Bill Nye talks about saving the Earth from an asteroid impact event

Nobody sees him coming. An unidentified asteroid, just a few kilometers wide, breaks the atmosphere of the Earth with a deafening noise, creating its surface with the energy of a few million nuclear bombs. The shockwave flattens the buildings as though they were made of dust. Millions of people cremated in the blink of an eye. After the initial explosion, molten debris is ejected into the atmosphere and into Earth 's orbit, so that the final act of civilization unfolds under a rain of fire.

This is not the beginning of an apocalyptic script. It is a dramatization of a highly improbable but plausible asteroid impact event that would mark the end for humanity as we know it. After all, dinosaurs ruled Earth the last time an asteroid the size of a city hit. And look what happened to them.

When it comes to asteroids capable of annihilating a city, we are almost as dark as dinosaurs, having identified about 1.5% of the million people there. Meanwhile, astronomers believe they have found between 90 and 95% of the rocks in the space of civilization, none of which poses an immediate threat to the planet. It's the 5-10% that we do not know who are the problem. If one of these bad boys falls unexpectedly, the consequence would be catastrophic.

Asteroid impacts do not keep Bill Nye at night Like a swimmer who is scared of sharks, it is those we do not see who worry about it. "It's a low probability event with a huge consequence," he tells Digital Trends. "The only avoidable natural disaster." The discovery of the remaining 5-10% of these asteroids is the key. After that, the engineers will try to deflect the incoming asteroids. Nuclear explosions that drop the asteroid from its trajectory to swarms of laser beam spacecraft to push it in the other direction, the technology may seem to come out of science fiction, but Nye says that any is in our technological reach

. The Planetary Society, the fun and often irreverent man of science, is currently leading a Kickstarter campaign called Kick Asteroid !, which aims to raise funds and raise public awareness of these spatial threats and to to encourage lawmakers to act. With commodities like shirts and posters, the campaign has reached its $ 50,000 funding goal, but continues to make commitments with a few days remaining.

So we talked to Bill Nye about the possibility of asteroid impact events. and what we can do about it.

Digital Trends: The impacts of asteroids make film scripts fascinating but seem less rooted in reality. How often do they really happen and how much should we be worried about?

Bill Nye: Well, there was an important one in 2013 that reached about 20 meters [in Chelyabinsk, Russia]. Everyone ran to the windows and tens of seconds later, the shock wave hit the ground, blew glass on their faces and injured a thousand people. Some of them were seriously injured and had to go to the emergency room. Then, in 1909, the explosion of Tunguska in Siberia razed two thousand square kilometers of trees. 10 million trees were felled in an instant. And 1908 was not very long ago. If this explosion occurred on Paris, New York or Sydney, it would be the end of any of these places. And finally, the dinosaurs had an asteroidal impact, which is now recognized as having been off the coast of Mexico

The smaller ones happen a few times a century, the big ones happen every few centuries, and the bigger ones happen every few millions of years. It is an event with very low probability but with enormous consequences. It would be simply "Control-Alt-Delete" for civilization

So, are we late for any of the big ones?

Nobody knows. We speculate about it all the time. Lisa Randall wrote a cool book where she speculated that Earth is going through a dark matter record every few million years and the periodicity of 35 million years of asteroidal impacts is related to a subject that we do not understand yet. It's a very good idea – but neither here nor there. All it would be, it is one. We have identified about 90 percent of disasters, but that leaves 10 percent, which is more than enough to be inconvenient.

You said that if we reached it, it would be essentially the Control-Alt-Delete scenario. What would the impact of a big asteroid impact look like?

In Impact [that killed the dinosaurs] which we now call the Chicxulub crater, the cone of ejected material is considered to be larger in diameter than the diameter of the Earth. These red hot debris ended up basically in the Earth's orbit for days or weeks. This caused global fires and killed everything big animals ate, so that they could not make a living. The only creatures who lived there lived underground in burrows and other things.

Let's say we were going to be affected by one of the 10% of unknown asteroids. How long ago would we have a warning? Would we be able to see him approach?

Probably not. Let's say it's 30 kilometers in diameter. It's big compared to a football stadium but tiny compared to the vastness of the space. While we love hilarious "joke" – the search for asteroids is like looking for a charcoal briquette in the dark. They are very difficult to see but with the right instruments, especially infrared telescopes, we can see them. They shine at about 150 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. So we want to advocate for space to build systems to look for these things, so that we are warned in 20 or 30 years. If we have 30 years notice, we can send a spaceship to give it a thumbs up so that it does not cross the orbit of the Earth when we are there.

What kind of nudges are we talking about? How could we deflect an asteroid?

Well, you can just get there with the high-speed spacecraft, using a kinetic impactor, as they're called. Maybe detonate a nuclear weapon near her so that she will fly some of the surface of the asteroid in space, to obliterate it. The Global Society sponsored a cool line of research where we proposed to build spacecraft with lasers on them. We would then have a swarm of our laser "bees" and they would send a laser light to the surface of an asteroid and cause the surface to burn, oblat a bit. This momentum of this ejected substance would give the asteroid a small push in the space. I've always been charmed by this idea.
But whatever we do, it is almost certain to demand nothing again. I mean by this a new technology. It would be a brand new spacecraft with a new set of gadgets, but it would be made from existing technology and components of the spacecraft.

What kind of investment would we be talking about building one of these spaceships?

I do not know, but I compare it to what was costing a flagship mission. It would be something like Cassini, who flew for 20 years for four billion dollars. It's not a lot, but let's say it's 10 times more. Compare that to the destruction of humanity. We should probably find the money. And all the money spent in the space is really spent on Earth! Do not forget that! There would be no aerospace contractors that we presume involved and, as I like to say, the space brings out the best in us. We solve problems that have never been solved before.

The Asteroid Kick! The campaign aims in part to raise public awareness of the threats of asteroids and to light a fire under lawmakers to fund some of these missions. What are lawmakers currently doing to mitigate the risk of asteroids and what can they do better and better?

We can devote more resources to more in-depth research. We have the NEOWISE spacecraft, but we could use two or three of those things. 10% of the asteroid population can end life as we know it. Progress of the NASA (NEOWISE) Near-Earth Objects Survey over the first four years since its restart in December 2013. NASA

But you used the word attenuation and I am all for. I want to say to Chelyabinsk that it would have been nice if there was a type of public warning, perhaps as an AMBER alert on your phone. "Stay away from the windows for the next three minutes!" Something like that. But it is better not to have to do it at all and simply divert each one of them.

This last question comes courtesy of our new technology publisher: "Deep Impact" or "Armageddon"? Which film is more scientifically accurate when it comes to a potential asteroid impact?

The one where they did not detonate the asteroid is better. (Note: it means that "Deep Impact" is better.) Exploding an asteroid is problematic.

By the way, in any of them (he means "Deep Impact" again.) The premise was that a child had seen an asteroid that no one else did not see. Well, a lot of asteroids are identified by amateur astronomers. Amateur astronomers are different from amateur golfers, in that amateur astronomers really contribute to the science of astronomy. It's a real science made by ordinary people. What amateur astronomers can bring is what we call tracking. Someone will find it and then all those hundreds or thousands of astronomers from around the world will be taking their telescopes to the same part of the sky to see if they're okay watching this thing move in the sky against the background stars, stars that are so fantastic that they do not seem to move from our point of view.

So the Planetary Society supports amateur astronomers with what we call Shoemaker NEO grants, named after the famous astronomer who studied asteroids and comets. Every two years, we provide grants to amateur astronomers to upgrade their equipment or systems associated with their telescopes to track these objects.