From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made with these headlines.

Astronomers watching city killer asteroid to determine chance of striking Earth in 2032.

And the odds of a city killer asteroid impact in 2032.

Keep rising.

Should we be worried?

And chilling video shows city killer asteroid more powerful than 500 atomic bombs hitting the Earth in 2032 and put us out of our misery.

Please, SpaceX.

All right.

That last one was not a real headline, but they're not very optimistic headlines.

I have to say.

Those were from just the last three weeks or so.

Now the situation looks a lot different.

The probability of the Near Earth object striking the Earth has decreased from, well, what, one 3%?

Now it sounded like less than a percent.

Scientists saying it's going to be close to zero.

Buzzkill.

But according to an expert who spoke with NPR, the chances are are still low.

They're not quite zero.

We're going to discuss what we know about this.

And the pattern that scientists are predicting is that there's going to be things that we're very interested in, that are in the sky, and we're going to be wondering, and we're going to be seeing more of them if we're funding it, if we're looking for it.

So while it's good news, we don't have to worry about a major destructive space event, there are still plenty of questions to answer.

Why was the asteroid classified as a city killer?

How often do we see these things in range?

And if the asteroid were a cause for concern, what could be done to stop it?

It sounds like a science fiction movie, of course, but a month ago, those questions weren't just hypothetical.

Let's get wonky this hour, and our guest is one of our favorite regular guests astrophysicist and science writer.

Doctor Brian Coburn, line is back with us.

Welcome.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you very much.

It's good to be back.

so, you know, I mean, like, for, like, a few days there, I was like, we got a 1% chance.

Everybody's kind of freaking out.

And then they're like, next week we're going to reevaluate the odds.

And this is like a month ago.

And they're like, oh, now it's up to like 3%.

Yeah, for a few days.

And I was like, wow, this thing's really coming.

Now they think it's what down close to zero but not zero.

Essentially zero.

And they expect it to go to zero.

Don't do that.

Like don't ruin this for me already.

you know, I mean it.

This one actually is a great example of what we need to get used to.

Now that's interesting.

You used to.

As in, there will be more of these.

There's going to be more of these.

It's going to be a lot more of these.

the, the, the basically where this was, was we found this in late 2024.

So December 2024, and it was coming towards a close approach in 28 and then swinging around and coming back to possibly hit us in 32.

And so we just found this thing.

We just look at the odds and they're a few percent or there 1%.

And then as it continues to move in our direction that rises.

So it raises to up to I think it was 3.2%.

Yeah.

That was at the high I mean that's pretty high right.

That's that's enough to go.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's let's let's start making plans.

You know, and they actually did start having meetings about what would we do to possibly deflect it and so on and so forth.

You mean they started having meetings?

They haven't been having those meetings?

Well, they know they had they've had general meetings for a while.

I want them to keep having us.

They they do plan on having those meetings for.

But but this specific thing, this was a specific topic of not just how in general would we deflect an asteroid or what would we do, but what would we do in this specific case.

So it did temporarily raise high enough for us to, you know, start thinking about what we would do.

But isn't it possible that we're just going to dodge away all of that funding for.

It's possible the what to do in the case of, of a space.

Right.

That's that's the thing is that right now, I mean, if you look at, you know, discovered in late 2020 for December of 2024, so really 2025 and hitting us in 27, 20, 32, that's seven years.

And that would be seven years to plan a mission, build a mission, launch a mission to get there, deflect it, and hope we miss.

That's a short time range in the term of of how you would do this type of project.

And that's common right now.

We generally don't find these decades in advance.

We generally find them years when they're pretty close, when they're pretty close.

So that's going to be part of what I want to talk about.

So what we're going to talk about with the astrophysicists this hour is how do we know this stuff to begin with, the science is amazing that we can even do this.

I find that's incredible.

And we're going to talk about how we do it.

I am curious to know if if we invest more in this kind of research, will we eventually start to find them farther out?

We'll talk about that.

Or is it always going to be a you know, they're pretty close relative speaking.

what these things are made of when we talk about a city killer, how big that is, how does that compare?

Everybody's thinking about the dinosaurs, but how that compares, you know, in terms of size.

So we'll talk about all that stuff and we will talk about with Brian, what happens if you stop funding things that a lot of people might assume are kind of tangential, not that important.

So there's a lot to cover here.

So let's start with this particular.

It's an asteroid right.

It's an asteroid.

It means it's made of what rock.

Maybe some ice okay.

Mostly rock okay.

That's not the same as a comet.

No, comet is mostly ice.

Some rock.

Okay.

Mostly rock, some ice.

and we find out, as you say, at the end of 2024, this thing exists, and it's going to kind of do this flyby in 28 and may come back around and come toward us.

First question I had was, does our existence at all does it attract objects like would it would it just be normally going this way.

But because we're here it goes boom.

Yeah.

So I just did a visit.

We do advanced.

We do have a YouTube channel.

For all the visual there is.

There is a gravitational, there is a gravitational dance.

And one of the things that raises the uncertainty is that if you have a close flyby of Earth one year, that could, depending on where that path exactly is, could change the trajectory of where it comes to the next time in a good or a bad way.

Well, that depends it become it depends on where it comes in.

But whenever you have an asteroid, that's a small mass that flies close to a planet like Earth, they both pull each other, but the asteroid gets deflected more.

And because of the interaction of their orbits and the gravitational pull between them, you can shift the trajectory.

We do this all the time with spacecraft.

If you want to launch a spacecraft into deep space, rather than just using rocket fuel and thrusting it way out there, you can make a swing by swing by Earth, swing by Jupiter, and get it out into deep space a lot more efficiently.

Slingshot it that way.

The slingshot effect.

Yeah, that's a flyby effect.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

Yeah.

Okay.

how to begin with, do we find these things?

How do we know about this one?

So so this one was found by a telescope that looks at, kind of just scans the sky at various patches at the time.

And when you find objects, when you go back and look at that same patch of sky, if it's moved, you now know that this is an object that's orbiting the sun.

It's not a distant object.

And so then if you take suspects of, of the multiple images, successive successive there is I don't know why, but multiple images of it.

You can then calculate where it is at different times and use that to determine what the orbit is.

I mean, it's remarkable technology.

And we I assume we're only getting better at it.

We are getting better at it.

Yeah.

So as you say, when it comes to these kinds of objects, that could strike us, we have to get accustomed to the idea that when we find them, you know, they're not going to be 500 years away, that they're likely to be, you know, in a lifetime or less or a decade or less.

Right.

Will we get better at finding them further, farther away or.

No?

Yes, I think we will.

there are right now a lot of telescopes have a limited field of view, basically how wide of a patch of sky you can look at at any given time.

And so generally, there's always been this thing of the the higher the resolution, the more detail you want, the smaller the, the area of sky that you can look at.

So you can look at a really detailed object in a very tiny patch of sky, or you can look at a large patch of sky, kind of blurry.

And so for things like asteroids, this has made it extremely difficult to try and find them, because you have to look at a patch, look at another patch, look at another patch, and be able to see basically map out this area to find them.

We are moving now to what are a different type of telescopes, which are sky survey telescopes.

So for example, the Vera Rubin telescope in Chile, it is an eight meter mirror, but rather than an eight meter mirror that's focused on a small patch of sky, it's able to take a high resolution image across a wide patch of sky.

So what Ruben is going to do is scan the sky every night and basically cover its entire observable sky every few days, and we're going to have images, and asteroids are going to be in those images every few days.

And so we're going to find a ton more of these.

This is why I think we might be living in a simulation.

This technology is so old with clever people, clever people.

It's not a simulation.

It's just people smarter than you even.

That's right.

It's very straightforward.

you've been to Chile at this particular array?

Yes.

It's amazing.

I mean, you told us some great stories about that experience.

It's, I was going to use the word spiritual.

It's got to be an amazing experience.

It's.

Yeah, it's it's I would say nominal.

It's a it's a very numinous experience.

It's a, it's a dark sky that most people don't experience.

and it's, it's so remote and so dark.

I would, I would say when the darkest part of the sky there I was at was so dark that the Milky Way cast shadows.

I was looking down at the ground going, what is that?

Oh, wait, no, that's a shadow.

There's nothing up in the sky.

It's not.

It's facing the Milky Way.

And you get this kind of blurry, patchy shadow.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

And so.

So this tech is getting better.

I keep wanting to jump ahead in the conversation.

Like, are we going to keep funding it?

Like, what happens if we don't find it?

We'll get there.

Coming up here I also want to talk about scale, though.

I want to understand what we know about this particular.

So again, the asteroid that's coming back around around 2030 to Brian was telling us the chances now are close to zero.

You think that they were likely go to zero.

They almost always do.

Okay.

Next.

Yeah.

They always have so far fortunately.

Well not always talk to the dinosaurs.

Right.

Well, the ones that we found, you know, I mean, the ones since we've been good enough to find, since we've been good enough to find them, they have all gone to zero.

Yeah.

And that's a lot, right?

I mean, there's a lot that we probably don't report on smaller objects, things like that.

Well, smaller objects or larger objects where the odds are so low.

you know, the, the one that people would talk about was Apophis.

It was it was this fairly large kind of not quite dinosaur killer, but but a large asteroid and a puff of puffs.

When was that?

it was.

Oh, golly.

When they first.

Like in the last generation.

Yeah, about the past decade, it was, you know.

Oh, well, this has some chance of hitting us.

And then as we tracked its orbit more, it's now it's now been delisted.

It's and considered not a risk at all.

And but it was the size of the dinosaur killer.

Not quite.

It was it was large though.

It's when when something is large enough to be named, it's probably something you want to worry about.

If it's a good you like.

172, 36, 24 it's like, it's probably the size of a Prius, you know?

But, but if it's named after, you know, some member of mythology, you probably go, you know, they took the time to name it.

It's probably something to be worried about.

So when it comes to the 2032, they called it a city killer, right?

How big are we talking here?

roughly the size of a small bus.

I mean, that's still not that large.

It's not that large, but it's, you know, it's it's not necessarily.

I mean, it has to do with its mass, but it has to do with its speed relative to us, too.

So am I wrong to hope that if something like that ever comes into our atmosphere, that it burns up before impact?

So this is a we've had things that are not quite that big.

So clearly have been, I think in 2014 and Russia, what it did is it, it came from the sun side.

So we didn't even see it coming.

Because if any asteroid swings at Earth from the sunward side, it's very difficult to detect right now.

This is not giving confidence here.

So so this one just happened to come in fast and shallow.

So it hit the atmosphere and it frag it before it hit the ground in one solid piece.

2014 Russia.

There was 2014 Russia.

And there were still fragments that hit the ground.

But didn't it cause windows to blow up?

It did.

All kinds of the airburst was enough to still cause a massive amount of property damage, but it didn't impact a city straight down in one solid chunk where all of that energy would be released at once.

Okay.

And and how big was that one that when it was coming in, of I want to say it was about 20ft across, something like that.

Okay.

So a little bigger than the bus.

A little bigger.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, around the same size.

I mean, okay, if it would have hit straight down over a major metropolitan area, it would have caused significant and significant death and damage.

I mean, like a like a nuclear explosion, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah, it so in this case, this the bus size one from 2032, the initial idea was that if it was going to hit the United States, it looked like it was going to hit, I think in the southern, the northern part of the southern hemisphere and most likely in water or.

No.

Yeah, most likely in water.

Okay.

I mean, we're we're still mostly water.

So it's yeah, it's good.

Odds are always likely that it's going to hit the ocean.

and, could an ocean impact cause all kinds of devastation, tsunami, things like that.

And ocean impact could cause something like a tsunami.

And if we weren't prepared for it, that can cause massive amounts of of loss of life and, damage.

Okay.

now, now that we know that this thing is probably not going to hit us, the 2032, is it something we still.

Are we going to keep observing it?

Can we still see it right now?

I mean, what's the plan with this thing?

So I think it's behind the sun right now, but it will pass by Earth.

We'll get a good view of it and it'll pass by Earth in 2032.

And we'll get another good view of it.

Didn't.

Aren't you implying, though?

Like with the cherry 1 in 2014, that there's a whole group of them that could be coming from behind the sun that we're not even seeing?

Well, generally they would go from the outer solar system past us and then around the sun and then back.

And so if we don't catch it when it's coming inward, we probably won't catch it when it's coming outward.

This is actually one of the things that that we look at in terms of how do we try to find these things.

One of the project is to focus on those inward coming asteroids.

If you want to make a serious look of these things, you have to look inward as well as outward.

Right now, most of the things we find are outward.

how big was the one that killed the dinosaurs?

Are you going to ask me that?

And I'm going to forget it's.

It was like a mile across or something.

I mean, it was big.

I mean, so when we're talking, a city killer is a school bus size.

Yeah.

A mile across.

Yeah.

I mean, that's almost a that's not a planet killer, but doesn't that kind of a planet killer, right.

It made a layer of of geological record across the entire planet.

Okay.

So you can you can see the line, I'm surprised anything lived after that.

Yeah.

Pretty, pretty remarkable resilience of life there.

Life finds a way.

You know, they say somebody once said that.

Yeah, but, you know, usually trying to create massive extinction of everything would be very difficult.

you know, I mean, you'd need something absolutely huge, like if you gave AI the nuclear codes and everything.

maybe, but even even even the full scale launch of that, there's probably be life that still survives.

I mean, there have been many times in which we've had mass extinctions in the history of, of life on Earth, including almost freezing over the snowball.

What's your point?

Is, life would probably survive.

Yeah.

You wouldn't be going to like Starbucks and enjoying yourself.

No no no no, we're we're fragile on that scale.

You know, there's always you know, I mean, look at how many cockroaches you find in an apartment.

You know, they they're more resilient than we are.

That's a very good point.

I'm talking to Brian Caroline, who is an astrophysicist and a science writer, and we've been talking about the so-called city killer.

from 2032.

We're going to talk in a moment about what's going on in the state of research and and one of the big questions that, you know, scientists and his colleagues are working on and what we need to keep working on or what he thinks we need to keep working on.

Anyway, that's part of the debate.

If you've got questions, comments about this, it's, connections at York.

If you want to email the program connections@wxxi.org, you can call the program toll free 844295 talk.

It's 844295825526302639994.

If you're calling again from Rochester.

So there you go.

And if you're watching on YouTube on our news YouTube channel, you can join the chat there.

I see a number of questions, I promise you coming up here, we'll get to as many as we can there even.

Yes, Patrick, about awesome green explosions in your own backyard.

So we'll we'll get to as much as we can with Brian.

He'll try to diagnose as much as we can.

Were you comfortable with the phrase city killer?

Was that a fair description for that thing?

I think for the popular press, it gives you an idea of scale.

so in that way, it's functional.

Yeah, I think it's functional.

The idea that, you know, if it hit a populated area would do massive damage.

It could wipe out a city, but it's not going to cause an extinction, which I think is is where in movies we always see, you know, the Bruce Willis level of, of extinction event where it's going to wipe out the planet.

Yes.

Wouldn't wipe out the planet.

So on the subject of movies, by the way, have you seen, Mickey 17?

I have not yet.

Okay.

Have you read the book, Mickey seven?

Did you read that?

I have not yet.

Oh, wow.

A science fiction guy.

Come on, Brian, I actually, I don't know if you love science fiction.

You know, I do, but there's a lot of science fiction out there that is local.

I know, I know, so you got anyway.

Yeah.

I'm not going to give you a hard time.

One of the things that I talked to with him on this program last week about was how interesting it is that science fiction gets to ask all of these questions and really think about their application, not just in a I'm going to entertain you in fiction way, but possible application to the human experience or to the to the experience of life.

You know, for example, last week we were talking about how if we end up in a situation where you can upload your consciousness, yes, into a computer, but also into, physical bodies that look like you and you, quote unquote, die, and then they upload your consciousness, which is what's happening in Mickey 17, the movie that's out now.

is that an authentic form of your life?

Is that something that you would desire?

Is that something that capitalism would exploit if corporations knew they could convince people for cheap labor?

You can be immortal.

I mean, these are interesting questions that may be coming and, you know, a lot of science writers think probably will be coming.

So in that way, did science fiction give us anything of value when Armageddon and deep Impact came out about trying to stop these things, or was that just pure Hollywood?

I mean, that's a generation old name.

Yeah.

I mean, it has to tell a story, but but the idea of we should listen to the science, because when we have the data to support that, we know what the consequences are.

And also the idea of could we do something to stop it?

So when the movies, they blew it up with a nuke, you know, it's the American way, but, but the idea that we fragment it or deflect it or something really popularized that idea, that one, we can find these things when they come to our way.

And two, we might be able to do something about it, but probably not obliterate them entirely.

Right?

Probably just nudge them off course.

That's right.

I mean, there are some ideas of obliterating them, you know, fragmenting them so that they would come.

That would be the American way.

That would be the American way.

Blow that thing up.

And that's, you know, some asteroids are very much loose rubble, so deflecting them may be hard.

We may have to fragment them and hope that most of the fragments Miss Earth, for example, you know, ones that are more solid, we can deflect.

And so that's something we're still learning, is, you know, how do we distinguish between the two?

What do we do and how do we handle it?

But in terms of like the science fiction books, in the movies, the idea of of what we're now doing, or at least thinking about, was proposed in science fiction that this really was a risk.

And, and we might be able to do something about it.

Science fiction is useful like that, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so.

I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't brought us more.

And maybe there is.

And maybe I just haven't seen them.

But Deep Impact and Armageddon come out at, like, the same time.

Like it's got to be 25 years ago or more.

And now what's what's come out since then.

Don't look up.

Yeah.

It's more of a metaphorical movie.

Yeah.

That was about.

That's okay.

All right.

Yeah.

No that's true.

Don't look up.

Was the Adam McKay.

Yeah.

And that was one of not listening to the scientists and ignoring the risk.

So what I think happened last month when there was all this talk about this city killer was for at least a few days.

There was this.

Not like we're all doomed, but it was.

Wow.

2032 is not that far away, right?

And there I think it put the public consciousness more in the mindset of, are we ready for something like this?

Like, what would we do right.

And so two questions.

If this thing, the, the one that's a school bus size, if the numbers went the other way, if it was like we're 70% sure it's going to hit.

All of a sudden it would be a massive worldwide effort to come up.

You would think to come up with the cooperation though these days who knows.

Who knows I know you never know.

But let's just, let's assume that we're not living in, you know, some sort of hellscape and that we actually would see cooperation to deal with it.

How confident are you that in the next seven years or probably before seven years, it would have to be sooner than that?

How confident are you that we create a solution that could stop a city killer from hitting us?

moderately confident, I would say.

You really.

We haven't.

We haven't done it in real time, but we have done the Dart mission, for example, where we impacted an asteroid to see could we deflect it?

And the answer in that case was yes.

in the case of the specific asteroid, because it would fly by Earth and then kind of go in orbit and then come back again, we could get it more when it's farther away.

And that's one of the things about having time is if you're a day out, your chance of deflecting it is zero.

But if you are at a part of its orbit where it's what they might say, you know, the farthest away the the abelian, then a small deflection is enough to make a massive change.

And so the more time we have, the more we can get it to that kind of critical point in its orbit.

There's so there's a reasonable hope that we could do.

It's not a reasonable whole.

Yeah.

it generally speaking, is it about mass or is it about the larger the more the challenge to stop it?

well, larger is usually mass.

It's usually that it would be mass composition and orbital dynamics.

Maybe, maybe mass was too.

I was told there'd be no science.

I was told there would be all science.

This.

Sorry.

no mass was the wrong description.

You talked about composition.

So when when there's different compositions that are a little more fragmented, or if it's if it's more like loose rubble or loose rubble, that's going to be harder to deflect because say, I would have thought the opposite.

Why is it hard if it's if it's much more solid, you can just ram into it a single impact bang, and that will nudge it in the right direction.

This is what we did with dart, okay?

We didn't try and subtly nudge it.

We just took something at high speed, launched it that way and it bang, just to see how much it would deflect.

And we found that it would deflect enough to deflect its orbit significantly.

So, so something that's solid, we can just hit.

But but if it's rubble hitting it could fragment it.

And that might actually pause, cause a greater risk.

Okay.

well, I mean, maybe, maybe there's a group of people sitting in a room right now who could be called upon.

I mean, like, does that exist at NASA or elsewhere?

Where these are experts in the field who think about this all day, think, yeah.

Yes.

That exists.

Yes.

Good.

Okay.

We'll probably defend that soon.

Max in Rochester.

Hi, Max.

Go ahead.

Good morning.

Hi.

there's a book called Lucifer's Hammer.

Larry Neven, back in the early 70s, I think a lot more realistic than the movies you were talking about.

But in any event, you're calling that asteroid city killer.

That would be if it hit somewhere on a land or near a city where the native middle of the ocean wipe out a whole bunch of other cities.

Okay, Brian.

if it if it hit in, say, the middle of Pacific, it would cause some tidal disturbances, but not a huge deal.

usually if you you have to kind of target the release of energy from one spot to another.

So, for example, an earthquake in Alaska kind of focuses ocean waves towards Japan.

So so that would be, you know, a bigger thing.

But if you if you went into the middle of the ocean, say, the middle of the Pacific, for example, the waves would go out in all different directions, it wouldn't be focused and most of the energy would be dispersed depending on the size, though, depending on the size.

But if you're talking about this size, the school bus, the school bus size, it wouldn't be huge.

There could be some damage, but it's not it's not going to damage cities on that scale.

Okay.

Lucifer's hammer, do you endorse it?

it was a great book.

So I love Nivin.

So realistic enough to scare you.

it was kind of the first example of this kind of thing, so.

So yeah, I mean, I guess I was too young to be scared by it, but.

Okay.

Max, anything you want to share before we let you go?

No.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, science fiction is the way to start thinking about this.

And as Brian said, there is there are people working every day on this.

When we come back from this only break, we're going to ask them how quickly they're about to get cut in terms of funding.

Now, Brian doesn't have all those answers, but we are going to talk to Brian, who's an astrophysicist and a, a science writer, about the kind of work that is happening that may not be on the everyday Americans radar.

That could get cut here.

And what is he concerned about?

What does he want us to continue?

What are the big questions we're still working on answering?

more of that on the other side of this, our only break of the hour.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Wednesday, on the next connections, we sit down with RIT Professor Loren Hall, who's been writing about what it means to be a principled conservative, especially during the second Trump administration.

What does conservatism mean?

What does it mean to truly pursue small government goals and to do it effectively and constructively?

She's got a lot to share, and we'll talk about it Wednesday.

Public radio brings you the kind of enlightened discussions about local and world events that keep you informed.

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Please make your gift at WXXI talk.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Kathy writes to say hi Evan and Megan.

Fascinating discussion.

A number of articles and research from the past couple of years indicate a comet, a comet or a meteor exploding in the atmosphere above Earth very likely contributed to the decline and extinction of the megafauna, mammoths, saber tooth tigers, etc.

across the northern hemisphere.

And Kathy shares a couple of articles on that.

If you heard about that.

Yeah, there there are some theories about that in terms of like, either more impacts or a large impact affecting certain environments.

I couldn't speak about that's been specifically, but.

Okay.

and let me read from Charlie as well here.

Charlie says, Evan, considering today's political environment and what is happening to my retirement account, do you think the scientists could speed this asteroid some way and put me out of my misery?

Charlie, he says, seriously, say this asteroid does a really close flyby.

Could it possibly wobble Earth off its axis and create a permanent winter, or project Earth closer to the sun than we burn up?

So Brian mentioned earlier this hour that typically when you get these flybys, the larger object, I think is what he was saying is, which is typically the Earth will affect the smaller object, and maybe even if we don't collide, affect its course.

Charlie saying, could it go the other way?

Could Earth be bumped off our path?

So the short answer is no.

But, when an asteroid does fly by Earth, it does change our orbit in motion.

Very slightly measurable ways.

But that just says how well we can measure this.

Okay.

generally, is it about the bigger object will not get bumped off course by the smaller generally?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically, the more mass you have, the less the more resistance you have to moving.

okay.

Charlie, I hope that answers your question there.

And I haven't checked the Dow Jones today.

I'm sure it's great.

I'm the president said yesterday, don't look at the stock market every day after he spent the last 40 years of his life saying, look at, oh, it's down 714 points today.

That's it.

Well, it's early.

don't look at the market every day.

Just don't do that.

After he told you during the campaign, look at it every day.

Okay.

Let's move on to what the federal government is doing on that subject.

and we have seen cuts in a lot of different places.

We have seen cuts in the last two months, literally put people out of work or change funding priorities for research.

A lot of it is speculation on what's going to happen.

Some of it we know.

So let me just start broadly here.

what are you hearing and seeing about possible funding cuts, whether it's NASA, other kinds of research, etc.?

And is that a concern for you?

I think what you're hearing is kind of all over the place.

I think one of the biggest things is uncertainty.

you know, I think the short term consequences, I can't predict, you know, it depends on what day it is and which way the wind blows.

but in general, if you want to recruit young people to become scientists, you need to have a path for them.

So there needs to be that some kind of good odds that that you're going to land into a career and you'll be able to do something meaningful and contribute, but also you'll be able to feed your family and, and, you know, live an ordinary life.

If if funding becomes so uncertain that it's just by random whim.

These people are very talented.

They're they're intelligent, they're motivated, they're highly trained.

Why go into that?

Why not pick something else?

We're going to lose scientists so we could lose scientists because we don't have a certain stability.

You know, a lot of missions that are planned on the scale of decades.

And that means that a lot of times, the people who thought them up retire about the time that it's launched.

Amazing.

And so you have to have the next generation beyond that, that will step up and learn the skills and do this.

You know, a good example is when we went to the moon, it's like we went to the moon.

We landed on the moon, something that is unprecedented.

And then we cut funding.

And so all those talented young people may have stayed with NASA or may have moved on, but new people didn't come in.

And so now when we said we're going to return to the moon, it's much more difficult because a lot of the skills that we had, we don't have anymore.

We couldn't build a Saturn five.

Now we just don't know how to.

Wow.

the mission to Pluto, right?

The a couple decades, I think.

Yeah, that there's that right.

If I'm remembering correctly.

Yeah.

Those Webb space telescope.

Yeah.

They're amazing images of of Pluto.

We got we saw the heart.

We saw all the beautiful Pluto in color and detail because we got.

Yeah.

And that's that is something that it took so long to do that mission that by the time we got it done, Pluto was no longer a planet.

We shouldn't have come here.

If we were going to decide that this wasn't even a planet.

Yeah, that's pretty funny.

but to your point, though, there were people who probably spent much of their career on that.

Yeah, there are people who first read about the mission and then went to college and then went to got to get their PhD and then joined the team.

So, so as children, they read about this mission and then became part of the team.

So let me also ask you about how the public thinks about science in general.

Before the program began, you used a phrase with me.

You said, you know, there's times where people think, well, these are just projects that aren't important, right?

You know, man, we can cut this.

Or do we need to spend this?

These are just projects that aren't important.

Tell me about the way you would contextualize that.

Well, I think, you know, certainly asking that question is something that we should always ask.

We shouldn't just say, because science, let's spend willy nilly.

I mean, that's that's kind of crazy.

But at the same time, we need to put them in the context of, of what can we do with this.

So as an example, when you look at, say, possible asteroids coming to strike Earth, most of them have not been found by projects designed and built to find asteroids.

Most of them have been found by sky surveys or satellites that had other missions.

And part of that mission was to capture large images of the sky multiple times, day after day, year after year.

And that's how you find these.

So, something like the Gaia mission, was really meant to map a portion of our Milky Way.

And so it's a space satellite that that scans the sky over and over and over again.

And so it really wanted to find out, like what's really the shape of the Milky Way, but it also finds exoplanets and it finds out, you know, what star systems may have life and it finds asteroids because as it's scanning the sky, it will find these asteroids.

And when it comes back and scans it again, it will find that it's moved.

And so it's finding asteroids in our own solar system, even though that wasn't its primary goal.

And now we have a spacecraft that's supposed to launch today called sphere X, that's going to make a full high resolution infrared map of the entire sky, and it's going to find asteroids.

Its mission is to look at galaxies and how galaxies evolve over time.

But it will find asteroids just because of the nature of the work it's doing, because it's scanning the sky in infrared.

And one of the challenges of finding asteroids is that most of what we find is invisible light, which is reflected light.

A lot of asteroids are very dark.

They're the color of charcoal.

And even though they're not hot, they're just warm enough to give off, to radiate infrared light.

So when you make a map of the sky in infrared light, you find these glowing rocks that are asteroids.

Is it possible that part of what sphere X will do will detect some of these dangerous near-Earth objects?

Absolutely.

That's possible.

Yeah.

What is the overall what is the purpose of sphere X sphere.

Its primary mission is to look at the evolution of galaxies.

So it's going to find hundreds of millions of galaxies from nearby all the way to the most distant ones at the very edge of the beginning of galaxies.

And and because it's looking at infrared, it's going to be looking at gas and dust, star forming regions, solar system forming regions.

It's going to see how the structure evolved over time, how the chemical composition changed over time.

Who's running this Fedex mission?

it's a NASA project, along with lots of other labs.

It's not related to space X, it's sphere X, it's sphere X, space.

Space is.

Well, they didn't have a good week last week.

Yeah, but they're a bang up company that's for sure.

Yeah.

Well who knows.

Maybe they'll do other cool stuff.

Yeah, I'm sure they will.

You know, they got a lot of money they have.

They do not have funding to succeed.

I don't think SpaceX has a funding issue.

No.

Yeah.

And I hope they succeed.

I mean, they have launched many satellites.

Yeah.

Oh so the the sphere X is going to launch on a Falcon.

So.

It's a SpaceX Falcon okay.

Yeah okay.

So sphere and that's launching today.

Sphere.

It's scheduled to launch this evening at last I checked okay.

It was going to launch earlier this month and then and there's nothing going on with funding that would change that.

Not in that case.

Okay.

I mean, there comes a point where basically the funding is already set.

Now, the funding to monitor the data could get shut off.

I mean, that's one of the things about like government shutdowns and stuff is you stop tracking data.

let me also ask you a little bit about what The Hill reported about climate change threatening satellites as they orbit in space.

The Hill, reports on the study that finds the ongoing surge of greenhouse gas emissions in the near Earth environment could cause dramatic declines in the number of satellites orbiting the planet by the end of the century.

By the year 2100, the satellite carrying capacity of the most popular low orbit regions could decline by 50 to 66% due to the impacts of emissions.

And that's a study published yesterday in nature.

Sustainability.

Experts determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can cause the Atmos upper atmosphere to shrink.

this sounds like possible trouble.

Yeah.

When when the shape of the atmosphere changes, the ability to launch these things changes.

And low Earth orbit, satellites have drag.

They interact with the atmosphere.

And so you have to accommodate for that.

And and if you can't, then that changes.

Like, how long are they going to stay up?

how much is are we going to change all of this drag.

So I'm reading it says less drag means longer lives for space junk, right?

The researchers said, would litter popular orbital regions for decades and raise the risk of collisions right.

In this case, because you do a lot of low Earth orbits, what you want to do is you make them small, cheap and easy, and then when they wear out, they eventually just fall into the atmosphere and burn up.

That's the plan.

But if they don't fall into the atmosphere and burn up, then they're still there and they are basically a dead car parked in your parking lot.

You can't do anything about it.

Yeah, and you know, space is big.

In a moment we're going to talk about scale with Brian, which is a popular subject, but I still still think it's valuable for human beings to think about scale.

But just reading about satellites, we've seen a surge in the number of satellites launched in recent years, particularly for delivering, as The Hill says, broadband internet from space.

the New York Times recently had a series about the United States and China, doing a lot of, to me, it sounds like high tech spy work, trying to set up kind of satellite wars.

Sabotage wars.

I don't think we quite know what it is going to be like if we see massive problems with satellites for human civilization.

You know, I think one of the things that's a difficulty is, you know, there's a limited amount of space that you can orbit around the Earth.

And so a good example of that is the geosynchronous orbit.

It's incredibly crowded.

And and so, you know, those orbits come at a premium low Earth orbit is coming at a premium.

Everybody wants to do low Earth orbit satellites, for communications, for space, for, you know, all sorts of things.

the problem is that that different countries want to have their own game.

And so you have overlapping satellites that have to avoid each other, and you're going to have impacts.

And those impacts are going to make debris.

one of the models, there's something called the Kessler effect where basically debris hits other satellites, which makes more debris, which hits other satellites, which makes more debris so that you can't have satellites.

we can mitigate that to a little bit.

But the real danger comes is what if the United States and China get very aggressive and we start taking out our GPS satellites and lower satellites?

I mean, there's literally talk about what happens in the future if we use nuclear weapons on satellites.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And there was talk about that way back in the Reagan era with Star Wars, you know.

So the thing is, the debris stuff stay is up there a lot.

And if you start exploding each other's satellites, you now have a debris field, not an orbital field.

So that brings me to the question of scale.

So when you think about that much debris, that's a lot of debris that makes it difficult to keep doing what you want to do with satellites.

And part of me thinks, well, isn't that what our planet is?

Isn't that what Earth is in?

We're in this universe with all of this space dust and rocks, and the difference is, the more I read and remind myself about scale, the more it's very different.

Whereas in our lower atmosphere where satellites are or I'm not even using the right term as Brian, like, please don't use scientific terms like I'm my approval.

But, you know, close to us.

We can really flood that with debris.

We are in space is so big.

Once in a while I'll see.

And the internet's always right.

I'll see a picture on the internet where it's like Mercury, you know, next to if Mercury was a marble compared to if Earth was a marble, compared to the sun compared to beetle guys, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, whatever you call that, whoever you want to call it.

Okay.

It's all fine.

I mean, like, it's incredible how much bigger the sun is than the Earth, and how much bigger beetle thing is than the sun.

And I want you to talk a little bit for a moment.

Like when we see headlines about this black hole that's expanding that I was reading about last week, and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's expanding so quickly.

I mean, our time's got to be numbered here.

Yeah, it is numbered in the billions of years.

That's how big the universe.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

So how do we can sort of conceptualize scale that way?

I think you, I think it's better to look at the connections than it is to look at scale.

What do you mean?

Well, scale starts to become just a numbers game.

Do you say, oh, a billion years, a trillion stars?

What is that?

What does that number really mean?

It's hard to visualize what a trillion is.

Yeah, what a trillion is.

What's a billion?

You know, billions and billions of stars.

Yeah.

Like what does it all mean?

And and when we get over kind of practical everyday numbers, it becomes increasingly difficult to, to visualize at scale.

And you can do the scale of a marble, you know, the one, the one I like for the size of the Milky Way is that if you take the entire history of human civilization and I mean be liberal and say 12,000 years, for example, look at how far light can travel across the Milky Way in 12,000 years, and it can't even traverse from one arm to the next.

It's one patch within the Milky Way, you know.

So if the if the Milky Way were the size of an LP, it would be, you know, basically the size of the 12,000 path of light would be basically a disk the size of the, you know, the 45 records.

You're really dating myself with the old 45.

Yeah.

That's the area within an LP.

That light is traveled in the lifetime of human civilization.

We have no concept of this.

You know, it takes 100,000 years for light to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other, which gives me comfort that we're never going to be hit by a not not never.

The dinosaurs were were unlikely to be hit by one of these massive objects, but that to me says there just must be a lot out there.

There is.

There is a lot out there.

But but again, coming back to the connections idea we have through the entire history of the human species, we've had a few impacts, but nothing that that really, impacted humanity.

We've just been lucky that way.

we've had volcanic activity that's impacted humanity more.

But but we are now, after all of the history of human civilization, we at the point where we are realistically talking about finding and moving rocks so that the risk doesn't go from to doesn't remain tiny.

It goes to zero.

And within a couple of centuries we may have that.

If we step up to the challenge, we could make the risk of an impact on Earth zero.

We've never been able to do that.

Remarkable.

Elizabeth writes.

Evan, I'm tuning in late, but have you talked about the TV show Paradise and what exactly happened to the Earth on that show?

I don't know, Paradise to You, Paradise Is is one of the two apocalyptic TV shows.

There's Paradise and Silo are you watching Paradise?

I haven't watched Paradise yet.

I've been watching.

I don't know if Elizabeth is asking for a spoiler here, so I want to be careful.

Maybe producer Megan Mack can figure out what happened to Earth on Paradise.

it doesn't sound like it was good.

Anyway, it.

Basically, they're both bunker stories.

Bunker story.

So they they're they're kind of underground in a bunker for the rest of civilization.

Paradise is basically like a 50s utopia underground mall where a silo is, is like government housing.

Elizabeth's, interest, Paradise producer Megan Mack says a super volcano triggered a tsunami that covered much of the Earth.

Yeah, Yellowstone sounds bad.

Okay, I was a little fuzzy on this good bad thing.

This our important safety note.

Thanks again.

Okay.

There.

I can always.

I can quote Ghostbusters there.

I shouldn't have given it away.

I should have just left.

That is an Easter egg for people.

okay.

Lastly, as we get ready to wrap up here, Dallas wants to now ask about the southern anomalous area.

That is a crazy thing.

What is the southern anomalous area?

What's he talking about?

Is it, I guess, is it this zone of avoidance is what he's talking about.

I don't know.

So.

So, Dallas, you have to clarify.

So the zone of avoidance for for people would know is, is in the center of our Milky Way.

And you can really see it in the southern Hemisphere.

If you look towards the center of the Milky Way, you don't see a whole cluster of stars.

What you see is just dark clouds.

And so what that means is it particularly an optical light.

We can't see anything in that direction.

And the fun part is that somewhere behind the zone of avoidance is a large supercluster of galaxies that's pulling the Milky Way towards that.

So we're being this there's this Great Attractor somewhere past the zone of avoidance that's pulling the Milky Way towards other galaxies.

Sounds like trouble for us in the future.

Like our ancestors.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, like a billion years.

Billions of years.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure we'll still be here in a billion years.

Okay.

Last minute or so.

What?

What's the next big thing that you're watching now?

Is it federal funding?

Is it making sure we can keep doing what we're doing?

Is there some really interesting question that scientists are working on that you're keen on them giving you some answers to in the next year?

Yeah, I think there's I think what's going to be really transformative, at least in the long term, is going to be these large data observatories.

So we are now at the point where we are gathering so much data that it's really the analysis of the data.

That's more of a challenge than gathering it.

Is that a place for AI?

It could be a place for AI, but one of the things that's interesting is that that data starts getting open to the public.

So the old school way of doing astronomy is I write a grant and I get telescope time, and I gather data, and that data is my data, and I get an exclusive period to analyze the data before anybody else does, because I wrote with the grant.

And when you get something like the Vera Rubin Observatory, for example, is going to capture wide areas of the sky, clean it up a little bit and then release it to the public, which means anyone with a computer or eye or anything can look for things in the data.

Pretty cool.

Pretty cool.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

All right, well that's exciting.

That's a that's an optimistic note to end on of what's been in I think a pretty optimistic hour.

I don't know I've been told my voice goes up like that.

It betrays I don't really believe what I'm saying.

It's pretty optimistic.

It's fine.

It's fine.

Everything's back.

It's good, everything's good, everything's great.

This is really fun.

Thank you for coming back here.

Thank you very much.

And keep us informed.

As always.

Brian is one of the best.

he is an astrophysicist and science writer, doctor Brian Cumberland.

And from all of us and connections.

Thank you for listening.

Watch the guys.

Stay safe.

And we're back with you tomorrow on member supported public media.

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