[crickets chirping]
[enchanting orchestral music]
* *
- Greetings. Bill Nye here.
Beautiful night, isn't it?
Hard to believe that charming, twinkly sky above us
is filled with celestial shrapnel--
ancient rocks and debris left over
from the birth of our solar system
that can, with very little prompting,
come hurtling toward Earth with devastating consequences.
[comet whooshing]
[tires screeching]
[explosion]
[gasps softly]
[dramatic music]
* *
[cow mooing]
Here we are again, my friends, in the Disaster Institute,
a conservatory of catastrophic events
that have happened in the past, are happening now,
or could happen at any moment.
We're here to witness the end of the world as we know it.
It will be instructive.
We'll learn how science can provide
a blueprint for our survival.
Tonight's disaster comes from beyond the sky.
The last time this happened,
nine out of ten living things on Earth disappeared.
It's about to happen again.
Our beautiful, blue Earth was formed
about 4.6 billion years ago,
but honestly, madam, you don't look
a day over three billion.
Many of the ingredients of life,
including almost all of Earth's water,
were carried here by flying boulders
and ice blocks.
We call them asteroids and comets.
Some of those icy rocks are still out there,
but along with bringing us the building blocks of life,
those objects can also be building blocks of death.
Brace for impact.
[soft dramatic music]
Any advice?
* *
- [growls]
- Our planet is under constant assault.
About 50 tons of cosmic dust, rock, and debris
fall to Earth every single day.
If you live out in the country
away from factories and other urban pollution,
the film that accumulates on your car
or your windshield, a lot of that
is asteroid and comet dust.
You can pull out tiny bits of metal asteroids
using a magnet.
This dust came from deep space.
Most of the celestial objects are so small,
they never even reach the ground.
They vaporize on the way down,
or they just blow away in the wind.
Every once in a while, though, a space rock will land
in your backyard or, blam, right on top of your car,
like back in 1992 in Peekskill, New York,
when a bowling-ball-sized meteorite
put a hole through a totally innocent Chevy Malibu.
* *
[explosion]
Your living room isn't safe either,
as Ann Hodges discovered in 1954
when a space rock cruising through the cosmos
for four and a half billion years
crashed through the roof of her Alabama home
and walloped her while she napped.
Ouch.
That object was only a foot in diameter.
Imagine something that's 100,
1,000, 10,000 times that big.
Most scientists agree that an impact event
caused the most recent mass extinction
66 million years ago.
It struck around what today is known as the Yucatan Peninsula
off the Gulf of Mexico.
75% of all life on Earth went extinct.
Think about it, three quarters of us.
That's like if a comet struck "Sex and the City"
and only Carrie survived.
I mean, who's she gonna talk to?
The dinosaur-killing space rock
was nine miles wide
and slammed into Earth so hard...
[explosion]
That it created a crater ten times that big.
The crash threw huge amounts of debris into the air,
blocking out the sun.
Plant growth slowed so drastically
that the entire ecosystem collapsed.
Only one kind of dinosaur survived,
the ones that could fly, birds.
That's right, folks, that cheerful chirping
you hear every morning are the shrieks
of modern-day descendants of dinosaurs.
[explosion]
Get ready for the next big extinction event.
It is coming.
We're about to take a ride on our disaster simulator.
I want you to experience this disaster firsthand
from different points of view--
an astronomer-turned-detective
trying to prevent the death of our planet,
a fanatic searching for meaning
in the end of the world...
[comet whooshing]
And a condescending Congressman
who foolishly believes
that lightning never strikes twice.
- Now, who are you gonna believe?
* *
- But, Bill, 66 million years ago
is so yesterday.
Things that happened back then don't happen now.
That, my friends, is where you're wrong.
* *
Dead wrong.
* *
Our story begins here in a farm field in Ohio
in the not-so-distant future.
This crater was created by a shock wave--
that fireball seen lighting up the sky last night.
[explosion]
Our esteemed colleague is an astronomer
who hurried here to study the impact site.
* *
She spent the last few years in Chile
helping to build a new telescope.
* *
She concludes that the debris in this crater
came from an icy comet.
Now, comet impacts are rare and usually create something
much larger than this.
She suspects it was a cometary fragment,
which leads to a mystery.
What happened to the rest of the comet?
* *
The next clue comes from 250 miles above.
* *
Up here on the International Space Station,
things seem pretty normal.
Could use a little sugar though.
[crashing and beeping]
What's that?
Micrometeorites, tiny space rocks
no bigger than a grain of rice hitting at 20 times
the speed of a rifle bullet.
The International Space Station's
designed to handle small impacts,
but this is like nothing
they've ever encountered before.
[crashing and beeping]
[glass shattering]
Air leaks, power losses.
Not great. Really not great.
* *
A comet fragment crashes in a farm field in Ohio.
Within hours, a swarm of space pebbles pummels the ISS.
What's going on?
* *
This is the brand new Vera C. Rubin Observatory
on a mountaintop in North Central Chile.
It's named after Vera Rubin.
She was an amazing American astronomer
who studied how galaxies spin and was the first person
to discover hard evidence of the existence
of dark matter, all the while advocating
for women in science.
Back then, women were denied access
to most major observatories.
She's what many experts might call a total badass.
Speaking of badass, behold this wide field
reflecting telescope.
It has an 8.4-meter primary mirror.
That's as wide as a tennis court.
It will photograph the entire visible sky
every few nights as part of a 10-year survey
of, you know, all of space and time.
It will provide the deepest, widest images
of the universe captured so far.
Imagine what it could do looking for a comet.
To check out our hunch
that the small farm field impact
and the micrometeoroid incident in space
are connected, our astronomer has returned
to her home base in Chile.
She studies the orbit of the ISS.
Turns out it passed over the impact site
just hours before the meteoroid swarm.
That almost certainly means the station got smacked
by the comet's tail.
The two events are connected, but there's still a question--
a big one.
Where is the rest of the comet?
And could it still pose a threat in the future?
[computers beeping]
* *
To answer those questions,
she needs to find the parent comet,
and to do that, our astronomer needs
to do a little time traveling.
Now, astronomers use something
called precovery observations.
That's short for pre-discovery recovery,
obviously.
She scans through images taken a few nights earlier.
Using computer modeling, she retraces the path
of the comet fragment all the way back to Jupiter,
half a billion miles away
and nearly two years in the past,
and what she finds is startling.
* *
Our astronomer confirms that the farm field impact
and the space station pebble storm
were both caused by objects
that came here by way of Jupiter.
Now, she wonders, could there be
more objects that were disturbed
from the very same path?
The answer is yes.
[comet whooshing]
Two years ago, a massive comet
passed by Jupiter where it got torn apart
by the giant planet's powerful gravity.
Two fragments plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere,
creating a pair of dark spots when they exploded.
At the time, astronomers assumed
they were giant storm systems not uncommon on Jupiter,
but they were wrong. Those were comet impacts.
* *
The surviving cometary fragments
whipped around Jupiter,
spreading out like a string of pearls,
and I'm not talking about what Grandma Nye wears
with a sweater set.
It's a string of smaller but still deadly
comet fragments ranging from a few hundred meters
to a couple of kilometers wide.
And here's the really bad news,
the other comet fragments in this string of pearls
are headed our way, meaning that they could
smash land right here on Earth,
and it's impossible to predict exactly how close
they'll get to Earth.
Maybe we'll get lucky, and they'll all miss.
Maybe there'll be no disaster today.
* *
What do you think?
* *
[dramatic music]
- Our astronomer has gone from watching the stars
to warning the world.
She has joined forces with others
in the scientific community to raise the alarm
about the deadly string of comets
threatening our planet.
They contact a powerful, ambitious Congressman
to request emergency funding for a plan
to deflect the comet. - Sounds like an overreact.
- But to get those projects off the ground quickly
will be a monumental undertaking
and cost billions.
Unfortunately, he's spoken to his own experts.
They've assured him that nobody
can predict the exact path of these things.
We don't have enough data,
and there are too many variables to consider.
He accuses her of getting too emotional
and blames it on her lack of experience.
- These things fly past the Earth
all the time, am I right?
- Our astronomer now knows how Vera Rubin must have felt.
She argues that, no matter how small
the possibility of an impact, we can't risk doing nothing.
The time to get prepared was yesterday.
- If we don't act now, we don't have a chance.
[computer beeps]
- Here it is, folks, our act of cow.
[cow moos]
Act of cow symbolizes the human negligence
that can trigger a disaster or make one worse.
It's inspired by a bovine named Daisy who,
as legend has it, kicked over a lantern
and started the Great Chicago Fire.
[cow mooing]
Kind of unfair to Daisy, if you ask me.
I mean, who leaves a lantern behind a cow?
Yeah, no one you know.
Well, in this case, the congressman
has spoken with the president and his advisors.
Everyone agrees that the science isn't settled,
so why waste billions of taxpayer dollars
on something that only might happen?
The congressman also calls it highly suspicious
that just a few weeks after astronomers switched
on their half-billion-dollar Rubin telescope,
they happened to discover
an existential threat to humanity,
and now, those greedy, bloodsucking scientists
are asking for more, more, and more--
more instruments, more missions, more money.
- Now, who are you gonna believe,
some rat-faced science twerp
or a straight shooter who tells it like it is?
And what it is is a hoax.
- A hoax. A hoax.
The H word. Really?
Come on.
Over the next few weeks, the world is in a state
of chaotic uncertainty.
[indistinct chatter]
Professional and citizen scientists
across the globe get louder and louder
with their warnings.
Some politicians and naysayers
get more vehement in their denials.
[people chanting indistinctly]
Even as nations compete for emergency supplies
and accuse each other of hoarding,
preppers build bunkers.
Deniers and conspiracy theorists
battle each other on social media.
[phones beeping]
* *
[people cheering]
News of the possible comet strike is spreading.
Folks are naturally freaked out,
so comet cults like this one are springing up
all over the world.
People join for various reasons--
fear, superstition, human connection--
like my good buddy over there.
We've been through some crazy disasters together.
He must have nerves of steel by now.
- Honk if you love comets!
[cheering and honking]
- I guess he figures he can't beat what's coming,
so I might as well make friends with him.
Hey, man. It's Bill.
- No, no, no, no, no!
- We are born of sin and this is why--
- Doomsday enthusiasts are nothing new.
You might say we are obsessed with how the world will end.
[explosion]
Every major religion features a vision of the apocalypse,
and so-called doomsday prophets
make a good living by predicting Armageddon.
Nostradamus claimed that Earth would be struck
by a giant comet, and that the world would end
in the year 2004...
which it didn't, unless you count
the cancellation of "Friends."
[laughter]
People are obsessed with the end of the world.
Don't believe me?
Well, why are you watching this show?
[explosion]
It's a different episode.
As the days turn into weeks, the news cycle moves on.
Most people are tired of even hearing the word comet.
The media thrives on the here and now,
not the later and maybe.
People have more immediate problems
to face like going to work, paying their bills on time,
and other more earthly matters,
until one fateful night,
the threat becomes impossible to ignore.
[explosion]
[people screaming]
- [gasps]
[car alarms blaring]
- Look, it is hard to believe what we're seeing.
For those of you just tuning in,
have you looked up at the night sky lately?
* *
[animals chirping and calling]
* *
[car horns blaring]
- The sight of the moon impact
is a serious wake-up call for humanity.
People of Earth, you are in danger.
* *
[dramatic music]
* *
- After the comet impact on the Moon,
there is no denying
the threat to Earth any longer.
More comets are heading our way.
Astronomers are now the most important people
in the world because they're the only ones
who can predict where the comets might hit next.
They are updating their simulations
minute by minute to account for the erratic motions
of the comet fragments.
It's too late to deflect them.
That opportunity was lost months ago
when the congressmen blocked funding efforts
and downplayed the threat.
- Tells it like it is.
And what it is is a hoax.
- Damage control is all we can hope for,
and it doesn't look good.
The latest projections show a 90% chance
of at least one impact, a 50% chance of three or more,
and you don't have to be a statistician to know
there's a 100% chance we're screwed.
They can now estimate the approximate impact times.
[bell chimes]
The countdown has begun.
[clock ticking]
The world has about 11 days, or a million seconds,
before the first fragment arrives
and we find out how bad it's going to be.
I'll give you a hint.
It's going to be bad.
* *
Earth's surface is mostly water,
so an ocean strike is likely.
Bad news for beach-goers.
* *
But this obnoxious Congressman
decides it's a great time to take a vacation.
* *
Most official agencies are recommending the evacuation
of coastal cities, but it's virtually impossible
to predict with any accuracy
which areas will truly be safe,
so our Congressman is heading to the Yucatan Peninsula,
where the dinosaur-killing asteroid
landed back in the day.
He figures there's no way lightning will strike
twice in the same place.
By the way, lightning does strike twice in the same place
all the time.
The Empire State Building gets struck dozens of times
every year, an example off the top of my head.
[phone chimes] - [snoring]
* *
[upbeat tropical music]
* *
- Thanks, babe. One more.
[exhales deeply]
[comet whooshing]
No way!
- After the impact off the coast
of the Yucatan Peninsula, astronomers do everything
they can to pinpoint where the next one
will hit so they can evacuate
as many people as possible and so governments
can brace for the worst.
- If there is an imminent impact, we need to alert--
- It looks like the largest comet in the swarm
is on course to graze Antarctica,
and another is just hours behind.
[dramatic music]
* *
[explosion]
[sirens blaring]
Remember the effects of global climate change
I've been whining about for 30 years?
Well, all of that just happened in about 30 seconds.
- One more thing-- - Yeah.
- Take the--
[panicked chatter]
- And here at the Rubin Observatory,
the telescope has been blinded by impact debris
spreading through the atmosphere.
No one on Earth can track anything anymore,
and there's one more impact on the way.
* *
[people cheering]
* *
- [screaming]
* *
It's been an hour since Canada got hit,
and it looks like the impacts have finally stopped,
but the entire world will suffer
the effects for decades.
In a few weeks, Earth will be a gray ball
and shrouded in debris, smoke, and ash.
If humans survive this,
we'll have to learn to live and grow food
in sub-zero temperatures.
[impacts thudding]
It's not over yet.
These are tektites from the Canadian impact
falling back to Earth like hot bullets.
Whoa!
[tires squealing]
[tires screech]
[screaming]
[explosion]
- Our disaster simulation has come to an impactful end.
Well, that sucked.
Maybe the suckiest part is that sooty layer
in our stratosphere which is going to block
the sunlight for decades.
Most of the remaining humans on Earth will freeze or starve.
How bad will it get?
Just ask any old ancient dinosaur.
Of course, you can't ask them because they're dead,
all of them.
Get it?
[dramatic music]
So how do we stop more space rocks
from killing us all?
First, we'll need to know
where those rocks are coming from.
Let's hit the lab and suit up.
Major cometary impacts have happened a few times
in Earth's history,
and each time one of them hit, it turned life on this planet
upside-down, but the story of these icy messengers of death
goes back even further, before life,
before Earth, out beyond any of the Sun's planets.
I'm about to take you to the outermost reaches
of our solar system,
a place very few people even know about,
so pee now if you have to.
* *
[tranquil music]
* *
Welcome to the Oort cloud,
named for Jan Oort, the astronomer
who realized it must exist.
The Oort cloud is a vast, spherical shell of icy debris
that surrounds the entire solar system.
It's made up of the same ancient stardust
and star gas that became our Sun and Earth
and the other planets,
but it never got sucked in by any of them.
Instead, it got scattered to the dim reaches,
trapped out here in this twilight zone.
If you could zoom out to see our solar system
from a light year away, the Oort cloud
might look something like this.
* *
That's right.
Our entire solar system is surrounded
by a shell of icy rocks.
There are trillions of comets out here.
Unlike asteroids, which, simply put,
are big space rocks, and meteoroids,
which are small space rocks,
comets are cosmic snowballs
full of water ice, and frozen carbon compounds.
As a comet moves closer to the Sun,
the snowball starts to vaporize
and spew dust and gases, forming a pair of tails
that can stretch for millions of miles.
* *
Comets typically pass far away from Earth,
but occasionally, they come close enough
to produce a dazzling spectacle in our skies.
Now, all these objects orbit the Sun, but very slowly.
The Sun's pull is so weak out here
that it takes only the tiniest random tug,
like the gravity from a distant passing star,
to nudge one of these comets
out of the Oort cloud.
When its orbit is disturbed,
a comet will start falling toward the Sun
and begin its long, long journey
across our solar system.
[dramatic music]
* *
Jupiter's gravity is so strong, it can easily rip a comet
like this one to pieces.
Happens all the time.
* *
String of pearl impacts leave telltale signatures behind.
They're called crater chains, and they are everywhere
in our solar system.
Some of you may remember when NASA's
Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter's moon,
Callisto, in 1979.
It spotted curious chains of craters.
* *
Eight more chains were later found on Callisto,
along with three similar chains on Ganymede,
Jupiter's biggest moon.
At first, the crater chains were a mystery
until the discovery of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Not a law firm, Shoemaker-Levy was a string of pearls,
a chain of comet fragments
created when Jupiter's gravity
ripped the original comet apart.
Shoemaker-Levy got its revenge in 1994,
crashing into Jupiter.
Astronomers watched in awe as the broken bits
hit like machine gunfire.
In fact, everywhere we look in the solar system,
it's all craters--
craters, craters, and more craters.
* *
The only reason we don't see craters everywhere on Earth
is because our planet is good at hiding its scars.
If we drained away Earth's ocean
and stripped off its forests and all the other concealers,
it might look something like this.
* *
Behold the Earth naked.
What? Not what you imagined?
That's enough. This is a family show.
[enchanting orchestral music]
Earth's taken quite a few shots
over the last four and a half billion years,
and we're still in the line of fire,
but here's the great news.
Of all the natural disasters showcased
in this institute of ours, this is the only one
that's entirely preventable.
How? With science.
[tranquil music]
* *
- To prevent an impact,
we first have to find the impactors,
see what's coming at us.
That's what the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact
Last Alert System is trying to do.
We call it ATLAS.
It's in Maui, Hawaii. You know Atlas.
In Greek mythology, he was the guy holding up
the Earth on his shoulders.
Well, this ATLAS is trying to hold up life on Earth,
and it's a full-time job with no benefits.
* *
The robotic telescopes in ATLAS
are part of a critical early warning system
that scientists use to detect near-Earth objects
a few days or sometimes only a few hours before they hit.
* *
The most important thing we need is advance notice.
There's an old saying--
I mean, an old saying among comet hunters--
that finding a distant comet is like looking
for a charcoal briquette in the dark
or trying to find a flattering pair
of cargo pants. It's almost impossible.
* *
Near-Earth objects fly past us all the time.
* *
Scientists estimate that several dozen large asteroids
fly past Earth at a distance closer than the orbit
of the Moon every year,
but only a fraction of these are actually detected.
* *
The ones we do see are usually spotted after they pass by,
and only one or two are detected with more
than 24 hours' notice.
* *
Not trying to freak you out here,
but we might want to find a better way to detect
these unexpected guests.
That's why we need this.
It's the Near-Earth Object Surveyor spacecraft,
the NEO Surveyor.
It's a new kind of space telescope
designed to hunt down
potentially hazardous space rocks.
Now, they get warmed ever so slightly by the Sun,
and it's fantastically cold out there in space,
so if you have a detector sensitive enough,
you can sense their reflected heat.
It's like night vision for space rocks.
By making this opening wide and dark,
it stays as cold as possible in here.
Then down inside are the most advanced
heat-detecting sensors ever built.
So let's get it flying,
then we can go looking for that thing.
* *
Oh, yeah.
* *
Seriously, let's say we find a comet or an asteroid
and we know that it's got our name on it.
Well people, you might think we could just blow that baby up
in Bruce Willis fashion--
throw a nuke at it and Bob's your uncle.
Actually, a nuke is a pretty good idea...
if scientists and engineers figure out
the right way to use it.
Space agencies have been studying ways
to make this work without having to rely
on a bunch of yoked up and bronzed oil drillers.
Here's one way.
You could use the nuclear weapon
to blast a crater in the surface of the comet.
The explosion, along with the spewed out stuff--
the ejecta-- would nudge the comet
in a different direction.
Or you could set off your standoff burst
some distance away that uses radiation
to heat the comet.
Some of the surface would vaporize,
and that umph would push the object into another orbit.
We'd go like this.
[explosion]
[coughing]
It's a tricky operation.
Set off your bomb too far away, and you might not change
the object's course enough.
Too close, and instead of a single object coming in,
you might end up with a string of jagged pearls
headed our way.
That's why we, planetary defense types,
want to have a whole menu of designs ready to go,
including ones that are a lot more subtle.
We still don't know exactly how much force
any of this will take,
so consider NASA's DART mission--
the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
The DART spacecraft was launched in 2021,
and it's on course to slam into a small asteroid
named Dimorphos in the fall of 2022.
[dramatic music]
* *
If DART works, we could use this method
to deflect a future space rock that might be headed our way.
* *
DART will shift things around as the force of its impact
will change the orbit just a tiny bit--
the kind of nudge needed to prevent an asteroid
from getting too close to us.
But wait, there's more.
Now, it's laser time.
What if we could combine the heat of a nuke
with the kind of control you get with light?
What if you blasted a comet with lasers?
Well, how do we deliver lasers
to a near-Earth object, you ask?
Oh, keep your pants on. I'll show you.
Ha ha! Behold the Laser Bees.
It's an idea my colleagues at the Planetary Society
have been cooking up.
We'd send a swarm of them--
dozens, maybe.
The laser beams from the bees
would burn or oblate a bit of comet ice
and cause it to out-gas into space.
[buzzing]
[clears throat]
Except in space, there's no sound,
so it would just be like this.
It's an idea so crazy, it just might work.
[sighs]
OK, let's all take a deep breath
and replay our story,
this time with systems in place.
Our astronomer and her colleagues
along with folks just like you and me have put pressure
on our legislators to take the threat more seriously
no matter what the cost
or how long the odds
because the safety of our planet isn't theirs
to gamble with.
- Thank you for choosing to listen to us.
- Our Congressman listens to the science and leads the way
in green-lighting a full-fledged global effort
to save our planet.
More than 100 countries invest
in the most urgent and ambitious
technological undertaking since the Moon landings.
But the question is, will it work?
* *
[lasers humming]
* *
[comet whooshing]
* *
[tranquil music]
The mission was a success.
Now the string of pearls will safely pass the Earth
in an event as beautiful as it sounds,
and we have nothing to fear.
Instead, the light show is spectacular.
[triumphant music]
* *
- Our ancient dino friends are goners,
and we could be too, but it's not too late for us.
Asteroid and comet impacts are preventable natural disasters
if we set our minds to it.
As far as we know, the dinosaurs
had no space program, but we do.
And we--you and me--
have the power to make sure our representatives
represent us when it comes to investing
in the technology that could save our world.
We have an opportunity to prevent our own extinction
while at the same time learning extraordinary things
about our universe and our place within it.
With a robust infrastructure of telescopes and spacecraft,
we'll learn more about how the solar system was formed,
about the origins of life here, and the prospects for life
elsewhere in the universe.
Even if you set aside the practical benefits,
face it, people, space exploration is cool.
Averting a potential mass extinction
has never been so easy or come with
so many fun and fabulous rewards.
The more we invest in exploring the possibilities up there,
the better our lives will be down here.