Joe Rogan | The Danger of Future Asteroid Impacts w/Graham Hancock

And our fears that you were just discussing earlier about how soft we are in comparison to past civilizations in terms of our ability to live off the land, that's one aspect that bothers me. But one of the big ones that bothers me is the fact that everything is digital. All of our information is stored on hard drives. You bet. If that goes down, there's not much left. You have paper books and few thousands of years, imagine what would be left. We would lose all of our advancement. Well, I can speak to this at a personal level. There was a time when I was an excellent map reader. I could navigate anywhere with maps. My wife, Santa, and I did huge journeys in Mexico back in the early 1990s in really cheap hire cars with maps. And we found our way everywhere without any problem. Today, I can hardly use a map. The skill of using a map has lapsed within me. Why? Because of GPS. GPS technology has come along and it always tells me where I am. And being a bit lazy, I just accept that technology. But then I had caused myself this just the other day, supposing GPS, supposing all the satellites go down and there's no GPS, the whole industrialized human race is going to suddenly be lost. All those Uber drivers who don't know their way from A to B and who rely entirely on their GPS, they won't know where they're going. And it's true with digital data. Digital data, unlike print data, is very fragile and requires programs in order to access and interpret it that are much more complicated than simply cracking the code of a lost language. I mean, the programs vary between different phone platforms. They vary in computer platforms. It's so fragile and it's so, I mean, I don't know if there's any precautions that have been taking place to preserve this information in case of like what Robert Schock described as coronal mass ejection or something crazy. Just click down all the satellites. Yeah. No, I don't think preparation has been made. And it's very clear that preparation is not being made for the risk of another cosmic impact. And again, a point that I'd like to make about this is that we are in a sense in a place where history can repeat itself, but there are certain cycles at work. The work on the comet impact 12,800 years ago has very clearly and specifically identified the debris trail of that comet. And that debris trail is the torrid meteor stream. And it's called the torrid meteor stream because it appears to emanate from the region of the sky in which the constellation of Taurus sits. It doesn't. It's within our solar system. It's an optical illusion. The torrid meteor stream is a giant complex of debris. It is 30 million kilometers wide. What you had was an original comet that might've been 100 to 200 kilometers in diameter, a small moon, which fragmented and broke up into multiple, multiple parts. And those parts began to spread out along the whole orbit of the torrid meteor stream and to widen, the whole thing widened. So it's like a giant tube of debris. And the evidence in the argument is that 12,800 years ago, several large bits of that debris fell out of the torrid meteor stream and impacted with the earth. The problem is that the torrid meteor stream still exists and our planet still passes through it twice a year. And those passages take place in June and in November. And each passage takes 12 and a half days. And the same group of scientists who are looking at the evidence for the impacts 12,800 years ago are deeply concerned that we may face future impacts from the torrid meteor stream, that there are still large objects up there. This is not theory. This is a fact. There's a comet up there called comet Enki, which is part of the torrid meteor stream. It's a large fragment of the original giant comet. Comet Enki has a diameter of, I don't know, five or six kilometers. There's 19 recognized huge objects within the torrid meteor stream. Calculations indicate that there may be as much as 200 asteroids within the torrid meteor stream of a diameter of a kilometer or more, which would have catastrophic effect if they hit the earth. And responsible astronomers regard the torrid meteor stream as the greatest collision hazard facing mankind at the present time. And it's not something that we need to fall into despair about because it's perfectly within the level of our technology to do something about it. What could they do? Well, to give you an example, commercial interests are looking right now and the technology is there to mine asteroids. We can go to asteroids if the commercial interest is high enough. We can go to them, we can mine them, we can extract minerals, we can bring them back to the earth. The same technology would allow you to move asteroids or comet fragments. You don't want to blow them up with a nuke. That would be a really bad idea. That would turn one large object into multiple smaller objects which could cause equally massive devastation and would be very difficult to predict where that devastation was going to fall. What you want to do is to nudge them and move them out of a dangerous orbit into a less dangerous orbit. And the evidence is in the next 30 years we are going to be passing through dangerous filaments of the torrid meteor stream. And if we were smart, we would be devoting some resources to protecting our cosmic environment. Just as there are many issues that we need to devote resources to, unfortunately, the one that's most attractive to our politicians at the moment is warfare. We devote limitless resources to technologies of mass destruction. There really is no end to the amount that we're prepared to spend on that in terms of our so-called security. We feel somehow we're making ourselves more secure by having these incredible weapons and spending trillions of dollars on them. But the cosmos doesn't give a fuck about any of that. The cosmos is out there with these giant objects which have a far greater explosive power than all the nuclear weapons stored on Earth at the present time. The Komet-Shumekilevi 9 which hit Jupiter in 1994 had a total calculated explosive power of 300 gigatons. If you took the entire nuclear arsenal of the world today and blew it all up at once, it would yield 6.4 gigatons. So these objects are producing catastrophic results on a scale that far beyond anything that we ourselves could do with nuclear weapons. It's time we spent a bit less time and money on weapons of mass destruction and a bit more on looking after this beautiful garden that we call the Earth and that is our home and that will be the home of our children and our children's children. I'm a grandfather now. I feel passionately about this. We need to look after this planet. It's our responsibility as a human species to do so and one of the challenges, it's not the only challenge, there are many, many other challenges, one of the challenges is to pay attention to our cosmic environment and to realize that the cosmos can intervene cataclysmically in the human story and that the torrid meteor stream in particular may have been a hidden hand in human history, that there may have been other impacts in the last 13,000 years that have affected and changed the course of humanity on this Earth and the ancients were very good at paying attention to the sky. We ourselves have amazing tech to study the sky but for some reason we're ignoring this problem of cosmic impacts and that's incredibly irresponsible because as I said a moment ago, it is a solvable problem. It is within the limits of our technology. It would require a global cooperative effort to sweep our cosmic environment clean but it could be done and a side product of that global cooperation might be a friendlier, more nurturing, more loving, more positive human community. It is very odd that we have this infantile nature even as grown adults and world leaders that we don't, we do like to ignore imminent danger as long as it hasn't affected us in the past. There's no real moment we can point to other than Tunguska in, you know, photographic history, modern history where you could take pictures of things. And if I can pause you on that very point, the evidence is compelling that the Tunguska event was an object that fell out of the torrid meteor stream. That happened at the peak of the Beta torrid in June 1908. It is extremely likely that that Tunguska object came from the torrid meteor stream because we were passing through the torrid meteor stream at exactly that time. And what the Tunguska object is estimated to be between 60 and 190 meters in diameter. So it's not a very big object. It's not a kilometer scale object. It's big but it's not that big. It doesn't even hit the earth. It's an airburst. It explodes in the sky above fortunately an inhabited area of Siberia. But the devastation is huge. It wasn't even noticed for some years afterwards until scientific teams went in and studied the area and discovered that 80 million trees across 2000 square kilometers had been completely flattened by that airburst. And to put that in context, 2000 square kilometers is the size of London. So anybody who knows London is aware that there's a ring road around London called the M25. If that airburst had taken place over central London, everything of London out as far as the M25 would have been gone completely. Is that what it looks like today? Pretty close. It says like 100 years later there's still no trees. Yeah. And if you've got, you're looking above there, you're looking at the black and whites that were taken in the early 1900s. Oh my God. Yeah. Which revealed the extent of this damage. So it's just stupid of us not to pay a bit more attention to this, especially when we have the tech to actually do something about it. We have that nature though when it comes to climate change. There's a curious denial. There's a denial of the role of cataclysms in the human story. And there is even a word for that in science and it's called uniformitarianism. And this is a particular philosophy of science where the view is that everything as we see it in the world today is how things have always been. So if we don't see cataclysms today and they're not playing a major part in our story today, then there weren't cataclysms and they didn't play a major part in our story in the past. That's why, although it's before the time of human beings, when the evidence that the dinosaurs were made extinct by a comet or an asteroid first came out, Lewis and Walter Alvarez, the father-son team who were behind that science were ridiculed by their colleagues and they were told it's absolutely absurd. Of course, no cosmic event could have made the dinosaurs extinct. They spent 10 years taking that ridicule until they found the crater in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, the whole scientific community has accepted that the course of life on this planet was radically changed by a cosmic impact. And I like to joke about it, but it was a cosmic impact that was big enough literally to turn dinosaurs into chickens, because that's what's left of the dinosaur line is the birds. And at the same time, skulking in those primeval forests is this little mammal and it looks a bit like a shrew 65 million years ago. Going nowhere, the dinosaurs rule the earth, then the cosmos intervenes, the dinosaurs are swept out of the way and what happens? The mammals start to evolve very rapidly and they start to occupy niches that were previously closed to them. And the bottom line is we would not be here, the human species would not be here, we would not be having this conversation if the dinosaurs had not been made extinct 65 million years ago. So these are world changing events and my argument is that such a world changing event occurred between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago and it's high time we paid more attention to it.