Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Katie talk about whether a future impact is predictable or random.
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Hey Katie, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow? And you're part of Italy?
Let me check it says it's gonna be sunny with a chance of meatballs.
And you believed that or the weather predictions pretty reliable over there, not really.
We're kind of near the Alps and that seems to scramble whatever weather radar that they use. So sometimes you plant a picnic and sometimes you get meatballed on.
It's sure would be nice if the weather is more reliable, like it was just a pattern and it repeated, like.
You could sort of schedule the rain at like two pm and then at three o'clock you get some snow.
That would be awesome. Or you know, you could also just try my strategy.
What's that?
Just move to a place where there isn't any weather. It's just sunny every day.
So essentially you're going to move to the moon.
Sometimes southern California does feel like the moon.
Is it because of all the people just as alien?
It's because of all the people acting like aliens. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine in southern California, and I definitely do appreciate the sunshine.
My name is Katie. I'm the host of Creature Feature and Animals podcast. I live in northern Italy and I do appreciate that our weather is mainly like pasta and pesto based.
And I know we're joking around, but is there an expression in Italian that's something like a cloudy with a chance of meatballs? Or is that a purely American thing?
I think that's pretty American. In fact, meatballs are not so much of a thing in Italy. It's as much of the iconic Italian food as it seems in the US that is more kind of an Americanized version of Italy. So it's neither on our plates nor in our weather.
So there's no like strange weather event that would make Italians say it's rainy, meatballs, huge pieces of hail or something not that I know of. Now, well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, in which we examine all of the crazy and amazing and surprising things that the universe does. We dig into whether it all makes sense and whether it can be predicted, whether we can find simple scientific mathematical stories that explain all of the amazing things that the universe does, from compressing matter the hearts of black holes, to whizzing quarks and gluons together inside neutron stars, to causing all of the weather patterns on Earth. Maybe even wiping out huge parts of life on the planet.
Well, this sounds fun.
We try to be an uplifting podcast as usual, though we don't shy away from facing the truth and from accepting our ignorance of it. My friend and usual co host, Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very glad to be joined by one of our regular co hosts, Katie. Katie, thanks again for joining us.
Yea absolutely. I noticed Jorge is suspiciously absent the day we're talking about asteroid impacts, and I gotta ask, does he got a secret spaceship?
Maybe he's the one causing the asteroid impacts, you know, he's the one dropping these things on the planet.
Has Jorge ever been in the same room with you as the asteroid?
No, but it does seem like sometimes he does want to wipe everything out. But I love thinking about the long history of life on Earth. You know, we are curious beings. We look around ourselves here on the planet. We wonder how did we get here? How did the Earth end up to be this way and not some other way? And one of the more fascinating things about the history of life on Earth is how much it hinges on certain tipping points, specific moments in history which if they had gone another way, we might not be here, or we might look totally different, or we might have feathers or three heads. It's fun to imagine all alternative earths. If you had run this experimental universe many times and had different earths, what would life on Earth look like at this point? Would there still be dinosaurs? Would we all be huge intelligent ladybugs. It's fun to imagine all the different varieties and what chance there was for us to actually get here.
I love the idea of being huge intelligent ladybugs. I think we'd need a lot more oxygen for that, but I think we would also look much more fashionable.
Do you think ladybugs, if they developed intelligence and technology, would also develop clothing. I mean, because they already look good naked.
They already look pretty fantastic. But I can't imagine some sort of fashion revolution of a ladybug who dares to wear stripes instead of dots.
The Ladybug Fashion Podcast pretty controversial stuff, but it is part of our job here, not just to understand what are the basic rules of the universe? How do the tiny particles come together and weave our reality out of little quarks and gluons and electrons, whatever or other particles might be out there. How does the dark matter shape the formation of the universe. We also like to think about the formation of life here on Earth and what happened to create this story, What exactly led to us being here having a podcast that isn't hosted by two ladybugs.
I mean, in a way, we are feasting on the bones of dinosaurs because by their mass death came the rise of mammals, and we are mammals, so we can thank a dead dinosaur for being here, I think, in my opinion, do you think.
That's like the best example of inherited privilege ever? You know, it's like, we're not responsible for the dinosaurs extinction directly, but we're definitely benefiting from the fact that they were wiped out.
Are you saying that some kind of very early prehistoric shrew was colluding with the asteroid and saying make it look like an accident.
It certainly does seem convenient, right, You know, when we benefit from these.
Kinds of things, well, hopefully the dinosaurs of today, that is, birds, will not sue us. Statute of limitations is long, long, long, expired.
And one fascinating thing about the history of life on Earth is that it is punctuated with these mass extinctions. It's not just the asteroid that hit the Earth that probably wiped out the dinosaurs that created a new flowering of mammals. There are many times in the history of life on Earth when there were these wipeout events where a huge fraction of life on Earth was killed, making room for new developments, new explorations of the evolutionary tree by the remaining life. And it's interesting to think about how each of these contribute to us being here today. Right, if all of those hadn't gone exactly the way that they went, we wouldn't be here talking about it. Maybe we wouldn't even be any intelligent life on Earth. It would just be a bunch of dumb dinosaurs tewing on each other and nibbling on plants, right.
I mean, it's just hard to know where things would have been. I mean, as you said, like when there is a die off of animals, there is an opportunity as long as the Earth is still habitable for a new kind of group, a resurgence of species who otherwise would not be able to really thrive because they'd be out competed by the animals that went extinct. So it's hard to imagine. You know, if dinosaurs hadn't died off, you know, maybe there would not have been evolutionary pressure for anyone species to become as intelligent as humans. Maybe it would have been too dangerous a life for primates to have been able to come to power. It's just it's so hard to know. Of course, you know, we could have also just been like two dinosaurs now talking about stuff on the podcast, talking about like what if we had gone extinct because of an asteroid? Would some of those little shrews turn into weird pink things?
Yeah, exactly. And I think there's something really interesting that you brought up there that's not widely enough appreciated, which is the importance of ra randomness and opportunity in evolution. Now, some people feel like evolution is this transformation where species develop into more and more advanced versions of themselves. But you know, there's really a randomness there, Like how does the species change from generation to generation. It's from like changes in the genetic code, which come from transcription errors or cosmic rays. There's no design here. It's really just like a random walk through genetic space. Right, It's like throwing a bunch of dice to see what your kids are going to be.
Like, yeah, I mean, so evolution doesn't have a game plan. I think that's one of the most important things to understand is evolution is not this like efficient force perfecting things into their most like quote unquote perfect forms. It's just a very simple rule. If something survives and passes on its genetic information, hooray, it survived and passed on its genetic information to the next that's it. That is absolutely it. And from that extremely simple rule you get in incredibly marvelous complexity. So there are a lot of things that can happen. It's not just the random mutation of DNA, it's the reshuffling of DNA, right, you have like mate choice, what happens there, And then it's the environment, like what happens with your environment. There can be random changes in the environment that leads to selective pressures, to extinction events, to changes in related species that then causes the other species to have to evolve. So there are so many factors that go into evolution that from this incredibly simple rule, Just like if you can pass on your DNA. Yeah, you did it, You passed on your DNA, and then the next generation gets a shot at that. That has turned into just this incredibly immensely complex and convoluted situation with life on Earth, where sometimes an animal will have weird features that we try to look at, we think, what is this, what is the thing? Why did they evolve it? And it just turns out it's this weird artifact of earlier evolution or something like, you know, we have this appendix and it's kind of mysterious. What does it do. We're not really sure if it has much of a purpose for us. But it's not like evolution has that foresight of like, well, I better take this appendix out because they're not really going to need it that much as modern humans. So like, it's not an intelligent designer. It's kind of just improv all the time.
I think that's a really fascinating aspect of it, not just that there's a randomness there, but that it's so tightly linked to the environment in which this exploration is happening. Right, it's really a reflection, it's like a mirroring of the situation that's doing the selection because one animal might survive very well in one context and just die off rapidly in another. And so the animals, the life we have here on Earth is a reflection of the selection pressure which comes from the environment in which we live, of course, right, but that goes also backwards in time. As you say, it's like it's telling the story of the selection pressure over time. Every species that survives has survived through changing environments. Right, Things were colder and then they were hotter, and in order to get here, you had to manage all of those changes somehow. It's your population grows and evolves and gains hair and loses hair and all that kind of stuff. So I think it's really fascinating that not only does the Earth itself tell the histories you like, dig down through the layers and see layers of rock and events that have happened through the history, but life on Earth also carries with it the history of its evolution. Right, as you say, why do you have this vestigial bit, Oh, well, we needed that millions of years ago, and we're still getting rid of it due to the new pressure. So I think that's super fascinating to look at the history of life on Earth and to me, that's one of the most important things about science is answering this question, like how did we get here? What is the story of us? It tells us sort of how to live our lives and who we are, and in some sense, you know, as much as science can, it tells us why we're here at least what happened before we got here.
Yeah, And I think it's so interesting because our life spans are relatively short compared to the universe, even compared to our own Earth. So our perception of what is stable, right, like what stable species are existence is warped by our you know, relatively short life spans, and so we have this sense of things are as they are. Giraffes have always existed, We've always existed, but that's really not the case. And you know, when we look at some of these animals that have gone extinct and we think like, wow, how could something that strange have existed? Well, maybe, hopefully if we're still alive in like a thousand years. Potentially some species like the panda that's highly specialized to eat massive quantities of bamboo, which makes it very vulnerable to extinction if there's an environmental change, you know, we might look back and say, like, how could such a silly animal have existed where it's entire diet is dependent on bamboo and they're really bad at may in captivity. I think we have this very narrow view in our own lifespan, so it becomes kind of fascinating when we zoom out and look at the history of the planet and you're like, oh, yeah, we're just like little babies, Like we're a little baby species.
Yeah. And it's hard for us because we tend to think in timescales of hours, minutes, years, maybe centuries to understand processes that go on that are much much slower. You know, it took us a long time to appreciate how old the Earth was. The first hints we had that it might be billions of years old blew people's minds because it was just such a strange concept. Understanding geological processes like the formations of the continents and like glaciation were hard for people because we don't tend to think in sort of deep time. And yet we know that these processes really do shape and influence the nature of the world in which we live. And maybe most interesting and most dramatic are the cataclysmic events, right, the ones where if the asteroid hits somewhere different, maybe the dinosaurs wouldn't have wiped out. Or if dinosaur scientists had looked up in the sky and seen it coming, developed technology too diverted, you know, then maybe things really would be different. I love those moments when history could really take lots of different courses.
Yeah, dinosaur Matt Damon and a dinosaur Jennifer Lawrence trying to figure things out.
I wonder if the dinosaur version of that movie would have been any better.
Yeah, I mean it is that. I do think about those cataclysmic events quite a bit, you know, just that our vulnerability of you know, as a single human, we're relatively vulnerable in our little, fleshy bodies, but then our planet also feels somewhat vulnerable, just this like little paradise of being able to be alive on it in a pretty unforgiving universe. And then just that rock just traveling along randomly could just whoop, you know, spell the end for an entire planet of species.
It's somewhat terrifying right to know that these rocks are out there, and if one of them falls into the gravity, well, the Earth it could end all life on Earth or some lives on Earth. It would certainly would not be a good day. And as we saw in the nineties, these kind of things do happen, like comet Shoemaker Levy, which came into the Solar System smashed into Jupiter, creating fireballs bigger than planet Earth. So this is not only something that happens than the deep history of time, it's something that could happen. We don't know when NASA is doing its best to track these asteroids, but beyond that we wonder, like, is it possible to predict these events far in the future. Is there some sort of like deep time process sort of like glaciation or like formations of the continents which we can't yet imagine because it happens on a galactic scale, which is shaping these asteroid impacts, which is maybe creating patterns that we could understand which we could use to predict so we could know. Ope, guys, we only got a million more years before the next wave of killer asteroids. Better start funding those spaceships.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to know, because if an asteroid's coming in like the next year, I know I can skip a dentist appointment.
So don't bother saving for retirement folks. So on today's episode, we'll be asking the question, is there a pattern to major asteroid impacts on Earth?
And is it gonna benefit us to know this or just make us scared?
You can short the stock market because you know all life on Earth is going so put everything in gold, folks. This is now a financial investment podcast.
I believe that's illegal. But also if the asteroid is made out of gold, maybe you shouldn't invest in it because then we will be inundated with gold and then also extremely dead. That's not actual financial advice. Don't sue me.
So you're saying that when we're wiped out and the Ladybug civilization rises up in our ashes, they're going to find so much gold everywhere. It's just going to be like they're paving their streets in gold.
Yeah, they're building their little Ladybug toilets at a goal.
So what is Ladybug Donald Trump then going to do to make his bathroom extra blink? Well as usual? I was wondering if people out there had thought about if there was a pattern to major asteroid impacts, and if there was something we could do to predict it. So thanks very much to everybody who participates in these off the cuff answers on the virtual street. If you would like to play this role for future episodes, please don't be shy. Write to me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com. So think about it for a moment before you hear these answers. Do you think there's a pattern to major asteroid impacts on Earth? Here's what some listeners had to say.
I think I heard once it's like every thirty million years or something like that there's this massive asteroid that crashes into Earth and basically wipes off all of the life on it.
But I don't really know.
I don't think there's like any sort of pattern to the distribution of asteroids.
The moose pods will collide with us at some point or in the post.
Island, So I don't think that there's a pattern of asteroid impacts. It's orbital mechanics. Anything more than two bodies is pretty chaotic and random. But I do think that there is a governing frequency that decreases over time, so as our Earth and Solar system get older, impacts become less frequent.
I think you get some patterns with asteroids, because wouldn't you get kind of like a cyclic almost resonant wave function if you sped things up on a macroscale, just since everything's orbiting, you could kind of mathematically predict when it might fling stuff in our direction. I don't know.
Well, hopefully if it's a pattern, it will show us that no major asteroid will hit the Earth in the future, or until we are able to defend ourselves properly to find them, because probably this is the most difficult thing, just to see them in time for us to prepare to do something about it.
I really do agree with the person who says that they hope that no asteroid hits Earth until we're ready to defend ourselves, because I feel like if we just learn like in one hundred years we're going to get a big one, but we have no way to do anything about it, that'd be a bit of a bummer. I'll be honest with you.
What do you mean we have no way to do anything about it? You have no faith in physicists and engineers to save the planet.
It depends on how fast you guys are at writing grant proposals. I guess. So, if we've got an asteroid coming in one hundred years, maybe you can do it. But if it's like five weeks, do you think we could do something about it?
You know, the key really is to discovering these things early on. If you see far in advance that it's coming that only needs a little bit of a push to not hit the Earth. It's sort of like if somebody's firing a sniper shot from five miles away, the tiniest little deviation in the direction of their rifle means they're going to miss their target. So if you can figure out that this thing is going to come in one hundred years, then even the faintest little push, you could throw a rock at it or zap it with a laser and they would miss the Earth. You only have a few weeks of notice. Then it's much much harder. You have to give it a much bigger push. But actually, you know, this week, as we record this episode, NASA is doing an amazing test. The Dart probe is out there and it's about to push on an asteroid to see if this works. Can we actually find an asteroid and push on it and see if we can change its direction This is not one that NASA thinks is going to hit the Earth. This is just an experiment to see is it possible to change its trajectory. Also, fortunately it's not one that NASA thinks is going to hit the Earth after they change its trajectory.
Right.
I was about to say, I really hope they double checked their math and their units, because that would be a heck of a whoopsie.
That is actually something people worry about developing these tools that can affect the future of the human race. Like if you can now aim asteroids, then you know, some supervillain might decide to use that to threat and Earth with asteroids. Right. Another direction people are working on is zapping these things with lasers. That sounds like science fiction, but you can get a powerful enough laser and zap one side of the asteroid, then you can like vaporize some of the rock and the ice, and it can give it a sideways push so that it doesn't hit the Earth. There people in Santa Barbara working on these kind of super lasers. But also that does make me worry about you know, like other applications of superri lasers.
Well, like you're not firing this laser from Earth right, because I would imagine you'd scorch a few birds and maybe a few planes if you did that.
I don't think they even have a prototype of this laser so far. It's still in the like exploratory studies. But there are a range of solutions. We actually have a whole podcast episode about how to defend the Earth from asteroids, including gravity tractors and laser beams and giving them a push. It all depends on what the thing is made out of, Like if it's a pile of rubbless kind of hard to give it a push, or if it's a big ball of ice, it's good to zap it with a laser, And also really depends on spotting it early and understanding where it comes from. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about the source of these deadly rocks that might wipe out life on Earth, whether or not the data suggests there are coming in a pattern, and what we can do about it.
So, like what angle I should keep my umbrella at.
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Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that is important to remember is that this did not just wipe out the dinosaurs only. It wiped out anything and everything that was around, like a good number of them, the things that ended up surviving. It was not like a dinosaur seeking asteroid that targeted the dinosaur specifically. It just targeted anything that was not able to survive the fallout of what happened after the asteroid hit. I mean, I'm sure there was a good amount of death and the immediate aftermath of the asteroid, but a lot of it was sort of both long and slow drawn out extinction, and the exact causes of it aren't precisely known. It's hard to find really accurate evidence of what exactly happened. But you know, there are a lot of theories about, you know, the ecosystems collapsing because of the you know, mass amount of debris that cut out the sun, and of course you don't have as much vegetation, and so you don't have as many big herbivores, and then you don't have as many big carnivores. So like that, it basically you know how these ecosystems are like these Jenga towers and you pull one thing out and it can collapse. Well, like this asteroid hitting is like a throwing a tennis ball at the Jenga tower. And so only the things that were hardy enough, you know, typically quite small as well, because they didn't require as much food, were able to survive. And not all the dinosaurs went extinct, like we still have birds. Birds are the surviving dinosaurs of this period, and they were small enough that they were able to sort of escape the starvation of these larger dinosaurs that had much more intensive dietary needs. And that's, like, I think, to me, is one of the more compelling theories of what happened.
Yeah, it's important to realize, as you say, that these are not like dinosaurs seeking asteroids that didn't come and then like hunt down on all the dinosaurs and kill them one by one. It really is a lot of the death probably came from the change in the environment. You know, all this stuff is now up in the atmosphere and you're blocking the sun's light and so as you say, ecosystems react to that, and now you have to survive in a pretty new world. I don't know if anybody out there it was a fan of The Dinosaur's sitcom. It aired I think in the eighties and nineties, but the series finale of that episode actually features like basically an asteroid winter where they're all hovering in their house as the snow comes down and they're not expecting to see the sun for years. Sort of a bleak ending to a comedy series.
It was a huge bummer. I think it was sort of a cautionary tale because it was something about some dino corporation caused this to happen, and so it was I think supposed to be an environmental message about not destroying our own planet with global warming or whatever, you know, potential ramifications of destroying our environment would be. And it was a comedy. It was like this lighthearted comedy with these big puppet dinosaurs and like, you know, a dinosaur baby that would hit the father with the frying pans. So it's as if The Simpsons ended on basically a nuclear war and everyone dies.
How inappropriate to combine, you know, heart hitting science with ridiculous jokes. I mean, who would choose that kind of venue for talking about such a serious topic. Anyway, let's keep making some jokes about how all the dinosaurs were wiped out millions of years ago. But I think it's important to understand where these things come from. Like, these rocks don't just appear in space and get dropped on the Earth. These are not like malevolent aliens. As far as we know, these are parts of our Solar system. One big misimpression is that these rocks might come from really deep space, like from outside our Solar system to impact. That's actually really quite rare because our star is pretty far away from other stars. You know, there's many light years between us and the next star, and many many more between most stars. So there's only been a few examples of times when we've even seen a rock come from another Solar system and pass through ours, like O Muamua. Most of the times when we're thinking about impacts on Earth, we're talking about our own neighbors. We're talking about sources in the Solar System.
Isn't that the thing with like murders and stuff where stranger danger is pretty overly hyped and it's usually someone you know that murders you. I guess it's the same thing with asteroids. It's the asteroid you know, your neighbor that comes and destroys your planet.
Another good example of inappropriate humor. Katie, Wow, now we're joking about murders.
I'm going to go to podcast jail.
No.
But you're exactly right. And the thing to understand is that the Solar System, like life on Earth, has not stopped developing. It's a continuous, ongoing process. Solar system is about four and a half billion years old, and it started from some huge cloud of gas and dust and little bits of rock left over from the death of other stars, and it coalesced into these planets and all of these bits. But it's a dynamic, ongoing process. And as we study our Solar System and compare it to other solar systems, we understand that lots of things are changing through that history of the Solar System. Planets might even be changing positioned. We think that Jupiter Modive formed in the outer part of the Solar System and then taken a trip to the inner Solar System before being pulled back out by Saturn into the outer Solar System again. So don't think of the Solar System as like a static place where it's like finished and it's going to be like this forever. It's still ongoing. And that goes double for the little bits, not just the planets, but the extra little rocks that didn't find their way into a big planet. So we know, for example that between Mars and Jupiter there's the asteroid belt, right, These are a bunch of little rocks that are not part of any planet. And it's not just between Mars and Jupiter. There are actually two blobs that are in Jupiter's orbit, and that in the same ellipse where Jupiter goes around the Sun is a blob that goes ahead of them and a blob that goes behind them. That I think is really cool. It shows you sort of why the asteroids exist. They exist because of Jupiter's gravity. Jupiter's like this huge bully in the outer Solar System. If it wasn't for Jupiter, these rocks might coalesce into a planet. We did an episode recently about why planets get rings versus moons, and the answer there was because of the tidal forces of the planets, pulling those moons apart into rings if they're too close. This is sort of a similar thing. Jupiter is tugging on all of these guys, preventing them from coalescing into a single larger thing. So you have this huge collection of rocks. But again that's not static. It used to be in the much earlier times in the Solar System that the asteroid belt was much much richer, there was much more mass. A lot of that has gotten lost because it's a little bit unstable. Things fall in towards the Sun or get knocked out of the asteroid belt by collisions or just by Jupiter's gravity.
What causes something to get knocked out of stability? So you have this asteroid belt, what is the impetus for one of these asteroids just deciding to go like, well, see it and fall into the Sun.
Think about it the other direction. What do you have to do in order to survive over billions of years? You have Jupiter's gravity tugging at you, if all the other planets also tugging at you even less, and of course the Sun. In order to survive, you have to somehow balance all of those things for billions of years. So you start out with a huge number of rocks, and nobody's organized these right, They're just sort of like out there in the Solar System. They formed gravitationally, and most of them are just not on trajectories that are going to survive. They're going to get tugged by Jupiter, or they're gonna get yanked by Mars, or they're gonna feel Saturns pull and then eventually they're going to fall into the Sun or into another planet. So it requires like a really delicate balance of all of those gravitational factors in order to survive this long and as time goes on, you're less and less likely to survive because you know, it's really chaotic. Like you can orbit a single object pretty stably for a long long time, you're just feeling gravity towards it. You have the right angle you can orbit. Now you add another object in the Solar System, another thing with heavy gravity becomes much more complicated to keep a stable orbit. Like the Earth, for example, its orbit is constantly being tweaked by Jupiter and by saturning these tiny little tugs, and so it's hard to find a path which is going to be stable over billions of years. It's amazing, frankly, that any of these asteroids were able to survive this fairly chaotic gravitational system that long.
I mean that kind of sounds similar to evolution, where you know, the rule is simple. If you survive, you survive, and if you don't, you get tossed into the sun or pulled into the sun.
Yeah. The difference here is that there's no way to reproduce, right, there's no way to replenish.
These meteors that we know of.
That we know of exactly unless like two planets collide and create a lot of debris. But our model of the asteroid belt is that it's like zero point one percent of its original mass. The first one hundred million years of the Solar System were pretty chaotic. Their collisions all the time and things were falling out of it. So the asteroid belt we think now is much much less mass than it used to be. In total, if you took like all the asteroids and the asteroid belt and add them up, it'd be less than five percent of the mass of our moon. So there's not actually that much stuff.
Out there, is that good news for us Because the more stuff, it seems like, the more likely we're gonna get hit by that stuff.
That's very good news for us. We want fewer asteroids because each one is like a bullet, right, Any of these things, if they're bigger than like ten kilometers or so and they hit the Earth, that's an extinction event, right, that's really catastrophic. Some of these guys are huge. Like there's a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, it's called Series, and it's nine hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter. Right, that would just obliterate the surface of the Earth completely.
That sounds pretty serious. So it seems like earlier on, like we probably had more asteroid collisions near Earth because like the Moon has a bunch of craters, But has the Moon been hit by asteroids more recently? Was that like debris from Earth hitting the Moon? Why do we have more craters? Like that seem to be old then we are currently experiencing in terms of getting hit by space rocks.
Yeah, there's a few things going on there. It's true that we have fewer space rocks hitting things now than we used to In the very early days of the Solar system, just because there are fewer and we sort of run out and the trend is towards things coalescing into larger objects, so we just have fewer of these rocks, which means fewer impacts, but there still are a lot of impacts. And if you look at the Moon, there's a very rich history there of impacts and you can see, for example, really big craters that you can tell are old with smaller craters inside them, and so you can use that to tell like which ones happened first because of the small crater it happened first, the big one would have obliterated it. So you can tell the sort of like the layers of cratering there, and you can use that to try to reconstruct something about the history of cratering on the Moon. But yeah, there was definitely more cratering earlier on. And remember that the Moon doesn't really have much of an atmosphere, has almost no atmosphere. We just did an episode about the Moon's atmosphere. It's like a few molecules per cubic centimeter, whereas the Earth is like ten to nineteen molecules per cubic centimeter. And that's a huge shield. Any rock that hits the Moon is going to cause a crater, whereas a rock that hits the Earth, if it's not big enough, it's going to burn up in our atmosphere and we're not going to see it. So every surface of the Solar System is constantly getting bombarded by smaller rocks and sometimes bigger ones Earth. We don't often notice that because our atmosphere protects us, but a big enough one is definitely going to make it to the surface of the Earth and do some damage.
Well, I want to hear about how we can prodeict whether one of these big ones are gonna hit us, But I think first I'm going to take a quick break to hide under the bed a little bit.
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Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe.
In our heads.
We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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We think of Franklin as the doddling dude flying a kite and no rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm having right with.
Last season, we tackled the engine nuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women shut wearing their hair in what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and wants Washington to do it.
Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So we've talked about how there is a lot of asteroid activity, that there's a lot of randomness and chaos to the movement of asteroids, like from say like the asteroid belt to falling into the Sun. So it seems like there's so much randomness it would be like really hard to predict if one of these guys would come and hit us.
It does seem like a lot of the process is random, right, Like what makes an asteroid hit the Earth or not hit the Earth. It does seem like it just needs to get tugged the right way gravitationally and then end up on a path. You know. For those of you out there who are more anxious, NASA is doing their best. They have a bunch of telescopes now tracking these things, and they think they know where all of the big asteroids are, the ones that might do any damage to the Earth. They can't find all the asteroids because they get to be pretty small, but the bigger ones and especially the shinier ones, they've had a lot of opportunities to see these things because asteroid belt is pretty close, so we get lots of chances. The things that are harder to predict are the things that come from further out in our own solar system. These seem a little bit more random and harder to anticipate because they're on long timescales, and those are things like comets. So outpast the asteroid belt, this is something called the Kuiper Belt. This out past Neptune. It's like thirty Au out there, and instead of just being rock, these things are icy rocks out past the snow line, and so it's cold enough for vapor to coalesce into ice. These chunky ice balls can also get disrupted and then fall towards the inner Solar system, and that's what we typically call a comet that have a tail, because this ice is getting boiled off as they get closer and closer to the Sun. And the Kuiper Belt is responsible for what we call short period comets, ones that loop around every two hundred years or so. That doesn't seem very short, right. The problem though, is that if it only comes every two hundred years, and we've only had like telescope technology for a few hundred years, and we don't get very many chances to see these things and to like understand their orbit and predict very well whether they're going to hit the Earth.
How much lead time would we have, like from first spotting a comet to it make contact with Earth, Like how fast could it move from when we could first feasibly see it to when it would hit us.
It's a great question, and we have an answer to that because it's happened right Comet Shoemaker Levy, which hit Jupiter in the nineties. We knew that was going to hit but only a few months in advance, because it comes from pretty far out in the Solar System where it's hard to track, and then as it comes in people can calculate its trajectory and see where it's going to loop around this time. And that's how we knew it was going to hit Jupiter. And so some of these things can come sort of out of the darkness and surprise us. The scary thing is that there are also long period comets, these things from the Ort cloud, and there might be like trillions of things out there much much further out, very loosely held by the Sun's gravity, and these things can give comets that have really long periods five hundred years, a thousand years, maybe even longer, you know, looping through our solar system once every million years, And so this is another source of potential killers. And one issue is that because they come from so far out, when they come in, they're going to be moving very very fast, which makes them hard to predict and also very very dangerous. So comets are harder to predict than asteroids and also faster moving, so they're really something to be more worried about than asteroids.
Well I hate that, so thank you for that, So ignoring that kind of mortal peril. Are we able to predict asteroids better than we can predict comets? Like, is there some science to understanding when asteroids would hit us?
There is some science there, but we're not great at predicting asteroids more than like a couple hundred years out. The more measurements you have of an object, the better you can predict its trajectory. If you've seen an asteroid one hundred times or a thousand times, then you have a good sense of exactly what direction it's going in and what its velocity is, and you can predict pretty well where it's going to go In the end, it always becomes chaotic because there's so many things in the Solar System that can tug on it. It makes it hard to predict. Commets are harder if you don't have much data, if you've only seen it once, or if you've never seen it before, or it's just entering the Solar system, and you know, the things that trigger asteroids or comets to fall into the Earth are these gravitational tugs. Right the Solar system, like left to itself, is pretty stable. There is some gravitational chaos internally, but something that we need to think about are effects from other Solar systems. You know, the Sun is moving through the galaxy and right now it's pretty far from other stars, but as time goes on, it gets closer to other stars and further from other stars. It's sort of like swimming through an ocean of the galaxy. And if you have these things out there in the or cloud that are sort of like very tenuously held by the Sun, then a little tug from something else out there might not get out of the stable orbit it's been in for billions of years and send it rocketing towards the inner Solar System.
We do have to predict things that's not always completely accurate, but it's based on like probabilities. So like if you have a coin and you're flipping it, you can't really with complete accuracy predict whether it's going to be heads or tails, but you have an idea of if you flip it a bunch of times that you know roughly fifty percent of the time it should be heads and fifty percent of the time it should be tails. So do we have a similar thing when it comes to asteroids, Like maybe we can't precisely predict when an asteroid would hit us, but we have an idea of the rough probability of asteroid hitting us over the history of our planet.
We can look back into our history and try to see if there are patterns there, to see if there is a periodicity. But before we do that, it's fun to think about, like what might be causing that periodicity, Like are there even conceivably theories that might generate that kind of pattern, Because the pattern means that there's something underlying happening. There's some like very slow process which is grinding forward, which is changing the nature of the environment in a way that's predictable, right, that's periodic the way like the seasons are periodic. Because of the way the Earth goes around the Sun, people have looked for these kinds of things in our galaxy, like periodic events that happen over tens of millions of years that might trigger asteroids and comets to hit the Earth on some sort of timescale. And there's a couple of candidates. One is sort of plausible, and the other one is kind of crazy and dramatic. The one that's sort of plausible is that the Sun does have a sort of thirty million year cycle in the galaxy. So the Sun is going around the center of the galaxy, and it takes a couple hundred million years to orbit the center of the galaxy. That's like one galactic year. But the Sun is also wiggling sort of up and down through the galactic plane. So if you imagine the Sun like going around the center of the galaxy, it is also going up and down above and below the galactic plane as it does that, and that happens about every thirty million years. We pass through this sort of plane at the center of the galaxy and then go below it and then come back up thirty million years later.
So, like I've always kind of thought of the Sun as this pretty stable, massive orb but now I'm thinking of it like this rubber ducky that is like circling the drain of the bathtub and kind of bobbing under the water and over the water exactly.
And as it moves through the galaxy, its environment changes, we get further and closer to other stars. The center of the galaxy. The galactic plane is definitely the densest part of the galaxy, and so it's not inconceivable that that kind of process might trigger comets or Kuyper Belt objects out of their otherwise stable orbit, give it just the right kind of tug that might cause them to fall towards the center of the Solar system. So that's the more plausible theory. Then there's a theory that was spread in a popular book recently about whether dark matter killed the dinosaurs. This is a book written by a couple theorists that Harvard, and they suggest that dark matter, which is this invisible matter that we know is out there, but we don't really understand very much. That we know that there's much more of it than there is normal matter, and we think that it's shaped sort of the whole structure of the galaxy. They imagine that dark matter might coalesce into sort of like a disk.
Like a dark Frisbee.
Yeah, like a big dark Frisbee. I mean when the Sun passes through this dark matter disc that maybe it's the dark matter that's tugging on the things in the outer Solar System and then knocking them in towards our safe little garden.
Is there any evidence for this?
So, is there any evidence for this? You know, this is just a fun speculative theory. These two Harvard theorists came up with a theory of dark matter that would generate this kind of disk, and then they went hunting to see if there was evidence in the history on our planet for some sort of periodicity, So that would be like an explanation for that. We don't have any direct evidence of the dark matter frisbee existing at all. It's just like another idea that might generate a sort of periodic tug on the Solar System that would create it. If indeed there is any periodicity in the asteroid impacts on Earth.
It sounds like a very convenient scapegoat to me. So like if I you know, knock over a vase. I'm like, oh, well, hey, it's that dark matter frisbee, you know how it is exactly.
And so now I think it's time to answer your question from a few minutes ago, which is is there actually any evidence can we look back on the history on Earth and see a pattern of strikes, because you know, one good way to predict the feature is of course to look at the past and to see if this has happened at regular intervals in the past. And this is challenging, right because people weren't around, We've not been doing astronomy for like hundreds of millions of years to take this kind of data. But there's sort of two categories of evidence that people have looked at to see if there are patterns. One is biological and the other is geological. So first people look at like the history of life on Earth and they look at the fossil record for extinctions, and there are a lot of them. You know, if you look back in the history of life on Earth is many times when you've had massive dieots and big decreases in the diversity of life on Earth.
Yeah, yeah, you have these like bottleneck events you can look at, you know, these kind of genetic locuses, like not just in terms of you know, you'll have a massive dump of fossils that you can look at and that are kind of layered, and so you can see like where you get these basically evidence of all these animals dying, you have interesting sort of genetic bottleneck where you can see evidence of mass die offs. I think we have this sort of nice notion that these mass extinctions don't really happen because we have not really been direct witnesses to a mass extinction in our human species lifespan. But yeah, they do happen with you know, some regularity, not too often, but it's something that is hard to think of happening to us because you know, we like very much being alive on the planet. But yes, it does happen.
Exactly, and sometimes these processes only happen in deep time, right, there's not things that we witness day to day or year to year. But they still are a part of the larger cycle of life on Earth. We just might not have been paying attention long enough to notice. And so, you know, sixty five million years ago there was a big die off, like thirty percent of the species two hundred and fifty million years ago there was a huge die off and the boundary between the Permian and Triassic period that I think people still don't even really understand. Something like fifty percent of species on Earth died out. And if you look at like overtime when have species died out, you do see these spikes and you wonder like, hmmm, is there a pattern there? So people have done a statistical analysis to see like, can you fit this to a periodic function? Is there like a gap between these peaks that's pretty regular or not? And the way to do this mathematically is something called a Furreer analysis. For those you like signal processing nerds out there, it's basically like taking a sound and decomposing it into frequencies. You listen to Bob Dylan, for example, and you can lower the base, or you can raise the trouble, or you know, you can change the frequencies. That's because all sound is actually build up of a bunch of different frequencies, and you can decompose sound into those frequencies and say Bob Dylan is more base than Lady Gaga or whatever. And so in the same way, you can take any distribution and you can break it down into basically sine waves and say, like what frequencies are more common in this distribution. And when you do that and you look at the pattern of die offs biologically, you don't see much evidence there. It's like maybe some weak evidence for periodic dieoffs every sixty million years or every one hundred and forty million years. Weirdly, you don't see something every thirty million years, like this cycle that we talked about where the Sun goes in and out of the galactic plane that happens every thirty million years, but we don't see a die off every thirty million years. It doesn't look like the life on Earth has been wiped out by an asteroid impact every thirty million years.
Right, So it doesn't seem like it's on an exact schedule, But it seems like there's also the chance that, like it wouldn't happen every thirty million years, but you know, the chance of it happening every thirty million years would slightly increase, but you would maybe skip a bunch of potential die offs because just by increasing the chance of something doesn't guarantee that it's going to happen, which seems like a really difficult analysis to make because we don't have, you know, that much time to work with, because like the Earth is not like the oldest thing in the universe.
Yeah, and our understanding the fossil record and our ability to analyze this thing doesn't really go much further back than like five or six hundred million years after like the Cambrian explosion and that kind of stuff. But you're right, it could be sort of like every thirty million years we play Russian roulette and sometimes we win and sometimes we don't win. But then you would see that appearing, right, even if it didn't happen every time, you would see it appearing at that periodicity. It wouldn't have to happen every time for this analysis to reveal it. But you're right, also, this is limited, like we don't have that many examples, and so it could be that it's there, we just haven't seen enough examples for it to sort of rise out of the data statistically. But currently when we look at the data, we can't say that there's statistical evidence for any sort of periodicity in the die off patterns of life on Earth.
There's too much noise and there's not really much evidence of a signal and maybe if we had many billions of years to work with, we could have better data, but we don't have that, And sadly, crocodiles and cel accounts and some of these really old species are not really good at data collections.
So exactly, the fascinating thing is that all of these events, somebody was there, you know, some life was there, some eyeball was around seeing these things happen. Just like all of human history, though most of it's forgotten, all of it was witnessed, right There was somebody who knew exactly what happened to humans twenty thousand years ago. It's just all those people are dead and they didn't write it down, and so all that information is now lost. That's so frustrating. Sometimes some scientists have turned to the interior of the Earth to try to understand if there's evidence in the geologic record for these impacts, not just like did enough species die off, because you know, maybe the asteroid hit but it just didn't cause a big die off. So instead they've looked at like the Earth itself to see if there's evidence for these impacts. And these guys were interested not just in asteroid impacts but also in slow geologic events that could have caused die offs from within the Earth. Like what if there's some crazy process inside the Earth that causes super volcanoes every fifty million years that causes a die off or some other very like slow process that bubbles up every x million years and we just haven't understood it yet. You know, we've definitely discovered these kinds of things in geology many times, so it's fun to sort of imagine even deeper time processes. So these guys look not just at evidence for asteroid collisions, but also like just large marine extinctions or changes in the seafloor or big volcanic events. And they did the same thing. They did a four y analysis to look for a repeating signal to see like is there a period to sort of large geologic events on the surface of the Earth. And these guys in their paper, they actually claim to discover a signal every twenty eight million years. They said that there's strong statistical evidence for something bad happening every twenty eight million years. But I actually have to take issue with this paper. I read this paper and I think that they've done these statistical analysis wrong.
Oh boy, some drama getting ready for some statistical analysis drama. All right, let's go, let's take them down.
What they did is they looked for the most common recurrence and they found something abound twenty eight million years. But you know, every time you're going to look at your data, you're going to find something to be the most common. The question is like, how likely is it to be that significant? Is it really a big peak or is it just sort of like the biggest peak among a bunch of random noise. And so they tried to calculate this. They try to say, like, how likely is there to see this big peak at twenty eight million years? Is this likely to just be noise or is this something real? So they ran a bunch of statistical tests to see how likely is it to see something at twenty eight million years, and they found those very unlikely to see this kind of peak, And from that they conclude, oh, well, this must be real because it's very unlikely to generate this from just random noise. Problem with this method of statistical analysis is that they're only calculating the probability of seeing a peak from random events at twenty eight million years, whereas these random events also could have generated peaks at thirty million years in fifteen million years, and if they'd seen that in their data, they would have happily written a Nature paper about that as well. So I think they sort of overstate the case that this thing rises above the random noise. And in my view, there's no real statistical evidence here for the geologic record having any sort of period of major events.
So speaking purely for a friend who you may go a little cross eide when discussing statistics. So essentially they're basically kind of pruning data points that would make this finding more likely, whereas if they included in their analysis all the data points, you would get a lot more evidence of noise.
Yeah, it's like saying, what's the chance of getting a random peak at this number? It's pretty small. Well, what's the chance of getting a random peak at any number. It's going to be much much bigger. And that's the number they really need to be accounting for, because they would have accepted a peak basically any number right now. It is interesting that the peak they get is just about at thirty million years. That is suggestive because we know there is this process where the Sun goes in and out of the galactic plane every thirty one million years, though they measure theirs to be twenty eight million years. And that might not seem like a big difference to you, but three million years is not a short amount of time.
Yeah, sounds circumstantial to me. Can you imagine if literature review was like a courtroom that you actually got to kind of be a big fancy city lawyer in court arguing for against statistical analysis. I think that would make science a lot more entertaining.
It would probably make it for a lot more deep grudges also, And you know, for answering our question about whether there's a pattern to asteroid impacts on Earth, remember that this paper is thinking about all geological events, super volcanoes and all sorts of other stuff. And if you look at most of these events the boundaries between geological time scales. For example, only the event at sixty five million years ago in the geological record shows a significant impact. You know, we can see like the ash and the dust from that impact in the record. If you dig down into the earth you can find that and see the impact. The other transition periods and the die offs that don't seem to align with any asteroid impact. There's no like event, we can find no evidence of ash and dust, so it seems pretty loose. As far as we can tell right now, there is no evidence of periodic asteroid impact on Earth, which is, you know, good news because it means that another one might not be coming. But it's bad news because it means they might just be unpredictable.
I mean, it's also bad news if I really want to cancel my dentist appointment in the next million years or so, you know. I think another thing is that when the big one hit Earth and you know, killed off the dinosaurs, of course a little more complicated than that. I mean, there were also other things happening at the time, other geological activity that was contributing to the extinction. So it wasn't just the asteroid. They also think that there was volcanic activity that had nothing to do with the asteroid that was causing an impact on the environment. And so it was just this kind of like poorly timed asteroid that kind of helped put a nail in the coffin of an already sort of precarious situation for the dinosaurs. And so yeah, I think it seems like it'd be a little too tidy in terms of finding. You know that every thirty million years we get hit by an asteroid and all the animals, you know, go oh no, except for a lucky few of them that end up surviving. But it does seem like the actual picture of it would be a lot messier, have to do with a lot more kind of just a confluence of environmental factors, both on Earth and maybe you know, outside of Earth, rather than just one kind of convenient every thirty million years asteroids and backtown.
You sound like the asteroids defense lawyer saying, hey, look, it wasn't my client. Even if they were there, there's other stuff going on.
I may be a simple country lawyer, but the evidence that my asteroid was anywhere near those dinosaurs is purely circumstantial.
I'm going to call in Daniel Whitson to argue about the statistical analysis of this paper. All right, well, I think you can rest easy then, knowing that a big asteroid may not necessarily be on way to pulverize all of us.
That is the most like lackluster optimistic thing I've ever heard. It's like you can rest easy knowing that you may not die a random and horrible death along with everyone else on Earth. But hey, you know glass half fault.
You may not die a predictable periodic death, but you may actually dye a random, horrible death because comets and asteroids are unpredictable, and especially comets are really a source of danger. And we need to keep funding those telescopes to look out there, and we need to keep developing these technologies to divert these objects if they do come towards our wonderful planet.
Oh, I see, this is why you're blaming the asteroids. This is a shakedown for funding for science.
Just trying to save the planet. I mean, just a little old thing like saving the planet.
How convenient.
All right, Well, thank you Katie very much for joining us on this optimistic view of our situation in the Solar System and offering your full through defense of asteroids. And thanks everybody for listening to another deep dive into the deep history of life on Earth. Thanks for joining us. Tune in next time, Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'man neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that.
Or we can steer our lives.
Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible. As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast. Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen. With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations, it's a hit with both kids and parents. Listen to Kid's Bible's Choice podcasts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
