The Culture War - Tim Pool - November 01, 2026


The END Is Coming, The Asteroid APOPHIS Signals TROUBLE

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Length

16 minutes

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141.32

Word count

2,323

Sentence count

211

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 On Friday, April 13th, 2029, an asteroid as big as the Eiffel Tower will pass closer to you
00:00:07.400 than the satellites that beam you TV. Its name, Apophis. It's named for the Egyptian serpent of
00:00:15.200 chaos, enemy of the sun god. When it was discovered, the people whose job it is to calculate these 0.88
00:00:22.200 things got scared. In December of 2004, the odds of it hitting Earth in 2029 reached 1 in 37.
00:00:30.000 No asteroid before or since has ranked that high on the scale scientists use for impact threats.
00:00:37.000 Today, NASA says relax, no risk of impact for at least 100 years.
00:00:43.000 So here's the question, if it is harmless, why are NASA, Europe and Japan all racing to get spacecraft to it before it gets here?
00:00:54.000 What will Earth's gravity do to it when it does pass?
00:00:58.000 Will you be able to see it? And what are they really preparing for? Let's get into it.
00:01:06.900 June 19th, 2004, Kitt Peak, Arizona. Three astronomers, Roy Tucker, David Tholen,
00:01:14.880 and Fabrizio Bernardi, spot a faint moving dot, a near-Earth asteroid, a few hundred meters wide.
00:01:22.260 That's normal.
00:01:23.460 They find those all the time.
00:01:25.600 What wasn't normal was what happened six months later, when they ran the orbit forward.
00:01:31.460 December 23rd, 2004, NASA puts out a notice.
00:01:36.020 This asteroid has about a 1 in 300 chance of hitting Earth April 13th, 2029.
00:01:43.500 Low, but not zero, a level 2 on the impact scale.
00:01:48.480 Then more telescopes start watching it, and the number moves the wrong way.
00:01:52.660 By that night, with 64 observations, it's now 1 in 62.
00:02:00.120 Then Christmas Day, 1 in 45.
00:02:04.640 December 27th, two days after Christmas, 176 observations.
00:02:10.360 The estimated chance of an impact on April 13th, 2029 peaks at 2.7%.
00:02:17.920 1 in 37.
00:02:21.200 That would be like if you placed $10 down on a roulette spin and your number hit.
00:02:28.500 This happens all the time.
00:02:31.180 Apophis was rated level 4 on the Torino scale.
00:02:34.280 That's the scale for how dangerous an incoming object is.
00:02:37.680 Level 4 had never happened before.
00:02:40.360 It's still the highest rating any object has ever received.
00:02:44.940 Then, later that same day, astronomers dug out older images of the asteroid from March 2004.
00:02:52.840 More data points meant a better orbit.
00:02:55.920 And the 2029 impact disappeared.
00:02:59.520 Think about how close that came to being a very different holiday.
00:03:03.920 One old photograph moved the line.
00:03:07.040 December 30th, nothing on the list was rated above zero.
00:03:11.840 But Apophis wasn't off the hook, not even close.
00:03:19.180 Here's the problem with an asteroid that passes this close.
00:03:22.820 Earth's gravity bends its path.
00:03:25.220 And if it passes through just the wrong spot,
00:03:28.260 a tiny region of space scientists call a keyhole,
00:03:31.800 Earth's own gravity can set up a hit on a later pass.
00:03:36.360 For Apophis, the keyhole that worried people led to April 13th, 2036, seven years later, to the day.
00:03:45.760 In 2005, the discoverers gave it its name, Apophis, the Greek form of Apep,
00:03:52.140 the evil Egyptian serpent, an enemy of the sun god Ra.
00:03:57.420 And yes, if that name sounds familiar, two of the discoverers were fans of the TV show Stargate SG-1,
00:04:04.900 whose villain is also named Apophis. Tolan has said the asteroid wasn't named after the character.
00:04:12.320 He calls it a coincidence. By August 2006, better tracking made the 2036 risk negligible.
00:04:20.000 But then there was 2068. That one lingered for years. Why was it so hard to rule out?
00:04:27.000 Because sunlight also pushes asteroids. The rock soaks up heat during the day and gives it off at
00:04:33.260 night. And that faint glow works like a tiny thruster. Scientists call it the Yarkovsky
00:04:39.400 effect. In 2020, Toland and NASA's David Farnokia measured it on Apophis. Its orbit drifts by about
00:04:50.440 170 meters per year. Over decades, that's the difference between a miss and a hit.
00:04:57.280 For a while, 2068 was moving the wrong way.
00:05:01.200 In 2013, the odds of a 2068 hit were put at 2.3 in a million.
00:05:06.780 By 2015, after new observations, they were 6.7 in a million.
00:05:13.300 About 1 in 150,000. Tiny, but climbing.
00:05:17.280 Nobody could close the book on it.
00:05:19.680 It finally ended in March of 2021.
00:05:22.420 Apophis swung past Earth, and NASA bounced radar off of it.
00:05:27.260 The Goldstone dish in California transmitted.
00:05:30.380 The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia listened at a distance of about 17 million kilometers.
00:05:35.940 On February 21st, 2021, Apophis was finally taken off of NASA's impact risk table for the first time since it was found.
00:05:45.280 David Farnokia, at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, put it simply.
00:05:50.580 A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility anymore.
00:05:55.740 He also said something telling.
00:05:57.460 When I started working with asteroids after college,
00:06:00.000 Apophis was the poster child for hazardous asteroids.
00:06:03.880 Now, why did everyone care so much?
00:06:05.860 Because of what it would have done.
00:06:08.000 NASA's 2021 risk estimate
00:06:10.000 with the energy of an Apophis impact
00:06:12.240 at about 1,200 megatons of TNT.
00:06:16.700 The Krakatoa eruption is put at about 200.
00:06:21.060 That's six Krakatoas in one hit.
00:06:25.360 It wouldn't have been an extinction.
00:06:27.320 Scientists put the damage at regional, not global.
00:06:30.060 No impact winter, but regional is plenty.
00:06:33.580 A stony rock this size hitting land would leave a crater about five kilometers wide
00:06:38.980 and devastate thousands of square kilometers around it.
00:06:42.980 Hitting deep ocean, it would throw up a tsunami that could flood coastlines about 1,000 kilometers away and farther in some directions.
00:06:51.860 For some coastlines, the reach is much bigger.
00:06:54.960 The same estimates put the danger zone at about 3,000 kilometers for Japan and up to 4,500 for parts of Hawaii.
00:07:02.700 A rock you could walk across in five minutes, threatening coastlines on the other side of an ocean.
00:07:09.820 Back in 2008, the B612 Foundation mapped where a hit in the 2036 scenario could land.
00:07:16.960 A narrow band crossing southern Russia, the Pacific off California and Mexico,
00:07:23.520 Central America, northern Colombia and Venezuela, then the Atlantic toward Africa.
00:07:29.080 Their estimate for Colombia and Venezuela alone, more than 10 million casualties.
00:07:35.640 That was a hypothetical, and it's off the table now.
00:07:39.060 But it's why people took Apophis seriously for 17 years.
00:07:43.160 So it's likely not going to hit good.
00:07:46.080 But it is still coming.
00:07:47.460 And when it gets here, something strange is going to happen.
00:07:54.500 April 13, 2029, 2146 UTC.
00:08:00.900 Apophis will pass around 31,600 kilometers above Earth's surface.
00:08:07.040 That's around 19,600 miles.
00:08:10.440 The geostationary satellites, the ones for TV and weather, sit higher than that.
00:08:16.160 Pophis will slip inside their ring.
00:08:19.440 The European Space Agency calls it the closest approach of an asteroid of this size
00:08:24.620 that humans have ever been aware of in advance.
00:08:28.640 And you'll be able to see it.
00:08:30.560 ESA says it will be visible to the naked eye from parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
00:08:36.480 A moving point of light with binoculars, most people of the planet will catch it.
00:08:42.240 At its brightest, about magnitude 3, it'll look like an ordinary star, except this one moves.
00:08:49.260 At its fastest, it crosses 42 degrees of sky in one hour.
00:08:54.180 About a fist's width every 15 minutes over roughly a day.
00:08:57.980 It sweeps from the southern constellation Centaurus all the way to Pisces.
00:09:03.780 16 hours after it passes us, it passes the moon too.
00:09:08.180 It'll pass about 89,600 kilometers from the lunar surface.
00:09:12.500 Two close encounters in one day.
00:09:15.580 And our aim on this thing is now sharp.
00:09:18.160 The uncertainty in how close it comes is about three kilometers either way.
00:09:23.280 Here's the part almost nobody talks about.
00:09:25.680 Apophis doesn't just pass Earth.
00:09:28.060 It changes Apophis.
00:09:30.340 At closest approach, our gravity speeds it up about 7.4 kilometers per second.
00:09:36.160 It bends its orbit so hard that it changes the asteroid's whole class
00:09:40.600 from an orbit mostly inside Earth's to one mostly outside it.
00:09:46.560 NASA says its orbit will change in a way that happens only during a very close encounter.
00:09:52.840 In the asteroid itself, ESA says Earth's tidal forces will stretch and squeeze it,
00:09:58.560 perhaps triggering quakes and landslides. Its spin could change. Parts of its surface could
00:10:04.580 get scraped off and reshuffled. It's a strange object to begin with. Radar suggests it's about
00:10:10.120 450 meters long, possibly two lobes stuck together, and it doesn't spin cleanly. It tumbles with one
00:10:16.720 full cycle, taking about 263 hours. Scientists think the pass could even change its color class
00:10:23.880 by scraping off old weathered surface and exposing fresh rock underneath.
00:10:29.680 Think about that.
00:10:30.760 A mountain-sized rock shaken by our planet as it goes by,
00:10:34.440 and nobody has ever watched that happen up close before.
00:10:38.400 Which is exactly why we're going.
00:10:44.180 People have wanted to go to Apophis almost as long as it's been scary.
00:10:47.440 In 2005, the B612 Foundation asked NASA to consider putting a tracking transponder on it.
00:10:54.440 In 2007, the Planetary Society ran a $50,000 design contest for a mission to Apophis.
00:11:00.900 It drew 37 entries from 20 countries.
00:11:03.820 In 2009, Russia's space agency said it would study a deflection mission.
00:11:08.860 In 2011, a team at China's Tsinghua University proposed slamming a solar sail-powered impactor into it.
00:11:16.960 None of those flew. What's flying now is a lot more serious. NASA is first in line, sort of.
00:11:24.720 In 2023, its OSIRIS-REX spacecraft dropped off a sample from another asteroid, Bennu.
00:11:32.240 Instead of retiring it, NASA renamed it OSIRIS-APEX. The Apophis Explorer pointed it at Apophis.
00:11:40.760 NASA approved the new mission in April of 2022. The spacecraft is already on its way.
00:11:46.960 It arrives a few days after the flyby, and stays for about 18 months.
00:11:52.260 NASA even plans to fire its thrusters near the surface to stir up rocks and dust,
00:11:57.740 just to see what's underneath.
00:11:59.780 Europe wants the before and after.
00:12:01.980 Its mission is called Ramses.
00:12:04.160 Member states approved the funding in late November of 25.
00:12:07.840 In February of 2026, ESA signed an 81.2 million euro contract to build it.
00:12:15.180 Ramsey's is supposed to launch in spring of 2028 on a Japanese H-3 rocket,
00:12:20.220 sharing the ride with Japan's Destiny Probe, which flies past Apophis first.
00:12:25.020 Ramsey's gets there by March 1st, 2029, six weeks before the flyby.
00:12:30.040 It will sit about five kilometers away and take a picture every minute as Earth goes by.
00:12:35.180 Even carries a little lander called Dan Quixote that will try to touch down.
00:12:40.440 China was interested too.
00:12:42.220 Its Tianwen-2 mission had Apophis on the list at one point, before it launched in 2025 to other targets.
00:12:48.660 So that's three space agencies and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing a rock NASA says won't hit us.
00:12:56.340 So why?
00:12:59.940 Well, because Apophis is practice.
00:13:02.620 ESA says it plainly.
00:13:04.440 Getting a spacecraft to Apophis is practice for responding to a dangerous asteroid.
00:13:09.180 If one is ever coming for real, the first thing you need to know is what it's made of.
00:13:14.180 A solid rock and a loose pile of rubble behave very differently when you try to push them.
00:13:19.620 And we've already tried pushing one.
00:13:21.060 In September of 2022, NASA slammed its DART spacecraft into a small asteroid moon called Dimorphos.
00:13:28.960 It cost about $330 million.
00:13:31.580 NASA needed to change that moon's orbit by 73 seconds to call it a success.
00:13:37.620 It changed it by 32 minutes.
00:13:40.860 The details are wild.
00:13:42.500 DART launched in November of 21, flew for 10 months, and hit at about 14,000 miles an hour,
00:13:49.060 almost 7 million miles from Earth.
00:13:50.760 The crash threw off so much debris, it left a tail at least 30,000 kilometers long.
00:13:57.500 And here's the part that matters for Apophis.
00:14:00.080 The debris did more pushing than the spacecraft did.
00:14:03.140 Scientists measured a boost of about 3.6 times.
00:14:07.300 The rock blasting off the surface acted like a rocket engine.
00:14:11.040 But how much boost you get depends on what the asteroid is made of.
00:14:15.540 Solid rock or rubble pile.
00:14:18.060 Dense or porous.
00:14:19.840 Which is exactly what Apophis is about to show us.
00:14:23.220 For scale, Dimorphos is about 160 meters wide.
00:14:27.080 Apophis is more than twice that.
00:14:29.340 Europe has already sent the follow-up spacecraft, Hera, to go back to Dimorphos and inspect the
00:14:34.940 damage. Neither Dimorphos nor its parent asteroid was ever a threat. It was a test.
00:14:40.920 Apophis is the next test, watching what a planet does to an asteroid, so we know what an asteroid
00:14:46.700 is made of before one is ever aimed at us. Now, the skeptic's view is simple, and NASA's on it.
00:14:53.520 Apophis is safe.
00:14:54.980 No impact for at least 100 years.
00:14:57.800 The 1 in 37 scare was a calculation with too little data.
00:15:01.740 And more data killed that prediction.
00:15:04.340 That's how it's supposed to work.
00:15:06.280 But think about what that scare really tells you.
00:15:08.860 For a few hours in 2004, the best numbers anyone had said 1 in 37.
00:15:14.800 The only thing that changed them was finding an old photograph.
00:15:19.360 And Apophis was the one we caught early.
00:15:20.860 It was found 25 years before its close pass, and it still took months of tracking, radar from two giant dishes, and the measurement of sunlight pushing on a rock to be sure.
00:15:31.940 Now imagine one we find with a few years of warning or a few months.
00:15:36.640 That's the scenario all of this practice is for. 0.73
00:15:40.540 Pafis is the one we saw coming.
00:15:42.680 25 years of warning, three spacecraft, and a front row seat.
00:15:47.060 But what about the next one?
00:15:48.840 What if we miss it?
00:15:50.500 Will we be ready?
00:15:52.580 Thank you all so much for hanging out.
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