An asteroid races toward Earth.
It's big, it's fast,
and it's about to do a lot of damage.
But we're not just going to sit around and
wait for the end of days.
We're going to fight back.
"Wakanda forever!"
In the year 2175,
the asteroid Bennu will pass by Earth,
and there's a 1 in 2,700 chance that
it will hit us.
If those sound like good odds to you,
think again.
Bennu is taller than the Empire State Building,
and it's 15 times heavier
than the great pyramid of Giza.
And if it hit the Earth,
it would release as much energy
as 23 Tsar Bombas,
which is the largest hydrogen bomb
ever exploded.
Do you still like those odds?
I'd like them a little more
if we had a contingency plan.
For NASA, that's the
also known as HAMMER.
And just like its name suggests,
the plan is to ram into an incoming asteroid,
or to detonate a nuke that will send it off course.
The sooner we discover
an asteroid heading our way,
the safer we'll be.
For example, if we detected
an incoming asteroid
a year in advance,
we'd only have to change its course
by a few centimeters (inches)
to keep it from hitting Earth.
To do this,
we could detonate a nuclear bomb
a few hundred meters away from the asteroid,
causing it to change its course
and move away from Earth.
And if that didn't work,
we could just crash into the asteroid with
the most powerful bomb we've got.
But if anything were to malfunction
before the bomb reached the asteroid,
the resulting consequences
might even be worse
than the asteroid hitting Earth.
But once the nuke was in space,
the world's population would be relatively safe.
With no atmosphere out there, only vacuum,
the blast would disappear completely,
but the radiation would be much stronger.
While people on Earth would be safe,
anyone in any nearby spaceships
would be risking their lives.
In the interest of
preventing as many casualties as possible,
this would have to be an automated mission.
And assuming that nothing goes wrong
and there isn't some kind of AI mutiny,
we could very well succeed in
pushing an asteroid off course,
as long as it wasn't too big.
A bigger asteroid would require bolder tactics,
such as DART.
DART stands for
NASA plans to slam into an asteroid
in 2022 to change its orbit.
The impact will be equal to 3 tons of TNT.
This mission could result in the first ever
man-made meteorite shower,
and if it works,
it will serve as a blueprint
of how we could respond
to asteroid threats in the future.
Of course, if it comes to destroying Bennu,
the bomb we'll use
will be at least a million times stronger
than what DART will be packing.
And yes, we've got nukes
that are that powerful.
The only thing we'd have to look out for,
after blowing up a giant asteroid,
is space debris.
The debris could
severely damage our satellites,
and endanger any astronauts
aboard the International Space Station.
And if any larger chunks of the asteroid
found their way down to Earth,
they could create craters
up to 20 times their size.
On the bright side,
if the nuke exploded close enough to Earth,
the radiation it emits would be distorted
by our planet's magnetic field,
which would probably be
the prettiest light show you'd ever see.
Or if you don't want to wait
for a doomsday scenario,
you could just take a trip up North
to see the northern lights.
It's crazy to think that nuking asteroids
is a potential survival plan for humanity.
But considering it's us against,
well, pretty much anything
in the infinite void of space,
we have to make do with what we have.
Find out what we'd do
by checking out our new show
HOW TO SURVIVE.