00:01Potentially hazardous asteroids can show up anywhere in the night sky at any time.
00:09Oh, this might be something.
00:11Oh, you guys, look at that.
00:14Right now, it is absolutely a potentially hazardous object.
00:18If you guys were going to be here for a discovery, a PHA is definitely what you want.
00:22This is a big rock, yeah.
00:25What would an asteroid that is a kilometer in diameter, what would it do if it hit the Earth?
00:32That is likely to end human civilization.
00:40Those objects are big enough to cause what we would call truly global devastation, meaning that they could cause global extinction events.
00:46The good news is that we found more than about 95% of them.
00:49When we get down to smaller objects, things that are larger than, let's say, about 100 meters across or so,
00:54now the picture's not so rosy.
00:55Today, we do not have a complete inventory of all the possible impactors.
01:00There's almost certainly a decent-sized asteroid out there that is going to pose an impact threat to the planet.
01:07We're just trying to find it right now.
01:09And that is something that NASA and the worldwide planetary defense community has been endeavoring to do.
01:15There's a huge community of astronomers that start observing it.
01:18From all around the globe.
01:19Finding asteroids, tracking them, calculating their orbits.
01:24Asteroids don't care about international boundaries.
01:27It doesn't matter where the asteroid impacts. It affects, you know, the entire humanity. In fact, anything alive on the Earth.
01:33I really like that I'm protecting the planet.
01:36Let's say we do find something that poses an impact threat to Earth. What next?
01:41The day is coming when Earth will get impacted.
01:45The dime source went extinct because they didn't have a space program.
01:48We do have one.
01:49We can.
01:50So why stop there?
01:54We know it will happen. We just don't know when it will happen.
01:57It will happen.
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