Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hoor Hey cham and today we're talking about asteroids. What exactly are they? Should we go out there and mind them or is one of them going to crash into Earth and wipe us out. We're going to be talking to one of the most famous astronomers on the planet about this, Who's going to step us through the nuances of how asteroids form, what it would be like to step on one, and what the most valuable resource in them actually is.
So get your asteroids and gear as we tackle the meaty or topic of space rocks enjoying. Hey everyone. I don't know about you, but I like planet Earth and I'm not in a big hurry to leave it. But it does seem that at the rate we're going, we might run out of things here, which is why billionaires and space enthusiasts have proposed maybe goin shopping out there in the asteroid belt. I also like our planet enough that I don't want to see anything happen to it,
like getting hit by an asteroid. So basically I had a lot of asteroid questions to answer them, I thought I'd reach out to one of the most well known astronomers on the planet. Doctor Phil Plait Doctor Plate, is the creator of the website Bad Astronomy, as well as the author of several books, including Death from Disguise, a fun survey of all the ways things from space can kill us, including asteroids.
He also wrote Under.
Alien Skies about what it would be like to visit other parts of the universe, like an asteroid. So I had three questions for doctor Plate. Number one, what exactly is an asteroid? It turns out there's a lot of people get wrong about that. Number two, is an asteroid going to hit the Earth and why it was out? And three should we mine the asteroid belt? It turns out there's more than just rocks and metals out there. We'll start with the first question, what exactly is an asteroid?
Here's my conversation with doctor Phil Plate. Well, thank you doctor Plate for joining us.
Oh my pleasure. It's nice to see you and hear you. I suppose hear you. Well.
I think we're both not enough that everyone knows what we look like, or can know what we look like with a simple search.
I'm not too hard to picture, you know, little aged, balding, bearded white guy.
Yeah, you've seen me.
Well, you famously read a book called Death from the Skies in which you talk about, among other things, the possibility of an asteroid hitting the Earth.
We'll get into that, but.
I guess maybe for people who are not familiar, what is technically an asteroid?
Yeah, you know, this is one of those questions where it's like this is really easy to ask and super hard to answer. When you think of an asteroid, you probably think of a you know, big rock in space that's floating around orbiting the Sun. But it gets complicated.
That's not the definition of it.
Well, there's no real definition. There's not really a size on these things. The biggest ones are a few hundred kilometers across or miles if you're an American, but there's no sort of lower size limit to them. You could think of something a meter across, the size of a chair as an asteroid, and that's not wrong. But if it's the size of a grain of sand, I don't know what you would call that necessarily a meteoroid, but it's still kind of an asteroid. So that's what these
things are. You know. I wouldn't call something the size of a grape an asteroid, but.
It kind of is kind of that's what happens.
You don't have a definition.
It's a like a vibe. You go in by vibes.
For the definition of asteroids, Yeah, yes, there is no clear definition of what an asteroid is. I mean, it basically means space rock, but not always. If the rock is mostly made of ice, then astronomers call it a or If the rocks are small enough, they call it space dust. And if the rock is on t way to Earth, they might call it a meteority. Now, the size of asteroids vary according to what scientists call an inverse law, meaning the bigger an asteroid is.
The rarer it is.
For example, really really big asteroids about one thousand kilometers wide. There's one it's called series asteroids about one hundred or more kilometers wide. There are about two hundred of them. But smaller asteroids there are a lot.
As they get bigger, there are a fewer of them, which is just kind of how nature operates. And it turns out bigger than about one hundred meters you know, football field sized. There are probably a billion of them orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, which is a lot. But if you say how many are bigger than a meter across. I heave't no, it's hundreds of billions, trillions. I don't even know.
There are a lot of asteroids out there. But before you get the idea that space is full of rocks flying all over the place, kind of like that asteroid field and solo flu, the Millennium falcon through and the Empire strikes back, you should know two things. First, space is big.
And the thing is there are so many of them, and you think, my heavens Empire strikes back. You know, if I can quote what is now an.
Ancient movie, let's not get into how the artful.
Yeah, you have a space ship and it's going through an asteroid belt and they're asteroids everywhere, and it's like, no, it's not like that. In fact, when you look at how much space is between Mars and Jupiter, and it's you know, it's a several hundred million kilometers between them. And a friend of mine who studies asteroids actually told me this that if you take all of the one hundred meter sized asteroids a hundred meters, you know, that's decent,
and you stand on one in the asteroid belt. If you were to spread them out evenly, you would not be able to see another asteroid with your naked eye. Whoa, they would all be so far away they'd be too faint to see. They're actually really far apart.
Wow, it's pretty rare in the Solar System. It seems to run into one an asteroid.
Yeah, and it just depends on what you mean, right, Yeah, there's zillions of them, so they're not rare, but they're so few and far between because of the just vast amount of space out there that you could go and travel to Jupiter and back thousands of times and never get even close enough to one to see.
So there are hundreds of millions of asteroids out there, but space is so big you would rarely run into one, even in the area of the Solar System called the asteroid Belt. And the other thing is that even though there are huge asteroids out there and hundreds of millions of little asteroids, they actually don't add up too very much. Do you have a sense of how much asteroid mass is out there?
The weird thing is if you add them all up together, you don't get a very big object. Even though there could be a trillion little ones. The biggest ones really eat up most of the space, and so you wind up getting something that's actually quite small. It's just a couple of thousand kilometers across what's smaller maybe than Earth's moon, or maybe the size of Earth's moon, something like that. Although there are lots of them, they don't add up too much.
Interesting, and you're talking about all the asteroids in the asteroid belt.
Yeah, and I could include the entire Solar System, although it gets more complicated if you go out past Neptune. There are these bodies out there that we call the Kuiper Belt and the ort Cloud, which is comets. There are objects that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune, and those get pretty big. I mean, you're talking about Pluto. There are probably a handful of objects roughly the size of Pluto,
and so these are actually decent size. Those would add up, oh, I don't know, twice the volume, ten times the volume of the Moon. So you're still not talking about a planet. I don't think. You know, it's certainly not Jupiter or that sort of thing. You've got a lot of these things, but they're small.
Oh, that's fascinating. It doesn't seem like a lot. Yeah, it's amazing, Okay, The last cool thing about asteroids before we get to the questions of whether we should mind them or whether one of them is going to hit the Earth and kill us all, is that asteroids are not as solid as some people would think. According to doctor Plate, they can be kind of crumply.
Some of them are. And this gets weird. Oh, this gets so weird. This is a relatively new concept. Are there rubbel piles? So instead of being a solid object like a rock in your backyard, a chunk of rock, there are actually thousands or millions or billions of smaller rocks, tiny ones up to maybe the size of boulders, that are all held together by their very weak gravity. What and so it's like having a bag of rocks, but you remove the bag and what you're lift with is
just the gravity holding them together. And a lot of the smaller ones, and we think the majority of smaller asteroids are these rubble piles. So that's what they look like. When you see pictures of them, you're like, yeah, that's actually not a solid surface, that is just a bunch of rocks.
Well, what was happened? If you went there and he stood on this, would you think.
Well, that's a good question. The thing is, these rocks, as we found, are very friable, which means they are incredibly fragile, and if you were to hold one in your hand, you could just crush it. There's very little structural strength to these things, and we found that out when a spacecraft, and I want to say it was Osiris Rex, went up to the asteroid and hit it
at a very slow speed to collect material. It had a sample collector, and the idea was that it would go up to the asteroid and it would blow rocks off and stuff and collect them into this collector. It hit the asteroid and actually kept going. It penetrated down about a half a meter into the asteroid itself, which was a surprise, and they had to like break and reverse thrust and get it back out of there. They thought it might penetrate a little bit, but I think
they were surprised by how much. So, Yeah, if you were to visit one of these things in a spaceship and say I'm going to jump from my ship and land on this asteroid feet first, you might just sink right into it, which would be embarrassing and potentially life threatening, So don't do it.
So what you say, at least a lot of the what we think of as large ash asteroids out there are actually just kind of like crumbly cookies.
Crumbly cookies, that's pretty good. It is true that a lot of the ones that get in near Earth that we have visited are like this. Some comets are like this. I think this is not at all how I was raised learning about asteroids.
Yeah.
Yeah, I feel like we've concluded that Star Wars has misled us for years unbelievably. Yes, so it's hard to run into an asteroid a large asteroid, and a lot of them are not sort of big solid rocks, the sort of crumbly cookies.
Basically, the force is not worth it.
Okay, so those are the basics of asteroids. Now I'll get to the big questions. Should we mind the asteroid belt? And is an asteroid gonna hit the Earth? It turns out that the answer to both of these questions, according to doctor Plate, is yes. When we come back, we're gonna venture out even further to examine how asteroids can kill us and how they can also save us.
To stay with us, we'll.
Be right back. Hey, we'll come back. We're talking about asteroids. Whether we should mind them and if one of them is going to hit the Earth and wipe us out. So far, we've talked about what an asteroid actually is and how many are out there now. Most of what we call asteroids, meaning rocks floating in space, come from the asteroid belt, which is the big ring between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter. So if you were to fly from Earth towards the edge of the Solar System, you'd hit the orbit of Mars, then the asteroid belt, then the orbit of Jupiter, Saturn, Urinus, and Neptune. And the reason the asteroid belt is there is pretty cool. Basically, you can blame Jupiter.
So the early Solar System was the Sun, the young Sun, surrounded by this disk of material that's gas and dust and rock and stuff like that. These things started to accumulate. Grains would bump into each other and turn into pebbles. Pebbles bump into each other, turn into boulders, and eventually you would grow to get something like a planet. That's
how our planets formed. But between Mars and Jupiter, Jupiter's gravity is very strong, and so any sort of object that would try to get big enough to form a planet. Jupiter's gravity would kind of swing it around, make it move faster, slam into other stuff in the asteroid belt, shatter it.
So basically, the asteroid belt is the graveyard of the chaos caused by the huge gravity of Jupiter. Any planets that try to form there would get dragged by Jupiter and slammed into other rocks.
And as we mentioned before, there are a lot.
Of rocks in the asteroid belt, and sometimes those rocks can bump into each other and get nudge to fall in our direction, which raises the possibility that one of them could hit us. It wouldn't be the first time. Sixty five million years ago, an asteroid called the Chicchulub impactor, which was about fourteen kilometers wide, hit the Earth and caused so much mayhem that it killed fifty percent of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.
Could it happen again?
That was the next question I asked, Doctor Blade, Doctor Plade, is an asteroid going to hit the Earth? What's the likelihood of that happening? One hundred percent?
One hitting us right now as we're talking? What there are thousands of hitting us right now? Well, I said, there's no lower limit to the size of an asteroid. Right, So if you consider something like a grain of sand an asteroid, there are fifty to one hundred tons of material that hits Earth every day. What so, zillions of these things are hitting Earth all the time, and you see them burning up as meteors shooting stars. If you call those asteroids, then we're getting hit all the time.
If you say, oh, let's say something that's a meter across, then we get hit by something that size once a month, as we're speaking. One fell over Europe a few days ago, and a couple of nights ago, one came over Ohio and Pennsylvania was seen by thousands of people.
You heard about that, Yeah, I saw the needs.
Yeah, it was really bright. Yeah, I've seen the videos. It's pretty cool. We get hit by those on timescales of a month or so, and the bigger they are, the more rare they are.
What picker Plate is saying is that just like the sizes of asteroids out in space, follow an inverse law, so that the asteroids that happened to hit the Earth, small asteroids hit Earth all the time, but as they get bigger, they get rarer and rarer. One of the biggest ones to hit US in recent years with the Cheliabinsk meteor event, which you can find video of if you search for it online.
Actually, so when you talk about something like the chel Yabinsk impact, which was in Russia in twenty thirteen, that was nineteen meters across, so you're talking to something the size of a house, big house. Those are much more rare. Those you're talking about every few decades or century. If one is fifty meters across and gets closer than that, it's not great. You don't want that, but it's not classified as potentially hazardous. It's still if it hits Earth,
it'll blow up like a nuclear weapon. I mean, you're still talking about a megaton or more explosion. That's bad, but it's not a global catastrophe.
Okay, but at around one hundred and footy meters that could be a global catastrophe, Yeah.
I think regional. So you're talking about if one hit in the middle of the US, it would be catastrophic for US, but not necessarily for you know, India or something like that, although it's not great and certainly economically you know, if you hit a country that is economically critical to the rest of the world.
That's bad.
I mean, we saw what happened when like a terrorist attack can cripple the economy of a country and bring about a global recession. So you don't want these things hitting over New York City, Moscow, you know, anything like that. That would be very, very bad.
So's if a one hundred footy meter asteroids hit is it would be about how many nuclear weapons?
Oh golly, so something like two hundred megatons, so multiple times the largest nuclear weapon ever dropped. But it's not radioactive, so at least you know, yay, no fallout. Hooray.
It's still bad, Okay, quick recap here.
Earth is hit by asteroids all the time, but most of the time they're small and they end up burning up when they hit all that air in the atmosphere. That's what a shooting star is. When the asteroids start getting about fifty to one hundred and forty meters wide, that's when they can do a lot of damage.
They could wipe by.
The city and maybe cause a global crisis, but it wouldn't end the human race. And luckily that size of asteroid only hits Earth statistically every one hundred years or so. Now you might be wondering, what about the big ones, you know, like the one that took out the dinosaurs, that are like several kilometers wide.
Those would be really bad.
But actually scientists are not too worried about those because remember the inverse law of asteroids says, there aren't that many of them out there.
We know there are no large asteroids big enough to be catastrophic globally, like an extinction level event. There's none that can get near us for at least the next century. It just gets hard to predict farther in the future because we don't know their orbits perfectly. But you know, something that's a global like like out of a movie armagedd and deep impact, something like that. If you remember those movies from thirty years ago, Now those are extraordinarily rare.
Those are like every you know, tens of millions of years, like dinosaur killer impacts. Those are extremely rare.
And in fact, there is an office at NASA called the Center for Near Earth Object Studies where the main job of the scientists there is to keep track of all the big asteroids in the Solar System and make sure we're not in a collision course with them. And according to their calculations.
We're good for now.
Now, does that mean we're totally safe? Not quite. Remember, those smaller asteroids in the fifty to a few hundred meters wide range can still come out of nowhere and do a lot of damage. But there is good news. According to doctor Plate, the good.
News is we can do something about them. The first thing we have to do is find them, and we are building observatories now. The Vera Ruben Observatory takes huge images of the sky and looks for things that change from night to night. So an asteroid is, you know, in one spot, and the next night it's in the next spot. Reuben will see it. And in its first night it observed two thousand asteroids and so it's going
to do this every night. So it's going to map out zillions of these things, and that's good because you want to know if one's coming toward us, or if it's orbit it's going to intersect ours in twenty years or something like that. Next thing you have to do is push it out of the way. You know, you don't necessarily want a nuke it because that's illegal and
that may not do the trick. Well, is it illegal, Yeah, it's actually, the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by a lot of nations in the sixties, makes it illegal to test nuclear weapons or detonate them in space, but in general, like blowing up a nuke and space is illegal and it's a bad idea. But on the other hand, NASA has just tested a few years ago in twenty two, twenty twenty two, to spacecraft into an asteroid. Ditamos was the name of the asteroid, a few hundred meters across.
It has a moon called Dimorphos, which is one hundred and seventy meters across, and they slammed this dishwasher size spacecraft into it called DART, which was the Double Asteroid Redirection Test DART. DART. It hit the Moon at high speed and the idea was the impact would change the orbit of the Moon. And then this thing hit it and the period of that object changed by half an hour, which means we significantly changed the orbit of that asteroid.
And that's good because that means that if you have enough time, like ten years lead time, you can build a rocket, send a probe to it, slam it, and then hopefully move it enough that over the next few years you've pushed its orbit enough that it misses the Earth with a dishwasher something like that. So really the key here, the absolute key here, is finding them early.
And if you have twenty years before you think this thing's going to hit us, that is plenty of time to get to work and try to do something about getting it to move out of the way.
So we do have a system in case that happens.
Oh, I don't know if I'd glorify it by calling it a system. We have rockets and we've done this. We hit an asteroid in two thousand and five. There was a mission called Deep Impact and that hit an asteroid to see what would happen. And then we hit dimorphos a few years ago, and that's really it. But we're getting better at this all the time. In thirty years, hopefully we'll have learned enough about how to do this that if anything's coming our way, we'll be able to
whack it and stop it. You're not trying to shatter it necessarily, you're just trying to change its trajectory.
I see, I see.
You don't want to stop the asteroid. You just wind to nudget out of the way.
Yeah, gently persuade it maybe you should go.
Over there hit Mars part is looking pretty good. Yeah, but I guess the take home message is that we have the ability and we have actually hit an asteroid that was out there flying and been able to just its trajectory.
Yeah.
I mean, that's great, fantastic news. I was really excited and I'll tell you relieved in that mission work when dart work, because it shows we can do it.
Oh, fascinating.
Yeah, it's just all relatively new knowledge. It's pretty cool.
Okay.
Few for those of you worried we were going to go extinct because of an asteroid hitting us, you can rest a little easier knowing that NASA has our backs at least against asteroids now, assuming something else doesn't do us, and then the big question becomes, how do we survive in the long term. It's possible that in the future we might run out of resource this year on Earth,
and in that case, maybe asteroids can save us. There are a ton of asteroids out there, but things that we could potentially mine to bring back to Earth.
But is that really feasible?
Can we or should we mine the asteroid belt while we come back. I'll ask doctor Plate this question, and I think you might be surprised by the answer, so stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about asteroids and pew. So far, we've learned that while the Earth is getting hit by small asteroids all the time, the likelihood of a big one coming and ending the human race anytime soon is fairly small.
NASA and other space agencies around the world are keeping track of all the big asteroids in our Solar system, and even if a medium size one comes our way, we are getting better at reaching them and deflecting them. Now, the question is good asteroids actually be good for us? A lot of people have noticed that asteroids in the asteroid belt are full of materials that we meet here on Earth, and so a possible is for us to go out there and mine them. But is that a
good idea? Should we send a spacecraft out there to check out the metals and minerals and those floating space rocks. Actually it furs out we already have.
There's a current mission NASA launched called Psyche, which is on its way. The asteroid's name is Psyche. It's this big asteroid. It's one of the biggest ones, and we think it's mostly metal. And when we say metal, we mean iron, nickel, and mostly silicon, and then a lot of lesser ones titanium, tungsten, aluminum, Platinum, for example, is very valuable on Earth and it's used in electronics. It's very important metal for a lot of reasons. Palladium is
another one. And it's not like these are abundant in asteroids, but they are out there. And so if you could take an asteroid and grind it up and extract these metals, you could then sell them on Earth and make a lot of money.
Yes, you could technically mine asteroids and bring back their precious metals and sell them for a lot of money.
So why don't we do it?
I mean, sending a spacecraft to an asteroid is hard, but we've done it before. In fact, we've managed to get to flying asteroids several times. In the nineteen eighties, we sent fly spacecraft from three space agencies around the world to get a close look at hay Least comment. Since then, there have been about a dozen more missions that were sent to either fly by or actually land on comets or asteroids.
But here's the thing.
Getting to an asteroid to mine it is not the main problem. The real problem is bringing back what you mind.
The big step is you then bring these things back to Earth. But bring it back to Earth it's not straightforward. You have something that's moving eight kilometers a second. If it's coming from deep space, it could be doing twice that fast. You have to slow this thing down and then somehow get it to the surface of the Earth in quantities that are usable. Right, if I'd drop a pound of platinum on the Earth, that's not really going to help. And you can just drop that from orbit,
let it hit. It'll actually lose a lot of it. You could encase it in concrete or something whatever, let that burn off as it goes through the atmosphere. But now, if you're talking about one hundred tons of something, how do you get that to the surface.
That's hard without basically creating a giant asteroid that will kill people on Earth.
Yeah, you could build some sort of machinery that would slow these things down and drop them for more of it, but that's also very expensive, and to do this at scale where you're talking about you know, a building weighs tens of thousands of tons, so you need a lot of this material to build a rocket or to provide for the electronics industry or whatever. And right now it's just cheaper to keep doing this on Earth. Some day it might be easier to do this. We're just not there yet.
That's right.
Getting things from space to Earth is hard, or at least it's easy. But the hard part is having what did drop from faith Land in one piece. And even if you do manage to figure out how to, say, bring all those precious metals from asteroids to Earth, there could be other things that can happen that you didn't expect.
There are other problems like crashing the market if you suddenly introduce a vast amount of material into the market. You know, the reason these things are expensive is because they are rare, and if you bring in a lot, there's more than one hundred tons of gold out there, but if you bring in a lot, it could actually damage the market. This, I can't stress this enough, is super super hard to do. We do not have the
technology in place to do this. We have the technology where we can start looking at it and investigating it and doing this step by step. But right now, if you wanted to mine an asteroid, I think you're looking decades. I don't know how many to at least, but it's going to be a while. I may be wrong.
So mining the asteroid belt for materials to bring back to birth is a bit of a hard sell. Or at least, you'd have to be really, really really desperate to make it worth all that money and development and risk to do it. But according to doctor Playd, there is one other reason we might want to mine the asteroid belt that is not about bringing stuff back to Earth, and that is for space exploration.
If we want to build a space station on Earth, we have to build it down here, all the pieces, and then launch each piece into space and put it together. And that takes a long time. It costs a lot of money. The space station International Space Station was one hundred billion dollars and took ten years to complete. Something like that. The rocket launches are expensive. Takes a lot of energy to move those things out of Earth's gravity into orbit or off the surface. If you mind an asteroid,
it's out there in space already. Oh and if you can figure out a way of processing it, smelting it and processing it in a way that you can use it to build structures, that is a lot, lot, lot easier than trying to lift everything off of Earth. And so this is something that people looked into them.
I see, it's like it's possible.
Yeah. I don't think there's anything physically or in an engineering sense impossible about any of this. You can imagine building a factory around an asteroid, using it, having it spin for centrifugal force, which is like gravity, and that you can use to separate out metals.
I see.
Okay, so let me see if I can recap so the idea of going to an asteroid mining it to bring back material like rare earth metals technically possible, but maybe not worth it.
Questionably profitable, Yeah.
Questionably profitable, I mean maybe just not right now. I see.
But then there's sort of the other reason why we might mind the asteroid belt, which is for space exploration, Like if we wanted to, we could use it as a source of metals to build spacecraft and space stations and there. It's not so much a business consideration, it's just like if we want to do it or not.
Yeah, I mean it's a sort of government level idea. Yeah, if you wanted to explore the outer planets, if you want to put humans out in space on Mars, for example, where some of these materials are scarce. Then yeah, going to the asteroid belt and figuring out how to do all this is not the worst idea.
In that case. Maybe it's the cheaper option.
Rather than lifting it from Earth. Yeah, because right now it still costs a lot of money per kilogram to just send air, water, food to people living on the Moon or Mars. If you could start in space already, it's vastly easier. You're getting rid of some majority of the cost of just launching something off Earth is so expensive and hard. If you're starting in space, it's way easier, and so it's a lot simpler technologically, and it's a lot cheaper, a lot less expensive.
So the asteroid belt could become like the wild West of the space frontier. And here's the interesting thing. Most people assume, like I did, that the most valuable materials in the asteroid belt that we would want to mine are the metals and the like iron or copper. But actually the most important raw element in them is wetter.
This wasn't known until relatively recently, a few decades ago, that asteroids can have a lot of water in them. Oh, what series for example, has a mountain on it that seems to be salty water from the interior that oozed out and froze in place, and it's a mesa. It's like this big flat topped mountain. It's huge, and it's made of dirty ice, basically dirty salt water ice. Whoa. So these things do have water, and you need water. Water is the most useful thing you can have in space.
You drink it. We need that to live. You can break it down and make oxygen to breathe. Water is h two Oh, it's hydrogen and oxygen together. You can recombine these to make hydrogen peroxide, which in its pure form, not like the stuff you buy at the drug store, which is like three percent.
You can diyur hairt space.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like you know, it's three percent hydrogen peroxide and the rest of its water, and it's more pure form. It's like ninety percent hydrogen peroxide. It burns and it becomes a really good fuel. So you can drink it, you can breathe it, and you can move around with it. So water is it, that's what you want. It's actually the single most important thing if you want
to have a permanent presence in space. Water is the most important thing besides you know, food, but even more than food, because again with water you can make air and.
Fuel right right, the grow food, you need water as well.
Yeah, humans need a lot of water just to survive because of not just our direct needs but also our needs like growing plants and protection from radiation. Water is great at absorbing radiation, so you can encase your ship in a tank of water and protect it from solar flares and such. So it's all around. It's just like the most useful thing ever in.
Space, right, and you need it to shower if you were so inclined to shower in space, Yeah, that would be a good.
Idea too, although who knows, you know, by then we'll have sonic showers like in Star Trek. Who knows it's out there. There's lots of their comments that are mostly water asteroids. There are moons of Jupiter and Saturn that are mostly water. Those are harder to get through than asteroids. But still there's a lot out there plenty for everybody.
Yes, it turns out the real question we should be asking it's not whether we should mine the asteroid belt, but whether we should drink it. Hey, this puts a whole new spin on the phrase meteor shower. All right, Hopefully this all gives you a good sense of what's out there sprinkled in our solar system that could hit us or potentially save us as we keep traveling through the vastness of space. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
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