Today im talking with William Burroughs about his work the asteroid threat. I guess i would characterize it as the story of how astronomers, scientists, engineers might someday save the world and how would you characterize the . Guest i think you did very well. I would characterize it by saying my point is that we dont have to be the hapless hopeless victims of nature. My friends at nasa and elsewhere in the Space Community say that they would have to Dinosaur Program and still be here. We have the wherewithal in the book the most important point of the book is that it explains and comes out with a plan and the plan was not invented by any but is pretty universally accepted in the community. On the Climate Defense is that right . Guest thats right. The cold war is over and peace has broken out. And what i like to tell people is it would cost an astronomical amount of money. To this i say what is productive civilization worth . The dinosaurs got blown away. It can happen again. The chances are its not going to happen very soon but its always a possibility. So what im saying is protect your self. That is a very good use of money. Host what are you advocating people should do if you have a few billion dollars or you are king of the world what is the right thing to do . Guest i would set up a Defense System, and again within the community this is acknowledged as having three parts. Part one you have to have the sensors on the planet and off the planet to spot any socalled potential impacts coming this way and it looks like its going to hit. Part number two you have to be able 20 or more years of notice given the distance nudging it off course with a tiny amount of pass far wide of the planet. The third part of the strategy is lastditch and that would be able to stop it if Everything Else fails and there is going to be an impact. Host so a lot of efforts that define these things that Congress Passed the bill and put up some money and there are these programs you talk about notably the Linear Program and the observatory and things like that is another one that will come online in the few years in the survey. Guest they should pretty well do it but its also as i mentioned in the book in the sentinel which is an infrared telescope in 2017 from where it would watch the neighborhood as i call and pick up anything again that is threatening. You cant have too many into the community is in agreement on that. So everything you mentioned is in play and the sentinel should be in play, too. Guest host so it will be up in 2017 as far as you know . Guest that is the plan. It was being funded by a company in the colorado, aerospace and technology corp. And the b6 12 foundation which is a what they started with some other people. They are actually going to build it and then it will get put into space as i said in 2017. Thats the plan. Host said the money we dont have anything to protect the planet for the spacecraft that would go out and actually meet the beast, right . There is no plan to build those things right now is that correct . Guest is it concrete . No. Host but for the order of magnitude with what it does cost you think . Guest as far as i know it hasnt been determined but its its multiple billings. But again, what is your life worth . Host what do people have a chance of getting killed by an asteroid or whatever else would come along or how does that compare to whatever else would come a long . After co guest thats a good question. The chances of being knocked off by an asteroid or very slim created their is a law that is earth is tilted over time as you know by everything from couples to the letters and so on. We are constantly being hit by the near earth objects. The chances coming along is very remote. The next time would be in about 100 years and by that time we should be prepared to do something about it. But as i say it is the smaller ones that will ruin the day. They can take out large tracts of area and it happened judging by the number of impact craters its happened have happened over 100 times. And of course it is a random process that could be happening in a minute and we wouldnt know necessarily. I read in the book getting killed by an asteroid is a little less probable than dying in an airplane crash, is that a fair statement . Guest that is right. It is the law. The chances are very remote but if it happens it could be devastating. Host one result of the program so far finding all of the asteroids with the we actually know that of a lot of the asteroids that are not going to hit us and some that will probably knock that probability just down. We know we are safer than before. Is that a fair statement . Guest i think we are a lot safer and there is an element to this and that is the Little Prince who loved the asteroid he had had a point they are not all bad. Asteroids have gotten some potentially useful qualities. One is a lot of them are loaded with Precious Metals that can be mined. Another is that very big ones can be lived on and add a preparation for a lunar colony which is in the book being something i believe very strongly in. So the point is they are a mixed bag. Getting in close turning to the beers can do terrible damage and as it has happened one blowup over the town and spent more than 1400 people to the hospital who were injured. So there are pluses and minuses. Host it was a lot of people being thrown around. Guest it exploded all over the city and at a lower altitude it could have been hurt as definite description. Host i remember in reading while in the subway asteroids early in the history of the year may have sterilized the planet over and over several times but maybe they were actually sort of like our planetary lifeboat that a big asteroid will throw things out into space and some of the rocks may be inspected by the early bacteria and such that were on the planet and then were sterilized but a what if lot of it can remain alive in space and people getting going again and reproducing. But you have to have a big asteroid and basically open up a vacuum to get them to fly out. They are the destroyers into the creators perhaps the u. Also said something about peoples ideas about asteroids and colonies bringing organic materials from outside. Host guest that is a theory propounded out of my head but in fact it did bring life to this planet which has not been disproven. Host its not a theory people talk about much but yes. So, how do you think the audience is for this what fraction of the populace knows the difference between an asteroid and equality versus a major planet or whatever . Do you have a feel for that . Guest my guess is that its a small percentage of the population. When i told the journalism i sent my reporting students out one day to interview the proverbial man on the street about what they think about the Space Program and they came back and once by professor said the lady that i talked to said that she is more interested in educating her children. Somebody else said putting food on the table. So the answer to your question is a very small percentage. People are worried about keeping the roof on it, and i dont mean that protects us against any of those. I mean literally the roof on the house and thats what it is. Host but it seems to me congress has been motivated in the question so that important, that are you thinking of how to get the word out about this and how we need to spend more money than we are . Guest i was privileged to be picked as the only non scientist in the 14 member panel of the National Research council which is of the academy of sciences to view on the near Earth Object Survey and mitigation panel a few years back. We took testimony and in santa fe thats how he got interested. They said its a serious problem. Again, doomsday was around the corner but i got interested in participating in it and i was privileged to have been picked. It is a real problem and as you know. Host do you think they picked you because they would rather look like this . Guest it was an act of faith. [laughter] host sitting here being somewhat depressed if i could imagine all kind of things that would wipe out the human race. They think 71,000 years ago we were almost wiped out by a giant poking him in indonesia and other volcanoes wiped out a quarter billion years ago and i can remember a very bad virus or Something Like that. Is the asteroid threat really the worst thing weve got to steel ourselves for or is it one of the top ones . Guest big ones can do a lot of damage. The good news is they can be stopped. As the geologist and the de facto planetary side pointed out, asteroids can be stopped. Hurricanes, earthquakes cant. So thats the difference. The bad news is if you are a dinosaur watch out. The good news is they can be deflected or stopped and that is part of why i wrote the book. Also to get back to that question also advocating the colony on the moon. The coauthor of the book called the heroine in Intergalactic Space commander and says they justify by saying no place on this planet is safe forever. The universe is telling us spread out or wait around and die. And thats the point. Host if youre on the moon a giant move in a giant walking away since going to get you in it might lead you into a bad situation that hopefully youve figured out how to get along with. So you have a chapter on how to survive all this stuff and so they may know about the moon but anyway, kidding around guest Planetary Defense is commissioned to be international and im advocating that we have a Planetary Agency or a Planetary Defense department but the point is its international and thats good. If we all work together, the bottom line is on some level we are no longer americans and grits and russians and chinese and japanese. We are earthlings. Host they are not going to know the difference. What we get a little technical about some things here. One thing i was a little surprised, people talk about the scale and that is sort of a good way to layout lay out the threat and the probability of something. Is that not use so much . Should we all be getting a reading on the scale of the threats . Guest as far as i know they are not talked about as much anymore for reasons i dont know. But the community doesnt get into the torino scale. A lot of them have been measured and thats out there. Host one thing i was wondering if i made wonderful job of finding hundreds of thousands of new asteroids and many of them are near earth asteroids and one thing i was wondering its easier to find them around the plane of the solar system where most things orbit. Have people been searching the whole sky including above and below the orbit around the fund as thorough or are we missing parts of the sky . Guest this cloud of rocks and things surrounds the entire solar system and a lot of these things are in there and we can pretty well monitored the main asteroid between mars and jupiter. There are untold hundreds of thousands of rocks of all sizes in the main build and we can see them coming because we can see a lot of them coming because of telescopes equipped to do that. The ones of us we dont see coming. That is a separate category that is truly being generous. There are not many that comment again if you cant see it you cant defend against and that is a potential problem. Host but i was thinking is the rocks that have almost hit us might actually be the ones that are trying to drop out above or below the plane and come at us again. These things will tend to get thrown away from earth orbital plane that they will come back and hit earth orbit. Those are the mechanics. They will return to the scene of the crime and if we are there or its is bad for us and those are the one that are frequently going to just be coming out of the north or coming out of the south within the surveys. They would come out of nowhere with virtually no warning and its a problem. Host thats the one that worries me because it almost seems like they discover 100,000 asteroids with 10,000 that covered the whole sky so there was no impression of things like that are not covered yet. First you have to look where you are going to find things but eventually, you are looking under the lamp post for the keys that you brought somewhere else in the parking lot and see if that is one thing i was worried about and they should be a little worried about about that fear may be missing some of the ones that are going to surprise us someday. Guest everybody as far as i know the leaves that. The other thing i was going to say is in terms of a near miss by the main build strike is that it will come around again. And in that regard, earth gravity is bad because they will swing out and because of the gravity it will come back and sour path again. All things being equal everything that comes by it comes by closer. The gravity will tend to do that host its going to come out of the orbit but how does the earth know that its their . Guest i dont know. [laughter] the chances are that it will keep getting closer. Host we will let that one go. What about all these mitigation technique into the three stages depending on how big this is and how close it is to hitting earth to ask why dont you tell us more about those plans at least for those proposals . Guest that is the standard plan, and again it depends on seeing it at least two decades or more before it gets here. Once it has been spotted and attract and it has been determined as a potential impactor then you want to try to nudge it off course longdistance and if that doesnt work again, blew it up. I should say in that regard as you know having read the book that i have claimed the term called the bruce willis defends and thus comes from the movie armageddon in which eight days out here when on a comet and nukes it and saves the world. If you were to nuke a comet or asteroid were made here eight days out, each one could take out jersey city or chicago or nairobi. The bruce willis defends it doesnt work. Again, youve got to stop it in decades ahead. Host we are going to take a break and we will have more things to discuss about the asteroid threat host weaver talking before the breakup of the space craft, the spacebased mode of changing the asteroid, not just looking for asteroids, so with something deflecting it can ethically and then just nuking it the first thing that would be intriguing to people is whats that all about how are you going to be collected . You are going to make good use of the effect. The big story is thanks to astronomy we can spot the danger the other side of the coin is that there is nothing in hand that will actually stop one of them. We dont have it. As a former news man they say it is a very good story. We can stop them. That is a good plan far out. Do we have a rocket that can do that . Though. If we had a rocket that could do that and it didnt work when it got endquotes in close it looked like it was going to impact, could we blow it away and we have a mechanism for doing that . Though. How do you get that to go out there and meet this thing several years out and blow it up. The technology isnt there. The big deal is that we are defenseless. We can spot them but we cant stop them and if we see one headed this way tomorrow, we better get our act together very quickly to try to get the technology in hand. Host what is the proposal to deflect something just a little bit if we thought way ahead of time . Guest we would send the rocket out to meet it and budget off course and then again getting it closer, you would use nukes. I should say in this regard as i mentioned in the book there is a socalled store star wars technology. I am very proud to say that i was among the first people in the country to come out against that stuff. He made a speech in march, 1983 based on what they told him about stopping russian missiles with this defensive system and as they were saying at the time its supposed to be stabilizing. The point that i made clear in the Foreign Affairs in 1984 within a few months is that it wasnt going to be stabilizing it is going to be destabilizing because if you had the only Defense System that works you will try to block off the enemys head but the point at which the technology was very dangerous in the cold war isnt way to be dangerous in the Planetary Defense. The asteroids do not have Ballistic Missiles they can use to destroy us and the economy is. So, the point is dust off this technology into the racers and all sorts of things to try to stop them and that could be very useful. Host a Nuclear Power laser would be in onto the asteroid and that would heat up stuff and the material blown out by being heated up what caused them to rocket away into a different orbit. Is that what youre talking about . Guest thats right. Host you were talking in the book about not even having to touch the asteroid with the spacecraft or anything from the spacecraft but using the gravity of the spacecraft into the gravitational tractor and thats something that may be practical if you have a couple of decades of leadtime . Guest yes. And again, the b6 12 foundation with ed lu and other people and the Southwest Research Institute who is a net aerospace talked about this for years. You can deflect it by touching it or not by touching it because it is so far out. Again, as those distances if you move it a couple of yards where it is its well ms. The planet by many, many miles so distance is on your side. Host the earth is only 4,000 miles in radius much more than that and missing the planet altogether and you just accumulate over decades you dont have to move its too much while you are there. There are a lot of exotic ideas like painting the asteroid white or black so that the sunlight will push it or more or less than a grey gray asteroid thats where does that make sense . Guest y. Satellites to this and painted colors when was the same with the same amount of effort you can push it off course. That is unnecessary just nudge it off course and again if worse comes to worse, blew it away but painting its colors is just senseless. Host they do affect asteroids but that is over thousands of millions of years so do the math. Do we know enough about asteroids to be exploding things on them . You have a picture in the book and as we said it looks like a rubble pile into a bunch of rocks laying on each other. What if all we managed to do is blow a hole in it or to pieces that are on the same trajectory do we know enough about asteroids . The good thing about the gravity tractor is it will work on anything because it works the same on everything. Weve known that. But when it comes to expecting an asteroid to react a certain way what do we know . Guest it depends on the asteroid and as you know they come in a lot of different compositions. Some of them are almost entirely iron and pure metal and the popular image of the rock i should say all of them carry a small craters or scars from impact with other objects which get back to gene shoemaker in the universe in terms of whats going on out there. But the point is asteroids come in all shapes and sizes and a very enormously. So it varies according to twitter talking about a. Of a mission to land on one worked into the japanese do the same thing. Host before we send a mission to move its . Guest its depends on how close it is. If it is 11 00, no. If it was very far away, yes or though it be a small thing to do. Find out what it is. In addition to Everything Else, the science builds up and you learn things about them. Thats whats important is a matter of how close it is. How big and close does something have to be the only thing left is to nuke them . Guest that is a good question and it depends not only on the size but what it is made out of. My suspicion is invited for six years but is close enough. The safety margin is as much time as possible. Earlier of course. But if youre going to blow it up, blow it up far ahead of time. Again, dont turn a cannonball into shrapnel. Host let me ask about this idea. Hasnt it figured out falling out of space but at the end of the 17 hundreds or something of that order . I remember there is a famous quote of that apparently Thomas Jefferson never said about he would rather believe that they yyankee professor could buy and rocks could fall out of space but apparently he never said that. But when did we first encountered the idea they could fall out of space and actually killed somebody or kill a bunch of people or anything like this . Has the notion that around . Guest basically since the 18th century and into the 19th. They begin spotting these things and again you do a little bit of homework and see they are flying around in all directions so it is a couple hundred years. Before that, it was all miraculous. Things were falling out of the sky when the cavemen were around. But they put it down to god and there was nothing you could do about it like the faces of the moon. Host astronomers were talking about dangerous meteorites sort of from the beginning, and i guess when did the Science Fiction writers get into this . Guest look at alea leo. 1610 he puts together the first telescope and trained on the moon. And every telescope thats ever been trained on the new and including his sees craters. Its rough and its obviously been hit by things. That goes back to 1610. Since then, we are built build on that. I should also say i wrote a book called exploring space which is about the Exploration Program and we had spacecraft which i mentioned in the book in the voyager and mariner and they did a sensational grand tour in the 1970s and into the 80s. Every four planets jupiter and saturn and every one of the moons that it passed had craters. Nobody talked about in the meetings because the science was wonderful. The science was so wonderful that is what they want to talk about. Not about the damage that the pictures were there. Hernandez creators by every solid object. Host it is a universal process. There are some obviously if you have a very thick atmosphere that keeps the craters from being formed and there are some places that are just volcano worlds but thats the minority. They are getting pelted by these objects over time. All these objects over time and its an amazing tool because they get hit at a certain rate and when they find out what it was by measuring the ages of the feature on the mound than the Apollo Program you could extend that to all the other objects that were being told to do so this is sort of like how do you look at the surface of the planet and tell how old it is . Without going down and picking up a sample you can just look at it and its a wonderful tool. So youve got the volcano world and you cant be impact world and the moon is going back and forth. They thought it was okay nose for a while and then they started convincing people that was in fact full and you talk about shoemaker convincing everybody. Host dont forget about the creator which they also thought was a volcano at another point. Guest that reminds me we are in more of a volcano world. It gets resurfaced and its like the ocean bottoms have been resurfaced 50 times since the beginning of the planet and they get the road on the continents and we have a lot of volcanoes and they are dangerous. The theory is that almost died because of the forking of and we are entering the 21st century and who knows what we are going to cook up in the way of Dangerous Things that kill us all. So returning back to this issue that you raised the survival imperative is that the name of the chapter so along with protecting ourselves from the asteroids we have to protect ourselves from Everything Else. So one thing youre advocating is lets get some people out of here in so why dont you tell me more about that. Host there is safety in spreading out and that is why we should have the lunar economy. It is not for adventure although it would be an interesting thing to do. Spread out what i. That is why we need to do that. In terms of volcanoes, again, going back to shoemaker it could be defended against and we cannot defend against volcanoes. As he pointed out oregon earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes. So i am an optimist in that regard. If you have the will you can defend the planet against asteroids. You cant defend it against exploding volcanoes. You just cant do it. So anyway we are sitting on it. Host have you thought about like we put the old and buzz on the new and individual can no have gone off while they were there they would have been in bad shape. Maybe there wouldnt have been an Aircraft Carrier to pick them up or Something Like that. So, talk about saving the earth from asteroids how big of a project you think is keeping your people will live on the moon, and by the way this is what i wrote about the 20 you think . Host in terms of the colony of the moon . It is a nobrainer. Spread out or die. And again, will it cost a huge amount of money clicks yes what is your life with . You dont have any sort of scale proposal in mind or Something Like that . They just have to come back to earth . Guest i think the third book which is a bible in the community and hes got the lunar and the mars colony and its under a pixie glass dome and if you look at if you can see automobiles and the vegetation and all sorts of stuff that would keep up the radiation that on mars is terrible. But again, what choice do you have . It would have been hit and we just evaporate. While the universe care . No but i care. Host its not just the volcanoes and the asteroids. You can think of any number of things getting out of hand. Its that we made it through the cold war. Guest at the Global Climate change absolutely. Host did you have to have people maintains maintains that when the threat is gone and the earth is settled back down into the Something Like normal to get a bunch back to earth so they could start it going again in terms of the civilization youd have to have a lot of people on the moon and, you know, you can talk about the numbers but it is in the many 100,000 or Something Like that. We are going to think about 100,000 on the moon that sounds expensive but what is so cool is that on the moon and on mars we discovered recently that there are actually these basically cavern underneath the surface and that is where you have to go using every million years or something some horrible impact occurs on earth if theres any number of things on the there that could kill you every day but the way to get away from them is to just go underground a little bit. You can scale out the vacuum. You dont have to worry that the radiation from the sun and the galaxy. You dont have to worry about the temperature going up and down by 500 degrees. They dont think its below the surface and just below the surface there are these giant spaces and if you do the math and ask how many people could you put in those spaces and keep them alive it is in the millions, so actually its not so crazy an idea. You would have to build a city of 100,000 out in the vacuum. Weve already got the superstructure sitting below the minimum. Sedgwick have to get people there and get to give them the tools to sort of make things themselves and they will take care of it. People are pretty good at making livable conditions especially if they are increasing in number and they want their children to live somewhere decent and things like that. It isnt such a crazy idea. It would be very expensive but its not as expensive as when you first think about how much it might cost. Guest another element that should be mentioned is what we call an archive director the record of the collective civilization also would be preserved we dont want to have been happen if there is a calamity on earth we dont want it to happen to the planet would have been to the Great Library when it was lost in the fire so we need an archive of our civilization which is constantly updated again, to make sure that if the worst happens and we are on the moon and on mars moon and on mars we havent lost the record of the civilization. Host we already have this library in the arctic i cant pronounce it where we are keeping all of the important grains and things like that and the amazing thing is that they are almost absolute zero and they sit there for a billion years like if you could if you wanted to store something and somebody a billion years from now you could actually do that. That is unfathomable. You cant do that. Everything on earth changes in a billion years. But that was a little bit of a tangent. Lets get back to the book. Im going to give you an opportunity to tell me what you think are the important things we havent covered here and just convince people they should buy your book. Guest Planetary Defense what is important here, again because we have access to space we have the wherewithal to protect ourselves one way or another either on the planet or elsewhere but access to space has given us a bat and we ought to use it. Host or else. Guest or else. [laughter] thank you bill borrows. I like the opportunity to read the book and talk to you its been great. Guest thank you. Youve asked wonderful questions and it is appreciated and it has been fun