What was the Tunguska event?

checked out. Yeah, other people more than nuts. I'd also like to point out the um fact that Jerry is writhing and discomfort right now, Chuck. Yeah, you're really sticking a tour. No, she's fine. Um, well, it was a great show, probably because Jerry was there and everybody, well, I guess you would have heard it by now because these are coming out after Christmas. Time Warp. Let's do the time warp dance, Chuck, and everybody's like, gee, she would be nice to see some of the things you're

talking about. What you can do maybe next year you mean in person? Yeah, if you want to do another live Christmas show, sure, Yeah, I'm done with that. I mean, we paid money for Christmas decorations. We did not to feel like we need to reuse those. YEA, hopefully everybody has heard it already and now they're like, yes, I know exactly what these guys are talking about, and I'm enjoying this horribly awkward intro diversion. It's not awkward. Speaking

of intro divergence, Chuck, I want to mention two things. Okay, Um, you know, the Stuff Network has a ton of really good shows and there's one that I was on recently called Behind the Bastards. I was on a two parter. It was it was nice. So Robert Evans is the host, and he basically just does tons of research about some of the worst human beings who have ever lived, many of whom are celebrated in some quarters, and he just kind of tears him down to size. Did you do

a show on me? No, you're just celebrated. There's no tearing you down. I'm sure people tear me down. I don't care. The ones that I sat in on were, Um, we're based on scientific racism, history of scientific racism and how it's been used to justify like colonialism and all sorts of stuff and the level of of research this cat does is astounding. Yeah, it's a good show. It is. It's a great show. So, um, I was on that. But that's a good maybe a good primer, but really

any behind the Bastards would be a great place to start. Yeah, the show was was a and I don't want to say some surprising success because Robert's awesome, but um, I think everyone was just like, wow, look at this thing, Look at him, go, look at him. Go. And we've got another news show actually from our pals that stuff to blow your mind. Joe and Robert. Yes, they just

launched a show called Invention. I don't remember if they went with the exclamation point or not, but it's just awesome because I think no, but that boy, their album art is so cool. It's it's really great. It's just a cool maze where you're just waiting for a minuteur to leap out. Yeah. And for the people that are like album art, what are you talking about? Did they record an lp uh little industry lingo everybody, the little icons that you see on your podcast players, it's called

album art in the industry for some reason. Yeah, I still haven't figured that one out. I think it's just a hold over from um iTunes days, I guess, But like what, it would be funny if they called it like the single art, that would be pretty funny. Actually, still never bought a single in my life. Oh I have. I don't remember what they were, but I have. So anyway,

go check out Invention. You're gonna love it. If you're a stuff to blow your mind fan, it's Joe and Robert doing their thing but on different topics, you're just gonna love it. And then if you're not a stuff to blow your mind fan, well you're welcome for introducing YouTube to awesome podcasts at once. Yeah, those guys are great. Ye. So uh okay, let's talk about our own thing. Okay,

let's do our own stuff. Yeah, what about us? So we're talking, let's get in the way back machine, and we need to put on our high temperature protective suits that we used to hang out on volcanoes sometimes. Well, and also our low temperature protective suits are in the back. They are we don't need them for this one. Well, what day are we going to We're going to June eight, so sure, it's probably about seventies seventy degrees actually early

in the morning. We're going to get there around around seven am to give ourselves some time to get set up. But seven am on June thirtieth, nineteen o eight in the Russian wilderness around the Pudka Manya Tungusca, which means the stony Tunguska River. Um, it was probably about fifty degrees, Will say, okay, yeah, which is I mean that is like choice summertime weather for the Siberian Plateau. Yeah, and

this place is gorgeous. So the stony Tunguska River is a nice, wide, meandering, slow river, and it's name stony because the bottom is all beautiful pebbles and it just kind of its banks are not really well defined. It just kind of goes into the land and swamp land and then suddenly the land rises upward into ridges with huge all evergreens everywhere. It's just gorgeous. I love it here. You know what we call those rocks in the South skipping rocks. They are skipping rocks. They call them that

in Russia too. Oh really yeah, Skivinski rocks. Emily the other day was like, I wish I could skip rocks, and I was like, dude, you just gotta get the right rocks. That's really the key. I mean, this show, there's techniques in the wrist and everything, but it really is the rock. Although so there are people who can skip just about any rock you handem well that I'm a pretty good skipper, but you still need those good, little, smooth, little river rocks. It's true. It makes it way easier

for sure. So in this beautiful place, I also failed to mention there's lots of reindeer wandering around and they're not wild. They're actually being herded by the Evenki people also known as the toong goose Um, who are basically nomadic reindeer herders that live in the area. Yeah, these are working deer, right. So everything's pretty idyllic and sweet and nice. It's the Siberian summer. And then all of a sudden, there's a streak of cloud across the sky,

a fireball at the tip. It looks like about a spear, and then all of a sudden, this is seven seventeen am local time, all of a sudden, that fireball disappears, and then a huge flash of light explodes in the sky. And that's followed very quickly by a huge burst of heat, and then after that is followed by a huge shock wave, and a massive explosion has just taken place, the likes of which have never been seen in recorded human history. Yeah, where are we? Are We dead now? No, we're in

our protective bubble. Since we're actually visiting from another time, we're still in this time. We're just kind of visiting as in like a movie. I have never really quite wrapped my head around the physics of it. But we're safe. We're not dead now. If Jerry killed us while we were paying attention to um, the Tungusco blast in this life, we would be dead. Yeah. When you talk about explosions, um, this was depending on where you look, Uh, it was something in the order of a hundred to one thousand

times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. I did the math. I saw two hundred to two thousand times more powerful. Yeah. Man, this that's the thing. When you're talking about explosions in night. Sure it's gonna be arranged, but the thing is, the Hiroshima bomb was fifteen killo tons fifteen thousand tons of t NT yield. Yeah, it was a big explosion, so much so and we'll get to more details, but supposedly you could see the light from this thing as far away as London. Yeah, there

was a lot of worldwide effects that happened from it. Yeah, so the Hiroshima woman was fifteen kilo tons. This is an estimated three to third mega tons, million tons of t n T. Just an astoundingly greater explosive force, and it just happened out of the blue, literally out of the clear blue sky on this day, on June nineteen

o eight. Yep, that's right. And uh, thankfully it's not a very populated area, but there there are people there, and there are you know, native tribes people that make their way there and they live in huts and they raised those reindeer, and while there weren't a lot of people there, it created Uh, it was. It was an awful thing if you lived in the area. Some people died of of shock and heart attacks, reindeer died, huts were leveled. It really kind of wiped out the way

of life for these people. Yeah, yeah, big time, because I mean, like, if you live in Siberia, you're spending your summer like preparing for the winter, and this blast like just leveled their supplies, the deer, the reindeer that they depend on. It like had a huge impact on them and some people some some people did die, although I think um, no one died directly like being blown to bits by the blast. It was like, um, elderly

people had heart attacks and things like that. Yeah, And it ended up it was a very interesting pattern that emerged here. So these trees were flattened out in a radial pattern that pointed away from the center of this explosion over an area this was about like close to seven seventy five square miles. Oh my god, which is a huge, huge explosion. Uh. There were trees that remains standing, and this is really interesting, but there were no branches,

no leaves, no uh, no needles or anything. They were just basically the the stem and the trunk of the trees bear standing straight up. Yeah. And that that was Those trees were right in the middle of the blast, the radio blast pat Yeah. And the fact that they were basically just stripped bear means that it was a very huge but super fast impact that blasted all those

branches off without affecting the tree itself. Yeah. So the this this blast, this explosion is very hot, fast, explosion actually lit the trees on fire from the temperature that formed the leading edge of the explosion, and then the shock wave that followed that moved the air actually put the fire out, so they were like flash charred and

then immediately extinguished. Yeah, there's one quote here from uh, I mean because this was there's not a lot of direct accounts, but they do have a few, and we'll talk about how in a minute. But this is one hot wind blew past us the ground and all the huts trembled, causing the sod packing to fall from the ceilings. The glass was blasted out of the window frames. Scary moment. Yeah, yeah, no,

I can't even imagine. Supposedly, the um the Evenki people believed that their god ug Dy who is I think the god of either lightning or fire or thunder one of those. Um. I've seen different accounts of it. Um, they that they assumed. So imagine this like you're the only people that you're the only people are used some

reindeer hurting tribes people who live in the area. Um, and this happens and you have no scientific frame of reference for it, and UM, you believe your god came to punish you wipe out all of your stores and all of your reindeer and everything, and then that's just what you had to live with. Because you were in

such a remote area. No one knew about this. No one knew that this happened for a very long time, actually, Like I think some of the local papers began to report it by the end of the summer, but the larger world had had no real ideal what had happened, even though there were effects worldwide, but no one could no one traced it back to this this moment in Siberia for decades, at least a full decade I think

actually too. Yeah, And it wasn't like, uh, it wasn't like the scientific community just descended upon this place ever, really like they've and we'll talk about some of the superstars of uh, particularly this one man that went and investigated. But uh, I mean that's one of the reasons that we still don't know exactly what happened. We have a pretty good idea, which will say for later, but there

aren't Uh. This was a singular event. It's not the kind of thing that we could say, well, this is like that other thing that happened right exactly, Yes, yeah, Yeah, it's it's there's nothing like although they they think that there was at least one other thing that happened like it in the twentie century. Um. Actually now to two things have happened that are similar to it. So we're kind of dancing around it a little bit. Um. But let me tell you, let me point out one thing

that has happened. Even though this is considered far and away the largest cosmic I guess explosion that you that that we we have ever recorded, there was something else that happened in Brazil in nineteen thirty near the Crusa. I think I'm saying that right river um where there was a very similar event, huge explosion in the sky um scared the Bejesus out of the indigenous tribes living there, burned a significant portion of the Amazon for a full month.

Um And there was a Jesuit missionary who um came along five days after and got a lot of firsthand accounts from that one. But they think it was similar

but much smaller than Tunguska. Yeah. And and the mystery of this whole thing has led to some weird theories that will hit on later that are I mean some of them of course, just like aliens and beasts and things like that, which is the we obviously no, that's not the case, but it still remains somewhat of a mystery after you know, a hundred plus years right um.

And then so there's one other that this was an unrecorded history as far as we consider recorded history typically, but there there's evidence that this happened one other time

and then this time people weren't so lucky. At something like about thirty years ago around the Dead Sea um there was a large area I think about five hundred square kilometers wide, which is a pretty significant amount of land that was just wiped bear of of life, including humans living in the area at the time, and that it was an explosion from the sky and it wiped out one village in particular called tall l Hammam And get this, chuck, you know what Tall l hamm was

also called at this time thirty years ago. Saw them that interesting. So they think that this is where the legend of sodom being wiped out comes from. That it was actually an explosion much like Tungusca. And they found shards of um like pottery from the time that the outsides have been turned to glass some of the particles

inside have been gasified. And for this to have happened without like doing anything more to the to the pottery means that it happened like in an instant, and that the air temperature was suddenly about four thousand degrees fahrenheit.

And the other thing that happened too, and this I think also kind of bolstered the Sodom legend, was that um a lot of the dead sea salts were pushed across the land, um over this huge amount of land and took like what was once fertile and turned it into like dead sterile land because it was salted, and it took something like six years for the area to recover from that. In that fascinating let's take a break, because so I think you can tell him getting a

little worked up here. All right, Well we'll be right back, everybody with more amazing nous, alright, dude. So from the outset, some scientific minded types were like, well, I'm hearing reports of this this weird event that happened in eight in Tunguska, the Tungusca area, and it sounds to me a lot like a meteorite. So I'm gonna go check out you know, the whole thing and try to find this meteorite. Yeah,

I mean that was one of the early theories. Uh. There were seismographs that did register some activity, so some people thought it was an earthquake at first. Uh. It lit up the sky um and created this massive dust plume. So that's where people in like London and Germany. Um, they said that they could read newspapers at midnight even that far away. So it was it was causing a little bit of commotion in the scientific community. Uh. And

still you know, consider this as was eight. Um. It's hard for a word to get around, so you can hardly blame people with you know, this event happened kind of in the middle of nowhere in nineteen o eight, and it didn't exactly like you know, shake the world. But there was one man, uh and this was uh, this was later on. His name was Leonid Kulick, and he was He was a scientist. He had a pretty

interesting life and career. Um. He was born in eighteen eighty three in Estonia, which was later part of the Soviet Union. He studied math and he studied science. He fought in both World War One and World War Two, which is really interesting because I'm curious about the number of people who were unfortunate enough to experience both those wars. Yeah, there were probably a lot, not a ton. I mean, if you do the math, like, you would have had to have been pretty young and then pretty old to

have fought in both of these. Um. But in nineteen uh one he had the task of examining meteorites within the Soviet Union. And that's where I got the impression that the first sort of a scientific fire was lit under his his butt to uh to get into studying meteorites. Yeah, well, no, he was already studying meteorites, and he heard some he read some of those local press clippings that had had been written like ten, ten or twelve years before, and that that he kind of put piece together like, oh,

this sounds a lot like a meteorite impact. My job is already to go fine meteorites because they you know, when they strike the ground, they have all of this rich interroal or with them. So I'm gonna go find it and um the government can come mind it, and that's my job. So he if if Leonig Kulik had not bred some of these accounts and then traveled to the area. Um, we would probably not have anywhere near the kind of um understanding or awareness of them the

impact that we have today. Yeah. So was that the sinct enough for you? Yes? I think so? Okay, good? So, like I was saying, in nineteen twenty one, he was, uh, he was given the task of studying meteor rights in the Soviet Union, and so by the time seven rolls around, he's got a pretty good knowledge bed that he's sleeping on every night, right, so he makes his first uh, he makes eventually three trips here to try and study things. The first one unfortunately he didn't even find the site

because there was poor mapping going on. Uh. He was really sort of um charting new territory, exploring this area, and was just getting help from anyone he could. A lot of people were scared to go there because of you know, they thought it was a judgment from the gods. Yeah. Yeah, so it was, Um, it was slow going, so that that first expedition in nine was basically to just say, hey, I think I know where this actually happened. Like that's

how rudimentary things were back then. Yeah, he um, he I think was so was it the first expedition in seven, he didn't make it in Did he also make it the same year or was it a different year? Did he also make it back there the same year? Yeah? Uh, well I saw that he went in twenty seven nine, Okay, so what whatever time he made it in there, he made it in there at least once there one the

first time. And he knew like pretty much right off the bat that he had had found the site because all around there were trees that were laying on their sides, but they were all pointing in the same direction, which you just don't see very often, Yeah, for sure. And then that you know, those at the center of those trees standing straight up with with nothing there was another pretty good indication. Yea. So the thing the thing about Leonid Koolik is is that he um, he was very

very frustrated. Like again, he was a meteor hunter, like this is his his thing. Um. So he fully expected to find an impact crater and hopefully the meteorite that that had all sorts of iron or whatever or um it bore for him to go back and tell everybody about. But he couldn't. He could not find this. Um. He did find those trees standing upright at the center that indicated that the reason they weren't blown over was because the force had blown directly down on top of them.

So he knew he'd found the center, but there was no sign of an impact crater. And he suspected that there was a swamp in the south just south of the um, the place where the trees still stood, that was hiding the impact crater and the meteorite itself. And I think that's kind of like what he He went to his grave believing that he just could never find it because the swamp had basically swallowed it up. Yeah, which, you know, you can't blame the guy in the in

the nineteen twenties. It was a pretty decent idea because he and again you know he had he had no idea that, uh well, should we go ahead and say what people think happened? Oh okay, alright, let's do it. Yeah, he had no idea that a meteor could explode pre impact, which is basically what most people think happened. Now. Yes, Yeah, he died in a Nazi sorry, a Nazi prison camp in World War Two. Uh so he would not have been had the benefit of that knowledge that came later on.

I think starting in the fifties they started to really suspect that. But at the time um when he came back and said, this is definitely like, look at these pictures, an explosion unlike the kind that we are even remotely capable of creating here on Earth. So therefore a natural explosion took place here. I have photographic evidence here. I've interviewed locals who were there, so firsthand accounts of the experience. I've documented all this stuff, and I cannot find the

meteorite or the impact crater. There's this sum total of all the info that I can provide, and some people took that and pieced it together to mean that, well, maybe it was a comet impact then, because comets are largely icy, they're rocky, and they have minerals and stuff as well, but they're not like an asteroid or a meteoroid where they're they're they're made mostly of rock or metal.

They're made mostly of ice. So when it does explode, it would just kind of evaporate, and it might have the same kind of impact, but it would also not leave a crater or any real remnants of self behind. So for a very long time and among some quarters that still explains the Tunguska event that it was a common impact rather than a meteor. Yeah, it's like that riddle, Yeah, the one where the guys hanging and there's a puddle of water. Q. Look, was like, there's a big puddle

of water here. Actually he thought the swamp swallowed it. But uh, you know that didn't explain it. And you look, I will say, like, although, like I feel bad for the guy that he died. Uh, well, obviously he died in prison camp. That's the worst thing, but that he died not really getting to the bottom of this, but he kind of kept that drumbeat going for people to study this, took those great photographs, interviewed locals, and really did a lot of the groundwork for other people later

to build on. Yeah, like if if he hadn't taken this expedition on himself and really gone in and like piece together the first bits of evidence we had fairly shortly.

I mean, what like this is ninety seven and the thing happened in nineteen o eight, So within twenty years he really went and documented it had enough and for his work, we um we would probably not have like any kind of anything like the understanding that we have today, and who knows, it might have been lost to history as well too, maybe, although I doubt it, because like you can still see evidence of this today, which, uh,

it's pretty amazing. It is for sure, like the fact that that that you can still find trees laying on their sides, right or laying yeah, on the ground. Yeah, I mean, like the forest is grown up around it, but that stuff is still there sometimes, you know, in some places. I would love to see that, yeah, of course in prison. It's just I would definitely go in the summer, but um so for those two weeks between late June and mid July before winter sets in and

late July. And I should also say, yes, I just saw it in the way back machine. But you know what I mean, Yeah, and this was like, uh, it's still not a populated area, so it's not like things have built up around it. It's it's still largely the same as it was back in. Yeah. There's a little little little town called Vona Vara, and at the time it was basically a trading post and it's not much

bigger now. It's really small. They have an airport which is basically a strip of concrete that has been cleared, and um, you can get in and out of it, but it's it's it's not an easy place to get to. It requires helicopters, horseback, some people ride reindeer in on some of it. A lot of hiking. There's a lot of bears, there's a lot of wolves. But the blast site, the epicenter, is preserved in a nature preserve in Siberia, so you could conceivably go study it, and people do.

I think the most recent expedition was in two thousand thirteen. They're still trying to get to the bottom of it. Yeah, and and Q look, I mean he he took every available mode of transportation he could to get there over I mean it took him days and days and days over these expeditions to reach it. And he was he was a brave dude and like very determined. So um

Culic found a couple of other things. He found that the ground around the epicenter was actually um scrunched up like a rug from the blast, which must have been astounding to see on like a massive scale. But he also saw that there were holes, really like strange circular holes that were just a few yards deep, but up to fifty or a hundred feet in diameter, and he had no idea what he was looking at. He knew that it must have something to do with the explosion,

but it's just peculiar. He hadn't seen those before. There was nothing in the literature to explain what he was looking at, and so some of the stuff that he documented it was great documentation and he was a very brave person for going and undertaking this this expedition. But he also laid the groundwork for basically, um, everybody with a theory to come along and suggest that their theory was what explains the Tunguska event. And like you kind of referred to earlier, some of them are kind of

out there. So let's take a little bit of break and we're gonna come back and get into some explanations for the Tunguska event, including the real one. All right, Charles, you've heard of this before, right, So, like, did you grow up with this was just one of the things you're just aware of as a kid. No, it's you know, something that became aware of with the Internet. I think I heard about it from my time life Unsolved Streets books,

which just God bless those things. Those the the set of those books, Um, the Uncle John's Bathroom Readers and David Letterman Top ten Lists from the nineties book. Um, probably are the three things that shaped my brain more than anything else. Yeah. Yeah, it says a lot Mad Magazine to you. Oh yeah, I can't forget Mad. Sorry, thank you for for for saving me on that. Yeah. Uh So here's some of the theories that have kind

of come and gone over the years. Uh. As we said that Q looks was that it was this meteor was swallowed up by the swamp south of the impact zone. Other people suggested that it was like Chico in Italy and that they were just off by their their mapping skills were poor, and so this was the actual impact creator and is now a lake. But now we think that they just didn't draw maps well back then because that wasn't on previous maps, and everyone's like, but now

it's here, so that's what it is, right right? Yeah? But there, Yeah, like you're saying, I think is it was just so remote and people weren't drawing maps of it that it just hadn't been bothered to be put on exactly, which I totally believe. Um, I think the comment, I mean are there people that still believe it was a comment? Yeah, Um, well, let me explain why there. There have been surveys of the site that UM are looking for traces of things that would be telltale signs

that it was definitely a meteor um. Like, there are different kinds of meteors, but most meteors are either really stony rocky that it's basically like a chunk of earth, or it's like super metallic it's basically like a big ball of metal or whatever. And there's like different It's a spectrum, right, there's like you can fall anywhere in between those totally rocky and totally metallic um. But the the stuff aboard are going to be basically the same things.

It's just the company the concentration of them. But one thing that you would find on like a meteorite is something like a ridium or osmium. There are things you would find in Earth, but you have to go to the center of the Earth to find them. Uh, they're not on the surface. So if you find those things on the surface of Earth, it's strongly suggests that a meteorite impacted Earth. Well, they've found not not much osmium

or a ridium around the Tunguskas site. So they think that actually is kind of a thing that it suggests that maybe actually it was a comet, because a comet would have those things, but just not in high concentration, because it would mostly be a big ball of ice. So that's kind of kept the comet thing alive. Is recently is just the last few years. Yeah, Well, they did surveys in the fifties and they did find uh, space dust is probably the best way to say it.

They did. It's true. Yeah, so, uh they found you know what was extraterrestrial rock dust. Uh, they found it in the area, They found it in the soil. Uh. And again it does match the date of the event um. So that to me means that the leading theory is probably correct, which is that a meteor exploded about three miles above land um, which basically just blew it to dust and that's why there aren't huge, huge chunks of

rock laying everywhere. Yeah. So that's that's the predominant theory right now, is that it was a meteor um that blew up, like you said, I think something like half a dozen miles over over the surface of the Earth in the atmosphere, and it blew up so with such force that not only did it, you know, cause the ground to to buckle and bend and turn into like a rug and blow eighty million trees down over a couple a hundred square miles, it also just blew itself

and every any evidence of itself just into smith reeds, into dust, and so that dust layer is the only remnants of it left. Um. But the problem is that they didn't know how that could happen. Like that's if you put all the evidence together, that's the picture it painted. But at the time, and until very recently, science was like, we don't know how something like that would happen. It seems like that is what happened, but how would that

even happen? Yeah, and it explains the fireball in the sky, because that's what you would expect to see when a meteor is is trucking towards the earth. Uh. This thing was about a hundred and twenty feet or larger in diameter, was going about thirty three thousand miles an hour. Uh, and it was hot, like super super hot because of friction. Right. So the thing this this huge rock, and they got all those numbers just basically reverse engineering the force of

the explosion. Right, So that rock that's traveling so fast, what did you say, like thirty four thousand miles an hour or something like that. That's at thirty three but give or take a thousand miles, all right, who cares? At that point? Right when it hits the atmosphere, it's suddenly met with that friction and gravity and drag and everything, and that these forces acting on it all of a

sudden just destabilize it. And that the the pressure that's building up at the front of this huge rock is different by so much to the pressure behind it that the differential just destabilizes this rock. And because it's traveling so fast and has so much energy and there's so much heat associated with it, it doesn't just break up. It blows up. Yeah. What I'm surprised about it is that this hasn't happened more, and it must just be a very specific combination of size and speed and heat.

But I'm surprised that that doesn't happen more. That combination. Well, some people are worried that it could happen more like one of the predictions I saw as that Tungusca like event we could expect it to happen over Earth maybe once every hundred to three hundred years. Yeah, but we haven't seen that. That hasn't played out right. No, But um, some somebody who wrote an article I read pointed out like the like, there's not some some schedule that that

that rocks follow when they're coming into Earth's atmosphere. This is not how things work. So, um, we hope it's like that, but it's it's probably much less predictable than that. And we actually did a survey called UM Projects Space Guard I think, where we surveyed all of the near Earth rocks, the big ones, and we found that none of the big ones are probably going to come near

us anytime soon. But we found also that we had trouble seeing the small ones, and the small ones could still create like a Tunguska event, which I mean, like you said, it happened over a pretty depopulated area and it's still affected humans. If it happened over a like a city, a major city, it would be just lights

out for that that entire city. So the chances are pretty low that it would happen over a populated area just by you know, virtue of the fact that we tend to populate in in dense clusters while leaving also huge portions of the Earth, especially the oceans, unpopulated. Where but if it did happen over over a populated area, it would be really really bad. Yeah. I mean they make movies about, like fictional movies about that stuff, right exactly.

So hopefully it doesn't happen, but it could, is the point. Yes, And I always wonder, like, man, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened over like a big city, But like you said that, it's we always think like others just people everywhere, but that's that's not the case. Uh, well, like how our settlements are. Yeah, like when you think about how large the Earth is compared to where the people are, it's we're we're we're we're not everywhere. Water is everywhere, right,

that's true. So there there. I think in two thousand thirteen, Chuck, there was the Cheliabinsk meteor. Do you remember that over Russia? M M. I don't remember that. There was a like it was very well documented because everybody has a video tape camera on their cell phone these days, and um, there was a meteor that that basically did the same thing into Tunguska, except it was far, far smaller. It was something like, um, two thousand times more powerful than

than Hiroshima. Now that doesn't sound right, thirty times more powerful. I'm sorry. Well, Tunguska was up to two thousand times more powerful. But it like blew the windows out of places, that knocked people down, and it really caught people's attention, saying like, hey, everybody, this is a real thing that that that like this can happen, and if a huge one happens over a population center, then we will be

in trouble. So I think it kind of caught the attention of the scientific community that like, this is something we need to keep an eye on. Literally, Yeah for sure, Yeah, hopefully we will. I'm glad it's not up to me. Ah, you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well, if you want to know more about the Tunguska event, type that word in the search bar of your favorite search engine and it will bring up all sorts of

interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this letter from a teacher. We love these. Hey guys, am writing to thank you for helping you teach my ap psychology course. I have a degree in history and had taught just United States history and world history up until last year, but I wanted to thank you guys for helping me teach my

own class. Needless to say, I have a lot of self teaching to do in order to prepare, and years of listening to stuff you should know has prepared me in a way that I was not expecting. As I taught the class, I found myself referencing knowledge I picked up from you guys, including how to train a pigeon, Stockholm syndrome, Oh mommy interesting, and the effects of bath

salts on the brain. It also seemed to me, uh, it also seemed at least once a class, I would utter the words I listened to this podcast once and then dive into something like feral children and how that gives insight into development, or how a social panic works. Even got a few students to listen, just a few nice Thank you for that. All that's to say, thank

you so much for what you guys do. You've given me confidence in the classroom and a constant stream of entertainment that isn't mind numbing, and that is from Michael Jacobs from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and he came and saw us in St. Louis in May, which is where he's from. Cool, and he said, Josh, you actually ran into my sister on the street right before the show. I ran into a few people at St. Louis like more than usual, and everybody was super friendly. Well, this was Samantha, So

we're giving her a shout out. Hey, Samantha, So Samantha Michael Michael's sister. Thank all you guys and ladies for the sport. Yeah, thank you everybody who came out to that show. And actually all of our shows, you guys are really we appreciate all of you for it. Um. Actually you can come out to our other shows. We've got some coming up. You can go to s Y s K Live dot com to find out where to

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