Jesse Rogerson

You could literally throw something at it, which is something we tested with the DART mission.

You probably remember that, where they literally shot an impactor at an asteroid and saw if it moved, which it did.

So but the idea of like, you know, blowing something up, as you pointed out, you could fragment it and then you just have a bunch of smaller things that are still really bad to hit us.

And so the question is, if what happens when you actually send a nuclear bomb at a thing like an asteroid?

And so to test that, how do you test that?

How do you test out if something like that would work?

Because if you if you test it in real life scenario, then you're just going to like, you know, pepper us with a bunch of asteroids anyway.

See?

Simulation.

You simulate.

Well, they simulated and they so they took a real rock, a real meteorite, and they had a proton beam to simulate the amount of energy deposited from like a nuclear explosion.

They just deposited a bunch of energy onto rocks, onto like rocks from from space.

And they wanted to see if we really put a lot of energy onto it, like you're simulating an explosion, what happens to the rocks?

And they found that the structural integrity of the rock doesn't do what you would expect.

It was more interested in deforming and dissipating the energy of the impact of the beam than it was like fragmenting.

And so the idea they think then would be on, you know, if you have like a multi, like a kilometer size object, something that could be really bad.

If you exposed it to this amount of energy, that it wouldn't just necessarily fragment, that it would like deform and melt or vaporize in some way.

Lending to the idea that maybe nuclear options are possible here.

Now, that being said.

This isn't like Armageddon, where you go there and drill a hole down into it and explode it from the inside.