C.C.I. Ways Space Can Kill Us Part1

**Bryan** (0:26)
You know what that means. It's time for the show to begin.

**Ricky** (0:29)
Let's do it.

**Bryan** (0:31)
And with these cheery voices, I'm Bryan.

**Ricky** (0:35)
Don't say I'm cheery, I don't even hate that word.

**Bryan** (0:37)
The miserable Ricky is over there. Your mood reflects today's topic.

**Ricky** (0:43)
Just crawled out from under a big bridge. Beer bridge.

**Bryan** (0:49)
This is the show Crash Course In Awesome, where basically the idea is Ricky and I pick a topic and give you a quick as possible crash course in it. And today we are going to be talking about part one of two, different ways that space can kill us, or at the very least just really just wreck everything for us. You know, small scale, just, you know.

**Ricky** (1:15)
Yeah, sorry. Is that my cue?

**Bryan** (1:18)
I thought you were going to say something.

**Ricky** (1:19)
No, God, no.

**Bryan** (1:21)
You raise your hand in a pointing motion and open your mouth like taking a breath. Just taking a breath. So to start things off here, I'm going to say that this episode kind of comes from a comment I made back in our episode, all about the 1908 Tunguska explosion. Right. Where we briefly mentioned Space Guard and the search for near earth objects that's like asteroids or comments. And it's also abbreviated down to NEOs.

**Ricky** (1:51)
Near Earth Objects.

**Bryan** (1:53)
And any of these objects that might come speeding towards earth and crashed into us. And in that episode, I wasn't really sure how well these guys at Space Guard were doing in their plan to map all the big objects near earth. But this got us talking about asteroids and the danger they pose. And we figured we just do a whole episode on asteroids instead.

**Ricky** (2:13)
Yep.

**Bryan** (2:13)
To try and answer some of those questions. So this episode is going to be all about asteroids. And then we've got, like I said, a part two coming next week. That'll be a few more ways that space could destroy the earth.

**Ricky** (2:25)
So cheery.

**Bryan** (2:28)
So of all the topics we're going to talk about, this one probably needs the least amount of explanation. It's a pretty commonly understood doomsday scenario. Some large, although it doesn't actually have to be that large, object or rock or whatever, floating through space just happens to pass too close to earth and crashes down onto us. And that's when things get really bad. So what would happen if a good sized rock from outer space came crashing down today? Well, we can actually look to the past for that. And for the sake of keeping things simple and comparable, I'll describe what has happened in terms of asteroid impacts throughout earth's past. And really the scenario would play out pretty much exactly the same today. So first off, I'm going to talk about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And that's known as the KT event. What's generally believed to have happened way back then was that an object in space guessed to be about 10 kilometers in diameter. That's about six miles-ish.

**Ricky** (3:29)
We're Canadian.

**Bryan** (3:30)
We don't use miles, but I think it's about six miles. This object came hurtling out of space and crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. And in case anybody actually doesn't know where that is. So picture the country of Mexico and how it wraps around the Gulf of Mexico, kind of like the shape of the letter C.

**Ricky** (3:48)
Okay, yeah, yeah.

**Bryan** (3:49)
We're talking about the lower tip of the letter C, where it kind of hooks up and around. That's the Yucatan Peninsula.

**Ricky** (3:54)
Right, okay.

**Bryan** (3:54)
Gotcha. So this asteroid impacts pretty much right on the edge of where water meets land in the Gulf of Mexico, and it generated a massive explosion that would have wiped out everything nearby, as well as kicked up trillions of tons of debris that had come crashing down every direction. So earthquakes, absolutely gigantic tidal waves would be felt all around the world. But what was probably the thing that doomed the dinosaurs was that the dust and debris kicked up into the atmosphere wouldn't have made its way back down to Earth for months. So we're talking a planet completely covered in darkness, that had dropped temperatures and kill off plants and animals that were not even in the general area of the first impact.

**Ricky** (4:37)
Right, like a nuclear winter.

**Bryan** (4:39)
Yeah, well, more or less. Yeah. If that wasn't bad enough, the debris up in the clouds would have turned whatever precipitation there was into acid rain that would be powerful enough to burn skin.