Speaker 1: Okay, before we start, I want you to just for
a second visualize something with me. And this isn't some
fantasy scenario. This is your actual life. Think about this morning,
the whole intricate, fragile ballet of your routine. Right, the
alarm clock, the coffee exactly, the alarm on your smartphone,
which you know is synced to a satellite orbiting the Earth,
a satellite.
Speaker 2: That needs a ground station to function.
Speaker 1: Then the coffee maker, which is drawing power from a
grid that stretches across an entire continent.
Speaker 2: A grid that has to be balanced second by second.
Speaker 1: And your commute, which relies on traffic signals on GPS,
on a fuel supply chain that is so perfectly timed
it's almost magic. It all feels incredibly solid, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It feels permanent. That's the psychological baseline we all operate from.
We just assume that tomorrow is going to look, you know, roughly.
Speaker 1: Like today, because there are systems in place, right. Yeah,
we think there are safeguards. We assume there are, exactly.
We confuse what's normal with what's safe. But I've been
digging through this huge stack of reports you sent over,
the papers from the National Academy of Sciences, the data
from the UK Met Office, some of these old historical
logs from the eighteen eighties, and then all the recent
near miss reports from NASA and the essay.
Speaker 2: It's quite a rabbit hole, it is.
Speaker 1: And that feeling of solidity, that permanence, it's just it's
completely evaporating for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it tends to do that when you look at
the raw data, not just the summaries.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today we
are pulling on a thread that, it turns out, holds
our entire civilization together. And what we're finding is just
how fraid that thread actually is.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly afraid.
Speaker 1: The whole premise we're exploring today is it's simple, but
it's also really disturbing. We love to think humanity survives
because we're smart, because we're adaptable, technologically advanced.
Speaker 2: The masters of our own destiny, right.
Speaker 1: But this material, all of it, it suggests a totally
different driver, something else. Entirely.
Speaker 2: It suggests that for the last say, one hundred and
fifty years of high tech development, and maybe even for
the last ten thousand years of civilization, our primary survival
strategy has been luck. Luck, just pure dumb blind luck.
Speaker 1: That is such a hard pill to swallow for a
species that prides itself on being in control. So today
we're going to analyze a whole series of events. We're
talking solar storms, invisible asteroids, cometary fragments, gamma ray bursts,
the whole cosmic menagerie where the difference between business as
usual and literally the end of the world as we
know it wasn't our engineering, it wasn't diplomacy, it.
Speaker 2: Wasn't a plan. It was just a matter of hours,
or a few degrees of rotation.
Speaker 1: Or just the fact that the Earth was in a
slightly different part of its orbit at that exact moment.
Speaker 2: We are floating through a cosmic shooting gallery. That is
the reality. And for the longest time, we've been attributing
our survival to this bulletproof vest that we aren't actually wearing.
Speaker 1: So let's frame the mission for what we're doing here.
We aren't here just to scare out everyone for the
sake of it.
Speaker 2: No, that's not the point.
Speaker 1: The point is to shatter this illusion of invulnerability. We
want to look squarely at the blind spots in our
planetary defense. And it turns out the biggest ones are
the ones staring us right in the face every single day.
Speaker 2: And we have to ask the really uncomfortable question. You
can go to a casino and you can win ten
hands in a row, you can win one hundred, but
can you win forever? Right?
Speaker 1: Because the house always wins, and.
Speaker 2: In this case, the house the cosmos. It eventually calls
your bluff. It always does.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack all of this. I think we have
to start with the most obvious threat, the one we
literally see every single.
Speaker 2: Day, the Sun, our volatile neighbor.
Speaker 1: It's the source of all life. But according to these
papers from the National Academy of Sciences, it's also a
loaded gun pointed directly at our head. And we came
incredibly close to taking a bullet in July twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: The twenty twelve event is it's probably the most significant
what if in all of modern history. I don't think
that's anas.
Speaker 1: I remember twenty twelve so vividly. The whole cultural conversation
was obsessed with the Mayan calendar. Right, the world was
supposedly ending in December.
Speaker 2: It was a joke, it was a meme.
Speaker 1: Blockbuster movies, internet jokes, end of the world parties.
Speaker 2: A massive, massive distraction. While the entire world was looking
at this ancient stone calendar and laughing, the real apocalypse
was brewing ninety three million miles away.
Speaker 1: On July twenty third, twenty twelve, the sun didn't just
have a little flare. It unleashed a monster.
Speaker 2: It was a monster, a true monster.
Speaker 1: This was a coronal mass ejection a CME. Now, for
anyone listening who might get this confused with a solar flare,
can you help us distinguish the two, because they're very
different things, right, they.
Speaker 2: Are critically different. Think of a solar flare as the
muzzle flash of a gun. It's a brilliant burst of
light and radiation X rays UV that gets here in
eight minutes at the speed of light. It can mess
with radio, but it's not the main threat.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that's the flash.
Speaker 2: The CME is the bullet. It's the actual cannibal. It's
a massive tangible cloud of solar plasma. We're talking protons, electrons,
billions of tons of matter, and crucially, it carries its
own embedded magnetic field with it.
Speaker 1: And on July twenty third, the Sun ejected an absolutely
enormous amount of this.
Speaker 2: Material, billions upon billions of tons a shotgun blast of
magnetized plasma.
Speaker 1: And the speed was just off the charts, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: The velocity was staggering. The data that was later analyzed
by the scientists sheer Nass and his colleagues confirmed it.
This storm was traveling at speeds over six point seven
million miles per hour.
Speaker 1: I can't even get my head around that number.
Speaker 2: It's almost incomprehensible. A typical CME takes you know, two, three,
sometimes four days to get to Earth. We get a
decent amount of warning. This thing was so fast it
would have cut the travel time down to under nineteen.
Speaker 1: Hours, so less than a day's warning.
Speaker 2: Best case scenario. Yeah, we would have seen the flash
and then we have known the bullet was on its
way and you were coming in hot.
Speaker 1: The reports all say this one rivaled the famous Carrington
event of eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2: It did. In some metrics, it was even stronger.
Speaker 1: We always hear about Carrington. It's the historical benchmark, but
the stories sound almost quaint now. Telegraphs sparking operators getting shocks,
papers catching fire.
Speaker 2: Right I don't know the telegram from London didn't get through.
Speaker 1: It's a good story, but it feels like it's from
another world.
Speaker 2: And that's the danger. It's the danger of historical comparison
without context. In eighteen fifty nine, the global internet was
a single copper wire stretched between wooden poles. The world
ran on steam, coal, and muscle, so.
Speaker 1: If a telegraph office burned down, it was a local problem.
Speaker 2: It was an inconvenience. You send a message by horse.
The global economy didn't grind to a halt.
Speaker 1: But if you take a Carrington level event and the
twenty twelve storm was at least that powerful, and you
drop it on our twenty first century civilization, you're not
talking about slow internet.
Speaker 2: Are you. No, we are talking about the total instant
frying of the high voltage backbone of the global power grid.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into the mechanics of that. Because I
think people here frying the grid and they assume a
fuse blows, a breaker trips, and a guy in a
truck comes out to flip a switch.
Speaker 2: This is not that not even close. It comes down
to something called geomagnetically induced currents or GICs. When that
giant magnetic cloud from the Sun slams into Earth's magnetic field.
Our field shakes and compresses like a bell. That rapidly
fluctuating magnetic field on the surface induces a powerful electrical
current in the Earth's crust itself.
Speaker 1: The ground becomes electrified in a way.
Speaker 2: Yes, and electricity always takes the path of least resistance.
Speaker 1: And what's the path of least resistance Across a continent.
Speaker 2: Are thousands of miles of high voltage power lines. They
act like giant antennas, so you get these massive surges
of quasi DC current, hundreds even thousands of ampers flowing
up the ground, wires and street into the guts of
the high voltage transformers.
Speaker 1: And these transformers they're the big ones, right, the size
of a house that you see at substations.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the extra high voltage ones that EHV transformers. They're
the lynchpins of the entire system, and they have a
fatal flaw. They're designed to run on alternating current ACA.
When you dump a massive amount of direct current DC
into them, their magnetic core instantly saturates saturation.
Speaker 1: What does that mean in physical terms?
Speaker 2: It means the iron core can't handle the magnetic flux anymore.
It's like a sponge that's completely full. The energy has
to go somewhere.
Speaker 1: And where does it go.
Speaker 2: It escapes as stray flux into the metal components that
aren't supposed to see it, the copper windings, the structural
steel tank. It creates incredible hotspots, instantly raising the temperature
by hundreds of degrees.
Speaker 1: So the transformer literally cooks itself from the inside out.
Speaker 2: It melts itself. Yeah, the insulation paper inside the windings
burns or chars. The cooling oil can decompose into explosive
gases like hydrogen and acetylene. The whole thing can literally
explode or just slump into a multi ton slag heap.
Speaker 1: It becomes a giant paper weight, a.
Speaker 2: Very very expensive paper weight. And here is the real picker,
the part that makes this a civilist station level threat.
What's that You can't just go to home depot and
buy a new seven hundred and sixty five killable transformer. Right.
Speaker 1: These are custom built machines.
Speaker 2: They are the spoke engineering marvels. They take twelve to
eighteen months to manufacture, and that's during normal times. There's
a global manufacturing bottleneck. Most are built in places like
Germany or South Korea, so there's.
Speaker 1: No strategic reserve of these things sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. They're too big, too expensive, They are built
to order, They weigh hundreds of tons and are incredibly
difficult to transport.
Speaker 1: So if the twenty twelve storm had hit us and
we lost let's say three hundred of these key transformers
across North America, you.
Speaker 2: Don't have power in the affected regions for years, not months. Years.
Speaker 1: Just play that out for me. The National Academy of
Sciences report did a scenario analysis on this. What does
day one look like day seven?
Speaker 2: Day one is confusion. The lights go out everywhere almost instantly.
Cell towers have battery backups that might last, you know,
four to eight hours, then they go silent.
Speaker 1: The Internet is gone, gone, so.
Speaker 2: All communication collapses immediately. But that's just the start. The
real problem is the cascading failure of all our other
interdependent infrastructures like water. Water is the first to go.
No electricity means no water pumps. Most cities only have
maybe twenty four hours of water in gravity fed towers.
After that, the taps run dry and.
Speaker 1: You can't flush toilets, sanitation.
Speaker 2: Collapses, disease becomes a huge risk very quickly. Then there's fuel.
Speaker 1: Gas station pumps are electric.
Speaker 2: Right, so you can't pump the fuel out of the
underground tanks, which means the trucks stop.
Speaker 1: Running and the trucks deliver the food, and.
Speaker 2: Our grocery stores operate on a razor thin, just in
time inventory system. The shelves are empty in forty eight
to seventy two.
Speaker 1: Hours, so within three days. Let me get this straight,
you have no water, no food coming in, no fuel,
no transportation, and no way to.
Speaker 2: Call for help, and no banking. The financial system is
entirely digital. Your credit cards are useless, the ATMs or bricks,
your bank account bound is just a number on a
server that you can't access. The ecomomy ghost to zero instantly.
Speaker 1: The NAS report estimated the cost at two trillion dollars
in the first year alone, and.
Speaker 2: That's a massive low ball. That's just the hardware damage.
How do you quantify the cost of civilization itself ceasing
to function? The report uses the phrase starving war zones,
and that's not hyperbole. That is the logical conclusion of
the logistics it's.
Speaker 1: The inevitable result of pulling the bottom block out of
the Jenga tower.
Speaker 2: The entire thing comes down.
Speaker 1: So this storm in twenty twelve, it was that powerful,
It was that dangerous. Why are we here? Why am
I talking into this microphone on a working computer?
Speaker 2: One word? Luck?
Speaker 1: Be specific? How much luck are we talking about?
Speaker 2: The storm? That shotgun blast of plasma. It tore through
Earth's orbit at the exact point where our planet had
been just nine days earlier.
Speaker 1: Days.
Speaker 2: Think about that Earth is orbiting the Sun at sixty
seven thousand miles per hour, a nine day difference in
our position in that orbit. It's a cosmic rounding error.
It's nothing. It's less than a single degree of separation.
Speaker 1: So if that eruption on the Sun had happened one
week sooner.
Speaker 2: While that active region was still rotated to face us.
Speaker 1: We would be living in a pre industrial age right now,
but with eight billion people who don't know how to
farm or find clean water.
Speaker 2: Precisely, we didn't dodge the bullet. The gun was fired.
The bullet passed right through the space our head was in.
We just happened to have bent down to tire our
shoe with that exact mell asecond That is what's so terrifying.
Speaker 1: It implies zero agency. We didn't outsmart it, we didn't
engineer a solution. We just weren't there.
Speaker 2: We were lucky. And the Sun has done this before
multiple times. The sources you read point to the Great
geomagnetic storm of May nineteen twenty.
Speaker 1: One, right, the New York railroad storm.
Speaker 2: That's the one. A monstrous sunspot ten times the diameter
of Earth rotated a view and just started firing off
CMEs for three days straight.
Speaker 1: And the magnetic impact was just as severe as Carrington.
Speaker 2: Right in some ways, yes, the induced currents were so
strong that telegraph voltages spiked to thousands of volts.
Speaker 1: Thousands of volts on a line designed for what a handful.
Speaker 2: It was lethal. Switchboards in New York City literally burst
into flames. A railroad switching station burned to the ground,
an entire telephone exchange in Sweden was destroyed by fire.
Speaker 1: And the auroras were visible everywhere as far.
Speaker 2: South as Texas and Samoa, places that should never ever
see the northern lights.
Speaker 1: But again in nineteen twenty one, the world kept turning.
It was a bad day for telegraph operators. But civilization
didn't collapse.
Speaker 2: Because in nineteen twenty one we didn't have a glass
jaw yet, we weren't critically dependent on fragile microelectronics or
massive continent spanning synchronized power grids.
Speaker 1: So the sun threw a punch that would be a
knockout blow today, but.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty one we were a primitive fighter. It
was just a glancing blow. We shook it off.
Speaker 1: It's that technology paradox again. The more advanced and interconnected
we become, the more vulnerable we are to this specific
kind of threat.
Speaker 2: We've built a civilization that is hyper sensitive to the
magnet mood swings of our own star, and we haven't
bothered to harden the grid to match that risk.
Speaker 1: We're driving a Formula one car on a road full
of cosmic.
Speaker 2: Potholes, whereas in nineteen twenty one we were in a
solid axle tractor.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of technology and misinterpretation, there is a story
in these files that I found genuinely chilling. It combines
solar physics with the absolute height of Cold War paranoia.
The nineteen sixty seven incident, Ah, yes.
Speaker 2: The Cold War solar flare. This is where the indifference
of the Cosmos almost tricked humanity into committing suicide, just.
Speaker 1: Set the stage for US. May twenty third, nineteen sixty seven.
The world is on a knife's edge.
Speaker 2: It's about as tense as it ever got. The Vietnam
War is raging, tensions between the US and the USSR
and an absolute peak. Strategic Air Command has nuclear armed
B fifty two bombers in the air twenty forty seven.
On airborne alert.
Speaker 1: The doctrine is mutually assured destruction. You launch, we launch.
Speaker 2: And the whole system depends on early warning.
Speaker 1: And then the early warning system goes blind.
Speaker 2: Pecifically, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System or BMWs. These
were three colossal radar sites in Alaska, Greenland and the UK.
Their entire job was to spot soviet ICBMs coming over
the North Pole.
Speaker 1: And suddenly all three of them go haywire.
Speaker 2: They get jammed, the screens just fill with noise, with static.
They're blinded.
Speaker 1: Now, if you're a general and a bunker in Cheyenne
Mountain in nineteen sixty seven and all three of your
forward facing radars go down at the exact same time.
Speaker 2: You don't think, hmm, I wonder if there's an atmospheric anomaly,
you think one thing, and one thing.
Speaker 1: Only, a coordinated attack.
Speaker 2: Bandard military doctrine, you blind the enemy's eyes right before
you launch a nuclear first strike. It's the logical, terrifying
first step.
Speaker 1: So the commanders assumed the Soviets were jamming their radar
frequencies to hide an inbound wave of missiles exactly.
Speaker 2: And so they prepared for war. The alert levels went up,
the engines on nuclear bombers were spun up. We were minutes,
maybe less, from launching a full scale retaliatory strike against
an attack that wasn't actually happening.
Speaker 1: The doomsday clock was literally ticking down in real time.
What stopped it.
Speaker 2: A miracle of perfect timing and a very new, very
obscure branch of the Air Force, which was the solar
forecasters at NORAD. They had only just started monitoring the
Sun's radio output.
Speaker 1: This was a brand new, feel, brand new.
Speaker 2: And they had observed a massive solar flare earlier that day,
one of the largest of the solar cycle. And they
knew something the generals didn't, which.
Speaker 1: Was that solar flares meet powerful radio waves exactly.
Speaker 2: It's called the solar radio burst. The Sun was screaming
across the entire radio spectrum, and it just so happened
to be screaming on the exact frequencies used by the
BMEWS radar.
Speaker 1: So the Soviet jamming.
Speaker 2: With the Sun, it was just cosmic static.
Speaker 1: And they managed to get that information up the chain
of command in.
Speaker 2: Time, just in the nicked time, they made the call
stand down. It's not the Russians, it's the Sun.
Speaker 1: We almost nuked ourselves into oblivion because the Sun burped
and our own paranoia filled in the blank.
Speaker 2: It's the most terrifying intersection of cosmic volatility and human psychology.
It shows how little margin for air we have when
we misunderstand the environment we are operating in.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the Sun is the big obvious threat. It's
the threat we can see. But let's pivot now to
the threats we don't see. The sources call them the
invisible rocks asteroids. Now I have to play the skeptic
for a second here. I feel like we've gotten better
at this. NASA has a Planetary Defense Coordination Office. We
have projects like pan Stars and the Catalina Sky Survey.
We track near Earth objects NEOs, we do I feel
like if a genuine city killer was on its way,
we'd know there'd be a press conference, we'd have a
plan with some of the dart mission or something to nudget.
Speaker 2: That is the comforting narrative we tell ourselves, it's what
we want to believe. But the case study of asteroid
twenty nineteen, okay, it blows that entire narrative right out
of the water.
Speaker 1: Twenty nineteen. Okay, the name is so innocuous. Everything's okay.
Speaker 2: It was decidedly not okay. On July twenty fifth, twenty nineteen,
this rock swept past the Earth. And when I say
swept past, I mean it was a hair's breadth in
cosmic terms, just forty five thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: Okay. For context, the Moon is about two hundred and
forty thousand miles away, right, and the geosynchronous satellites that
carry our TV signals and weather data are at twenty
two thousand miles.
Speaker 2: This thing threaded the needle. It flew right through the
space between our critical satellites and the Moon. It was
deep inside our backyard.
Speaker 1: And how big are we talking here? This wasn't some pebble, right.
Speaker 2: No estimates put it at up to four hundred and
twenty seven feet wide. That's a forty story building moving
at tens of thousands of miles an hour.
Speaker 1: And the impact energy you're.
Speaker 2: Looking at something in the neighborhood of ten megatons of
TNT ten megatons.
Speaker 1: The bomb that destroyed Hiroshimo was fifteen kilotones.
Speaker 2: So this is hundreds of times more powerful. This is
the definition of a city killer. If twenty nineteen ACAD
hit a major metropolitan area London, New York, Tokyo, that
city is not damaged, it's erased gone. The crater is
miles wide. The airburst flattens everything for tens of miles around.
Speaker 1: And this is the part of the story that I
cannot wrap my head around. We didn't see it coming
until it was practically on top of us.
Speaker 2: That's the horror of it. We didn't see it until
mere hours before its closest approach.
Speaker 1: How is that possible? How does a global network of
billion dollar telescopes miss a rock the size of a
football stadium until it's waving hello?
Speaker 2: It's because of the blind spot the sun. It approached
Earth from the direction of the Sun.
Speaker 1: Can you explain the physics of that why does that
make it invisible to us?
Speaker 2: All of our big optical survey telescopes work on contrast.
They need to see a relatively faint, bright object moving
against the black background of space at night. Okay, you
cannot point a sensitive telescope anywhere near the Sun during
the day. It would instantly destroy the optics, and even
if it didn't, the object would be completely lost in
the Sun's glare. It's like trying to spot a single
black fly buzzing in front of a giant stadium searchlight.
While you're share directly into the beam.
Speaker 1: You're completely dazzled. You can't see a.
Speaker 2: Thing, You're totally blind. Twenty nineteen, ok was hiding in
that daylight glare. By the time Earth's orbit carried it
into our night sky, where our telescopes could finally pick
it up, it was already passed us.
Speaker 1: So on July twenty fifth, twenty nineteen, while I was
probably drinking a coffee and worrying about some stupid email,
there was a rock with the power of a massive
hydrogen bomb skimming our atmosphere and no one on Earth knew.
Speaker 2: And if its trajectory had been just a tiny fraction
of a degree different. There would have been no warning,
no sirens, no breaking news alert on your phone, just
a flash brighter than the sun and then a shockwave that.
Speaker 1: Makes me feel incredibly small and powerless. And the sources
are clear. This isn't some freak, one off event. This
blind spot is a known and terrifyingly regular problem.
Speaker 2: It is. Just look back at asteroid forty five eighty
one Silippius in nineteen eighty nine. This one was even bigger,
a one thousand foot wide mountain of rock.
Speaker 1: One thousand feet Okay, so now you're graduating from city
killer to regional catastrophe.
Speaker 2: Oh way beyond. The impact energy for as Sclepius is
estimated at six hundred mega tons six hundred.
Speaker 1: The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Sovietsar BOMBA, was
fifty megatons.
Speaker 2: This is twelve times bigger than that. If Asclepias had
hit the Pacific Ocean, the tsunamis would have been biblical.
You're talking about the complete annihilation of the coastlines of California, Japan, Australia,
tens of millions.
Speaker 1: Dead, and the mist distance on that one.
Speaker 2: This is the part that gives you chills. It passed
through Earth's orbit at the exact spot where our planet
had been just six hours earlier.
Speaker 1: Six hours Earth moves.
Speaker 2: Through its orbit at roughly sixty seven thousand miles an hour.
Six hours is nothing. It is a cosmic blink. It's
like you're sleep walking across a ten lane highway at
night and a silent electric semi truck brushes the fabric.
Speaker 1: On the back of your coat and you don't even
wake up.
Speaker 2: You don't even know what happened.
Speaker 1: And did we see that one coming? Did we track it?
Speaker 2: Nope? The astronomers Henry Holt and Norman Thomas discovered it
on March thirty first, nine eighty nine.
Speaker 1: But when did it pass us?
Speaker 2: March twenty second.
Speaker 1: So they found it nine days after the near miss.
Speaker 2: We only saw the bullet hole in the wall behind
us after the shot had already been fired. We were
looking at the event in the review mirror.
Speaker 1: It's the exact same pattern nineteen eighty nine, twenty nineteen,
And it just happened again, didn't it. In twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: Asteroid twenty twenty three NT one last July, a two
hundred foot asteroid so bigger than the one that created
Tunguska passed within sixty thousand miles of US, again, completely
missed by NASA, missed by the European Space Agency, missed
by the amateur networks.
Speaker 1: Let me guess the sun blind spot.
Speaker 2: The exact same mechanism. It was discovered by an observatory
in South Africa two days after it had already passed us.
Speaker 1: So it's like the gun went off right next to
our ear twice in the last five years, and we're
still not wearing your protection.
Speaker 2: It proves that despite our AI, despite quantum computing and
our rovers on Mars, we have a fundamental gaping hole
in our shield. If the threat comes from the sunward direction,
we are effectively defenseless.
Speaker 1: It's like playing Russian Roulette, but you don't even know
the gun is pressed to your temple until you hear
the chamber click empty.
Speaker 2: That's the reality of the solar apex approach, and it
is a statistical inevitability that eventually one won't miss.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered the sun trying to fry us, and
invisible rocks trying to crush us. But the deeper we
go into these source materials, the stranger and frankly more biblical, the.
Speaker 2: Threats become things get weird.
Speaker 1: Section three covers what you call deep space monsters. And
there's one story here, the Bonilla Observation of eighteen eighty three,
that feels like it belongs in a Victorian horror novel.
Speaker 2: It's one of the most fascinating cold cases in the
history of astronomy. You have Jose Bonia, a respected Mexican astronomer,
at the Zakatika's.
Speaker 1: Observatory, and he's doing routine work right.
Speaker 2: Totally routine. It's August twelfth, eighteen eighty three. His job
for the day is to observe and sketch sun.
Speaker 1: Spots, and then the routine stops being routine.
Speaker 2: Abruptly he starts seeing these objects crossing the face of
the sun. They're not sunspots. They're described as dark, fuzzy
bodies surrounded by a sort of mist.
Speaker 1: And not just one or two.
Speaker 2: No, that's the shocking part. He counts four hundred and
forty seven of them over a period of two days.
Speaker 1: Four hundred and forty seven. That's not an object, that's
a fleet, an armada.
Speaker 2: He was meticulous. He documented everything. He even managed to
take some of the first ever wet plate photographs of
these objects translating the sun. But when he wrote up
his findings and sent them to the prestigious scientific journals
in Paris.
Speaker 1: Let me guess the European scientific elite weren't exactly receptive
to a major discovery coming from a Mexican astronomer.
Speaker 2: They ridiculed him. They laughed him off completely. The official
explanation from a French journal was that it must have
been high altitude bird migrations or dust on his telescope lens.
He was dismissed. The observation was basically forgotten for over
a century.
Speaker 1: Just filed away as a curiosity. Oh the day at
rained geese in Mexico exactly.
Speaker 2: But then fast forward to twenty eleven, a team of
researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico decide to
pull Barnia's old data out of the archives and reanalyze
it with modern computers and modern techniques.
Speaker 1: What did they find?
Speaker 2: They looked at the parallax.
Speaker 1: Explain parallax for us, How does that prove it wasn't
a flock of birds.
Speaker 2: Parallax is the apparent shift in an object's position when
you view it. From two different locations. If Bonia was
seeing birds or dust inside our atmosphere, the parallax shift
would have been huge, meaning only he could see them.
The calculation showed these objects had almost no parallax, which.
Speaker 1: Means they had to be incredibly far away.
Speaker 2: They had to be in space beyond the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So what were they?
Speaker 2: The twenty eleven study concluded it was the only thing.
It could be a massive, recently fragmented comet, a billion
ton comet that had shattered into hundreds of large pieces.
Bonia was watching a river of cosmic debris flow past
the Earth.
Speaker 1: A river of rocks. And how close did this river come?
Speaker 2: This is the truly terrifying part. The data suggests the
fragments passed between three hundred and five thousand miles.
Speaker 1: From Earth three hundred miles Wait a minute, the International
Space Station orbits that are around two hundred and fifty miles.
Speaker 2: Yes, this was a razor shave. Some of these fragments
might have passed through what we now consider low Earth orbit.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't one rock, it was a stream of them.
If Earth's orbit had intersected with that stream, it wouldn't
have been.
Speaker 2: A single impact event. It would have been a global
bombardment like what think of the Cheguska event in Siberia
in nineteen oh eight. That was a single, relatively small
object that exploded in the air and flattened eight hundred
square miles of forest. Now imagine three thousand Tunguska events
going off simultaneously all over the daylight side of the planet.
Speaker 1: That's an extinction level event, without question.
Speaker 2: Global firestorms from the re entry heat, it's the ozone
layer being chemically destroyed. It's a nuclear winter from the
dust kicked into the stratosphere that would last for decades.
Humanity would have been decimated.
Speaker 1: And the most insane part is that we watched our
own funeral procession flowty took pictures of it and dismissed
it as birds.
Speaker 2: It highlights our own observational arrogance. We assume if something
that world ending were happening, you would be obvious, we
would know. But we stared the grim Reaper right in
the face.
Speaker 1: And the laught and it really speaks to the unique
danger of commets, doesn't it, As opposed to asteroids.
Speaker 2: It does. Asteroids are mostly rocks that live in the
inner Solar System. Their orbits are relatively stable and predictable.
We can track them over years decades. Comets are different
beasts entirely like.
Speaker 1: Comet Hyacutech in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: High Coutech is a perfect example. It was a spectacular
comet for anyone watching from Earth, but the Ulysses spacecraft,
which was out exploring the Solar System, found something terrifying
about it.
Speaker 1: Its tail.
Speaker 2: Its tail was the longest ever discovered, three hundred and
fifty million miles long. It was so vast it wrapped
halfway around the inner Solar System.
Speaker 1: And Earth flew right through it.
Speaker 2: We passed directly through the tail. We didn't even know
it at the time, not until they analyzed the magnetic
data from Ulysses months later. Now at his tail is
just ionized gas and fine dust. It's completely harmless, but
it shows the scale. It shows the sheer scale of
these objects. And hier attack was a long period comet.
It came from the Ort cloud, that's.
Speaker 1: The deep freeze at the outermost edge of the Solar System, right.
Speaker 2: Way way out there. These are itsty bodies that get
nudged by a passing star and start a long, slow
fall towards the Sun. They come in on highly elliptical orbits,
picking up incredible speed.
Speaker 1: If we don't get much warning, by the.
Speaker 2: Time we can see them, they're already moving incredibly fast,
and they're already close. We might have months of warning,
maybe a year, not the decades we'd need to mount
a serious deflection mission.
Speaker 1: So if a big, long period comet nucleus was found
to be on a direct collision course.
Speaker 2: There is no Bruce Willis solution. There's no secret rocket
sitting on a launch pad ready to go. We would
just watch it get closer.
Speaker 1: No, Bruce Willis. That is a profoundly sobering thought.
Speaker 2: But if you want to talk about the ultimate bolt
from the blue, the ultimate threat you can't see, can't predict,
and can't defend against, we have to talk about gamma
ray bursts GRBs.
Speaker 1: The death rays from deep space.
Speaker 2: They are, without any hyperbole, the most powerful explosions in
the universe since the Big Bang. They happened when a
truly massive star, many times the mass of our Sun,
collapses at the end of its life into a black hole.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't just explode outwards, It fires these beams exactly.
Speaker 2: Its rotational energy focuses most of the blast into two
tightly colimated, relativistic jets of high energy gamma radiation. There
were literal beans.
Speaker 1: Of death, and we had a close call, or at
least a significant event very recently, the one they called
the boat.
Speaker 2: We did October ninth, twenty twenty two astronomers detected GRB
twenty two to one zero zero nine A. It was
so powerful, so much brighter than anything ever recorded, that
they nicknamed it the boat the brightest of all time?
Speaker 1: How much brighter are we talking?
Speaker 2: It was seventy times brighter than the previous record holder.
It completely saturated the detectors on our space til scopes.
Speaker 1: Where did it come from?
Speaker 2: A galaxy two point four billion light years away?
Speaker 1: Two point four billion That is a distance my brain
simply cannot process. Surely from that far away? Is just
an academic curiosity.
Speaker 2: It's harmless, you think so. I mean, the light from
that explosion has been traveling since before there was complex
life on Earth. But the energy in that beam was
so focused and so unbelievably intense that when it hit Earth,
it physically altered our planet's atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Wait what it changed our atmosphere? From two billion light
years away.
Speaker 2: Yes, it had enough energy to significantly ionize the upper atmosphere.
It measurably changed the electron density in the Earth's ionosphere
for hours. It triggered lightning detectors on the ground. It
shook our entire magnetosphere.
Speaker 1: So what here is pretty obvious. What if one of
these goes off closer to home?
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate nightmare scenario. If a GRB like
the boat were to occur inside our own Milky Way galaxy,
say within five thousand or ten thousand light years, which
is our cosmic neighborhood, and the jet happened to be
pointed directly at us, it wouldn't just ping our sensors.
Speaker 1: It would sterilize the planet absolutely.
Speaker 2: The wave of gamma radiation would flash fry the daylight
side of the Earth and more importantly, would rip the
ozone layer to shreds instantly.
Speaker 1: And without the ozone layer.
Speaker 2: The Sun's unfiltered UV radiation pours in. It would be catastrophic.
It would break down DNA and surface life, causing mass
cancers and mutations. It would kill the phytoplankton in the oceans,
which are the base of the entire marine food chain
and produce a huge amount of our oxygen.
Speaker 1: It would be a mass extinction from a direction we
never even thought to look.
Speaker 2: We are sitting in a galaxy that is effectively a
mine field of these slumbering hypergiant stars, and our survival
is entirely dependent on the random chance of which way
their jets are pointing when they finally go off.
Speaker 1: If the stars pointed one degree to the left, we
might see a pretty new nebula. If it's pointed directly
at us, we become fossil records for some future intelligent
species to find.
Speaker 2: That's the game we're in.
Speaker 1: You as you list all these near misses twenty twelve,
nineteen twenty one, twenty nineteen, eighteen eighty three, twenty twenty two,
it's easy to start feeling like we have some kind
of plot armor, like the universe can throw its worst
at us, but will always just.
Speaker 2: Scrape by the invincibilities.
Speaker 1: Salla sie exactly. But the final section of these source
materials suggests something very different. It suggests our luck has
run out before catastrophically.
Speaker 2: Section four the ancient scar We carry the evidence of
a past apocalypse in our own DNA, and.
Speaker 1: This is the Toba Supereruption, roughly seventy four thousand years ago, the.
Speaker 2: Toba supervolcano in what is now Indonesia. This wasn't just
a big eruption. This is the largest volcanic eruption of
the last twenty five million years. It was apocalyptic on
a planetary scale. It blew nearly three thousand cubic kilometers
of rock and ash into the sky.
Speaker 1: But the sources you sent mentioned a possible solar connection
here that I'd never heard before.
Speaker 2: It's a newer theory. It's still controversial, but it's incredibly compelling.
Some paleoclimatologists and solar physicists are looking at the core
between deep solar minimums, periods of very low solar activity,
and an increasing cosmic rays hitting the Earth.
Speaker 1: How would that trigger a volcano?
Speaker 2: The theory is twofold. The increased cosmic rays might seed
clouds causing dramatic climate shifts, or, and this is the
more speculative part, the muons generated by cosmic rays could
potentially trigger instabilities in large silica rich magma chambers that
are already prying to blow.
Speaker 1: So the Sun going quiet might have helped pull the
trigger on the Earth's biggest volcano.
Speaker 2: It's possible it was a synchronized hit, a perfect storm
of solar inactivity and geological pressure reaching a tipping point.
Speaker 1: And the result for our ancestors, for early Homo sapiens,
was nearly the end of the story.
Speaker 2: It was. Genetic studies of modern human DNA from all
over the world show a clear bottleneck. Right around this time,
the diversity of our genes collapses, which indicates that the
human population crashed.
Speaker 1: We were reduced to a tiny, tiny.
Speaker 2: Group, frighteningly tiny. It's very of course, but some of
the genetic models suggest the total human population on the
entire planet was reduced to as few as three thousand
to ten thousand breeding individuals.
Speaker 1: Three thousand people. That's not a species. That's a small town.
That's the crowd at a high school football game.
Speaker 2: We were, for all intents and purposes, on the endangered
species list. We were one bad winter, one new plague,
or one prolonged drought away from total extinction.
Speaker 1: It really puts our whole modern world into perspective. We
look around at eight billion people, at skyscrapers, at the Internet,
and we forget that every single one of us is
a direct descendant of that tiny, ragged band of survivors
who just barely scrape by.
Speaker 2: We aren't the chosen ones who are destined to rule
the planet. We are the leftovers. We're the descendants of
the few who managed to crawl through the great filter.
Speaker 1: So let's try to bring all this together. We've gone
through the physics of doom. We've melted the grid, we've
dodged city killing rocks, we've been missed by cosmic death rays.
What does this all mean for the person listening right now?
What's the synthesis here?
Speaker 2: I think the first and most important takeaway is about
the illusion of safety. We have this deep, powerful psychological
need to believe that someone.
Speaker 1: Is in charge, that there's a plan.
Speaker 2: Right. We think NASA, the government, the military, they've got
this handled. They see the threats, they have a plan
to mitigate them.
Speaker 1: But the data we've just talked about shows they are
almost always reacting, not being proactive.
Speaker 2: Finding an asteroid nine days after it nearly hit us
isn't a plan, It's an autopsy of a near miss.
We have to accept fundamentally that our systems are reactive
and often completely blind to the biggest and fastest threats.
Speaker 1: Which leads to the second point, which is more philosophical,
the indifference of the universe.
Speaker 2: That's the real philosophical weight of all this. The universe
isn't malicious. It is not trying to kill us.
Speaker 1: It's not a bond villain sitting there stroking a cat
and plotting our demid No, and.
Speaker 2: In some ways that's much scarier. It's simply indifferent. The
Sun throws a cme because of the physics of magnetic reconnection.
It has no idea that a species on the third
planet has built a fragile electrical guid It doesn't know
and it doesn't care.
Speaker 1: And you can't reason with indifference.
Speaker 2: You can't negotiate with it. You can only harden yourself
against it.
Speaker 1: And we've done the absolute opposite, haven't we, which is
the technology paradox Exactly.
Speaker 2: We have built a global civilization that is exquisitely tuned
for efficiency, but that has made it incredibly fragile to disruption.
We have systematically traded resilience for convenience at every single turn.
Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty nine, a Carrington event was a light
show and a few burnt telegraph offices. We were resilient
because we were simple.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty four, that same event is a civilization
ender because we are complex, and our complexity breeds cascading fragility.
Speaker 1: We've built a beautiful, intricate house of class in.
Speaker 2: A neighborhood where the kids are constantly throwing rocks.
Speaker 1: And that leads finally to the Casino analogy.
Speaker 2: It's the only one that really fits. We are playing
a game of cosmic Russian Roulette, and we've had an
amazing winning streak. Twenty twelve was a win, twenty nineteen
was a win. But probability and statistics are unforgiving. You
cannot win forever. The house always wins, The house always wins.
The question isn't if another Carrington level storm will hit us.
The question isn't if another city killer asteroid will line
us up in its sights. It is strictly and only
a matter of when.
Speaker 1: And when could be tomorrow, it could be in one hundred.
Speaker 2: Years, or it could be happening right now while we're
recording this. The light just hasn't reached us yet.
Speaker 1: On that cheerful note, let's leave the listener with a
final thought to chew on throughout this whole conversation, we
kept coming back to these tiny time frames nine days,
six hours in the grand scale of the cosmos thirteen
point eight billion years, What is six hours? What is
nine days?
Speaker 2: It's less than a rounding er, It's a fraction of
a nanosecond on the cosmic clock. We are missing extinction
by margins that are, for all practical purposes zero.
Speaker 1: Well, here's my question to you listening to this on
your phone, powered by that grid, safe and sound in
your daily routine. We have survived this long by being small,
and mostly by being lucky. But is luck a sustainable strategy?
Is that something we can bank our.
Speaker 2: Future on a gambler's fallacy?
Speaker 1: And knowing what you know now about the grid, about
the fragility of the water pumps and the food trucks
and the digital economy, how would you really survive if
our luck finally ran out? If the lights went out
tomorrow and didn't come back on for a year or longer.
Are you ready?
Speaker 2: Because preparation is the only real antidote to a bad
roll of the dice.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on thrilling freads. I encourage you
to dig into these sources yourself. They are equal parts
terrifying and fascinating, and leave your answer in the comments below.
We want to know what you think. We'll see you
next time.