Speaker 1: Imagine this for a second. You're looking up at the
deepest night sky, completely dark, and then suddenly there's this
this searing point of light. It gets brighter, much brighter
than the sun itself. But it's definitely not a star, No,
it's not. It's a rock, maybe the size of a
football stadium, and it's just tearing through our atmosphere, moving
at something like sixty times the speed of sound.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the speeds are just incredible.
Speaker 1: And what we found looking at the sources for this
deep dive is that scenario, even with a moderately sized
object like that, it translates instantly into the energy equivalent
of four thousand Hiroshima bombs all going off at one
four thousand.
Speaker 2: It's hard to even picture that's enough kinetic energy localized
to just flatten major cities, wipe out millions of people
in an instant.
Speaker 1: And the scary part, the really key thing here is
that this isn't just some grim theoretical exerciser, not at all.
Speaker 2: We are right now living in what you could call
a cosmic shooting gallery. And the tension, the urgency it
comes from understanding how often we nearly get hit by
these things, objects big enough to cause, you know, regional disasters,
I just don't see them coming often, not until the
very last minute.
Speaker 1: Those near misses, they really hammer home why we need
to talk about this. You don't even have to look
far back. Remember asteroid Okay, that was twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, that was a close one.
Speaker 1: It was about the size of a thirty story building,
not stadium size, but still huge. And we only spotted
it one day before it zipped past, one single day,
closer than some of our own satellites. And if it
had hit, the energy release would have been like three
thousand Hiroshima bombs.
Speaker 2: It's just staggering. And that wasn't even the last one.
Just last year, twenty twenty three, we had Asteroid MK.
Speaker 1: Even bigger, wasn't it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Larger still, yeah, And we spotted that one just
thirteen days out, thirteen days before it flew past, closer
than the moon orbits us.
Speaker 1: Thirteen days and potential impact that.
Speaker 2: Was calculated at around nine thousand Hiroshima bombs nine thousand,
averted purely by luck by cosmic.
Speaker 1: Chants nine thousand. It just highlights this terrifying vulnerability we have.
I mean, we have pretty good systems right for tracking
the really massive, multi kilometer stuff, the ones that could
end civilization.
Speaker 2: We do for the most part. The big ones, the
planet killers, we generally have a better handle on their
orbits years or decades in advance.
Speaker 1: But these smaller ones, the city killers, the ones maybe
one hundred meters across like that stadium, they're the tricky ones.
They often only get spotted when they're basically, you know,
right in our backyard, days or weeks away.
Speaker 2: And that's when the clock really starts ticking, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that brings us right to the core problem
we need to unpack in this steep dive. Despite these
incredibly close calls, humanity doesn't currently have a reliable, ready
to go plan for that kind of short notice intercept.
Speaker 2: Exactly if we get that two week warning, that critical
heads up, what can we actually do with the technology
we have right now? And maybe more importantly, why do
all the classic solutions, the common sense ideas, why do
they completely fall apart when time is the one thing
we don't.
Speaker 1: Have right So we're diving into the architecture of planetary
defense today, or maybe the terrifying gaps in that architecture Okay,
let's start with those classic ideas, the scientific proposals that
seem well sentible on the surface, the sort of elegant
soft touch approaches, methods designed to just nudge the asteroid
away gently.
Speaker 2: Right, the deflection approach, not destruction, just pushing it slightly
off course.
Speaker 1: What are some of those and why are they basically
useless if we only have say two weeks.
Speaker 2: Well, you've got a few main categories there. They all
focus on applying a really tiny but consistent force over
a long period. There's the kinetic impactor, basically crashing a
spacecraft into it to give it a small push. NASA's
Dart mission was a test of that concept.
Speaker 1: Right, Dart that work. Didn't it change the orbit slightly?
Speaker 2: It did. It was a fantastic proof concept, but it
hit a small moonlet of a larger asteroid. And the
key is they planned that mission for years. They knew
exactly where Dimorphous would be, and even then the change
in its orbital period was measurable but small.
Speaker 1: Okay, So kinetic impactors are one idea. What else?
Speaker 2: Then you get into more nuanced stuff like painting one
side of the asteroid white or.
Speaker 1: Maybe black, painting it. How does that help?
Speaker 2: It uses something called the Arkovski effect. Basically, sunlight heats
the asteroid and as it rotates, it radiates that heat
back out into space. If one side absorbs or radiates
heat differently because you've painted it, that creates a tiny, tiny,
almost imperceptible thrust.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: Clever, it is clever. Or you could land thrusters on it,
small engines to steer it gradually, or even use lasers
maybe station nearby, to scorch one side, causing material to
blast off and create a tiny push similar to the
Arkovski effect, but maybe stronger.
Speaker 1: Okay, So these all sound like very long term, very
low energy strategies, gentle ledges.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what they are, and they all suffer from
what the source material we looked at calls the cargo
ship and potatoes problem.
Speaker 1: To create analogy, actually, cargo ship and potatoes explain that.
Speaker 2: Imagine a massive cargo ship sailing along. That's your asteroid, millions,
maybe billions of tons, moving incredibly fast. Now imagine trying
to change its course by standing on the dog and
throwing bags of potatoes at it.
Speaker 1: Right, each potato has a tiny impact, but against the
momentum of the ship.
Speaker 2: It does basically nothing in the short term. These methods
that painting, the lasers, the small kinetic impactors, they're designed
to impart an incredibly small change in velocity we call
delta V. We're talking millimeters per second, maybe even.
Speaker 1: Less millimeters per second.
Speaker 2: That's tiny, minuscule. But the idea is, if you apply
that tiny push early enough, years or even decades before
the potential impact, that tiny change in speed accumulates over
the vast distances of space.
Speaker 1: Ah I see, so over millions and millions of kilometers,
that millimeters per second difference eventually adds up to missing
the Earth by thousands of kilometers exactly.
Speaker 2: It's all about the accumulation time. But if you only
have two weeks, applying that same tiny force for just
two weeks, well the total miss distance you create might
only be a few hundred meters, maybe a kilometer if
you're lucky.
Speaker 1: So the cargo ship barely even notices the potatoes in
that short timeframe. It's still heading straight for the dock.
Speaker 2: Precisely. All these elegant, gentle solutions, they require patients, They
require lead time that the universe, especially with these smaller
harder to spot objects often just doesn't give us.
Speaker 1: Okay, So nudging is out for the short notice scenario,
which leaves while the brute force option doesn't it. The
one we always see in the movies, the nuclear bomb,
Hollywood favorite. Yeah, just launch a nuke, blow it up. Simple.
Except it's not simple at all, is it? Why does
that fail when you really look at the physics?
Speaker 2: Right, the nuclear option seems obvious, but it's riddled with problems,
especially on a tight deadline. Let's think about the most
direct approach first, just sending a missile with a nuclear
warhead to collide head on with the asteroid. Okay. The
problem is the speed these things could be approaching us
at say seventy thousand kilometers per hour. That is blisteringly fast,
fast enough to cross the Atlantic Ocean at about five minutes.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you launch your messle what happens at impact?
The kinetic energy of that incoming asteroid, just its sheer
mass and velocity, completely overwhelms the warhead structure.
Speaker 1: You mean, the asteroid destroys the bomb before it can
even detonate.
Speaker 2: Exactly the force of that seventy thousand kilometer collision pulverizes
the missile, the casing, the detonation mechanism, everything turns into
useless shrapnel before the nuclear chain reaction can even properly start.
We literally crash our own weapon before it has a
chance to work. The asteroid wins that kinetic battle every time.
Speaker 1: The physics turns our ultimate weapon into basically a fragile
egg hitting a speeding truck. Okay, so direct impact is out.
What about the other movie trope exploding the bomb near
the asteroid to push it like an air burst, but
in space.
Speaker 2: That seems like the logical next step, right, avoid the
direct impact, detonate nearby, use the blast wave to push it.
And scientists have actually modeled the optimal distance for this,
maybe tens of meters above the asteroid surface for the
best deflection effect.
Speaker 1: Okay, sounds plausible, but you're.
Speaker 2: Forgetting where this is happening. It's happening in the vacuum
of space. Ah, no air, No air, And what does
a nuclear explosion need to create that massive, devastating shockwave
we see on Earth?
Speaker 1: Air atmosphere a medium to travel through.
Speaker 2: Precisely on Earth, the explosion rapidly heats and expands the
surrounding air, creating a powerful mechanical wave, the shockwave that
carries immense force. In a vacuum, there's nothing to heat and.
Speaker 1: Expand, So what happens to all that energy from the bomb.
Speaker 2: Most of it just radiates away uselessly as thermal energy,
X rays, gamma rays. It flashes the surface of the
asteroid with intense heat. Sure, some surface material might vaporize
boil off in a space. That's called ablation, and that
ablation does create a tiny push, like a very weak
rocket engine, but it's not enough, nowhere near enough. You
get a dramatic flash, maybe a carbon nice crater on
the surface, but the actual change in the asteroid's trajectory
is minimal. You might deflect it by a few kilometers maybe.
Speaker 1: So still heading for Earth, just slightly off its original path.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like hitting that cargo ship with a washing
machine instead of potatoes. A bit more noticeable, maybe makes
a dent, but ultimately still useless for avoiding the collision
in two weeks.
Speaker 1: Okay, so head on fails, stand off detonation fails. Because
of the vacuum. That seems to leave only one nuclear option,
the really complicated one, the one where they land, drill
a deep hole and bury the bomb inside the asteroid.
Speaker 2: That's the one that method does solve the vacuum problem.
If you detonate the bomb deep inside the asteroid, the
energy isn't radiating into empty space. It's contained by the
rock and ice around it.
Speaker 1: So the asteroid's own mass acts like the air transmitting
the shockwave internally exactly.
Speaker 2: It forces a catastrophic internal disruption. The energy is trapped
and channeled, potentially shattering the object or giving it a
much more significant push.
Speaker 1: But the logistics on a short timeline.
Speaker 2: The logistics are an absolute nightmare. Think about landing anything
on another celestial body. It's incredibly difficult and risky. Even
landing probes on Mars, a planet we've studied for decades.
A place is relatively large and slow moving compared to
an asteroid. The historical failure rate for landings is something
like seventy percent.
Speaker 1: Seventy percent failure rate on Mars are well known neighbor.
And now we're talking about landing not just a probe,
but a crew potentially and a heavy, delicate nuclear.
Speaker 2: Device onto a small, possibly tumbling, fast moving rock that
we only discovered two weeks ago and know almost nothing
about the Chances of successfully landing in that scenario are
astronomically low. It's almost certainly impossible on that timescale.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let's play Devil's advocate. Let's say miracle happens.
They stick the landing. Now they have to drill, and.
Speaker 2: Drilling in microgravity is another huge challenge. Here on Earth,
gravity helps pull the drill down, keeping the bit seated
and allowing you to apply pressure. In microgravity, there's no down.
Speaker 1: So pushing on the drill just pushes the astronauts and
the lander away from the asteroid pretty much.
Speaker 2: You have to anchor yourself somehow, and the drilling process
itself becomes incredibly slow and complex. You simply can't drill
fast enough. You need to get that bomb very deep
to be effective. How deep are we talking depends on
the size and composition, but likely tens, maybe hundreds of meters,
and trying to drill that far in microgravity on an
unknown surface with maybe only days or hours left.
Speaker 1: Time runs out. The clock ticks down before you even
get close to the required depth.
Speaker 2: Exactly the Hollywood solution land drill plant the bomb, it
gets completely choked by the sheer impossibility of the logistics
and the physics of working in microgravity under extreme time pressure.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is getting a bit bleak. Gentle nudging
fails because it's too slow. Brute force nukes fail because
you either can't hit it right the vacuum neuters the blast,
or you can't physically drill into it fast enough.
Speaker 2: It does seem like we're running out of options using
conventional thinking, which.
Speaker 1: Means we have to shift our thinking entirely. The research
we looked at suggests we need to think less like
I don't know a missile defense engineer, and more like
maybe a lumberjack, someone who understands the material they're dealing with,
finding the asteroid's secret weakness.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it, because there is
a fundamental misunderstanding, or at least an outdated view in
the popular imagination about what asteroids actually are.
Speaker 1: We tend to picture them as solid lumps of rock
and metal, right like giant boulders floating in space.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and some are, especially the very large ones formed
early in the Solar System, but many, perhaps most, of
the near Earth objects that pose a threat, particularly these
stadium sized ones, we might only get weeks notice of.
They're not solid at all.
Speaker 1: They're what planetary scientists call.
Speaker 2: Rubble piles precisely. Think of them less like a solid
bowlder and more like a giant back loosely filled with gravel, pebbles, dust,
maybe some bigger rocks mixed in, all held together only
by their own very.
Speaker 1: Weak gravity, A giant cosmic gravel bag. Okay, that changes things.
If it's not solid rock, maybe you don't need to
push it or blast it from the outside, right.
Speaker 2: If it's just a loose collection of stuff, maybe the
goal shouldn't be deflection, but disintegration, pulverization.
Speaker 1: Break it up, turn that incoming gravel bag into a
harmless cloud of scattered dust and pebbles before it reaches
Earth exactly.
Speaker 2: And if that's the goal, perverization not nudging, then the
tool changes too. It's not a nuke, not a laser,
not paint. It's something much simpler, in a way, a
super dense kinetic weapon, something called a penetrator.
Speaker 1: A penetrator okay, sounds serious, like a cosmic bullet.
Speaker 2: That's essentially what it is, an engineered hypervelocity bullet designed
to tear through that rubble pile.
Speaker 1: So describe this hardware. What does a penetrator look like?
What's it made of? Typically we're talking about something relatively
simple in design, a long, slim, dark shade, maybe a
few meters long. And the key is the cial. It's
made almost entirely of tungsten. Tungsten.
Speaker 2: Why tungsten because tungsten is incredibly dense. It's nearly twice
as dense as lead, which makes it exceptionally heavy for
its size. And it's also extremely hard, much much harder
than any rock or ice it's likely to encounter in
an asteroid. It's just very very good at punching through things.
Speaker 1: Okay, so a heavy hard dart. How fast does it
need to go? Do we need some super advanced propulsion
to get it up to speed?
Speaker 2: That's the elegant part. You don't actually need to accelerate
the penetrator to incredible speeds itself. You just need to
place it accurately in the asteroid's path.
Speaker 1: Wait, you just put it there and let the asteroid
run into it exactly.
Speaker 2: Remember the asteroid is already moving it potentially seventy thousand
kilometers per hour. That's the energy source. It doesn't really matter.
Kinematically speaking, whether the bullet hits the target or the
target hits the bullet, the relative velocity is what counts.
Speaker 1: So the asteroid provides its own destructive energy when it
slams into this incredibly dense stationary tungsten object.
Speaker 2: Right, It maximizes the momentum transfer and the destructive force
of the impact. When that speeding rubble pile hits the
tungsten core, the energy releases instantaneous and incredibly violent. But
there's a really critical constraint here, which is we absolutely
cannot let this pulverization happen too close to Earth.
Speaker 1: Right. You mentioned this earlier. Even if we break it
up into small pieces, if it happens too close, it's
still catastrophic. Why exactly the compounded shockwave.
Speaker 2: Thing, Yeah, it's about the physics of atmospheric entry and
pressure waves. If you break the asteroid into say thousands
of fragments, even if they're just pebble sized or maybe
fist sized, but they all enter the atmosphere over the
same region at roughly the same time.
Speaker 1: They're still carrying immense kinetic energy collectively.
Speaker 2: A huge amount, and as they hit the atmosphere, they
create individual shock waves and released intense heat. If thousands
of these events happen almost simultaneously in the same large
volume of atmosphere, those pressure waves and thermal pulses combine,
they compound.
Speaker 1: Creating one massive atmospheric blast effect. Even without a single
large impact or hitting the ground exactly.
Speaker 2: It's like setting off thousands of bombs high in the
atmosphere all at once. The resulting over pressure wave hitting
the ground could still be devastating over a huge area,
potentially killing millions through the shockwave alone, even if no
large fragments actually land.
Speaker 1: Okay, so distance is key. We need to break it
up far enough away that the fragments have time to.
Speaker 2: Spread out spread out significantly. We need them to arrive
at Earth not as a concentrated swarm, but as a
diffuse cloud, hitting the atmosphere over hours or maybe even days,
and over a vast geographical area hundreds of thousands of
square kilometers, so.
Speaker 1: They burn up individually harmlessly. How far away do we
need to make this intercept happen for that dispersal, The.
Speaker 2: Calculations suggest we need the intercept point to be about
one full day of the asteroids travel time away from Earth.
Speaker 1: One day's travel time. At seventy to thousand kilometers.
Speaker 2: Per hour, there's nearly two million kilos away. For perspective,
that's more than four times the distance.
Speaker 1: To the Moon two million kilometers. Okay, that sounds far.
Can we actually get a spacecraft carrying this penetrator out
that far within our two week warning window?
Speaker 2: Yes? Absolutely, that's the good news. A standard powerful rocket thinks,
something like an Atlas V or a Falcon nine, maybe
a Falcon Heavy for a larger penetrator, can cover that
two million kilometer distance in about a week.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the mission profile fits. Launch within a few
days of detection, travel for about a week, deploy the penetrator,
and let the asteroid hit it one day before potential
Earth impact.
Speaker 2: That's the plan. We send one relatively simple payload, maybe
a two meter long, two point five ton tungsten penetrator,
get it into position and wait.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's visualize that impact. Slow it down. The asteroid,
this bag of gravel moving at seventy thousand kilominator hits
the stationary tungsten dart. What happens in that instant.
Speaker 2: It's pure focus violence. That collision instantly unleashes the kinetic
energy equivalent of about one hundred and twenty metric tons
of TNT right into the heart of the asteroid structure.
Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty tons of TNT just from the
impact itself.
Speaker 2: Just kinetic energy. The force is so localized and so
extreme that the rock material it hits immediately vaporizes. The
tungsten itself likely melts or partially vaporizes too. It carves
this devastating wound, punching deep into the rubble pile.
Speaker 1: And because it's a rubble pile, just loosely held together.
Speaker 2: Right, it doesn't have the structural integrity of solid rock.
It's only held together by its own weak gravity. That
sudden massive energy input, that shock wave propagating through the
loose gravel. The structure just can't handle it.
Speaker 1: It can't contain the energy. It rips itself apart from
the inside out.
Speaker 2: Effectively, Yes, the asteroid is blasted into thousands, maybe tens
of thousands of pieces. They scatter outwards, forming a rapidly
expanding diffuse cloud.
Speaker 1: And then a day later, when this cloud reaches Earth's position.
Speaker 2: The fragments are spread out over that huge area hundreds
of thousands of square kilometers instead of a single city
destroying impact or a catastrophic atmospheric blast you get. Well,
the source materials called it a mostly harmless show of
cosmic fireworks.
Speaker 1: Like a spectacular widespread meteor shower, as all those tiny
fragments burn up harmlessly high in the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Exactly an apocalypse turn into a light show. Yeah, and
this solution, the penetrator, seems genuinely feasible for that short
notice stadium sized asteroid threat. Two weeks is enough time
if if we have the system ready to go, the rockets,
the penetrators, the targeting systems all on standby.
Speaker 1: That's the crucial caveat preparedness. So okay, the penetrator concept
seems like a solid Uh well, maybe solid isn't the
right word, a viable strategy for dealing with those one
hundred meter class rubble pile asteroids with a couple weeks.
Speaker 2: Notice, right, it handles the city killers potentially, But we
have to talk about the big ones, don't we, The
truly existential threats, the cosmic mountains, the planet killers.
Speaker 1: We do, because the penetrator solution, as elegant as it
is for smaller objects, completely breaks down when you scale
up to something truly massive. These are objects carrying the
destructive power equivalent to tens of thousands of entire nuclear arsenals.
Speaker 2: And often the sources point out these ultimate threats aren't
actually asteroids. They're comets. Yeah, frequently they are, especially the
ones that might give us relatively short notice, like months
instead of decades.
Speaker 1: What makes comets the top tier threat? What are their characteristics?
Speaker 2: Well, they typically originate from way out in the Solar
System to Kuyper Belt beyond Neptune or even the Ort Cloud,
which is incredibly far away. They're essentially giant, dirty ice balls,
mixtures of ice, dust and rock, often kilometers across, sometimes
tens of kilometers mountain sized.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're big. Are they structured differently than asteroids?
Speaker 2: They can be. They're often more fragile structurally than a
solid rock asteroid, more like pack snow and gravel than
solid granite. But the key difference is their speed and
trajectory faster than asteroids, much faster. Often because they come
from so far out, they fall towards the Sun on
these long elliptical orbits, picking up incredible speed. We're talking
maybe one hundred and forty thousand kilometers per hour by
the time they reached the inner Solar System, double the speed,
which means four times the kinetic energy for the same mass.
Speaker 1: And because they come from the outer darkness, harder to.
Speaker 2: Track, incredibly hard. They're dark, they're distant. They only brighten
up significantly when they get close enough to the Sun
for the ice to start vaporizing and form a coma
and tail. Often we don't discover them until they're already
well on their way into the inner Solar System.
Speaker 1: You mentioned commet Neowise earlier in twenty twenty. That was
a good example, a perfect.
Speaker 2: Example, a big, spectacular comet, beautiful in the sky, but
it was only discovered about four months before it made
its closest approach to the Sun and subsequently Earth.
Speaker 1: Four months notice. And if Neowise had been on a
collision course.
Speaker 2: The calculations were sobering. Its size and speed meant it
carried the energy equivalent of roughly six thousand all the
nuclear weapons currently deployed on Earth combined six thousand cold
wars worth of energy in one object.
Speaker 1: Good grief. Okay, So let's say we spot something like
Neo WA's a planet killer comet maybe six months out.
Why doesn't our penetrator plan work anymore? Just hit it
with a bigger penetrator.
Speaker 2: It's a matter of scale and the end goal. With
the one hundred meter asteroid, the goal was pulverization, turning
it into dust that burns up harmlessly. But a comet
that's say ten kilometers across it has vastly, vastly more
mass orders of magnitude.
Speaker 1: More So, even if you hit it hard enough to
break it into a million pieces.
Speaker 2: Those million pieces are still huge. Each fragment might still
be tens or hundreds of meters across. Individually, they'd be
regional killers. And hitting the Earth's atmosphere is a swarm.
Forget a light show. You'd essentially set the entire sky
on fire globally.
Speaker 1: Massive atmosphere heating, continental firestorms, tsunamis if they hit oceans,
immediate impact winter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, game over for most complex life on Earth. So
for a plan killer, simple fragmentation isn't enough. You don't
just need to break it up. You need to ensure
that the vast majority of that mass misses Earth entirely.
You need significant deflection, not.
Speaker 1: Just dispersal, And to get enough deflection enough spread for
fragments that big, you need to hit it much much further.
Speaker 2: Away, much further. We're not talking two million kilometers anymore.
To give those massive fragments enough time and orbital distance
to spread out so they miss Earth. You need to
intercept and destroy the comic way out, maybe as far
out as the orbit of Mars.
Speaker 1: Mars's orbit, that's hundreds of millions of kilometers away, depending
on where Earth and Mars are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a vastly greater distance, and destroying a cosmic mountain
at that range ensuring enough of it misses Earth. This
is where the numbers just become mind boggling.
Speaker 1: How many penetrators would that take.
Speaker 2: To reliably break up and deflect a large comet at
Mars distance. The estimates suggest you'd need hundreds of thousands
of penetrators, maybe half.
Speaker 1: A million, hundreds of thousands, okay, and launching that many
that payload mass, plus the need to get it all
the way out towards Mars within that six month window, Yeah,
you'd need an absolutely colossal fleet of launch vehicles. The
calculations point to meeting something like twenty four thousand super
heavy rockets.
Speaker 2: Twenty four thousand. Let's just pause on that number to
find super heavy rocket again for context. A super heavy
rocket is the biggest class there is. Think NASA's Space
Launch System, the SLS Moon Rocket, or SpaceX's Starship. These
are machines capable of lifting at least fifty metric tons
into lower orbit. Absolute behemoths, the most powerful rockets ever conceived.
Speaker 1: And how many of those do we as a planet
currently have.
Speaker 2: Operational effectively two types SLS and Starship. Yeah, and neither
of them is flying regularly yet they're still in development
or early operational phases. We certainly don't have thousands of
them sitting around. We barely have a handful of flat
articles in existence right now.
Speaker 1: So if we detected a planet killer comet today with
six months warning, even if.
Speaker 2: We dropped everything else, every car factory, every shipyard, every
aerospace company on the planet switched immediately to building nothing
but starships or sols rockets two hundred and four seven.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't even come close to building twenty four thousand
of them in six months.
Speaker 2: Not even remotely close. It's logistically impossible with current or
even foreseeable near term industrial capacity. If that scenario happened today,
we would be utterly, completely helpless. We could track it,
we could watch it come, but we could not stop it.
That's chilling, truly chilling. The science tells us how we
might stop it, hundreds of thousands of penetrators launched by
tens of thousands of rockets, but the industrial reality says
no chance.
Speaker 1: The blueprint exists conceptually, the factory to build the tools
that the scale required does not.
Speaker 2: Okay, that reality check is harsh. Twenty four thousand super
heavy rockets in six months is impossible. So if we're
faced with that nightmare scenario, the planet tiller comet spotted
six months on the clock. Is there anything else? Is
there any kind of last ditch hail Mary plan that
doesn't rely on impossible industrial scale up, something that could
maybe work with say just one super heavy rocket, if
it was ready.
Speaker 1: There is one theoretical contingency. It's incredibly high risk, requires
technology push to its absolute limit and involves elements we
previously dismissed but used in a very specific way.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm listening. What is it?
Speaker 1: It involves combining the precision of the penetrator concept with
the raw power of the nuclear device. We talked about earlier.
Speaker 2: Ah, so we're back to nukes. But didn't we establish
they don't work well in space? They don't work well
when detonated outside the object in the vacuum. This plan
uses the penetrators first, but not primarily for fragmentation. It
uses them to prepare the target for the nuke, essentially
to drill the whole we couldn't drill conventionally.
Speaker 1: I see use the kinetic energy of multiple penetrators to
create the buried cavity, then detonate the nuke inside.
Speaker 2: Exactly, But this plan hinges entirely critically on one thing,
extreme readiness. It only works if we already have a
super heavy rocket in sols, maybe a starship sitting on
the launch pad, fully fueled, with this very specific complex payload,
already integrated, ready to go immediately upon detection and confirmation
of the thread like launch within hours or days of
spotting the comet.
Speaker 1: Minutes ideally or hours at most, there's no time to
build anything. It has to be ready. If that condition
is met, we launch and then begins a long tense journey.
How long about five months of travel time chasing this commet,
which is hurtling inwards at one hundred and forty thousand
kilometers per hour, aiming for an intercept point far out
beyond the orbit of Mars. Five months just to get there.
Speaker 2: Okay, the spacecraft arrives near the comet. What happens then?
The precision required must be insane.
Speaker 1: It's almost unbelievable. The plan calls for deploying five massive penetrators,
not small ones, but large tungsten darts. They have to
be released in perfect sequence, perfectly lined up, maybe two
kilometers apart, all aimed at the exact same tiny spot
on this mountain sized comet that we've only known about
for five months and is tumbling through space at immense speed.
Speaker 2: Five sequential hits on the exact same point from kilometers
away at one hundred and forty thousand kilometer relative velocity.
The engineering challenge.
Speaker 1: Is horrendous, astronomical, and you get exactly one shocked. There's
no room for air, no second chance. The timing, the
alignment has to.
Speaker 2: Be flawless, and the source material mentioned a human element
being necessary.
Speaker 1: Here, yes, to achieve that level of required precision, to
make the final micro adjustments in targeting to supervise the
complex deployment sequence in real time and troubleshoot any glitches.
The model suggests it would require a small crew of.
Speaker 2: Astronauts on the Intercept spacecraft. Yes, very brave, highly skilled
astronauts and given the mission profile, a five month trip
out deploying the payload with no possibility of return.
Speaker 1: It's a one way trip, a suicide mission, it would.
Speaker 2: Have to be. Their role is to ensure the sequence
executes perfectly, that the penetrators hit exactly right. It's a
level of sacrifice baked into this last resort blueprint.
Speaker 1: Okay, assume the crew does their job, the deployment is perfect.
Describe the impact sequence.
Speaker 2: Penetrator one hits Penetrator one, a massive tungsten dart slams
into the comet. The energy release is enormous, maybe equivalent
to two thousand tons of TNT just from kinetic energy.
It vaporizes ice and rock punches deep, creating the start
of a dunnel.
Speaker 1: Then number two hits the same spot milliseconds later.
Speaker 2: Exactly followed by three and then four, each one hitting
the base of the crater created by the previous one,
exploding the damage, smashing deeper, melting and vaporizing more material.
They're essentially hypervelocity drilling this tunnel into the comet's nucleus.
Speaker 1: How deep do the first four get?
Speaker 2: The goal is to reach a depth of about one
hundred meters, which on a comet maybe ten kilometers across
is still just scratching the surface relatively speaking. But it
creates a confined channel deep inside the structurally weak cometary material.
Speaker 1: And then comes number five. Penetrator. Number five is different.
It's not just tungsten inside. It carries the primary payload,
a massive nuclear device. We're talking maybe three hundred megatons.
Three hundred megatons, that's twenty thousand times the energy of
the Hiroshima bomb.
Speaker 2: An almost inconceivable amount of energy. And this penetrator follows
the others down that freshly drilled hundred meter.
Speaker 1: Tunnel, and it detonates inside the tunnel.
Speaker 2: Yes, likely time to detonate just before it hits the bottom.
So the explosion happens while fully confined deep within the
comets icy rocky structure.
Speaker 1: That's why the nuke works here. It's not in a vacuum.
Speaker 2: It's contained precisely. All that energy three hundred megaton's worth,
doesn't radiate uselessly into space. It slams into the surrounding ice, gravel,
and rock. The shockwave propagates outwards through the material. The
heat causes massive instantaneous vaporization, The pressure.
Speaker 1: Builds, and the entire structure just fails catastrophically.
Speaker 2: It shatters. That frozen world, billions of years old, is
blown apart from the inside, not just chipped, but disintegrated
into millions of fragments.
Speaker 1: Fragments which, because the intercept happens so far out near
Mars orbit, now have months and vast distances over which
to spread out.
Speaker 2: Ensuring that the vast majority of that mass, those millions
of fragments achieve enough orbital separation that they completely miss
the Earth when they evidentally cross our orbit months later.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly complex, parifyingly precise plan, But the crucial
thing is the pieces exist.
Speaker 2: That's the takeaway. The physics is understood. The engineering components,
super heavy rockets like sls or starship, tungsten penetrators, high
yield nuclear devices, precision guidance systems. They all exist, at
least in prototype or operational form today. This isn't science
fiction for the twenty second century.
Speaker 1: It's theoretically possible with current knowledge and technology.
Speaker 2: Yes, actionable even, but requiring a level of readiness, precision,
and perhaps sacrifice that is currently unprecedented and certainly not
in place.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so this deep dive, it's really taken us
across the whole spectrum from realizing that, you know, gentle
nudging just doesn't cut it for short note threats.
Speaker 2: Right. The time constraint kills those ideas.
Speaker 1: See the kind of elegant, almost surprisingly simple solution of
kinetic penetrators for those medium sized city killer asteroids, the
cosmic bullets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exploiting the rubble pile weakness that seems genuinely promising
if we're prepared.
Speaker 1: And then scaling up to the planet killers the comets
where fragmentation isn't enough and we hit that terrifying logistical
wall of needing thousands of rockets we don't have the
industrial gap, leading finally to this incredibly complex, high stakes
nuclear assisted penetrator sequence as the absolute last resort requiring
near instant launch readiness.
Speaker 2: The hail Mary Plan. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The core revelation for me throughout all this is that
the fundamental technology, the science, the engineering know how it
seems to be largely there, or at least within reach
for dealing with boat scales of threat.
Speaker 2: I agree. And what's really fascinating and frankly quite sobering
is that contrast. You highlighted the gap between what seems
technologically possible, like that incredibly precise five stage penetrator and
nuke delivery sequence.
Speaker 1: Which sounds like science fiction but apparently isn't from an
engineering standpoint.
Speaker 2: Right, The gap between that and what is currently logistically impossible,
like building twenty four thousand super heavy rockets in six months.
It tells us the primary bottleneck isn't necessarily inventing new science.
Speaker 1: It's building the infrastructure. It's the industrial scale.
Speaker 2: It seems to be for the largest threats. Yes, we
have the blueprints for the ultimate Acts, as you put
it earlier, but maybe only one or two axe handles,
and they're not even fully assembled yet.
Speaker 1: So the knowledge to potentially save humanity from these cosmic threats,
it seems to already exist. The concepts are on the
drawing board based on current physics and engineering.
Speaker 2: The blueprints are there actionable ones, at least conceptually, which really.
Speaker 1: Leaves us and leaves you the listener with a pretty
profound final thought, doesn't it. If the science is mostly
figured out, then the real challenge of planetary defense isn't
primarily scientific anymore. It's industrial, it's economic, it's political.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how do we make the transition as a species?
How do we go from being reactive scrambling frantically to
build something only after the threat is confirmed in the
clock is.
Speaker 1: Ticket to becoming proactive to actually building and maintaining the
kind of ready state infrastructure. The launch capacity of the
stockpold hardware, the train crew is maybe even that single
ready to go SLS with its contingency payload necessary.
Speaker 2: To defeat an extinction level threat that might statistically only
show up once every one hundred thousand years or once
every few million years.
Speaker 1: When is that level of constant, incredibly expensive preparation actually
worth the cost weigh against all the other immediate challenges
we face. That's the trillion dollar question, isn't it?
Speaker 2: It really is what price preparedness for the ultimate catastrophe?