Fun Fact: If it wasn’t for Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, the Earth would get hit all the time with asteroids. Jupiter’s rich gravity ALMOST always takes the blows.

I know:)

Juptíer is largést giant gas.

Ohhhhh

NOT A FUN FACT.

@Vincent Harris whys it not fun :(

That guy was so chill talking about the devastating impacts of asteroids, so you can tell he's been researching them for a long time

Same thought

This guy discovered Kuiper belt you know.

Brother think of asteroid having momentum equal to weight× gravity×speed will fall on earth as fire ball due to atmospheric friction.

@Vivek Kapoor I think you mean mass x velocity but yes it would be a lot of momentum

hij liegd alles aan elkaar! allemaal fake

I've been to the crater in Arizona and there's no way to convey how huge the crater is without seeing it in person. It's beautiful and haunting.

Not a crater, it's a volcano.

@Rik Ellis literally called the meteor Crater, idk what you want me to tell you

Eh, the Grand Canyon was much bigger

@Qualicum Jack yeah, but the Grand canyon is less terrifying than a meteor Crater because at any moment one of those could crash anywhere on earth.

@DrKoneko Thats not quite true

Derek, you are fantastic at what you do. You are among the top information sources, not on Youtube but in the whole of Internet. Respect to what and how you do it. Thank you.

LMAO There is no truth to any of it .

Yeah he's usually pretty good putting it in layman's terms too.

@Gary Ryan Whats Real You have absolutely zero clue what you are talking about. Keep replying on edited and out-of-context Instagram posts and other's horrible research to convince people that the Earth is flat. I don't know how you try to disprove this.

Asteroid Kessler Syndrome might be a thing.

A 1-2 kilometer rock would definitely obliterate Germany or France, but when you consider impact angle and the amount of ejecta even those could have a global effect. It may not turn the earth into a roaster like the K-T event, but it definitely would have a climatic effect considering a volcano that releases far less energy can affect the entire Earth's climate.

he also forgot to mention, when it hits the ocean, it will be also big problem, with tsunami, it will create. He also forgot mention radiation... imagine, how many nuclear plants will be affected by big explosion. It will make problem even bigger, particulary if it hit country with big number of nuclear plants. Imagine, what caused only Chernobyl or Fukushima on their own. Now imagine 300 nuclear plants being hit...

As long as it gets France we good

I wish we had a way of slowing the earth down, just before meteors hit, so we could make sure they all hit somewhere unimportant like the Sahara Desert. It's like a giant sandbox. It's like catching a huge cat turd. (PlOp!) I should be a scientist.

@B L Not sure if this is meant to be ironic shitposting/stupidity but they usually drop in the ocean, due to oceans being the majority of surface area. This means we've got tons of undetected impacts, in fact we never even found Chicxulub until some oil survey team mapped the ocean floor because a lot of the crater is under water. It also means that in most cases nobody even sees or hears of a big Chelyabinsk boom, and Russia is a frequently hit for the same reason, which is it's got greater landmass than any other country so it's statistically most likely to be hit of any country. The problem with a land impact he already talked about. Think of it kinda like a really big nuke on land vs in the ocean. In the ocean it's just going to bore a hole to the ocean floor, cause a tsunami, not really eject that much material but just vaporize tons of ocean water (idk the short term impact this will have on weather). The problem with a land or shallow water hit is it's going to eject countless gigatons of material, that's then going to partly rain down and heat up the atmosphere, bury the area in dust/ash/sediment, pollute the air, and a sufficiently big impactor will theoretically cook the surface like an oven from so much debris raining back from near orbit. On top of that you'll have so much ash in the atmosphere it'd block out the sun. So not even getting into why slowing earth's rotation down is a stupid idea, you'd get everyone killed and guarantee a mass extinction event pointlessly.

It's scary that we still aren't that good at detecting asteroids, but the size of the universe and all the objects within space makes it so hard to predict. The idea of wrapping tin foil around an asteroid seems like something out of a science fiction comedy movie, but it's cool that the radiative properties of some metals are something to think about when entering outer space.

The fact that we don't have a rocket that could deflect an asteroid, but plain old photons could, is quite funny to think about.

Hats off to the cameraman who filmed all this space stuff for us.

hope they got a raise.

Underated comment

He should make a YouTube channel

He has held breath more than actors in nemo

@SKAIRYM GAMING i bet he's working for nasa and he records the astroids and nasa has a time machine since they recorded the dino's death day

After all these years of inventions and developments it might seem depressing to know that there really is nothing we can do to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth or even evacuating people before it does. An ode to the fragility of human life.

"After all these years" Actually, in reality what we humans lived though out these many years are far less compared to the time earth existed. All our modern technologies are just hundred years old. We are basically babies. We need much more thousands yesrs of technological advances..

@Pradeepa Pandiyan - Music Essentials True. Farming began just 10,000 years back. Who knows what life will be like in another 10,000 years.

If we find the asteroid early enough any minor force on the asteroid would already be enough to change its orbit over time. One impact from a small spacecraft might already be enough to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth in a few years (see the upcoming DART mission). The key is finding all the potentially hazardous asteroids and determining their orbit with high enough accuracy (including the Yarkovski effect present on the asteroid). The OSIRIS-REx mission has done this for one potentially hazardous asteroid already, and with the upcoming technology of interplanetary cubesats we might be able to do this for many asteroids in the near future.

@2424Lars but we dont need to do this in fact if an asteroid 5 miles wide comes hurling at earth about 80,000mph people should raise their arms by their side tilt their head high and accept their fate we DONT need to stop an asteroid from hitting earth if it hits earth oh well to bad to sad it's natural we need a few billion people to seemingly disappear too it would really help out

@Young Flashy An asteroid impact affects all life on the planet, not just humans though

This is one of the best example of clear, rational, scientific thinking and presentation of a subject. Outstanding. Full marks.

Since learning about the Chicxulub Asteroid, I've always wondered how much it impacted our atmosphere and thought, this may be the reason nothing grows as large as the dinosaurs did. That is, because it destroyed a major portion of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Maybe that's way off base. I got the idea after having kept fish for about 10 years. Then I learned that, how big a fish grows in a tank depends on two things: #1, how much oxygen is in the water AND #2, how many other fish are also using that oxygen. So it makes sense. But is this the reason animals do not grow as large as they did during the time of the dinosaur?

In a roundabout way you are totally correct - the earth's atmosphere used to have (many millions of years ago) a far higher % of oxygen than it does today. I remember reading it was something like 28-35% back in the early days of dinosaurs, whereas its down to 20-22% these days. what caused the depletion of all that oxygen is up for huge debate - certainly many causes over 10's of millions of years.... and I'm sure huge asteroid explosions that changed the whole structure of the atmosphere contributed a considerable amount. also note that with a higher % of oxygen comes a much higher chance for huge forest fires that burn for months at a time... and what they burn releases CO2, thereby reducing oxygen further. For all we know, the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere may be on a permanent very-long-term decline, but the timeframe is so huge (hundreds of millions of years) it doesn't really affect us and we may as well consider it stable. The huge rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration that we humans have been causing in the last 300 years on the other hand is totally unprecedented and is a MASSIVE cause for concern for us right now!

@Ziggy F Thank you. Yes, increased CO2 certainly is a concern. The hardest question is, can we do anything effective about it now? When the pandemic struck and so many people stayed home -- and many office-type jobs learned about remote working -- I was hopeful this would become a popular trend, long term. I kept thinking, it is so good on several levels: less commuting means less pollution but it also means people waste less time because of their jobs and can regain some time with their families. AND the businesses can save money on all the expenses of keeping larger office areas. It's a win-win-win! But, no. Most have reverted and seem to cling to the old ways. :( Failure to adapt... that's what killed the dinosaurs.

I know this is an old comment, but reasons (land) animals are not as big as dinosaurs: 1. many dinosaurs (specifically sauropods) had hollow bones & air sacs (basically bonus lungs) which made them surprisingly light for their size and able to breathe better (basal dinosaurs evolved in a low oxygen environment, as more oxygen entered the air they got bigger) 2. giraffes, elephants and hippos are already too big to be hunted regularly/effectively* there is little pressure for them to get bigger 3. for predators, extra size reduces the prey pool (hunting a gazelle would burn more calories than they get from eating) forcing them to hunt dangerous prey like elephants/hippos/giraffes 4. there was an extinction event at the end of the last ice age which killed the largest megafauna, it might just be nothing has filled the niche yet 5. there is now a predator (us) which can kill just about any creature regardless of size and has possibly caused several species to go extinct (moa, haast's eagle, megalania) also failure to adapt only killed the largest non-avian dinosaurs, considering there are more chickens than humans id say dinosaurs are still doing pretty good :P

It would be helpful if you also covered the implications of various levels of incidence. For example asteroids commonly skip off the atmosphere when they don't enter at a steep enough angle. And if they do enter, the angle is usually still great enough to burn off most or all of the asteroid before impact. For a small asteroid to actually make it to the Earth's surface requires a perfect 'shot'

Each day there's 17 perfect "shots", meaning they hit the surface. That's about 6100 perfect "shots" in one year.

I felt like the solutions he offered weren't super representative of the ideas we have today. I study astronomy and asteroids have ended being a point of focus for me, I even took an entire class about defending the Earth from asteroids. To start, the animations in this video didn't properly show where force would be applied to redirect an asteroid. Rather than pushing it away from the Earth we would push it in its orbit, either from the 'front' of direction of movement or from 'behind'. This either increases the asteroid's orbital velocity or decreases it, subsequently increasing its orbit or decreasing it. This would be used put the asteroid on a non-intersecting orbital path. We have a few ways of doing this. The first and most realistic is a kinetic impactor, this simply smashes a heavy impactor into the object. Kinetic impactors are feasible if we have about 1-2 years of preparation with a smaller object (max a couple hundred meters). Currently the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) from NASA is on its way to test a kinetic impactor on a binary asteroid system, one of the main goals is to determine is this method has future potential for application. On a side note, my professor for the above mentioned class was on this project, and a TA of mine from another class was involved in the principal calculations. Similar to the kinetic impactor we also have nukes. In the video they only talked about surface detonations, with nukes we would aim to detonate a distance from the surface of the asteroid to prevent breaking any large sections off. Again this method relies on the force created by the detonation to either increase or decrease orbital velocity. This method is a bit less feasible, although it is a solution for slightly larger asteroids (up to several kilometers). Realistically the world would have to come together against a threat that requires nuclear deflection, signing treaties and agreements that allow for the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space. There are many other proposed methods like a gravity tractor which would place a large ship in front or behind of the asteroid's orbit to increase or decrease its orbital velocity via gravitation. This is much more theoretical and at its current conceptual stage would require many years to affect its gravity enough to prevent an impact. Time is most important with all of these methods, the farther out a high chance impactor, the easier it will be to alter its orbit enough to prevent an impact. The asteroids we are most worried about range from ~50-1000 meters, because their potential for devastation is great and they are small enough that some avoid detection. When it comes to larger asteroids, their size gives us a leg up, we would likely discover an impactor chance from a larger body with significant time beforehand, giving us more time to solve a more difficult deflection. Also looking at the statistics and the functions of our solar system, the chance of any significant asteroid impacting in our lifetimes is low.

Will you please give me a simplified version? It's 12:00 and my mom would kill me, so I don't have much time to read an entire paragraph

Interesting comment

The Gravity Tractor idea is extremely intriguing... I will enjoy daydreaming about that, thank you! The point about the animation is also interesting, and I should have picked up on it, but I didn't think about it at all. When I first learned about Orbits I was taught that increasing or decreasing forward momentum was the key to changing orbital distance, but I still just let the animation flow past without criticism... A decent reminder that real scientists have to bully themselves into remembering to think about all kinds of simple factors, and never take anything for granted.

Excellent to know. Makes total sense what you said about nudging it out of its orbit. Are there ways to use the asteroid's velocity against itself? This is a purely speculative question, but could some aspect of its energy be used or redirected or harnessed somehow to cause enough of a change in its trajectory to make it a near miss instead of an impact?

The idea of a kilometres-wide chunk of iron getting so hot that it becomes - not just a liquid, but a GAS - is genuinely hard for me to imagine.

plasma buddy .

Yeah, falling at 60,000 kmph!

That's when you realize that the "velocity SQUARED" component of kinetic energy starts to get seriously ridiculous at very high speeds. And the law of conservation of energy states that if you are slowing down, that energy has to go SOMEWHERE. And if you slow down all of a sudden, well you get the energy all of a sudden too :)

Yeah that was pretty crazy to think about

and when it hits, its back end will still be several kilometers in the sky.

Wouldn't a rubble pile burn up much faster than a single asteroid? You're dealing with far more surface area in direct contact with the atmosphere. Wouldn't stop it, but seems like it would make a drastic difference.

with "pile of rubble" they literally mean that: It's one gigantic chunk made up from thousands of pebbles stuck together by gravity and/or slightly melted by friction. This means that while technically being a pile of rubble, it effectively acts as one big clump, especially in the most relevant time during reentry where everything gets melted and liquefied into a blob anyways

Lol tell that a redhead female 500 yrs ago

'Rubble piles' or C-Type asteroids in more scientific terms indeed rarely make it to the surface before burning up. It's the rocky and metal type (S-type and M-type, respectively) that are the most dangerous

@Logic Prevails mmh, in that case we didnt hit it with a bomb powerful enough. Also making it explode later would help, less time for the pieces to reconjugate

An asteroid is scary, but what's even scarier to think about, is how there could potentially be so many other things like black holes, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, etc. that can potentially wipe out life as we know it.

Eyy first comment

If a blackhole swallows earth wha-

The good thing is that it's very far. Sunlight takes around 8 minutes to reach Earth.

And there's more too

wow, a comment from you with 27 likes

Immense production value.. A video about exactly what the dinosaurs experienced would be really interesting….

I have been to a meteorite crater in India, it’s overwhelmingly beautiful, but also a bit scary. As for the present, We should not blame (lack of) technology. More of the problem lies in less number of people working towards a common goal of science exploration, and making our planet better and safer. Maybe we should go under the ground, build a fallout shelter even while there is no threat.

In india ? Where ?

Sounds like the plot of the city of ember

Yeah, underground cities could be built to withstand most asteroid-related catastrophes. Especially if installed with biospheres, like those planned for space exploration, which could use artificial lighting and waste recycling systems to grow plants which would in turn produce O2 and food, and remove CO2 from the air. Energy for the lighting and waste recycling systems could be produced with deep geothermal power plants, for instance.

@surya Sai Lonar lake (salty), Buldhana, Maharashtra

About the foil and its reflective properties; wouldn't it be much more efficient to paint the object with a hyperreflective pigment/color? This doesn't solve how to get there with all the needed equipment, but I think it could work if someone figured that (very important) part out. A number of drones carrying paint could cover a large area in no time.

I love how the scientists basically said "well when the asteroid is a problem, we'll figure it out then" true procrastination in its finest

The complete sentence would be: well when the asteroid is a problem, we'll figure it out then how to spend the trillions USD required to stop it. It is all about money and resources that would have to be spent and might not be needed for millions of years. Although smaller impacts do happen more frequently.

@Pavel just a joke buddy! But yes the actual logistics involved are extremely complicated.

@Pavel its a joke man! I understand the reason they are putting asteroid defense on the back burner. Like you said the logistics would be expensive and taxing for any government. And being proactive is not Our (humans) strong suite.

​@Richie l No worries! ;) There are tons of demanding comments questioning the science and scientists on the internet these days, so I just try to address the misconceptions as I see them ;)

And maybe if it's too late then, the excuse "The dog ate my research" will still work.

I love your videos, I learn so much from them I did not know anything about until I came across your work. Keep up the good work.

I take solace in knowing that even if there’s a catastrophic asteroid out there that will eventually hit earth, I know it’s out of all our control and space is so much bigger than all of us. Interesting for sure

Thank you for the videos! I have an idea that may not be feasible. Would it be possible to build a rocket that could dock and use the asteroid material as propellant? Maybe, some sort of a nuclear heater that spits out rock gas?

A mass driver! That's somrthing that we've been theorizing about for a while.

3:41 Only the few will recognize this piece of space history for what it truly is, AMAZING! Not to mention, the size of it! I have found small ones the size of pebbles in the Arizona desert, but this one could easily make you A LOT of money. Not that I would sell it if I had it and it is obvious this man does not plan to either.

Actually, cities occupy a tiny percentage of the Earth's surface and are unlikely to get hit directly. However, 71% of the Earth's surface is oceans, and a water impact could result in a megatsunami that would wipe out entire coastal cities even thousands of miles away.

That scientist dude is definition of being cool and a nerd at the same time

And scaring us

nool

yeah my guy watched Jurassic World and decided to buy a T-rex head

Mizuhara

You know being smart doesn’t mean you’re a nerd, right?

This was really good. Ar really well made scientiifically documented video. Thank you!!!

Very interesting to study about asteroids. Sir, the person you interviewed is very knowledgeable about this subject. How I wish to hear from him again. Thank you so much.

Sir. You vegana

"Sir"?? Has he been Knighted by the Queen?

6:08 this is such a terrifying representation of how miserably vulnerable our situation is.

there's something particularly haunting about seeing someone who knows so much say "we don't know what will happen until our lives are directly threatened".

Wow, this was very well done, thank you Veritasium you deserve your millions of views. With all the mass murders and our national debt and world debt and wars, etc. an asteroid does not bother me. I can see why the Bible says, "fear nothing, stop fearing."

Honestly, I don't think we need an asteroid's help to get humans extinct, I think we're doing good enough ourselves.

That's such an outdated point of view

@Rakobaron please provide citations.

@Rakobaron lol

@Valsorayu read Marian Tupy, Bjorn Lomborg or really anything on the current state of the world, instead of eating up popular narratives. You can believe it or not, accept or reject the new information, that's not the point. At least you will broaden your horizons and will be less inclined to spew out cliched angsty philosophy of 2000s, like the op does.

There’s too many of us… that will be our downfall

Asteroids travel about 25 km/s on average, but the fastest man-made object, which is a large steel manhole cover launched by a nuke, traveled 6X Earth's escape velocity, which is 67.2 km/s (150,322.1 mph)! Nobody knows for sure exactly how fast the manhole cover was going, but it was traveling 125,000 mph at minium!

When I learned about all the asteroids near to the earth that could potentially destroy humanity, it really felt like somebody is holding me at gunpoint and could pull the trigger any second.

very nice video I must say. Forgive me, am I the only person financially feeling this economic collapse. It may not be about the video, but I think if I came here to share, I would get some attention. Like I'm really trying to feed my family and pay my bills with my average salary, I really wish I could see other lucrative ways to keep up to date

to be honest you are not the only one but trading paved the way for me two years ago

Trade? please can i get more information about this?

Crypto trading is a digital currency investment that can bring you good profits over time. I would recommend Joseph Sabatier met him in Florida and my life just wasn't quite the same

I have heard so much about crypto trading and seen so many people that it has changed their life. I had to invest in it too, so I have something to fall back on in case I lose my job

oh come on, he doesn't need much publicity because he's made a name for himself. I want to say that John Joseph is not a new name in the market. I especially enjoy trading stocks with him.

I live in Hawaii driving north on the clearest day ever on the freeway when horizontally a rolling cloud looking much like the space shuttle Columbia when it came in for a crash landing and just went away but never hit the ground. Hardly anyone was on the freeway so I looked over at this guy and we both gave facial expressions like we couldn't believe what we saw.

I'd love to hear an update from this guy after the experiment NASA a few months ago to move a large asteroid orbiting a moon. Would like to know if it actually has hope of working

It worked much better then they expected it too. I don't know the exact measurements, so I'm not gonna make anything up

"We're really not that good at detecting asteroids before they're going to hit us." Well. That's comforting.

Yep look at the dinosaurs 🦕 🤣 😀 😄 😧☠

@Owen Halverson what

The dinosaurs got hit with a meteorite and all died but that meteorite was like 6 miles wide hopefully we can detect something that big before it gets to close

@Owen Halverson They also said that they couldn't alter its trajectory which means it would hit the planet but you would know about it beforehand which would be rather upsetting. Best not to know.

Yes we could all die from old age disease car crashes or get crushed by a giant meteor

I love that he suggests the best way to avoid an asteroid strike is to wrap it in foil.

This guy is just so likable and cool! So nonchalant about the devastation that could come.

A video about exactly what the dinosaurs experienced would be really interesting…

There is one Kurtegerzal in a nutshell. Analyzed the impact - very well made

@Jinx? kurzgesegt*

The thought of getting instantly vaporized and disintegrated into fundamental particles, is calming. More calming than the slow death and struggles to stay alive. In the society where people step on one another to get themselves higher and further.

This scientist is such a legend. He has a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite, a men in black chair, and a t rex skull

He’s either a supervillain or the coolest grandpa/family relative

I remember a few years ago, I got to go to a friend's house, and his parents were archeologists, it's probably the craziest house I've ever been to. It was a flat of 3 floors, the basement was full of meteorites of all sizes, some with the size of a tennis ball, some with the size of a chair, and let me tell you they were heavy, they needed a crane to carry those. Then they had the entire house filled with different artifacts (coins, masks, etc.) and... someone skeleton in the living room that they were studying. Yep, quite an interesting house.

Aaron López That's so cool! I wish I had those parents.

He discovered the Kuiper belt too

@Cameron Scanlan what's his name ?

This is a fantastic video! Having grown up right next door to a minute man missile base in the 60s taught me that there's some things I'm just not going to worry about LOL!

Aren't most of those closed now? Strategic disarmament was progressing until certain 'leaders' turned up.

I start to think that evacuating a city can be done quickest if you let the people walk. You close all roads exept for transport of those who can't walk. In a week's time, you could reach another big city walking. If people flee in all directions, the masses thin out. So, if you have many evacuation centers all around the city in a distance of a five days walk, you can transport the people from there.

Thats what I was thinking… If the roads are blocked then any reasonable person would simply start walking. A few days is more than enough time to make it out of a city on foot

In 2015 (i think) Neil deGrasse Tyson was on a science tour thing and I went to see him with my dad. He talked about the asteroid and played one of the videos that you showed here. He also played a video of a someone standing in front of a mirror and then a guy flew through the mirror, back first , and slammed into the other person. I immediately laughed because a guy just flew through a mirror at someone. It was not so funny after I got context. Also I was like 7 or smt idk.

Did you give him a banana? 🍌

I saw one this impressive after midnight about a year ago. I was having a smoke and then everything lit up. I turneed around and watched, fascinated at 1st, then leary as I thought it would hit nearby community. It burned out and heard no sound. So similar to this vid too!

Wow, but the sound would've been heard probably like a minute or so after you saw it, did you wait a little while afterwards?

@Michael Bruns Yes, it looked like it all just melted up, nut no sound!

I’ve been subscribed for a decade plus and just can’t get enough of this channel!! Love it!!

4 and a half billion years ago are you kidding me... I believe in 100 thousand years ago but not billion, my man Is so confident talking about 4 billion years ago like he seen with his own nacked eye 👁️

@vknaga what?

Hmm.. now i am prepared strong enough to face December 2020.

Glad to find you here Mr GK 😀

are you really ready for flash to go bye bye?

No. No I don’t think you are

Congrats on getting a lot of likes!

"Now if you're concerned about the world ending..." Actually I am hoping for it.

I couldn't imagine all of the people that were driving bear the meteor in chelyabinsk; their windshields shattering and then crashing. It's a horrific reality

bears aren't real

What’s sad to me is there’s scientists that have said we could actually make a weapon that could destroy meteors before they hit at full weight but even now it would take at least a decade for them to build something like that.

why is that sad

@dedruck we would never get funding for it and by the time we needed it, it would take too long to make.

Destroying the asteroid doesn't do all that much since the mass will still impact, it'll just be a less localized event. We need to change its orbit, and we only need the smallest of nudges for that if we find it early enough. No need to build nuclear weapons if a well timed spacecraft crashing down on the asteroid is enough.

​@2424Lars Nuclear explosions are much more energetic than spacecraft collisions are though, and so they'd have a bigger impact on the orbit.

@VVayVVard But the point is you don't need a big impact at all. If you nudge the asteroid early enough the orbit will show very large changes over time

12:24 Well not quite zero. Any impactor that could be extra-solair would still be possible, and also the ones we didn't yet catalog and yet still exists somewhere in a near unstable/metastable path, that could allow release from it's celestial counterpart. (similar to a very fine spiral trajectory) And impactors that are on a 100+ year trajectory for a single orbit of the Sun. (with highly different apses, one very near the Sun and one beyond even Pluto.)

An only solution that comes to mind for me to having figured out 15 to 20 years back; is to have all laptops become constructed of with an absolute mirror and automatic aim of reflecting the sun towards the comets all at the same time and areas until it is gone.

Have a look at the Younger Dryas impacts circa 12,450BP and again at 11,600BP. First one hit the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets in North America, causing widespread devastation like in the Washington Scablands as well as hitting far flung places like Greenland and even Abu Herera in Syria. The second, caused by fragments of the first, hit the mid Atlantic about 2000 years later, both impacts can be linked to Ragnarok and also the destruction of Atlantis.

I like how the guy casually walks into his living room with the heart of a 4.5 billion year old planet

xDDDD

and he almost tossed it like a baseball loll

Ah yes, one of the best things you can flex

And the fact that he puts flower pots in a trex skull...

@ETAN 🏳️‍🌈⃠ that is not a real t-rex skull, right?

What a painful way for the dinosaurs to go. I grew up in Florida, so I'm familiar with "the sky cooking everything on the ground" as you know, a close-to-accurate, but not actually *literal* description. :(

Not really scary, it’s just fascinating how stuff like this exists, despite how old sol is.

props to the cameraman for filming the dinosaurs while a masive extinction event was going on

18:20 "Let me put your mind at ease. We're almost certainly all going to be dead from some other global catastrophe in a hundred years, so there's no need to worry about 10km asteroids." Well, thanks. I feel much better now.

Props to the camera man for risking his life to capture these dangerous objects in space.

I know that I'm living in a dream world, but is it possible to setup an invisible "screen" of energy that will ward off any threat given by the asteroids? maybe microwaves?

The rocket idea is pretty solid, other than the tethering part. As long as the rocket can pulse on and off as it spins

Thanks for the video, your guest was amazing. If you can have him for any related topic that would be great.

Saw a meteor light up Death Valley like it was daylight one night from the Panamint mountains. Talked to a ranger the next day and he said there had been no other reports. My partner and I were surprised that an event that spectacular had gone unreported. We gave them our location and bearings, but never heard anything further.

12:48 its crazy to me that an asteroid only 10x smaller than the one that wiped out the entire world and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs would only wipe out one country. I wouldve thought it would do much more damage than that.

What an amazing professor, I envy the the students that have had the opportunity to attend his lecture.

As do I! He absolutely sold me into going back to school to be as well educated as he. He also just said savage! Wooo

how exciting! What are you studying? I'd live to go back to school.

@SpagettiOsMeatballThief medical billing&coding. Not something I ever once thought about until recently. And I don't feel exciting giving that answer. I needed to invest in something that will provide. And work around the way things are. I made a choice I was going to start with something with more opportunity for growth in a at home flexible setting. It's a start. Never have I ever would have guessed the cost. But I'm in to deep now l. Ha.

@Jarko ¿ Aww hey you should be excited! The fact that you are doing somthing says alot, it's not easy, or cheap you've got that right. I've seen alot of people decide to just take the easy way, and spend their time and energy and money on crazy things. But whatever makes them happy I guess.

Does anyone know the professor's name?

We had a small asteroid land here in Mississippi. If felt like a mini earthquake. I can’t imagine the impact of a huge one.

The DART experiment has shown that we do have the ability to deflect a asteroid with a high velocity impact. I know that happened after this video was made. It was an important experiment and a fun one to see live.

The discoverer of the asteroid named KANSAS, Dave Tholen, was in my Astronomy classes at the University of Kansas. I visited him and other near earth object NEO ASTRONOMERS at the University of Arizona in about 1985 .

Instead of trying to destroy the object, we could explode a part of it so the damage is reduced,and the rocket we throw at it will slightly change its motion.

Just let Kim jung-un go all out on it

The inertial power of an object that size is truly humongous. Even 100 rockets wouldn't do much except knock off a few chips to small to matter. A synchronous blast of 2,000-5,000 or so nuclear blasts, (more or less depending on the kiloton range), might do it but also might just break it up into (radioactive) chunks that fall to earth. Rocks are HARD which you no doubt know if you've ever been hit by one and you can't stop them by putting out your palm, your wrist or arm will break. So, despite our supposed technological superiority we're just as vulnerable as the cavemen who looked at the sky and saw doom in shooting stars. They were right!

Any impact will slightly change its orbit, and if you do it early enough you can make the asteroid miss Earth altogether. We're actually going to test this in september by smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid moon to see how well we can change its orbit.

Isn't that terrifying to know that we could all die by a rock!

well, throughout history, many people have died, rocked to death by their fellow Jews

“If you are scared of a meteor impact then this will put you at ease, *you can die a thousand more painful ways* “

Mankind is the greatest threat to life on Earth, not asteroids.

@Kyle Oien This gonna be what caused the events of Pikmin

@omar pikm idk if people would realize it was a nuke first, 9r just a lot of lava/insanity

@Kyle Oien id bet that when people start to figure out how to make anti matter missals then we would die

Despite our supposedly superior technology we are just as vulnerable as the cave men who looked at the sky and saw doom in shooting stars. They were right long before science proved their fears true. Btw I followed your suggestion to visit DoS - Domain of Science and I'm glad I did. He holds himself to the same high standards as you do and also has a quirky sense of humor. So now I have to watch twice as many videos on these subjects. *Straightens glasses, picks up cold drink in one hand and puts other on the mouse. Ok, awaaaay we go!)

Enjoy!

I had this crazy idea. Would it be possible, if we hired a team of professional drillers (perhaps from a drilling rig in the ocean) and sent them up to the astroid with some astronauts. They could perhaps drill a hole into it, and ignite a massive bomb. Seems like it could work? right?

No. They have other, way safer ways of deflecting asteroids.

@iwouldliketobelievethatthatisafalsestatement 😉 Bruce Willis would need to be part of the team.

they should make a movie about that!

Its basically going towards us at a very fast pace. Isnt it?

1. The asteroid itself is moving so fast, itll be hard to land and stay on im guessing 2. Thats alot of men at risk 3. The exploded asteroid parts still pose a threat as they move towards the earth at high speeds (like grenade fragments) 4. The explosion will also put the men at risk 5. High cost

such a great person, family man dad and a perfect channel too. thanks alot for being there for us!!!

If you put the rock at the axis of rotation you can exert a consistent force over time.

I can now clearly see why asteroids are probably the scariest subject to discuss in Astronomy. Even in the age of the dinosaur, they went extinct due to an asteroid collision on Earth many years ago. That's exactly the thought of "if it were to happen tomorrow or even later, how would we prepare for it?"

Veritasium trying to give us all existential crises worse than Vsauce does.

The world is created last Tuesday

... or does he? **vsauce theme**

Kurzgesagt says hello!

Nj

CGP Grey says a story for another time.

Given the margin for error and a 100km fatal blast radius, and a 7 day notice period, mentioned in the video, and the inability to use a car, one starts to question if it's worth even walking away at all, given that you may be inadvertently walking TOWARDS where it will hit. You just maybe have to hope it doesn't hit you.

This was absolutely fascinating!

The thing is not to explode a nuke inside an asteroid but rather explode it sideways to create pushing force from the side pushing it away. Several fusion nukes should do the job changing at least the flypath

To direct an asteroid away from earth- why not have 1 or more rockets attached to the meteor and when they spin to a chosen position they turn on and when moving out of position they turn off and same for each of the other rockets when they come into the chosen postion. Eventually it will move the meteor out of trajectory from earth, if its small enough.

Would be great if you could make a second part to this video. Here we are, 2 years later, and there is the NASA's DART mission and the news: Oct. 20, 2022 – The DART spacecraft successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, reducing the period of the asteroid's orbit by 32 minutes. Scientists considered a change of 73 seconds to be the minimum amount for success. This article has been updated to reflect the latest data and images from the impact. – and compare this success to the ideas in this video (nuke, rocket, kitchenfoil, evac)

love it when the caveman solution works perfectly

Veritasium's videos now have better production than most documentaries i watched as a kid (and are more informative)!

No 20 commercial breaks and the same sentence repeated about a hundred times. What a time to live in!

@Bastien Millecam Indeed

B Phoenix They seemed like they were _always _*_kinda_* documentaries, but you do have a point!

think about that more carefully

I believe what Stephen Hawking really stated was the greatest threat to life on earth is either getting impacted by asteroids or swallowed by a black hole.....something else to consider.

I feel like he didn’t say that considering how far away most black holes are

evacuation might be feasible if as the asteroid gets gradually closer we can continue to rule out more and more locations. so if you know a month out that you are in the danger zone, you can choose to leave earlier to be on the safe side, then hopefully by the time we know what city it will likely hit, it will be easier to evacuate. but i also saw a breakdown once before on the fact that chances are highest it would hit water, and then if it did hit land chances are still pretty slim it would hit a big city

@Mario Vicente well if you have a month notice, it might be possible 😀

His whole thing about evacuations is partly true but I live in the southern US and we have LOTS of hurricanes. Yes, the highways get clogged but within a day or two a city like New Orleans will empty out and become a ghost town.

My seismic crew and i saw an asteroid with our naked eyes that I have no doubt, if it would have impacted , would have changed life on earth as we know it. It was march 1985, in northernmost Alberta,Canada,10 pm or so.our linetruck driver drew our attention to it by exclaiming: WHAT THE F***!!! At first I thought it was the moon ,thru the trees ,but we pulled into a clearing and hopped out to get a better look. it was a large ..rock.. moving across the clear night sky..slowly..with its leading edge glowing incandescently..i could see its terrain..a couple of small chunks came off and were trailing flame of purple and green hues..it must have been traveling at enormous speed..but yet seemed to be moving slowly across the sky..it relatively appeared to be the size of a full moon..we stood there..mouths agape..and watched it.. travel across the sky..it took what seemed to be a minute..maybe more..an extremely long time compared to any footage I have ever seen of any other meteorites or fireballs..even the Russian one,which was gone in a flash compared with this.. Im no expert..but this is what I know: it was moving very fast to have the leading edge glowing incandescent it was far away to seem to be moving slowly..had to be the very outer atmosphere yet still hitting atmosphere to glow incadescently.. ..and appeared the relative size of the moon in the sky.. and it was completely silent..we stood there awhile..no sonic boom..nothing. (if it was closer ,there should have been a mighty,earth shattering, KA-BOOOM ) I roughly tried to figure it out at one point,knowing the rough distance to the outer atmosphere,distance to the moon and its diameter..basic trig. and... the thing would likely have been in excess of a kilometer across..i believe it was a rubble pile of great magnitude. I hope to god I never see it again but I WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT I SAW THAT NIGHT ! the thought of it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end

If an asteroid is going to hit, the likelihood it will hit a city has to be extremely low. I mean, cities cover so little land mass compared to open spaces, especially in the US, and the ocean is over 70% of the surface. Most likely it will hit the ocean.

I love how there's this massive bright light in the sky that looks like a missile and everyone's just like "Yeah, Probably just another nuclear bomb."

We could probably predict more if we knew the strength of the gravitational pull in the other planets.

We do know the gravitational attraction of other planets though. The problem is that the n-body problem is chaotic, i.e. even minuscule errors in measurements would drastically increase the errors in predictions.

The gravitational effect is pretty well known, the biggest unknown influence on an asteroids orbit is the Yarkovski effect. It's basially a force that is exerted on the asteroid by the infrared radiation its surface emits as it cools down, which has a certain direction depending on the rotation of the asteroid. You can only model this if you accurately know the rotation rate of the asteroid and the thermal properties of its surface, so you would need to send a spacecraft close enough to measure these things. The OSIRIS-Rex mission recently did this for the asteroid it was investigating, and with the emerging technology of interplanetary cubesats we migth be able to do this for many more asteroids in the future.

I feel like scientists did predict that the asteroid would enter the earth's atmosphere, but chose not to disclose it for fear of public panic.

If we can't deflect an asteroid, can we shift the earth's orbit around the sun? Hypothetically, imagining Star Trek level idyllic technology, could we place jets along the equator and a few longitudes, and have them fire in schedule with the rotation of the Earth, to 'dodge' future debris paths?

Be careful .... we might shoot the Earth out of the Sun influence ;) .... which is way worse than dodging the asteroid

I think moving the earth is orders of magnitude more difficult than deflecting an asteroid. If future tech can move the earth, it can move an asteroid. Remember that he said it was impossible to do anything about a 10km asteroid. The earth is 12,000km. So, even Star Trek tech is not moving the earth. We won't even get into the problems that changing the earths's orbit would cause.

@GizmoMaltese Obviously, yes - but isn't it fun to think of a genuine Spaceship Earth?

Great video, as usual. But, I don’t think the analysis of city evacuation is quite on point. We do have experience evacuating populations, and there are viable options. We’ve see regular evacuations from flood zones in advance of hurricanes on a fairly regular basis.

Also, freeways aren't the only option to leaving a city. Certainly you can take state/county routes out as well.

Me: Man, this stuff sounds really terrifying. Veritasium: If you're concerned about the world ending in an asteroid impact, let me set your mind at ease with this map of many other potential global catastrophes. Me: Pfew, thanks dude. What a relief!

Never have I ever imagined that I would grow emotional for the dinosaurs that no longer exist...until I watched this. Watching the excerpts of cgi dinos trying to run from that unexpected pain really just sort of broke my heart. How horrible it would have been to just be minding your business, eating a plant or carcass...and BOOM! You're suddenly in excruciating pain and being cooked alive. How awful!

Most dinos died because of the aftermath of the impact. Dusts covers the sky for a long long time, barely any sunlight, temperature drops, plants can't do photosynthesis then die. It's like a slow torture to death. So... in a way, the ones that died due to being near the impact site is actually lucky.

Like the other guy said. The ones who died right away were sort of the lucky ones. They weren't really cooked alive in the way you're thinking. They died within seconds maybe even (milliseconds or micros seconds) of getting hit by the blast

Agreed!

Imagine what all the wild animals go trough every day.. being eaten alive, or starving to death

Thanks for mentioning the source of the music in you description! Great subject. I love your videos! 🙂

Here's an idea. We can repurpose old fusion bomb cores and send them into space as sleeper impacters. We can even put telescopes like the James Webb on the other side of the sun, we could launch multiple telescope space stations at each hemisphere of the sun designed to to autonomously catalog and communicate data on smaller orbiters. Theres a lot we CAN do, if we set aside the cost and just do it.

I have an idea about sending bombs only just powerful enough to break those 1-2km into smaller pieces that small enough for atmosphere to do the rest to burn them. About the asteroid gravity that would unify the small pieces again, i think we can detonate the bombs when the asteroids are close enough to the earth so the asteroid gravity didnt have enough time to bring them back together. Of course my idea had zero math calculation

yeah, we can do the most out of any life form on earth every other life form.. can’t do anything they aren’t even aware of it

I'd honestly worry about the (admittedly very remote) possibility of such sleeper bombs a) being hit by other satellites (though whether that could cause detonation is another exponentially unlikely calculation on top, the almost certain outcome of this would be radioactive material being spread throughout a substantial range of orbital trajectories relative to the impact vectors) or b) that they might end up decaying in orbit with the wrong mix of solar ejecta, time, and initial altitude. Decommissioning or refurbishing them after their operating components have reached the end of their design life would be a more likely problematic scenario to consider honestly given how unlikely collisions are.

This professor speaks very clear and smart. I’m not native and don’t use English everyday but I think I understood most.

i think more ozone and oxygen helps with the planetary defense system against meteors and asteroids, minor influence but significant if added to other things

A calmly horror video that satisfies and also make us tremble