043 - Don’t Look Up: Can an Asteroid Destroy Earth?, Part 1 with Dylan O'Donnell

Dr. Brian's Health Show

Click here to download the full transcription as a formatted PDF. Episode Summary Welcome to The No Cap Health Show, a weekly podcast where Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler uses his decades of experience in medicine and ability as an expert researcher to provide a light-hearted approach and share health trends popular on TikTok. In this episode, Dr. Brian welcomes astronomer Dylan O’Donnell to help provide his Cap/No Cap analysis on today’s topic: Don’t Look Up: Can An Asteroid Destroy Earth? What damage can an asteroid or meteor do to the Earth? How much lead time would we have if an extinction-level asteroid were headed towards Earth? Why is Jupiter considered Earth’s “big brother?” Find out in today’s episode! If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you leave the show a Rating & Review at RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap. Key Takeaways 01:39 – Dr. Brian takes a moment to promote a film that he was a producer on, Holky: The Steven Holcomb Story and encourages listeners to stream it free on Indieflix 02:14 – Dr. Brian welcomes Dylan O’Donnell to the show to discuss today’s topic: Don’t Look Up: Can An Asteroid Destroy Earth? 07:24 – How to determine if a ‘near-Earth’ object is threatening to Earth 10:15 – The extinction of the dinosaurs 12:19 – The extreme damage a meteor can cause 17:31 – How Jupiter interacts with asteroids 18:48 – What, if any, lead time would we have in spotting an extinction-level asteroid? 23:14 – NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission 27:27 – Dr. Brian provides the No Cap Recap of today’s episode and encourages listeners to reach out and Rate and Review this podcast on RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap. Tweetable Quotes “Just to give you an idea, this month already NASA, and people like me in their backyards, and other global surveys have discovered one hundred and forty-four new objects just flying around in space that are considered ‘near-Earth’ objects.” (07:05) (Dylan) “It’s this huge gravitational force in our solar system. And the theory for a long time has been that Jupiter is like our big brother. It’s like a big gravitational vacuum cleaner that is stopping the Earth from being hammered to death by asteroids.” (17:42) (Dylan) “There was a shooting star that we did predict. We did see one come towards Africa and burn up. It was a bit of a success story in that they saw it, they detected it, they calculated its orbital parameters. And it gave us a lead time of, drumroll please, two hours before we knew it was gonna hit.” (21:52) (Dylan) “We’re connected as a species, as a universe, to all these things. So, the core of the Earth, the meteorites flying through space, the iron that’s raining down on your rooftop every night, the iron flowing through your veins. It’s all that one atom.” (27:06) (Dylan) Resources Mentioned NCHS Links Mentioned Link to Byron Bay Observatory Link to Dylan O’Donnell’s Twitter NCHS Footer Powered by FullCast