's coming up.
Head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the
podcast episodes, all the videos, Various blog posts links out
(39:07):
to these social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter where
blow the mind on both of those, and tumbler where
we're stuff to blow your Mind. Yeah, and don't forget,
We're gonna be on periscope every Friday at noon, uh
and you can interact with us directly on their last time,
people were able to ask us questions right through the app,
and we were able to talk right back to them,
talk about things like melt movies. Some people give us
(39:27):
suggestions for new episodes, like a one on strange weather,
which sounded like it would be kind of fun to me.
Uh and uh, you know you can listen to us
talk about our favorite horror movies. Uh, and maybe even
some horror literature as well. Things that we you know,
we probably talked about casually on the show, but aren't
usually the themes of the show. Yeah, and hey, maybe
(39:48):
one of these days we'll spend the periscope session for
Joe to find, like cook those that use that recipe
for cookies that he found. Yeah, great, dude, cook He's
especially we can give that spice. So one last thing, though,
if you want to write into us directly, like the
listener mail that we just read out loud, you can
(40:10):
always send us an email at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Savior.
Today we're gonna talk about even more ways that humans
have devised to kill one another. In fact, I think
(00:24):
this is one of the most creative ways I've ever
heard of. Yeah, and we're talking about weapons here, a
crazy weaponized scheme that this will disguise ultimately doesn't really
hold any water, but but it's a It just shows
to what extent we'll we'll think about what are our
greatest technological achievements and then how can we use those
as a grandiose means to reign death on our enemies? Yeah? Yeah,
(00:48):
and I will get into it, but I can sort
of understand the justification for guys sitting around the room
trying to come up with all these grizzly ways to
destroy one another. Before we get into that, though, I
want to remind our audience that we are periscoping every
week now. So we did our first episode last week
as of this recording, and we are going to be
doing it every Friday at noon. You can find us
(01:11):
at Blow the mind on Periscope and Twitter and Facebook
and Tumbler, all those platforms will be letting people know
when we're periscoping, giving you a little bit of a
preview of what we're gonna be doing that week. I
think this week coming up, which will be in the
past for our listeners, Uh, we're going to be talking
about our favorite horror films and perhaps uh some of
(01:34):
our favorite gateway drug horror literature. Yeah, for for Halloween
and certainly as we we go far with you know,
it's we're having some fun with it. It's very loose,
very free form, very casual. We're just shooting the breeze
about some stuff that we're into, both on topic, uh
stuff with all your Mind material and sort of the
sort of jibber jabber on the side. Last time we
(01:54):
shot from within the podcast studio, we you know, will
hopefully be able to talk to you about what we've
recorded this week, what we're recording next week, behind the
scenes stuff, get to know with stuff. Uh yeah, so
check it out if that's your thing. And in addition
to that, we have heard and uh you know this
may or may not be true, but we've heard that
if your iTunes reviews are if you have a large
(02:18):
quantity of them, and obviously I would assume if they're
positive that it helps your rankings and iTunes for other
people to discover your show. So if you listen to
us on iTunes, if you have time, leave us a
review and help that algorithm out. And also, we just
found out yesterday that we are now available on Google
Play as well, so if you're using an Android device
(02:39):
or or something else, I believe you can download or
stream right through Google Play. Now. Yeah, yeah, it's exciting,
another great way to check out the your favorite episodes.
So let's get into Let's let's get into the meat
of this episode though, which is something that's referred to
as Rods from God. And I know that sounds like
(03:00):
a horrible title for our pornography film, but it is
actually a space weapons system that has been devised and
has not actually been built to my knowledge. But but
the the idea is basically as simple as this um
space is already weaponized. Okay, so we know, like the
(03:23):
Corona was launched in the early nineteen sixties, is the
u S is for spy satellite so they could gather
information on the Soviets and their military arsenal uh Global
Positioning System, the GPS that we use in our cars
and on our phones that was originally designed to offer
navigation and timing for the U. S military. So the
idea here is that because space is becoming a an
(03:47):
area that is getting weaponized not only by the US
by but by other large nations like you know, uh,
former Soviet Union. We'll talk about China in a second,
these military teams are actually assigning the goal of trying
to find out other ways of developing technology for both
(04:09):
range and accuracy from space in the same way that
they did for land, sea and air. So space is
becoming a war zone and weaponized, right, And that's where
Rods from God came from. Yeah, a k A. Project
thor or. This is the more technical title that I like,
hypervelocity rod Bundles, not to be confused with pro wrestler
(04:31):
Rod hypervelocity bundle, um who I couldn't help but created
my own head when I was reading this, uh, but
hypervelocity rod bundle. And it all comes down to just
this single stupendous idea. As a as a superpower, I
have the ability to put things into orbit and then
bring them back down again, which is just god like
(04:53):
in terms of human technology. So god like is this
power that I don't even need to use a weapon. Theoretically,
I could just put some tongusten up there. I could
put some steel up there and then just drop it
on you, and it's reintrigud alascity would be enough to
take out an enemy encampment, to dig down into a
bump bunker and blast that out. Doesn't even need any
(05:16):
explosives or munitions, just a big beam of steel. We're
literally talking about telephone pole sized bars of tungsten or
the other one that is proposed as uranium, and I'll
get into that in a minute, but that you just drop,
uh like handing a bus to god Zilla getting him
to throw it a well. One of the alternatives you
(05:36):
wrote was death pennies from Heaven. I mean, the idea
here is essentially the same principle as that old urban
myth of the Union throw a penny off the Empire
State Building and it kills somebody, right, So it's the
same kind of principle here that that the idea being
that they would take two satellites, they'd launch them into orbit.
These two would work together several hundred miles above earth.
(05:59):
One of them is for targeting and communications back to
the ground. The other one carries a bundle of twenty
foot long tungsten rods that are one foot in diameter,
so these are pretty big. Between the time that somebody
on the ground says, uh, drop the rods, it takes
fifteen minutes for them to hit their target. They followed
(06:21):
a speed of thirty six thousand feet per second, and
when they hit they have the same destructive force as
a meteor strike. So that's essentially what we're talking about here. Uh.
The math goes like this. The energy is greater the
higher the orbit that you drop them from, right, but
so is the fall time. So in order to get
the energy the same energy of like a high explosive munitions,
(06:44):
you would need a material speed of three kilometers per second,
and to do that you have to at least get
up to an altitude of forty four hundred and sixty kilometers.
This corresponds roughly to about twelve minutes falling time, and
that I think they probably added another three minutes for
you know, I'm assuming communications and mechanics of the technology
(07:06):
and such, But that's how this idea works. You're literally
dropping telephone pole pulls of metal on people on your targets,
and it just hits so hard that it will supposedly
just create this incredible explosive impact digging down into the earth. Right,
And like you said, the idea here is that if
(07:27):
somebody like you're, you know, Osama bin Laden style target
is in a deep underground bunker, this is the way
that you get them without radiating the entire land around them. Yeah,
and again it comes back to that it's very reminiscent
of the myth of the penny off the top of
the Empire State Building, which again, as you pointed out,
wouldn't kill anybody. It's it's only a gram. It tumbles
(07:49):
as it falls, so there's too much air resistance for
it to do any damage. But even still, if you
were to throw a fifty gram nut off the Empire
State Building a roll of pennies, which is certainly more
like a rod um a bullet now you're talking, that
could actually kill somebody. And so that's the basic idea
here is just an epic death pennies from having kind
(08:09):
of scenario. And the other so I mentioned uranium. So
the tungsten and uranium, with the two materials that were
specifically listed. I originally wrote about this on a sister
site for How Stuff Works called Stuff of Genius, and
one of the readers they're actually suggested that titanium would
be better. And I don't have any inkling about materials sciences,
(08:32):
so you know, I'd love to hear from the listeners
on what they think on this. But they were saying
that basically, tungsten is flammable, so of course it's going
to burn up on re entry, which we'll talk about later,
and uranium is reactive. Uh So it seems to defeat
the purpose because the gist here is that you want
to have the same explosive impact as a nuclear weapon
(08:53):
without leaving behind radiation, right, and essentially having that kind
of high powered explosive weapon without actually having to use explosives.
Now we're talking about guys sitting around thinking up ridiculous
high tech ways to tosh out some death. Who thought
this one up? So this is guy named Jerry Cornell,
(09:13):
and you out there may be familiar with him because
he's primarily known as a science fiction author. I was
gonna say, that's that's this name ring a Bell from
Path to Sci Fi section Perusals. Yeah. So Cornell, he's
an engineer. He's a science writer. He's primarily known for
science fiction. H He has degrees in experimental statistics, systems, engineering, psychology,
(09:36):
and political science. He worked for Boeing in the nineteen
sixties and the idea was that he was going to
help develop the aerospace industry. But this is where he
came up the idea with dropping metal from outer space
to kill people. Um. I don't know if that was,
you know, on his action item list from a meeting
or something, but this is where it came up. So
the idea is a kinetic energy weapon. That's kind of
(09:59):
the herm that's used for these style weapons. It's been
around since something called the Rand Corporation proposed placing rods
on the tips of I C B M s way
back in the nineteen fifties. And we'll get back into
that later because that seems to actually be the more
plausible method of kinetic energy deployment. Yeah, attaching to the
front of an intercontinental bollistic missile. A little bit more
(10:22):
about Jerry Parnell. I want to get into though, before
we get into to the rest of the science behind
Rods of God. So he's, like I said, he's best
known as a sci fi novelist. I haven't read any
of his books, but I'm really curious about them. He
maintains a pretty active blog. Uh. He attracted attention from
politicians in the eighties. Ronald Reagan actually applauded a tract
that he wrote that was called Mutually Assured Survival as
(10:44):
space age solution to nuclear annihilation. And then he and
Newt Gingrich actually teamed up and worked together on a
novel that is so far unpublished. I want to read
this though. It's called The Faction, and here's the premise.
The Yakuza worked together with big corporations to overthrow the government,
(11:06):
and the way that they do it is by using
kinetic kill type weapons. They use Rods from God. So
he's repurposed his own idea for for this novel that
he's working on with Nuke king Rich. Unfortunately, he suffered
a stroke in he's still writing. My understanding is that
he's still active, but not as much as he used
to be. By the way, and I have not read this,
(11:27):
but apparently he wrote the novelization of the movie Escape
from the Planet of the Apes. Oh wow, Which that's so?
Is that the one that has a nuke in it
as a central theme? Is that the one with the
undergo cool letter ground stuff. Um, I always get them
mixed up. I later escape from Planet of the Apes,
the one where they go back in time and they
(11:48):
actually two Apes come to present day America and they
end up trying to convince like Congress or something like
that that they shouldn't uh, you know, proceed with war. Yeah,
that was I timed out before they really got to
that point. In my viewing, this one would be the third.
I've just looked it out. Yeah. The first one that's
Planet of the apeses we know and love it. Second
(12:09):
one is Beneath the Plant of the Apes is a
few of us know and love. But I love it
because it has those more locky in creatures that live
underground and worship the bomb. This would have been the
third one he wrote for the So, so keep in
mind that the guy who came up with this idea
and that the US government has actively worked on, and
also the weapons industry has has actively worked on, also
(12:32):
happened to work on the Planet of the Apes franchise. Uh,
and So in particular, in the last decade alone, there's
been two big reports that are public and have been
written about this. The first was in two thousand three
and it was the U. S. Air Forces Transformation Flight Plan.
And then in two thousand two that RAND Corporation again, uh,
they wrote a report called Space Weapons Earth Wars, which
(12:53):
were probably gonna reference a lot in this because we
read it for the podcast. Um and I'll link to
some of these resources on the landing page of this episode,
at least the ones that are easily accessed by everyone.
So this is a concept that people are taking seriously.
They're they're doing the math, they're doing the science. They're
trying to figure out can we drop these telephone polls
on our enemies and destroy them without irradiating them. And
(13:17):
there's one other benefit to this too. The other benefit
is that weapons like this wouldn't technically violate the nineteen
seventy two Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. So if you put
them up and you were dropping them in the way
that we're we've described, I think you could you know,
work your way around that. Now, I want to point
out that just just as this relates nicely to dropping
(13:39):
pennies off the mentire state building. There have been a
number of missile weapons that achieve the same ends, though
in a smaller scale. You know, make a payload go up,
bring it back down. Uh As for achieving enough altitude
that the descent speed weaponizes the payload, well, we have
a couple of interesting examples from the twentieth century. Um
in World War One that you saw air dropped fletchets,
(14:03):
which were essentially just look like metal arrowheads that were
dropped out the same ideas. So you dropped them from
an airplane, they can achieve enough velocity to do some
damage when they hit. Those are the things that the
X Men archangel shoots out of his wings. Yet yeah,
I feel like they flashettes show up his um as
immunition and the sci fi properties as well, Like I
(14:26):
think Gibson deployed them. Roment idea of using them as
kinnecticut like railguns or something like that is popular because
again the ideas of it's moving fast enough, there's enough
kinetic energy you don't need explosive energy. Additionally, there's something
called lazy dog bombs, and these are developed in World
War Two and deployed in Vietna and Vietnamic Korean wars,
(14:46):
sometimes called buzz bombs, sometimes called lawn darts, because essentially
that's what you're talking about, a bunch of small, unguided
kinetic projectiles. They're not technically bombs. Often they're dropped in clusters,
sometimes for a mounted casings underneath the wing of an airplane,
other other times supposedly just hurled out in a bucket,
you know, very very loose, very Hey, we're up here
(15:09):
just by virtue of being in the air at a
certain altitude, we have the kinetic advantage by throwing these
things out. So the idea itself pretty simple. But when
you take it up, when you take it up to
an orbital level, that's where you get some real, essentially
cosmic destructive possibilities. Yeah, and so this kind of reminds me,
(15:30):
I know, this is like an actual explosive munition, at
least as my understanding. But around the time of the
beginning of the war in Iraq, Uh, there was a
lot of attention being paid to the Daisy Cutter. Do
you remember that it was a specific kind of like
bunker buster type weapon, uh. And I think the attraction
was that, like it was so incredibly powerful that it
(15:52):
could defeat our enemies, and yet it wasn't as horrific
as like the nuclear bomb right in off exactly, yeah,
shocking off. So I think this is the same sort
of principle, although it's kinnectic and not explosive. UM and
I do want to take a second here too as
an aside. These are different from what you may have
(16:14):
heard about in the news lately, being referred to as
anti ship ballistic missiles or a s b M. S UM.
These have been They were something that the US actually
tested in the nineteen sixties and had two successful flights
with the Soviet Union developed them in the past, but
more recently, in January of two thousand and fourteen, China
conducted a test of a hypersonic glide vehicle that was
(16:37):
designed to carry missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers. UH.
This thing flies at mock ten. It isn't the first
time that they've developed an a s b M, but
it's thought to be like the stage, the second stage
of their program essentially, UH and the idea is that
it's very similar to this. It launches an I C
b M up into outer space and then sends that
(16:58):
back down at mock ten, so there's no satellite up there.
It just launches it up and brings it back down.
And the ideas that one of these things would hit
an aircraft carrier and just completely take it out, and
that uh they move. I think the idea here is
like that they move so quickly, uh faster than actually
like traditional munitions, that they're difficult for anti air defenses
(17:21):
to take down. So there's some concern about that. But
this is not the same not the same thing. Okay, alright,
well we're gonna take a quick break and when we
come back, we're going to get into the feasibility of
rods from God's and this is where it gets a
little more fun and ultimately where everything falls apart. All right,
(17:45):
we're back, Yeah, so let's talk about how feasible rods
from God actually are. It's nice a bunch of guys
sitting around in a room smoking cigars, talking about sci
fi ideas on how they could kill each other. Then
let's get down to the nuts and bolts of this thing.
So first of all, uh, there's some scientific reasons why
it wouldn't work. Uh. One is vaporization. So the thing
(18:07):
that that we see with with meteorites. Yeah. Uh so
even a giant tungsten rod would probably vaporize on impact. Um.
There's been some ideas that, like you could attach to
retro rockets to each one of the rods that would
slow their re entry slightly, but some the calculations basically
(18:28):
say that if you did that, the non explosive rod
would then be no more effective than the commit conventional
munitions that we already have it And you're kind of
betraying the spirit of the thing, right, because the whole
idea is I have all this technology and I can
use it to destroy up drop a big chunk of
metal lining. If we're putting rockets on that, then we're
kind of getting back into the area of just creating
(18:49):
a space missile. Yeah, and it's going to be more
expensive to which is another drawback that the physics just
wouldn't work. High velocity impact would limit the actual penetration depth.
So remember, like you know, part of the idea behind
this is to bust bunkers, right to get those underground
uh headquarters, I guess that are usually unreachable. If you
(19:11):
look at high speed photography of a bullet impacting steel
at one kilometer a second. And remember, to achieve the
rod from god uh impact, you have to hit three
kilometers per second, but just at one kilometer a second,
Apparently the jacket fragments right off of the bullet and
leaves a small crater on the on the steel that
(19:34):
it strikes. So the idea here is that like there
would be probably a similar effect on a larger scale
that the rods would chatter vaporized. They might leave a
little bit of a crater, but for the most part,
it wouldn't have the explosive impact that they're looking for.
In fact, the Sandy A Laboratory, which I didn't know
about until doing this research, it's a national security nuclear
(19:54):
weapons testing facility. They've actually confirmed predictions about this UH
looking that at that even the hardest materials will max
out their penetration capabilities at one kilometer per second. So
you go any faster than that, the tip of the
rod will probably liquefy. Uh. It will cause the penetration
depth to fall off, and then you get this situation
(20:16):
where even if they're delivered from low altitudes, they would
only deliver one ninth of the destructive energy per gram force.
As a conventional bomb. So again, what's the point of
that where we're totally losing the spirit of our beautiful,
uh death dealing device exactly. Yeah, And also keep in
(20:36):
mind too that even if the entire rod doesn't vaporize,
the tip would probably deform or something like that, which
would change their flight path considerably and you end up
striking a nearby town or something rather than the bunker
that you're trying to strike. Yeah, because each rod would
need to follow eight percies nearly vertical flight path they
wanted to reach its target. Again, assuming you don't have
(20:57):
any kind of thrusters on there that are turning into
a missile more of a guided missile anyway. So I
mean it's difficult enough to figure this out without factoring
in a rod it's partially disintegrated or warped due to
all this re entry friction. Yeah, and so this is
the thing like for me, like again, not knowing a
lot about material science, I'm wondering why tungsten is the
metal that they chose for the proposal, given that it's
(21:20):
flammable and it's you know, going to be just on
re entry alone, probably gonna catch on fire. So I'm
not quite sure, there must be a reason, though, I
would think, or maybe maybe it's literally just like a
sci fi novel pitch and just in with it. Uh So,
Actually to get to the you know, the the actual
proposal in that Rand Corporation Space Weapons, Earth Wars, the
(21:45):
authors suggest that one way that they could address this
is by quote extruding material through pores in the nose
tip of the rod for evaporation. Another option, they pitch
is abletative cooling, where the outer layer would be designed
to melt away on purpose. But again, then you get
that thing where the nose potentially deforms, and then you know,
(22:05):
it's just completely unpredictable where this thing is going to hit. Yeah,
you again, we just see it at time and time again. Here,
with just the basic physical design, it sounds like it'll
be a simple, yeah, procedure, a simple design. But even
then you have to tweak it. It's like, all right,
we gotta put thrusts on it. It needs the tip
needs to use and it needs to be reflective, and
and what what next? It needs to crew. All this
(22:27):
stuff essentially makes it untenable. Not to mention that there's
something called the absentee ratio for the satellites that are
circling around in orbit carrying all these rods. So because
satellites circled the planet every one dred minutes, they won't
always be in position to hit their target. So yeah,
I remember that whole thing, like, oh, yeah, you just
(22:48):
call it from the ground fifteen minutes later boom, right,
But no other side of the exactly, You've got to
wait for it to actually be in position to hit
the target. And satellites as we have them right now
can't really change their speeds that easily or maneuver around
in orbit because there's no atmosphere, so they might not
even work because of this. And then you know, there's
(23:10):
also the whole idea of like if you're up in
orbit again, like you have to break the atmosphere for
re entry, so you need some kind of thrust too. Yeah,
that's one thing that's important to keep in mind is that, yes,
you have to use all of this energy and effort
to get something into orbit, but then you also have
to use energy and effort to get it out of
orbit um at least to get it out of orbit
(23:31):
along the timeline that you're looking at to weaponize the thing. Yeah,
and the satellites as well. Here's another like the whole
reason why this isn't feasible, the satellites would probably be
vulnerable to ground based attacks. Right, So let's say, uh,
China puts one of these up in the in the
(23:52):
in orbit and it's floating around there. We're going to
be able to detect that and we'll probably be able
to shoot it down. Yeah. Yeah, we've been able to
bust satellites for a while, so that's yeah, that's not
even an issue. So then to improve efficiency there, they'd
have to launch even more satellites, which costs even more money.
And these things are not cheap but crazy expensive. So okay,
how expensive is it? So we know from NASA that
(24:16):
it costs ten thousand dollars per pound to put something
into orbit, no matter what the object is. Right, So
somebody actually broke down the math and I brought it
here for us today. If one of these rods weighed
point one tons and there were three tons of propellant
(24:36):
on it to stop its orbital motion, basically to give
it the thrust to get through, because that the wise,
it's just going to continue to orbit. H That means
that launching one rod would cost thirty million dollars and
you need at least ten rods per satellite. So this
is just insanely expensive. Uh. And like we said, there's
(24:58):
just you know, a lot of feasibility shoes science wise,
strategic wise, and then it's just incredibly expensive. Yeah, cost
a ton of money. And you're you're ultimately going to
have to do so many things too. You're gonna have
to turn that rod into a into a guided missile
anyway to make it work. So why I just use
a guided missile? Yeah, absolutely, And that's one of the
(25:18):
proposed solutions, right to just use an I C d
M instead. Yeah, And ultimately it goes all the way
back to that nineteen fifties rand proposal. So the idea
there was that they would attach the rods to uh
intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are the I C b M
s that you know, only a few nations actually have
access to that launched missiles around the world. The downside
(25:41):
is that these could be detected a lot easier. So
I was saying earlier about how like the kinetic drop
makes it so that they're so fast that they can
it's a lot harder for them to be detected by
anti air defenses. Um. But so here's some more math
for you to get the one kilometer per second speed
that would be needed an acceleration of thirty times that
(26:02):
of gravity. So this is something that a nominal solid
rocket motor could probably provide. It would take three point
three seconds over a distance of one point six five kilometers.
So that actually doesn't sound like all that much, right,
especially compared to what we've just been talking about with
dropping these telephone polls. But this would only cost us
a hundred thousand dollars or less, plus the cost of
(26:25):
a terminal guidance system. I don't know how much of
those run for nowadays, where it's like an iPhone, Yeah,
I think it's as the next box one. Yeah, uh
so it's cheaper, sounds like it would probably work better.
I think the disadvantages the speed factor, and and then
also that it's not coming downward exactly, it's coming at
an angle, right, so that possibly would lead to less penetration.
(26:48):
I'm not quite sure. Um. But the other proposal from
that space weapons Earth wars proposal, I would love to
just be a fly on the wall for the writing
process of that, Like the people sitting around just putting
that together for the RAM Corporation, there's no bad ideas
in brainstorming space weapon. So their ideas to try conventional
(27:12):
ordinance that delivered from space, so basically just space bombing
space rockets. Um. So the idea here is that they
would have the direct destructive force, but it would be
outward instead of downward like I was talking about earlier.
They'd be slower, but they wouldn't erod uh. And they
would require explosives in fusings. And here's the problem with
that that they'd have to survive the impact, right, but
(27:34):
then they'd also have to be able to determine their
depth penetration before they exploded. Getting back to that bunker
busting exactly. Yeah, the ideas that these got to drill underground,
so and again they're more susceptible to terminal defenses than
kinetic weapons would be. So when you put it all together,
Rods from the Gods, Operation thor whatever you want to
(27:57):
want to call it, kinetic strike force, raw, kinetic strike force,
rod bundles, Uh, it just doesn't make a lot of sense,
but it's such a captivating idea. And again I think
it comes down to just the idea that technology, our
technological advancement could be such, our power could be such
that it would be akin to having a slingshot, Like, right,
(28:18):
the the slingshot is the technology. The thing that goes
in the sling shot needs to be nothing more than
a pebble. Yeah, absolutely, I think. I think the attraction
here is like we're just harnessing the physics of the
universe essentially, right when having to build the specific devices
designed to kill I mean it is, but but you
know what I mean, Like you could put other things
(28:39):
up there too and drop them and they would kill
people as well. It's just they wouldn't be able to
do it with precision and range. Yeah, I mean statues
of Walt Disney, um, you name it, giant oscars, I
guess something of statutes for some reason, just lots of statues.
A statue of Lenin, a statue of Darth Vader. There's
something kind of nicely space opera about that. I can
imagine being the merciful Us using rods from God and
(29:02):
each rod is just a statue of me. Well, I'm
glad that you brought that up, actually, because this idea,
having come from a sci fi writer, has actually worked
its way into a lot of our popular fiction. UM
two I can think of. I first heard about this
reading the War and Ellis comic Global Frequency, which was
adapted into a television show. So he had clearly read
(29:23):
about it somewhere, and UH decided to incorporate it as
like a I think a terrorist group had access to
one of these. The other one I believe the second
G I. Joe Live Action movie, the premise was that
they were going to use kinetic weapons. I saw that
on the airplane going to or from China, so it's
pretty distracted at the time. Yeah, but yeah, there was
(29:45):
some sort of rods from God, I think, so yeah, yeah,
and I'm sure there's others. Joe brought up something he
I was talking to him about this before we went
to the studio, and he said that he thinks that
in the Mass Effect games and universe that there's like
a similar netic velocity kind of idea behind UM A
lot of the weapons, not just like ship to ship weapons,
(30:06):
but also the like guns that weapons. I think, so yeah, yeah,
So you know, the idea is really cool. It's fun
for stories, but it doesn't really it doesn't seem like
it's gonna work until we spend a couple more than
a couple million dollars to put these things in outer
space and then drop them and see what happens. All right,
(30:28):
So there you have it, rods from God. Uh, you know,
we get a little time here. Let's call over the
robot and see if we have a little listener mail.
Who in the robot is founding a little more satanic
than usually? It? Is it Carney or Arnie at this time?
I can never remember when he's possessed by the devil.
(30:48):
I don't know it's Carney, but with sixes in there,
somehow he felt it really weird. But yes, it looks
like we have. We've received a couple of new listener
mails regarding our Satanic Pack episode, which was the first
episode that we did together. Yeah. Yeah, this one comes
to us from Katie. Katie writes, and he says, so,
first off, id Or your podcast discovered it a few
(31:08):
months back, and it's been my been a wave to
keep my mind from um atrifying at my mind numbingly
boring job as an overnight grocery stalker. I listened to
the new episodes as they come out and have been
slowly working my way back through the rest of them.
My co worker hates me because I always stopped midway
through the work, take my earphones out, and insist on
educating him on topics he has absolutely no interest in. Luckily,
(31:30):
family members and roommates are much more accepting of my
need to tell people of my newfound knowledge. So Katie
goes on to mention that she just listened to the
Satanic Panic episode and uh, and she shares some some
personal family stuff here, uh, which I'm not going to
get into the details here, just because I'm not certain
she would want to share with everyone, and some of
(31:51):
the details are probably a little bit too much for
the the average listener, but she can, she continues in
the email, and say so, Obviously, when I first heard
were that this whole Satanic panic thing was most likely
mass hysteria, I was personally offended by it. I didn't
want to think that someone I cared about could have
had it, could have such a big part of her
life based on something entirely fake. I honestly skimmed the
(32:13):
article that first brought it to my attention, got angry
and closed it and never went back. When I started
your Satanic Panic episode, I had a moment of thinking
I should just skip it once I realized it was
what it was going to be about. But at this point,
you guys had kind of totally won me over, so
I decided to give it a shot. And there was
one line in there, just to throwaway line, where you
guys acknowledge that while they're most likely wasn't some huge
(32:35):
satanic craze in the seventies, that there were still some
people who are suffering horrific abuse. Hearing that kind of
wiped out my whole personal offense at the topic, and
I was able to enjoy an incredibly interesting podcast. I
honestly really like stories about mass hysterias, and this was
definitely an incredibly fascinating one, more so when I could
put aside my personal feelings and consider it in relation
(32:55):
to my story. So thank you Katie for writing in
uh it's yeah. I really appreciate listener mail in general,
but this in particular. You know, thank you Katie for
sharing your personal story with us, but also for letting
us know that you know this is something that you
weren't inclined to want to listen to, but that because
(33:16):
you know you trusted us as hosts. I'm assuming you
went ahead followed us on the journey, and we're happy
that you know, you learned what you did afterwards. Yeah,
And I guess I have two thoughts on all time.
And first of all, and that's one of the things
that's so fascinating and disturbing about the Satanic Panic scenario
is that there is this pure fantasy and pure fiction
and hit and mass hysteria. But the pain that that
(33:40):
that spiraled out from it, it was it was real. Yeah. Absolutely,
I think I said that during the episode that like,
I may not believe their stories, but I believe that
they believe in them, and that's real enough to them
that it, you know, requires us to be sympathetic as
you know, emotional human beings to the things that happened
(34:02):
to them. Uh. And and also I think it's important,
you know, we tried to do this with every episode
and with whatever we're talking about, whether it's Satanic panic
or dropping giant metal telephone polls from out of space. Uh,
there's more than one side to every story, right, And
so obviously, like you have to keep that in mind.
You want to also be open to the possibilities of whatever,
(34:23):
you know, somebody else's perspective, whether it's subjective or not.
And in the Satanic Panic situation, there were hundreds of incidents.
So we're never gonna know all the stories, you know,
We're never gonna know that how things all matched up
with one another. But you know, by and large, I
think we we covered the the hysteria part, the mass
(34:45):
media part of it fairly well. Yeah. And I also
like how Katie talked about how when we first heard
about the mass hysteria aspect of about Satanic Panic, that
she was offended, that she was turned off, and then
she but she knew coming back to it. And I
always think about that a lot when I when we're
engaging with listeners, particularly on social media, because there's always
(35:07):
gonna be somebody who who has a reaction to some
sort of article or study or material, and they're kind
of defensive about it, and maybe they're, you know, they're
they're a little up in arms. And I often think
back to times in my own life where I've come
across some new way of looking at the world, and
a lot of times there is this gut reaction. There's
something that challenges your personal history, challenges your ideology, and
(35:30):
there's a the reflex is to put the guards up,
and it takes some time sometimes to come back around
and open yourself up to this idea and put it
put yourself in a and really in a state of
open minded vulnerability to uh, to consider it. I think
that that gets down to the ethos of this show
(35:52):
overall for Joe, Robert and I is that, like the
overall quality that I'm shooting for with every episode is
that we're trying to connect to that one of looking
at the world and going, oh wow, I didn't know that,
you know, uh, and and then thinking about the thing
that you go oh wow at and kind of criticizing it, like, yeah,
oh wow, it would be really cool if you could
drop metal from outer space and destroy your enemies, right,
(36:14):
Like that's like a like a thing that it like
five year old does in the sandbox, like playing with
their toys. Right. But at the same time, like you
kind of step back and you look at the science
of it and you go, huh, well, that's a wonderful idea,
probably not feasible, probably doesn't work, but look at our
human imagination work working at this, or look at the
wonder of science that we could even begin thinking about it.
(36:36):
All right, well, what is that? What does the robot
have to looks like? It looks like he has another one.
Another one's coming out here? Hold on. Uh, this is
from Hannah and she writes in to let us know
that she's a long time listener and that she had
some thoughts that she would also like to share on
the Satanic Panic episode. Uh. It turns out that she
I'm going to read this uh verbatim. The first is
(36:57):
in response to your Satanic Panic episode. Robert and Christian
mentioned how some teenagers may have explored Satanism to shock
the authority figures in their life and find a sense
of individualism, and it reminded me of a song by
folk rock band The Mountain Goats. I'm vaguely familiar with
the Mountain Goats. I don't listen to them a lot,
but yeah, yeah, I have some friends with a real
(37:18):
big fans. Uh. So they have a song apparently that's
called the best ever death metal band in Denton. I
like the Tyble, and we're gonna have to listen to
It tells the story of childhood friends Jeff and Cyrus
and how their dream of becoming a famous death metal
band was dashed by the adults in their lives, but
all hope is not lost, says Hannah. The song ends
by saying, quote, the best ever death metal band out
(37:40):
of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you,
followed by a couple of rousing hail Satan's. In this
the hail Satan's are not so much an actual hailing
of Satan's but more of a to the people that
told them too. I kind of like that idea. Um,
I guess I'll add on to this Hannah that I'm
a big fan of the band Ghost, which is a
(38:04):
they're associated with metal, but I think they're more kind
of like a hard rock band. But the premise behind
the band is that they're supposedly uh Satanists, uh and all.
The leader of the band is a guy called Papa
Emeritus who dresses up like an anti pope with like
an upside down cross. And I've seen plenty of pictures. Yeah,
(38:24):
I mean, so it's all theatrical. It's all ridiculous. The
lyrics to the songs are supposedly about summoning Satan and
you know, worshiping him and all these things. Honestly, it's
it's it's a big circus performance. That's what I love
out of it. I love the theatricality and it's that
appeals to me. Um So I can see why this
(38:45):
song would kind of do the same thing. It sounds
to me like this Mountain Goats song might be about
a proto version of ghost Nice. All right, Well, there
you have it. Hey, you want to reach out to us,
you want to see what we're up to, you want
to explore some of these past episodes, see what's coming up.
Head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the
podcast episodes, all the videos, Various blog posts links out
(39:07):
to these social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter where
blow the mind on both of those, and tumbler where
we're stuff to blow your Mind. Yeah, and don't forget,
We're gonna be on periscope every Friday at noon, uh
and you can interact with us directly on their last time,
people were able to ask us questions right through the app,
and we were able to talk right back to them,
talk about things like melt movies. Some people give us
(39:27):
suggestions for new episodes, like a one on strange weather,
which sounded like it would be kind of fun to me.
Uh and uh, you know you can listen to us
talk about our favorite horror movies. Uh, and maybe even
some horror literature as well. Things that we you know,
we probably talked about casually on the show, but aren't
usually the themes of the show. Yeah, and hey, maybe
(39:48):
one of these days we'll spend the periscope session for
Joe to find, like cook those that use that recipe
for cookies that he found. Yeah, great, dude, cook He's
especially we can give that spice. So one last thing, though,
if you want to write into us directly, like the
listener mail that we just read out loud, you can
(40:10):
always send us an email at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
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