How To Stop An Asteroid From Hitting Earth

In today’s video, I'm going to take a crack at Avenues Online's Save The World Challenge. To prevent an asteroid from destroying the Earth, I’ll test my theory that a giant Fresnel lens can create enough ablation to change its path.

[CRANJISMCBASKETBALL-fbid]

Use a large paper, since a meteor is basically a large rock and paper beats rock.

[adamplace]

The demos on this channel are always so good. I wasn't sure what I expected when that rock was getting heated, but it wasn't that.

[Lampe]

3:51 "So you have essentially created a mini ROCKet on the side of the rock!" - That pun was just too funny not to mention!

[hxzzxrd]

Nice stuff man, just what i expect from my favorite YouTuber

[Petch]

What if the asteroid is rotating? (Then it might be really hard to use a laser to heat the surface)

[juankruger]

What did you think of the DART test last year? It was so cool seeing the emissions and that lil bit of rock shoot off when you were heating it

[RichardHartness]

Ok, so weird. I saw Armageddon in theaters and really haven't thought much of it sense. I was talking with some people about old films just today and brought up Armageddon. And here it is on The Action Lab.

[St-huom]

I watched don’t look up yesterday. Now this video.

[claytonharting]

That would make a great apocalypse story. Like there’s this asteroid in an orbit that crosses Earth’s, and has to be periodically hit with a laser to avoid the planet. However, some OTHER apocalypse happens, making it no longer possible to run the laser. Then a few months later, the asteroid hits, making bad into worse. It’s got a certain chaos to it and I like that a lot

[Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

From the results of the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, it seems that hitting the asteroid with a small impactor is the most promising approach, at least for certain types of asteroid.

[dryued]

One thing I hoped you'd cover is how much energy is needed to steer an asteroid away from earth, which I imagine is pretty little due to the fact how the difference in trajectory is going to accumulate as the distance increases, and we don't need much to avoid a direct collision to begin with.

[shazam]

Neat! I like your sponsor! Much better than the banal, airhead gaming stuff. Hope it works and they continue.

[LuisMiHerrero]

No space -> no asteroids -> no problem

[jerijayz]

brilliant explanation. I too dabble in the finest art of trajectory and this is great stuff.

[JakeSeeber]

Thank you so much for this video and all the work you put into this channel <3

[teddyfurstman]

Asteroid hitting earth is the thing that keeps me up at night. Very scary stuff.

[westphaliaphilosopher]

Cool! Very interesting! I'm wondering.... If you put that scale underneath that rock you were heating up, would the bursts of activity we were observing on the surface of the rock have created enough force to have registered a reaction on the scale? Maybe??

[LokirofRoriksted]

We could predict exactly where the asteroid is gonna hit and inflate a bouncing castle in that location, so when it hits, it bounces back to the space

[CountGremlin]

What if we have a cluster of explosions not on the asteroid itself but close to it? Would the explosions change the course of the asteroid?

[TheGamingHungary]

Exploding asteroids also have the risk that the separated parts of the asteroid after the explosion just end up coming together again due to gravity.