The Deadliest (and Simplest) Space Weapon

if humanity ever really does expand into space conflict is sure to follow there will be a scramble for power resources and influence sure to produce some stellar skirmishes it's just human nature but i ask you what will be the most fearsome weapon in these inevitable battles i can tell you that it won't be ai auto turrets or kilometer long railguns no it'll be something almost prehistorically simple arya take us in now entering the facility before we begin i should mention that today's episode contains some minor spoilers for season five of the expanse in that it mentions a major plot point but you can also see that point in the trailer so we're not really giving anything away sausage boss man all right in season five of the expanse an oppressed belter population seeks revenge on earth and the inners to exact this revenge they use not nukes or lasers but rocks they just fling some rocks at earth now this sounds almost comical at first glance but these kinetic impactors these weapons that trade in on kinetic energy alone are the simplest and deadliest space weapons why because isaac newton is the deadliest sob in space in space there is sorry in space there is no air which of course means no sound but also means no real resistance to motion there's no atmosphere out here to be a literal drag on your life like season eight of game of thrones and it's very unlikely that i'm going to hit anything that's why out here newton's first law of motion is so critically important any object unless acted upon by an outside force is likely to continue on in a straight line at a constant velocity forever combine this with newton's second law of motion and the reality of motion in space is that any force no matter how small will accelerate some object up to a final velocity at which it will continue on forever that's very important for our purposes because space has a lot of big rocks and it's very unlikely that a single rock would hit anything if you fired it in a random direction in the night sky it's going to find that target and it will be unimpeded while kyle is muted this would be a good time to tell you that kyle has a huge crush on amos and that he desperately wants avasarala's wardrobe every so often earther astronomers will warn the rest of the population that there's a big old space rock flying by close enough to earth to warrant looking at the skies and even though earth hasn't had a major cataclysmic asteroid impact in millions of years it makes sense to pay attention to the skies because there are a lot of near-earth objects that are large enough to do serious damage now astronomers categorize the damage in potentia here with what is called the torino scale a color-coded scale that uses probability of impact and energy of impact measured in megatons of tnt equivalent to show just how bad an impact might be so why don't we use this same scale and some math to categorize our own killer space rock let's say that we have some space rock with a diameter of one kilometer if we approximate the rock as nearly spherical as every physics 101 class would do the mass of the rock will be the volume of a sphere multiplied by the estimated density now as you might know kinetic energy is equal to one half the mass times the velocity of that mass squared and if tnt equivalent energy is defined as some amount of energy per unit mass then this is our final equation popping in some typical values for scary asteroids and plugging and chugging the numbers as my engineering professors used to say and i really hated that and we get an estimated energy value of over a hundred thousand megatons of tnt this fits with what the torino scale would say this energy is so that's good and that means our numbers are good but more importantly this energy is more than eighteen hundred photon torpedoes worth for just a one kilometer wide rock and we know it we know what that much antimatter can do don't we nerds the point being there's so much energy here and this rock is relatively tiny and harnessing the damage of this rock is so much easier than you might think bringing us all the way back to the point of this episode you have an incoming message from amos do you want to take it no i don't i don't always need to take his calls sometimes i like to i'll be right back hey so while we're thinking about bad things happening to other things because of things floating in space i want you to consider a sci-fi trope that you've probably seen a thousand times some unfortunate soul to something bad in a spaceship and he gets spaced out an airlock to the void what would actually happen to that body after this well as we've been talking about today motion is relative everything's moving very fast in space it may look stationary but that ship was probably going very fast and now this body is also going many kilometers per second i can imagine some space law governing the disposal of space bodies similar to that governing space junk because a body like your boy here moving many kilometers per second frozen solid could obliterate a smaller ship and just just imagine that in a sci-fi film some captain is sitting on the bridge looking out of a window the ship probably wouldn't have because of structural integrity reasons and instead of the last thing they see being some space junk some part of a satellite it's some guy's frozen space junk tough way to go writing in his famous book pale blue dot carl sagan was thinking about the real technology and foresight it would take to deflect an asteroid away from a cataclysmic earth impact and he concluded that any technology that could deflect an asteroid whether that be lasers or nukes or gravity tugboats could also just as easily be weaponized to move an asteroid to impact a certain country or city or part of the planet because of this sagan thought that humanity was at much more of a risk from a man-made impact than a natural one sound familiar arya ready the rossi what makes the expanse work as a world building exercise is that all the ships have advanced and very powerful fusion drives called epstein drives now as scary as it sounds it really would be as easy as some angry belter just finding a large space rock strapping a few engines to it pointing it at a target or at least putting it on an intercept trajectory letting that rock silently accelerate for a few weeks and then just cut off the engines and let kinetic energy do the rest there's no real additional technology or tracking needed there's no real way to trace who set this rock on its way and for the victims there's no real warning a rock just a hundred meters wide would easily have the energy to be a city killer capable of localized destruction on land and giant tsunamis offshore if angry belters found a rock between 100 meters and a kilometer wide when it hit the earth it would be a country killer unprecedented regional devastation for a land impact and or the threat of a major tsunami for an ocean impact five kilometers and above represent the planet killers single impactors large enough to threaten the future of civilization as of 2019 earther astronomers have identified almost a thousand near-earth objects that could be weaponized as planet killers just a few epstein drives and this happens as you can see me simulate here in universe sandbox a rocky body less than a billionth the mass of the earth would have more energy than 80 000 times earth's total nuclear arsenal exploding all at once this is a 10 on the torino scale accomplished without nukes railguns or the proto-molecule just a rock smaller than eros with a few engines on it and keep in mind it would be similarly easy to bombard and obliterate any martian settlement in the expanse as it would the most populated belter station because almost anyone with a few engines could turn an inert space rock into a planet killer with minimal guidance training or consequence the expanse is totally right on the science here as it often is a belcher population bent on punishing the inners could easily and effectively cause the most cataclysmic event on earth in millions of years just find a large space rock that's already traveling a few dozen kilometers per second and nudge it with some delta v it's kind of ironic a throne rock being the simplest and deadliest space weapon because a throne rock is probably the first weapon that humans ever came up with until next time arya take us back to earth please because that's where amos is right now no maybe he gives good hugs okay they don't even hurt all that bad now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i'm going to recognize research assistant farbad and visiting scholar eric kuzard if you want to join the facility if you want to drape a silky white lab coat over your shoulders get behind the scenes photos and videos join me on discord almost every day get patreon only live streams you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility staff today and hey if you support us just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm going to pass that so here's the thing about space rocks even today we do not really have the technology to deflect a certain impact we would need months or years of ahead of time notice to deploy some kind of technology like lasers or mirrors or gravity tugboats or nuclear weapons or kinetic impactors to actually deflect it such that it wouldn't hit earth the thing is if someone was deflecting it on purpose and putting it on a torino scale 10 trajectory without much warning there's not really anything anyone can do which is why this is so simple and deadly and effective it would just be game over man like game over oh i like that has anyone said that before no no he didn't he you did it thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 277,415

Rating: 4.966691 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, the expanse, asteroids, planet killer, amazon, expanse, the expanse season 5, james sa corey

Id: ZApW34z-aUw

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020