strike what we ask former nasa astronaut asked a physicist and space and children or. as our world becomes more familiar with what's beyond planet earth the potential dangers of space are becoming more apparent with the threat of asteroids able to wipe out entire civilizations scarily close to our atmosphere so can we count of these dangers before it's too late is humanity's existence simply a game of chance or is it in their own hands to define and protect. add lou physicists former astronaut c o b six twelve foundation welcome to the show it's really great to have you with us thank you very much for having me on now of your foundation says there's around half a million asteroids and planet earth neighborhood as big as the one that struck. in one thousand no weight which flattened two thousand square kilometers of forest on

impact i mean i've heard warnings and massive spacewalk could reach us by october twenty seventeen so how big does an asteroid have to be to flatten a city well the one that we saw and. in one thousand know it was only about forty meters across and it was more than enough to destroy a large city so as you said it flattened two thousand square kilometers and it was no larger than a small building but to tell us something what is more deadly about a meteor hitting earth its initial impact or it triggering tsunamis and earthquakes . well the danger from an asteroid all depends upon the size and obviously where it hits so the bigger ones can cause more damage the smaller ones such as we saw in chelyabinsk just a few years ago exploded in the air and it was the shockwave the did the damage so it the answer to your question really depends upon the size they once can cause tsunamis big ones can cause massive destruction small ones it's more like the

explosion of a nuclear weapon in character so yes but it can cost tsunamis and earthquakes. yes you can for very large asteroids get tsunamis earthquakes obviously if you hit in the ocean but you can get plenty of damage from smaller asteroids just due to the the shockwave from the explosion you know a huge asteroid flew by earth in april but does an asteroid even have to hit earth to wreak havoc say hits to moon or just passes by a couple of kilometers away well in most cases to really do a lot of damage on earth you actually have to hit the earth hit the earth or its atmosphere so the ones that miss us well you know it's just a no show you can watch me go by so those that miss us can't do us any harm is that we're saying yeah really pretty much has to hit the earth to do harm the problem of

course is that you have to know if you want to do something about it you have to know which ones are going to hit the earth and that's the real issue finding them and tracking them and knowing which ones are going to hit long before they hit well we're going to get to that but before. your foundation is preparing to send a telescope to orbit the sun to detect dangerous things coming towards earth but space agencies like not sell already have projects which monitor space objects so why do you need your own private project to do this is nasa has program not enough . no the programs done by ness and other telescopes are around the world are fantastic and they are presently aiming to their next goal is to find the asteroids larger than one hundred meters that could hit the earth now one hundred metre asteroid would destroy a small country it's quite large these surveys these telescopes will not do as well for asteroids smaller than that however as we just mentioned a forty meter asteroid is enough to destroy

a very large city so there are going to be a lot of esther as effect the great majority of estrades that could do damage on earth are actually smaller than one hundred meters and would not be found by these current surveys or these these planned surveys so our goal at b six twelve foundation is to figure out technology to find and track these smaller asteroids right now you know i say a joke about how asteroids are nature's way of stimulating a nation space program but saying out here doing this on your own it seems like the threat of asteroid isn't stimulating enough well no there is i disagree less of it because the space agencies of the world including this hour are doing a lot they are working to fund astronomers and telescopes to find these larger restaurants as well as the science behind them the science behind how you would deflect such asteroids so you know i look at our work at the six zero foundation as being part of you know our collective space program if you like of human beings on

earth you explained before how crowded the solar system is with asteroids not if there's really so many of them is it even possible to detach all the possible incoming threats. well you know there are a lot of asteroids as you mentioned before that there are you know of of order a million or so s. are as large enough to destroy a major city out there but space is big so they're spread over a few and far between so they don't basically don't hit each other very much at all but as you are correct that makes it a challenge to find them because they are you know like the side as i mentioned before the size that could be dangerous could be as small as a building and if you put that millions of miles away from the earth it can be quite difficult to detect and that's what we're all working towards is finding and tracking them but it is possible to say an asteroid is detected and we know it's had it towards earth and it's huge and will destroy the planet if it hits now you're saying we can stop it with spacecraft sent to their rock from its past so it

misses our planet so this kind of spacecraft already developed. first off we should we have to talk about the size of the asteroid first if it's something that's going to be enough to say kill off everyone on earth then it's going to be quite large this is not the building size thing but more of a kilometer or larger size asteroid ok. and you can bump them with an asteroid with a spacecraft to nudge them slightly but you have to do it early decades before they hit and you may need to do it multiple times so that's one technique it's called the kinetic impact you just run into the asteroid with a small spacecraft but such technology does exist we've run into a comet before using such a technique we rammed a comet in two thousand and five and there is even a mission currently being planned between the european space agency and nasa to test this technology on small asteroid so how much time would space agencies need

to prepare and launch an asteroid deterring spacecraft into orbit even small space missions take years of approval yes and if you were actually to have a good chance of deflecting an asteroid successfully you really want five to ten years at a bare minimum you really want more than that if you can in fact the earlier you do such a thing the easier the deflection is which makes sense right the further away the thing is from hitting you the less you need to change its trajectory to make it miss the earth so anyway we can't be sure that it gets the job done. the way you do you guarantee that in esther a deflection mission a successful is that you you you fly multiple spacecraft as backups you know we do this in we have spec up systems for aircraft for spacecraft and things like that and you can think of multiple missions as being backups to each other so if it's really super critical you know and you're building

a spacecraft to deflect it why not launch two or three. so you know most of the guests who come to this program talk about politics is what we're talking about is it something world powers are taking seriously i mean they can't even cooperate and decide things on earth do you expect states to stop the threats from outer space if in some sense threats from outer space are perhaps easier to agree upon than threats. do it from one country to another on earth because. you know it's not an enemy if you'd like that is thinking or whatever it's a natural thing ok can some sense be all of our something that we can all rally around and do something about the hard part is deciding which ones are are are worthy of being deflected which ones need to be deflected that's going to be the hard part in deciding but i think if we knew for sure that a large asteroid was going to hit the earth we'd come together and do something about it so i want to ask you about trajectory can scientists really discover the

asteroids exact trajectory i mean can't something change at the last minute like if an asteroid hits another object in space. yes true a trajectories can be measured very precisely now you need to measure asteroids jittery extremely precise if you want to know if it's going to hit the earth you know ten twenty thirty forty fifty years from now but it is possible. and changes in their trajectories are incredibly rare but there are things which can be predicted so for example when when. the european space agency or or the roscoe's most sends a probe to mars or jupiter or venus you know that shows that you can years ahead of time predict the motion of planetary bodies and we can do. that as we mentioned a couple of years ago a meteor hit their russian city of she had been scanned it came as a surprise now another asteroid slipped past virus closer than our weather

satellites and it was only detected hours before it flew back why are some asteroids passing so close to earth and detect it well the reason is that we have yet to discover the great majority of asteroids. if we take for instance the size large enough to destroy a city say forty meters or so of the million or so asteroids out there we have discovered perhaps a percent or so of that ten thousand of those perhaps so in other words that means that ninety nine percent of them are undiscovered so you should expect that the great majority of asteroids which come very close to the earth. to come as a surprise if you like as of right now which explains why we have b six twelve foundation are working on trying to detect it so but with today's cap abilities how far in advance can an asteroid be detected if you've discovered it already we believe that it should be yeah we believe that with.

the technology the work we're working on it will be possible to detect these smaller asteroids. again with decades of warning and to measure the trajectories accurate enough that you would know which one of these if any are our dangers for it and we're going to take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking with lou former nasa astronaut physicist to talk about all kinds of space threats to live on stage.

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and we're back with add lou physicist astronaut who is now working on protecting our strawman asteroid threat talking about the dangers that lurk around our planet what can we do about them welcome back at so apart from being capable of destroying our planet asteroids could also be useful some of them are rich in natural resources and precious minerals there's already comedies out there who have space mining plans how long before we can buy asteroid gold oh that's a good question i wish i knew the answer to that. i suspect it will be sometime i suspect that the first use is a restaurant resources what actually be. for water which is the can be turned into rocket fuel hydrogen and oxygen will be used in space rather than shipping things like metals back to earth so is there are natural ways to go around or world power

is going to find themselves in a battle for the ones richest in resources. well there are an awful lot of asteroids out there in all sorts of varying orbits so i do think there is an enormous amount of resources out there and if you think about it you know as as you mentioned asteroids are both a threat. and an opportunity right in what's the first thing you do when you have a brand new frontier that you want to take advantage of or you map it right and so the most important thing for both. uses use cases is to find and track these things know where they are and that's again what our principal goal is at the moment to to build a comprehensive method locations and trajectories of these esther here's another saying that we hear a lot about scientists warn off the danger of a massive sollars storm to our planet one that can cause

a major power outage how big of an impact are we talking about i mean power stations nuclear reactor satellites the i.s.a.'s is that all going to go haywire. no i mean people have been aware of this danger for quite a long time and we've had very large solar flares. that have caused things like power outages and have disrupted satellite communications and so on so it's something that everyone's aware of and we try to build systems to be robust to it but you know that's not to say that a very large event can be very disruptive but it's to impact temporary are a short life you know we're talking about a short term blackout and how big of an area kennedy impact well it again all depends upon the size of the solar event so you know you can have temporary power outages but those again can be really disruptive if you lose power for twelve hours that you know that's a lot of people that can be affected so if there's

a power outage and if then if an event powerful enough causes that outage what are people going to feel when it hits. you don't feel anything yourself but except for the fact that your lights go off and that's pretty disruptive right i mean you're my everything is powered by electricity leaving your house and your daily life was right because either our i've heard we're not on everything from the even the few in your destination but i would warnings about millions of us that may occur if a solar storm hits our they're all going to be caused by radiation isn't they aren't already out there layer supposed to protect us from this i have never heard any. report like that so i've not sure that i believe it but again you know the kinds of damages you tar we're talking about can be very very big you know especially from an economic standpoint so for instance you know if you lose electricity widespread for some period of time you know things like water treatment

plants are run by electricity things like the gasoline pumps that the guest ation are into you know so if you don't get power back on and soon you know then there's going to be some serious serious disruptions to daily life you know there's also a theory that solar activity has a direct effect on human societies and it makes everyone go mad start revolutions wars what do you make of it is that a danger. that sounds pretty far fetched to me scientists are constantly monitoring the sounds activities so once you see the sun acting all weird and moody how much time do you have before all this ions to reach earth. or these sorts of things happen all the time there are solar storms all the time that they called space weather because it's akin to saying you know a do we have weather here on earth yes we do you know it's always changing so people monitor it for that reason so you know we. you can see

what are called active regions on the sun these of areas with sunspots and increased activity you can see them as the sun rotates around and you know when these things are becoming active and you can they can prepare things like satellites and. power networks to handle it but how can we were lying on predictions about sol or storms when scientists can't even predict earthquakes accurately well earthquakes are a totally different thing but you in general have some time when you're when there isn't because the light from a large solar flare reaches us within eight minutes when it from the sun whereas the radiation the particles the part that would cause a disruption in the earth's magnetic field that can take hours longer so there is some time that you get some warning time that you get you know we're protected against sol or storms by our natural magnetic field but now it's failing because it

is realigning but isn't that the normal it all happened before right and humans were fine somehow yeah i don't i don't know about the dangers that you're speaking about because i've never heard any such things know anything credible now the earth's magnetic field as you say does occasionally switch its polarity if the north becomes the south pole and back and forth and that's the natural process that has been going on for millions of years so what have you heard of gamma ray bursts because people say they're one of the most dangerous things in a universe they can emit more energy in one burst and this sun can ever in its lifetime if outline it gets in the way of something like that life on earth will be over and we're completely powerless against such thing. as you are correct are extraordinarily bright things. but there's never been one anywheres. near our galaxy since we have been around to observe it. so these things primarily

happen very very extraordinarily large distances from our galaxy so they're very very far away in general so there's no threat to our planet it's not something i spend a lot of time worrying about and say again so there's no threat to our planet it's not something i worry about no. you know the saying something is no threat doesn't mean that there isn't some possibility of it but again this is a tiny possibility now we're talking a lot about the dangers only to our planet but is there anything threatening the whole universe i mean scientists have been warning of an event like the vacuum decay for example is the universe in danger of self destruction. that's pretty speculative the. it's not that it's not something that anyone takes that seriously i would say really so all the scientists all this works.

using there are just about nothing. there's a lot of speculative things that go on in science and i think that's a good thing but you have to keep in mind. that the probability of these things is extraordinarily low this is very different than say for instance asteroid impacts which we see happen right just a few years ago we watched you know what asteroid impact those things happen on a fairly regular basis that's completely different than things like you know hypothetical things like back and forth duration space debris like old satellites is clearing there are so orbit and it's threatening space ships like the i assess it could mess with takeoff trajectories etc why it can't all be just shot down from the sky. the space debris that you talk about is leftover junk from all of the you know pieces that broken off of rockets or satellites you know the many thousands of

satellites that we human beings have place in orbit as you are correctly point out they do hit on occasion other satellites and for instance the i assess. but most of these pieces we're talking about a very small you know we're talking about things like this you know just very small pieces and so. getting them out of space is something that we don't have any good idea how we do right now right now the best thing you can do is to track them accurately and know what if something's going to hit you and move your spacecraft so is everyone at the moment just sort of dumping their stuff in space like whatever because it's space and it's got room how do you make space faring nations clean up after themselves well that's a process that's already happening there are international agreements for what's called best practices in space not you know if you have a satellite that is about to go dead you don't leave it in an orbit where it could were once it dies where it could get hit by something you do your bit on purpose or

you put it into a higher parking orbit so these agreements are. have been made over the last several years and they're going to make a difference i think so not sa has said that finding a new earth is not a matter of if but when and sever an oath like planets are orbiting a star nasa says they might have life on them but you know there are forty light years away and that's like thousands of actual human ears so seeing how we won't be able to fly there in our lifetime why all this excitement. idea that there might be life elsewhere in the universe is incredibly exciting because that means that we're not unique unique here on earth and i think that would be the discovery of life somewhere else in the universe would be among the most important discoveries ever made by a human being space that again we don't know there are as you say planets that

could support life but that's all we know space x. is saying it will send a couple of tourists to the moon next year company space vehicles are already preparing to have to s.s. under a contract with nasa is private space exploration finally becoming a reality absolutely these private companies are driving a lot of progress in space exploration and i think we've only seen the very beginnings of it i think the next ten years are going to be quite exciting so you as an awesome not you've spent time on ward of the international space station you've flown inside a space shuttle is it an experience that should be available to all i would love for more people to have that experience know the experience as i did it which is you know required years of training is different than what it's going to have to become for it to become much more widespread so i think that process is going to happen in the same way that modern airline travel doesn't require you to be

a pilot no right you buy a ticket and you find someplace right and that has changed life on earth for the better i think but the first space tourist dennis tito didn't take his spaceflight too well despite all the training he recalled feeling sick during the trip can you make space travel confortable or has it become more confortable over the years. well i think you have to accept that certain things are not as comfortable as sitting on your couch and eating potato chips or watching t.v. right you know if you want to do certain things you have to accept for know a certain level of discomfort you know if you want to travel overseas even you may you have to take an overnight flight if you want to go to mt you know go to visit base camp among everest it's cold you know so i think that's ok. all right at thank you very much for this interesting inside good luck with everything we were talking to add blue former spacewalking astronauts now see being six twelve foundation

dedicated to defending earth from threats from outer space talking about real dangers to life on the planet as well as the ones that are more far fetched that's it for this edition of next. very much. for many particularly his critics a trumpet ministration is nothing less than chaos on steroids for some who know the

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