 First of all, let's all give this space around a pause. I'm really excited that this is our 7th event in Club 21. Like, the amount of work that it takes to turn this nightclub into a place where you guys can hear us talk about various subjects. There's probably a lot, so I'd really like to thank our hosts. We have a really fantastic night for you. I'd just like to say that slugs are weird. No offense to UC Santa Cruz alumni. We're talking about weird. Slugs are weird. Like, future mom are weird. So this particular slug is a member of the Alicia Species. Well notice it's green. It looks like a leaf. It doesn't look like slug. Other scientists put it on things like plant physiology or molecular plant. Right, so they're like slug plant. So this slug actually needs algae. And it absorbs the chloro-classic algae. It actually has horizontal gene transfer. So it's able to efficiently store energy from the sun. So, but there's some kind of slugs for it to eat. But that's not even like, that's the tip of how weird slugs are. Does anyone know what this is? Yeah, so I heard it. So this is not a slug. So this is men of war jellyfish. You don't have to do anything like this to people. Don't go swimming to big signs. So there's, you know, that makes everything kind of sexy. But that's, you know, blue sea slug. It looks like that. Beautiful, beautiful picture. These men of war jellyfish absorb the poisonous spines and therefore then cells become poisonous and will sting you with the spines that they just eat. So it's weird. And now to tell us a little bit more about how slugs are weird. Here's Vanessa. So I'm going to start with a little bit more of your act because sometimes people think that's weird. So hopefully that's the kind of, you know, vibe we have here tonight. So sex slugs in a rock and roll, which made me a little bit anxious because I was like, yeah, I'm such a big badass. So I'm actually, let's see here, slugs. We'll leave the sex for later on in the talk. Right, so one of the things about slugs is you probably, particularly sea slugs, which are the type of slugs that I study. We'll look at it, right? We'll look at the slug. And this one, it's typically found for themselves, but it's been popping up in places even more this year. There's one of my colleagues who's actually looking at this question. Where are they coming from? So that should be interesting to know about. More recently, there's been news of these true people laugh. So this is a horrible picture because this is on land. And in real life, they look a bit better than that. So this is called a sea hare. It's a slug that looks a bit like a rabbit. Sort of, you know, as much as a different can. And fortunately, when they're on land, they just look. But they've been popping up locally recently as well. More recently than news. My colleagues at the California Academy of Sciences just got back from the Philippines where they discovered about 100 new species of marine creatures and about roughly 40 of those were new species of sea slug. So that's pretty exciting. And, okay, tell me, raise your hand. Who has got emails or Facebook posts with this image before anyone? Two of them! It's a really cool picture she wish. But, and people are really excited because they're like, what is that cool thing? Well, this is a sea slug. They showed you a better picture of it in the water before. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the relatives of this particular slug in a bit. Okay, so before we talk a little bit more about sea slugs specifically, I need to point out these imposters because I frequently have people asking me about things that look kind of like slugs. They have a slug-like shape to them, but they're not actually sea slugs like what I studied. The first one of those are sea cucumbers. Raise your hand if you've ever held a sea cucumber before. Wow! That's awesome. Okay, so sea cucumbers are sea slugs. They're actually more closely related to us. They are a type of a kind of germ. So they're related to things like starfish, sea stars, sea urchins, crane ointments, sea lilies, those types of things. And some of them can look quite seemingly like a sea slug, especially this one recently on Facebook. There's a lot of movement in Facebook groups, so if you want to join, look for that. Someone posted a picture with a bunch of these and someone had to tell them that they actually had some sea cucumbers in there. They got to go to another group, go to the Canada group. These usually, though, you can tell apart because they'll have two feet. So if you look at the bottom, like a sea star, they've got two feet. And if you go up, you're in the most social encounter. Now on the right, this posture can be really tricky. This is the type. It looks like a new direct, doesn't it, or sea slug, right? It's right with color. If you look carefully, it's got these two little parts here that kind of look like the sensory organs on the front of a sea slug. But this is actually, not at all closely related, this type of flatworm, a polyclotid flatworm. And these can often be really good mimics of mutant rights in particular. So a lot of these, I think, are also toxic. A lot of mutant rights are toxic, so there may be some mimicry going on there. It's pretty cool, though, but you've got to watch out for those. Easily miss the other bite. All right, so first we've got to talk about what exactly these sea slugs are. And if you remember, or think back to your high school class or your biology class, and you went to college or high school, whatever. They are, first and foremost, a type of mollusk. So mollusks, one of the points for anyone who can name the seven extant classes of mollusks. You don't have to give that a try. Anyone? I know you know. I know some of you know. So it includes things like gastropods, which includes sea slugs. You have things like this. This is a Bible or a clam. But it also looks like a monocophrin. It's drawing here. So monocophrin is another group. But you have things like cephalopods, too. Some other really cool mollusks. All right, so the mutant rights are a type of gastropods, snails and slugs. And this is a really gross simplification. But typically when I'm talking about sea slugs, I'm talking about a group that includes the mutant rights. So it actually includes a lot of other groups of something, mollusks, that live in the ocean. But not all of those are mutant rights. So the way you can think of it is that all mutant rights are a type of sea slug, but not all sea slugs are a type of mutant right. But this diagram here is not a very good representation of their relationships. Their evolutionary relationships are really important to me because that's what I was telling you. All right, but some of these other groups of sea slugs can be a little bit misleading and you can often see them misidentify as mutant rights on the interwebs. But a lot of them are really brightly colored like they're mutant rights relatives. So you've got, these are some non-mutant rights here. And what's cool about these sea slugs is a lot of these different groups actually still retain shells, but they're often reduced or they're internalized. And so this is a really interesting model to study the lost-in-shell evolution, which is one of the questions I'm interested in. And a lot of these are really beautiful. All right, so the name newborn literally means naked gill. And the reason they're called naked gills is if you think about these animals, they're snails, but you'll notice they're missing something really obvious. What are they missing? So whereas some of those other groups of sea slugs may have a shell that's reduced or internalized, one thing that all neuter rights have in common is they have no shell in their adult stage. And this is some of the diversity you see within the neuter rights. So you have different groups within the neuter rights. Some of the ones you're most likely to see are likely these types right here with all of these structures that kind of poke out the size of their bodies or the backs of their bodies. This type is called alid neuter right. And the one that Rick showed earlier, the anime looking Pikachu-ish thing, that's a type of alid. And this other one over here is a type called a dory neuter right. This is, for me, since I study dory, it's a pretty typical neuter right. And so you can usually find a nice little tuft of gills located on the back, that's what this is right here. And then you'll see these two little structures at the head end. And those are called the rhinophores. So they use that to sense different things in their environment. All right. This is one of my favorite feces, actually. This is from Doris Will and I. It's hard to tell from here, but they've got these really cool speckled gills and rhinophores. All right. And then this one here, this is actually a type of neuter right called a dendronoted. And the only reason that I included this here is because to me this looks like a crumpled wad of used dental cloth. And this is actually what this animal looks like in real life. This is actually recently described by my advisors from the pastors. So that's a really crazy looking neuter right. All right. But an interesting question is, you know, if you're a gastropod and you have a shell, you know, what do you use that shell for? For protection, that's what snails have on fork. So if, you know, the shell is such an effective way of reducing predation, why would you get rid of your shell? Well, you better have a pretty good one. So we're just going to talk a little bit about neuter right mousine. Because it turns out that a lot of these defense mechanisms come from the food that these animals are eating. So if you look here, you'll see a little menu for neuter right in general. So they eat a lot of, in fact, that's one of the things I forgot to mention is that all neuter right eats other animals. They're carnivores. But they eat animals that a lot of people don't really consider to be animals. Well, two or three of them, because they are. But they're animals that don't really move around a lot. So things like rhizoans, corals, hyvroids, these are related to jellyfish. So they can stink. So can corals. Things like sponges and then this thing here called an acidian or a sea squirt. So they eat things like that. And then the ones I said, they actually haven't eaten other neuter right, which is pretty badass. All right. So one of these neuter right are able to do, in many cases, is they will take the defenses of the food that they eat. I mean, think about it. If you're eating, I've been stoned by a hydriger before. It was not pleasant. It hurt for more than a month. Okay? But what some neuter right can do is they'll eat hydrige and all kinds of hydrige. And what happens is, they're not really deterred by those staining cells. In fact, what happens is, as the staining cells pass through their digestive system, which there's this little schematic over here, it actually passes through and gets diverted up into the serrata here to the very tips where you have a little storage area called a nitro stack. And what these ailments can do is they'll actually store those staining cells in there and use them as a defense mechanism against predators that might try to eat them. So it's kind of like they're stealing superpowers from their food. It's pretty awesome. Okay. Other neuter ranks, including this lovely neuter rank right here. This is one of the best neuter ranks. I heard that, Josh. This is what I'm fond of because it's a gymnasium, that's what I study. They're not the most aesthetically pleasing, but they're badass, so it's okay. So these ones actually have these structures underneath the skin that are presumably able to secrete acid or some sort of defensive compound that they're getting from the food that they eat. And remember, my badass neuter ranks eat other neuter ranks. So those defenses don't work so well on them, which makes them, again, extra badass. Okay. Some other neuter ranks, they don't necessarily have really obvious glands in their skin, but they're able to secrete a lot of noxious chemicals to neuter predators. And so I put a picture of this one because it's particularly gross, actually. If you go scuba diving on a reef, you'll find relatives of this one everywhere because no one wants to eat it. It's disgusting. And if you're a scientist and you have to deflect it and you touch it with your hands, you're gonna smell those toxins on your fingers because it's so strong. And you can't even keep this in a tank or a container with any other neuter ranks or anything else for that matter because it'll actually kill all the rest of them just by being in the same enclosed container. And it's pretty wild. So pretty effective defense mechanisms. And that's how you ditch a shot, revolutionarily speaking. All right, so now for the juicy stuff and away from the slimy stuff. So it's still slimy. All right. So we're gonna talk a little bit about slow sex because it's just, like, pretty different from what we're accustomed to. All right. And I will, if you have a disclaimer, I don't actually study, you know, sexual behavior in neuter ranks. Most of the slows I study are dead. So we're a little bit past being able to observe that. But I feel like I qualify to talk about sex in slubs because I spend a large proportion of my time looking at the sex origins and genitalia of these creatures. So that's mostly what I'm gonna talk about here. So if we think about slow sex, the first thing that's pretty interesting is that neuter ranks are all hermaphrodites. So they are both male and female. They've got all the goods. And sometimes they're usually simultaneous from aphrodite. So they will, when they're engaging in a sex act, they can be both the donor and the recipient in that sex act. This here is actually a photo of the process of this population between these two species of nympharotha here. Another interesting thing about neuter ranks is a lot of them, if not all, I haven't looked at the penises of all neuter ranks, so I don't know for sure. But firsthand, I know the ones that I study, their penises are actually covered in spines. That doesn't sound very pleasant if you're a female slug, but they all are, so, you know. I guess they put up with it. So basically this here, this is actually the penis of one of the slugs that I study. This is actually one of the species that I'm currently describing and naming. That's exciting. And this little insect here are the spines that cover the surface of this penis. You might wonder, okay, what's up with you guys looking at slug and filia so much? It's a little weird. This is a pretty typical when you're a taxonomist, because actually a lot of the times you'll notice differences between species in the arrangement of the sex organs and whatnot. And sometimes things like these spines can actually be informative and can tell you how things are related to each other or, you know, if you're looking at two different species. So it's pretty important. Oh, genital opening. Right on. Yeah. So the thing about these hermaphrodites, too, is that their genital openings are all on the right side. So you can actually see that. So if you look at them, whenever they're about to mate, they'll actually line up with their right sides sort of next to each other. And that's what these are indeed. That is correct. Don't worry, we've got some video. Okay, so this here, it wouldn't be to turn on the video, right? Okay, so these are two junior nursing rights. Again, the bad-ass books that I study. And this is a really, just a short clip that actually shows you the mate. And this is really cool, because if you look carefully, you can actually see the sperm being transferred there, which is pretty wild. So this is going to come up again, and I'll actually show you. So look carefully. These are the genitalia booked together. And this is actually really interesting, because, so they both have a penis and a vagina. Yeah. Oh, there's the sperm up there. Can you see that? That's crazy. Okay. These here are relatively common and non-specific brief areas. This is gonorrheic dysparticulosis. It's a nice red-matered right. There's a study that came out a couple years ago that basically showed that they have a disposable penis. It's talking while it comes in. They actually... Let's see for you. After mating, they will actually dispose of their penis. It's fine-covered, okay? They dispose of it. That's what you see here. And this, it's a little blurry here, but this is their penis-covered and spined. Spines. And interestingly enough, the authors speculated, well, since the penis is covered in spines, they actually might use it to remove sperm from competing males that have copulated before them. So this last figure here, this is all this stuff here. That's actually the sperm and it's kind of tangled up in the spines. So maybe it's a way to remove competing spines. I mean sperm. All right, really quick. I'm running out of time here. This is really cool. So back to the German girls. They're awesome. And I told you they eat other human rights, too. Well, sometimes they'll actually eat each other while they're doing it. So this series of photos here actually shows two of the same species. They're different colors. They're all untangled and they act here. And then this white one just decides who wants to eat the orange ones. So you can see here, they're actually still mating. They're still hooked up here. As this white one here is eating the orange. And in the end, just like a strand of spaghetti, this human dress here just kind of slurps up the rest of its heart there. The little bizarre. All right. So after all this sex happens, they lay eggs. That's what you see here. They're usually laying in women's like this. They're asking about in the middle of that presentation. Okay. Where do you go? Typically, many species will hatch into a marble stage. So it's around in the plankton for a while until it's ready to settle. And then they'll grow into an adult human right like this. But some species are actually really cool and they bypass this marble stage. And they'll actually hatch into a human out slow, directly. Pretty cool. All right. Time to do rock and roll. Okay. So when I was growing up in high school, I wanted to study biology and I wanted to study something to do with music business because let's face it, I just wanted to be a rock star. Like who didn't, right? I didn't realize that I would get to do both because it turns out research is a little bit like rock and roll. So one of the things we do, and I really want to emphasize this here, because lately on the Facebook groups, there's been a lot of people kind of bitching about scientists that collect specimens. So I just wanted to address that because a lot of times, we need dead specimens to be able to study them. I can't dissect the life's love, stitch it back up, send it on its way back to the ocean. Okay. But I promise you, the type of collecting that we do is not very destructive to the environment. Far less destructive than seafood harvesting is. So just FYI. So that's important. So we do a lot of collecting and one of the techniques and I get across to one of my colleagues, we literally call rock and roll because a lot of these slugs are found on the bottom sides of things like coral rubble, like you see here, and on the bottom of boulders like this, in the entitled, or while you're student diving. This is actually the most badass picture of myself that I own. So I had to put that in here, even though this is just a vacation in Puerto Rico. So I just put that in there. And that was the entire title. All right. So one of the things that I do is I use DNA to establish relationships. So this is really important because this is how we can actually study how different traits involved in slugs or any other animal. And traditionally, we could use this to do some morphology, so studying the shapes of different body parts of the anatomy. And we still do that. It's actually really important. But DNA is kind of a revolution that's the way we determine these relationships. And we get trees like this that helps us to understand these relationships. Again, how am I on time? Good. Now I'm going to keep going. All right. So again, this is the genus that I study here at Jim and Doris. A lot of them eat each other, other species. But a lot of them are really confusing because they look the same. A lot of them have this share pattern that transits the white with the more spots. It gets a little annoying and really difficult to identify. And people are so obsessed with nudibriques and sea slugs. There's many web sites, including this one called Nudipixel. Yeah, it sounds like a porn site. But it's actually a site devoted to nudibriques. And what people do on nudipixel is they'll actually upload photos of slugs and they kind of go diving or poking around at me for titles. And then a panel of experts will identify them for them. So what I did is I went onto this site and looked at one species of Jim and Doris. And I counted out how many species I identified as a separate species that had been identified by the panel of experts as one species. And it turns out that I counted people that posted 16 different species thinking it was Jim and Doris alba. And the panel verified the identity of six different species as Jim and Doris alba. I don't think people want to very good at identifying these guys. Are we any better? This is hard to see, so I apologize. But this is some of my results from my research. One of the shows is some of these Transistor White with Orange spots that we thought were the same species, it turns out they're not even that closely related to each other. There's like one cluster here, one cluster here, one cluster here, one cluster here, one cluster here, one cluster here, and one here. How they're related to each other. And actually what an actual species is. And I'm getting better at identifying these some sort of connection that I have with them. Again, how am I on time? So good. Keep going. So, this is my last story. Basically, on this huge expedition, we went diving at this one dive site. Two night dives over a couple of days. We collected all of these Jim and Doris slugs here. And we thought, maybe these belong to two or three species. They look very similar, don't they? They're all Transistor White with Orange spots. Imagine that. Well, it turns out that what we found on this, those species or those individuals actually represented at least seven different species in this genus just living under this one dock. That's mind blowing, because there are a whole bunch of other species in general living under this dock as well. So it turns out a huge percentage of muted rights are actually still undescribed and unknown to science. And just in the genus that I studied alone, about 80% of the slugs that I studied had no name. We didn't even know they existed before. It's pretty mind boggling how little we actually know about our planet. Alright, so what you should take away from this is even though you might not think much of slugs in general, they're actually pretty important. And they can be useful for helping us as indicators of our environment or what's going on. Because remember, a lot of these slugs, they're not typically found in our environment. So we can have, you know, maybe more main water, just warmer waters might be to blame or maybe you have an unusual weather event that they'll need or whatnot contributing to that. So that's more of the slugs that don't have shells for night. So they demand that at one point. And the thing was more in the context of oh, if they don't have shells, are they going to be less impacted by ocean acidification? The thing is that, remember, some of them pass through that larval stage. The larval stage does have a shell. So they would be vulnerable to ocean acidification in that state. But either way, if we don't have enough data to even answer that question, roughly 80% of the species in the group that I've studied, we didn't even know existed, it would be really difficult. The reason we know about the ones moving north on this coast is a lot of people have been, you know, monitoring different sites over the span of decades. And so they have really good data to show that, you know, these species present here quickly asleep. And so they can really show that there's been an awkward migration. And because of that, you know, if you guys are interested in this stuff, because to distance scientists, you're actually really helpful to answer these kinds of questions. It's important data. I'm going to avoid you. The question, convergence in a similar color pattern. So in the case of the ones I studied, trans just in white with orange spots. Great question. I don't think it's so much convergence. I think they have a common ancestor that had that pattern. And then there's just no selection, they're on the color pattern for those guys. And so you just get the same color pattern and they speciate, you know, based on other, you know, other pressures. Yes. There are lots of medical uses for C-slugs. So a lot of those compounds that I mentioned before are actively being researched for potential drugs for different diseases, cancer, HIV, things like that. And there are, I believe, certain drugs that are already in the testing of the basis. Two more questions. Who, like, maybe wants to answer their question or want to answer their questions? Okay. You have a great shirt. Great question. So the question is they feel a lot of different prey items that have, you know, different contents, like chemicals and whatnot. Do you serve new drugs specialized for certain prey item, or are they generalists? And in general, in general, they tend to specialize. You might have, like, a C-slug that will feed on several species of hydroids, or several species of sea squirts with sedians, but you don't typically see a new ring that's going to be feeding on hydroids and sea squirts and other new rings. There are some exceptions to that. I think of a local species, Fidiana, that actually feeds on other sea squirts and pyrrhaids as well. So in general, they specialize. That's one of the questions I'm interested in, which is, you know, do you have certain species that feed on many different types of squirts, or specialize on either one species or genus or family of prey item? Great question. And one of them actually feeds on the fins of Gobi fishes, which is really wild. I just had to throw that in there. Yes. Yes, I only heard part of the question, but I know I heard there were color. I didn't talk a lot about the era 8 was not at coloration, so a warning signal to predators, you know, don't eat meat because in my Achilles we're maybe sick. And in some cases, you know, that may be true, but there needs to be more work done. So there are some people that study that specifically and they will extract some of the toxins from new degrees at it to pellets and try to do experiments feeding it to different potential predators of new degrees. And so they can actually test, you know, like, are these color patterns that are associated with a particular type of toxin, you know, effective in deterring sea stars or which can't see the colors anyway, so that's a normal example, but you know what I mean. All right, thank you. So thanks to Vanessa. Vanessa is going to be right up here for the next 10 minutes to answer maybe your questions. I'll encourage you to partake in the bar. They will say hi to the local public library. If you do not already have an Oakland library part, you should go get one. She also frequent our food vendors, the Lucia Company and Shades of Sugar. We'll be back in 10. We're going to put an answer at the bar. We have $3 shot for some of the comfort and $3 for some of the comfort of toast. The next 10 minutes. It's probably just straight life between us. Difficult to put an exact number on the likelihood. I don't want everyone to worry about dying as the dinosaurs possibly did. Because there's so many other ways the apocalypse may happen. But don't even worry about us. Super volcano. How many of you are familiar with the super volcano? Super volcano is kind of like a regular volcano but it's super. They're really huge. And the initial blast of the super volcano which apparently there are fewer around the world. The initial blast could cover an area as big as the size of North America. But don't worry too much about the initial blast. Because even if we should survive that all the volcanic ash and dust that would be put up into the air would block out the sun and create global cooling and no more crops would grow and we'd all die of starvation. So that's one. There's one under Yellowstone. That's the case. We thought you wouldn't be close enough to be seriously affected. There's one under Yellowstone. It erupts about every 600,000 years and the last time it erupted was 620,000 years ago. But that's not the only way we might die. There's also a pandemic. This is the Spanish blue which many of you have heard of especially when you watch down now. The Spanish blue was sort of like the mother of all pandemics or all workflows anyway. It was the H1N1 virus and apparently most almost all workflows today are descendants of this virus. In fact, for example in the late 15s there was an outbreak of H2N2 influenza, avian influenza which killed 1.5 million people worldwide and has been more or less eradicated but still exists in wild and domestic birds. And also, people born after 1963 have no immunity to them. Even though we all live in a birdie space where the stuff gets transmitted so we're fast or we're full of travel it's going to be great. So don't worry too much about asteroids the pandemic is coming. This is always a hope for robot essentially. So I think this is my favorite one of all the disaster scenarios. These are just a few of our robot friends and weapons that we have currently. So we're rapidly approaching what some people would call a singularity which is that moment when robots become more intelligent than humans. In fact, the UN just in April, it was right, a convention on conventional weapons where they discuss the question related to emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Yeah, lethal autonomous weapons systems because they're wrenching between your standard drone killing robot that is killer robot. Consider killer robot that's controlled by a human versus your autonomous killer robot that's making a decision to ourself and we'll never choose to web us out because come on. So that's only a matter of time and then lastly we have germline modification another great one germline modification never. I wish I could credit who gave the role I don't know who made this wonderful graphic but this is basically changing the genes in eggs and sperm and embryos so that the genetic change that you create gets passed on to the next generation as opposed to like gene therapy which can help treat or cure disease but only affects that one patient and isn't passed on to the next generation. These are changes that enter the germline. This already exists for example you might remember from the news a few years ago there was a rare infernal woman with genetic effects in their mitochondria were able to reproduce using the donated egg of another woman and the offspring had TNA from both the egg donor and the mother and the husband so very interesting right and there's like a whole line of up called transhumanism which I learned about today which is people who really want to bring forward this more human than human better human being through technology and genetic modification and some people already say about this and feel like once we improve humans significantly to a point where they're not actually human anymore there will probably be an inevitable war so let's talk about that for a second you all have to think aside there's going to be four camps I've been researching this and this is what I've discovered what are the apocalyptic event maybe genetic war maybe asteroid maybe survival camp there will be survivors and we're going to be in four camps first you're going to have the machines if you could be part of this you could upload your consciousness get a robot body a positronic brain it's more appealing to report for the men there's going to be the sunny boards the enhanced humans with tech but still largely human we need a better recruitment picture then there's going to be your genetically modified human let's call them the animals and then you're going to have your ritual to human now it's pure so start considering because it's coming and you're going to have to think aside in the meantime to talk about one apocalyptic scenario which would be asteroids we have Gerald McCann Rebecca is scared of the jeavers out of you I'm going to comment down a little a room full of nerves and I know that as nerds you all watch the science channel the discovery channel the history channel and all those other highly reliable sources of accurate scientific information so if you have you've probably seen pictures like this swarms of asteroids orbiting around the sun so many of them so close together that if you were a starship commander you'd have a tough time getting through if you go to a website like a NASA website you might see a diagram like this there's a lot of pictures there's lots of little dots showing where all of the known asteroids are and again there's millions of them out there so you might wonder how did we get through an asteroid field well video games computer games movies they all show you how to do it they show the spacecraft kind of fly their way through an asteroid field and of course you remember in Star Wars Han Solo was trying to fly the millennium Falcon in these mountains and driving and everything and C-2PO said serve the odds against successfully navigating the asteroid belt or about 3,721 so this is the impression everybody has of asteroids millions of them out there flying around in storms and we can't get through them very well unless we really navigate the spaceship the right way the problem with it is it's simply not true it's bunk this is what an asteroid field really looks like when dawn gets full of stars this is an actual picture of a field where asteroids exist and this is what they look like space is a really huge place and you can have millions of asteroids out there and there'd be hundreds of thousands of miles apart and that's exactly how they are and there is an asteroid in this image if you look carefully if you look carefully right up there there's an asteroid inside the box you see it help me out here a little bit there's an asteroid right there now granted that they are far apart but if you are flying around flying through an asteroid field eventually you will encounter asteroids and that's exactly the situation of the earth the earth is flying through an asteroid field this gives you an idea of a 5 month period the Earth's orbit and it shows you all the asteroids that it encountered during that 5 month period each of those little dots represents an asteroid and you can see that we are flying through a shooting gallery now they look close but actually they are pretty far away most of the asteroids that you see are at least 1.5 million miles away from the earth and some of them are more than a million miles away but we do consider them to be near earth asteroids but some of them get a lot closer sometimes asteroids get actually closer to the moon in fact about 30 times a year asteroids get closer to the earth than the moon so you don't hear about it because in this case when we talk about it we get really close but most of the time we just see them go by and no problem the evidence of asteroid impacts is very clear when you look at the moon even if you look through binoculars you'll see that the moon is covered with craters and it's a record of billions of years of asteroid and comet impacts in fact if you look at the moon through a telescope you'll see just craters on top of craters on top of craters the moon has no atmosphere it has no weather no plate tectonics or anything like that so impact craters just stay where they are and don't grow so we see craters that are more than a billion years old on the moon so when you look at that and say well ok there's a lot of craters on the moon obviously the moon's been hit by a lot of asteroids but what about the earth there aren't a lot of craters on the earth the fact is the earth for every impact on the moon the earth gets hit 16 or more times the earth is bigger than the moon it has stronger gravity than the moon so that means it gets hit a lot more often so where are all those craters but remember that the earth has on the weather we have plate tectonics we have oceans we have bulldozers so there's lots of stuff to kind of get rid of the craters nevertheless we do have quite a few craters on the earth we know of at least 180 craters in Australia it's about 350,000 years old this one very interesting crater this is very immediate crater it's in Arizona about 30 miles outside of Flagstaff and if you are a true nerd you must go there this thing is fantastic it's three quarters of a mile in diameter it's 650 feet deep and it has a visitor center so you can go there and contemplate what it would be like to have something like this happen the asteroid that caused this hit the earth 50,000 years ago was about 40 meters across and by our current definition of asteroids do we consider that a small asteroid nevertheless if you were within 5 miles of this crater when the impact occurred you'd be hit by super sonic rocks flying out of the crater we have actually detected evidence of shockwave damage 100 miles away from the crater so this is a pretty spectacular event a few more recent events in 2010 a couple of Italian scientists were browsing through Google Earth and they were looking at the deserts of Egypt and they noticed a round circular feature and they said do you know what it looks like? an impact crater so they went there and sure enough there was a 150 foot diameter impact crater that we figured is somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 meters old it was ejected from out of the crater more than 500 feet away from it so again very small object hitting the earth makes a very big crater in June of 2004 of 1908 a small asteroid again about 40 meters across came down over the Tumusco region of Siberia it did not make it all the way to the ground it exploded before it hit the ground at about 30,000 feet that explosion leveled to 200 square miles against force fortunately it was a very remote area there weren't any people around so nobody was hurt but it flattened all the trees and the few that were still standing and all the branches were blown off of it more than 10 years before they were able to actually identify what it was that had happened here more recently 2007 an asteroid came down in Peru and this was a very small asteroid it was only about 6 feet across it hit the ground out in the pasture near Caracas, Peru and punched a hole about 45 feet in diameter blew out a couple windows in the little village that was nearby didn't hurt anybody however, this flat pasture area was actually the flood plain for Lake Titicaca and the water table was only about 6 or 7 feet below the ground level so very quickly the crater filled up with water and of course we all remember this one Chelyabinsk, Russia an asteroid about 17 meters across came down exploded in the sky and blew out windows knocked down walls and injured nearly 2,000 people interestingly the explosion of this asteroid did not happen over Chelyabinsk it was actually about 30 miles away from Chelyabinsk so they gave you an idea of how much energy was involved here another interesting story Chelyabinsk is where the Russians keep their nuclear weapons that aren't being used so when this began to first happen all the Russians assumed that those Marikoskis were attacking us you want to get a couple of terms to find here real fast and we use the term Neil quite a bit and Neil is the near-earth object it's an object that comes within 44.7 million kilometers of the Sun of the Earth Earth now that number is kind of an odd number but it actually refers to the distance to Venus we don't want to call Venus a near-earth object so we made it a little less than that another term that we use quite often is PHA Potentially Hazardous Asteroid it's a subset of the Potentially Hazardous Object Potentially Hazardous Asteroid is an asteroid that's at least 140 meters across and it comes within about 7.4 million kilometers of the Earth these are the asteroids that we consider to be dangerous now they say 7.4 million kilometers of the Earth they should correct that it's actually 7.4 million kilometers away from the Earth's orbit you can pass it across the Earth's orbit 5 years or 9 about 1993 scientists knew about impacts but they didn't really think they were much of an issue and it wasn't getting a whole lot of attention but a few astronomers thought this was something that we need to worry about so three astronomers Gene Shoemaker, Carol Shoemaker and David Levy got together at Mount Palabaric Observatory and started scanning these guys looking for near-Earth objects potential impactors after a while they spotted this guy right here this was actually a comet that was moving around Jupiter and Jupiter's strong gravity had broken it apart now there were about 20 pieces all sprung out but they called the string of pearls they looked at the data and they said hey this is going to hit Jupiter next year 1994 so they announced this to the world scientists all over the world started paying attention and they pointed the telescope to Jupiter and they said what would happen next few patients were looked the largest of these fragments was only about 1 or 2 kilometers across Jupiter's 140,000 kilometers so this is like a grain of sand hitting the beach wall so they didn't have high hopes but they thought maybe they'd be able to catch something if enough telescopes would climb up Jupiter what they saw was way lower than anything they would have dreamed of each of these impacts produced an impact point that is larger than the Earth Jupiter is surrounded with clouds those clouds absorb the impactor and create a shock wave that spread out to an area larger than the Earth so they realized there's a whole lot more energy involved in these impacts than they realized they thought everybody's attention especially you've got these guys' attention there we go but their attention, which is always a bad thing, right? so later on in 1994 the House of Representatives Committee gave direction to the District of Columbia so we'll let go of a little more attention so in 2005 Congress passed the Georgie Brown Jr. Neal Survey Act this directed NASA to find 90% of all mirror Earth objects larger than 140 meters instead of do that by the year 2020 so that was in 2005 or 10 years into that let's see how we did well finding the one kilometer or larger mission of objects we now know that there are about a hundred or about a thousand mirror Earth objects that are larger than one kilometer and we have found at least 900 of them so we've accomplished that part of the mission but in terms of finding those 140 year larger mirror Earth objects that by the year 2020 we're not even close we don't make that goal, we don't close and the reason is the process of finding these small guys is actually very hard and there are very few resources involved in doing in the last 12 years or so all mirror Earth object discoveries have been done by these three telescopes these are at the Catalina Sky Survey on Mount Lementaire Tucson, Arizona and these are big telescopes on a high mountain peak and they have been scanning the skies for quite a while and most of the discoveries have been credited to the Catalina Sky Survey a couple of years ago another telescope joined them this is Panstars One, this is in Hawaii it's also a big telescope capable of scanning quite a bit of sky at one time and together these are the guys that do more than 90% more than Neo-Discoveries and what they do is they scan the sky each night but they don't scan the entire sky they can't do that what they can do is they only scan portions of the sky each night so this is a graphic showing the parts of the sky that were scanned during a five day period by all of these telescopes now as they scan the sky they only look at each part of the sky for a short period of time if they spot something moving they make an initial effort to identify it if it can't be identified then they report it to the Minor Planet Center the Minor Planet Center is run by the International Astronaut and it is the global clearinghouse for all of asteroid data if one of the survey telescopes reports an object to the Minor Planet Center that says we can't identify this the Minor Planet Center will do some calculations about it and post the data on their website inviting other observatories to try to confirm this possible discovery the other observatories are not big telescopes like the ones on Mount Leonard they're mostly much smaller telescopes university telescopes, smaller research telescopes and even amateur telescopes so up at the Schmose Basin Science Center we have a 36 inch reflecting telescope where part of that network that confirms will follow up, follows up on the discoveries made by the survey telescopes but a lot of this work there's a network of about 350 observatories in the whole world and a lot of them aren't amateur telescopes this is an example right here this is a guy in England whose name is Perk or Pete Bertwistle and Pete has a small 2 liter diameter dome in his backyard and in England they call it the garden but we'll call it the backyard he has a 16 inch telescope and this guy spends a tremendous amount of time searching the skies trying to confirm or follow up on these asteroids and they have been discovered by the survey telescopes in fact he does it so much he's so prolific and he has a big time job you wonder where does that guy sleep I heard an interview with Pete Bertwistle and he said he was an airline pilot so I guess that explains it okay how do we do it how do we find these things the process is pretty straightforward we take three or four images of the same patch of sky and then we just look forward and we're being docked the word asteroid means a starlight so what we're looking for is a starlight object that moves in each of these images so you all look at this and we can all tell where the asteroid is right maybe not so what we have to do is do some processing we scale the images using known stars we identify the known stars in the images we scale the images based on the coordinates of those stars and that allows us to put all the images together align them properly and we develop an equation that gives us the corresponding stellar coordinates that relate to the pixel coordinates once we do that it's a real simple process to find them all we got to do is blink through all the images and you see the asteroid and you all know what that one is right okay so we found our asteroid now we need to get some data from it we do specialize software to extract data from these images these images are not in JPEG format or TIFF format or anything like that they're in a specialized format that we use for astronomy and we use this special software to extract data we get three pieces of data the exact time they all go a fraction of the second of that image the astrometric position which is the coordinate system that we use on the star charts and so on and the photometric magnitude which is the brightness of the asteroid again they just look like stars like little dots on the screen so brightness is something we use to try to estimate the size and that can be a challenge because all you're looking at is a dot and just because it's bright doesn't mean it's big on the other hand if it's dim it could be very big an asteroid that's very dark in color like this one here might show up at the same brightness