i'm gonna sleep a little bit better at night knowing that the dart mission has now launched and we're actually gonna test out this plan if dart doesn't work though and it and it doesn't give as much energy to this asteroid as we'd hoped and change the speed as much as we'd hope then what are our other options right i mean there's lots of different ones available there's just a huge big trade-off for all of them between performance and cost and risk and whether the technology even exists to do it but essentially it all boils down to like two different options either you deflect the asteroid like in darts case or you break up the asteroid somehow and breaking up the asteroid usually people tend to leap towards like the idea of a nuclear bomb and actually you can use a nuclear bomb to do both breaking up and deflection as well a nuclear bomb detonated just above the surface of an asteroid would give it enough of a kick to deflect it slightly in its orbit so that you'd end up with a near miss you don't actually need bruce willis to drill down in armageddon and the astronauts in deep impact didn't have to sacrifice themselves flying down into the center of the asteroid either with their nuclear bomb the age-old problem with the nuclear device though is obviously nuclear waste radioactive waste from the nuclear bomb that could become a huge issue you know if you especially if it's detonated close to earth you know you could save yourselves then but in the future cause yourself a massive problem because every time earth comes back to that point in its orbit it's like oh yeah march is is radioactive month again and and you cause a whole host of other problems that you then have to solve so deflection is often considered the best option but then the question is what do you use to deflect right you basically need anything that can somehow transfer energy from one thing to the asteroid whether that's radiation pressure from sunlight itself by building essentially a huge magnifying glass in space or similarly radiation pressure from firing a really powerful laser at it or even somehow attaching a rocket engine to the surface of an asteroid and then burning a lot of rocket fuel so that you essentially push the asteroid off course that way or better yet with technology that actually exists crashing a spacecraft into the surface it's definitely the cheapest option because the technology exists but also because it's incredibly simple as well it's a win-win situation really as long as it works so you know that i'm going to be keeping an incredibly close eye on the dart mission when it arrives at the dynamo system in september NUMBER_TOKEN and all of the results and everything that happened after the impact i'll be keeping all of my fingers and toes crossed in hope that this very beautiful simple physics solution to this problem actually works before we get to the bloopers a huge thank you to this week's video sponsor brilliant brilliant is a website and an app with a huge range of interactive courses on science maths and computer science personally i learn best by working through a problem myself and brilliant allows you to do just that getting a really good grip on a specific concept or topic through the little interactive widgets that they have on all of their courses plus it's just really fun as well you know
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN before we get to the bloopers a huge thank you to this week's video sponsor brilliant brilliant is a website and an app with a huge range of interactive courses on science maths and computer science personally i learn best by working through a problem myself and brilliant allows you to do just that getting a really good grip on a specific concept or topic through the little interactive widgets that they have on all of their courses plus it's just really fun as well you know END_SPONSOR_TOKEN