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Jan. 5, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
55:07
Comet impact researcher Dr. Malcolm LeCompte talks astrophysical science with Mike Adams
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Welcome, folks.
I've got a great interview for you today.
We have Dr.
Malcolm LeCompte, who is with the Comet Research Group, and his doctorate is in astrophysical, atmospheric, and planetary science, which means he began studying atmospheres of other planets and has become interested in the comet impact theory and implications for understanding the history of It's
a pleasure to be here.
Well, where do we even begin?
How about this?
How did you get interested in comet impact theory?
What led you to this point where you are right now in the Comet Research Group?
I experimented my own and started looking at what we call bolide impacts, which are essentially meteorites that hit the Earth on a regular basis.
And it turned out to be roughly one a month or one every couple of months as Ebola is a meteorite explosion that's about as bright as the full moon.
Wow.
And investigating that, it turned out that the estimates for the numbers of these things was off by about an order of magnitude.
I mean, this is the thing I think is a problem with science today is that there's a sense that we know everything and I think we know very little.
We have some ideas.
We have some boundary or estimates of how often things happen, what the probabilities are.
But we're really just learning.
And we have to keep open minds and investigating because we don't know as much as I think we think we know.
I would agree with you on that point.
We have to be humbled from time to time.
Absolutely.
And that got me pursuing this topic.
And I started asking around from colleagues who might be doing work that would, you know, expand that domain to larger objects.
What was the likelihood of serious impacts in the Holocene the last 10,000 years or the recent Pleistocene, you know, going out to 20,000 years or so?
And I got hooked up with this Dallas Abbott at Columbia, Lamont Daugherty Earth Observatory, connected me to Dr.
Alan West, Dr.
Rick Firestone, who was at Lawrence Livermore.
And they...
Took me, as it were, and showed me the analysis techniques that they were using.
And I did some work on samples I collected from different sites in the States and validated their results.
And that was my first paper in the support of this research.
It's probably an independent paper that used their techniques to validate what they had done, because it was in dispute at the time.
People were saying, well, you can't reproduce those results, and I found them eminently reproducible, easily reproduced, in fact.
I have so many questions for you about that, but let me mention to the audience first, the website that you need to visit on this is cometresearchgroup.org, and there's an excellent series of presentations there.
If you click on Comets, Diamonds, and Mammoths, and you have the Younger Dryas Impact Overview, you can go through that presentation.
I think it's really outstanding.
So, did your research then, I mean, you said, of course, it was controversial.
We understand that Graham Hancock's special on Netflix has kind of reinvigorated a lot of attention in this area, but there's been a lot of resistance from traditional, you know, archaeological and planetary science academia circles, you could say.
But it seems like that attitude is changing.
It is.
I think it is, by and large.
There seems to be more acceptance for it because the evidence is pretty much overwhelming.
Every site we look at, every archaeological site, because we tend to piggyback off the archaeologists because they have the dated soil.
So we can go to a specific layer and test it and test the layers above and below it to see if it's reproduced.
And we have this one layer that's enriched in these, what we call proxies, evidence of the impact at that time, roughly 13,000 years ago.
Now, is that what Hancock is always talking about, the 12,800 years?
Yes.
Is it believed to be a single impact event?
And I don't mean a single object impacting, but rather a single passing through the tail of a comet that has multiple debris objects, for example.
But is it believed to be a single event or multiple events spread out over a thousand plus years?
You know, that's a really good question, and we don't know.
I mean, we think it's a single event, but there's also just, you know, kind of, what would you call it, distractors that say maybe it's not.
Maybe there were other, because we pass through the trail of what's hypothesized to be the source of this event, the Yankee Comet Debris Trail.
They turn out to be the Torres, as I recall, meteor streams, and we pass through it twice a year.
So turn back the clock 13,000 years, and there may have been larger objects more commonly distributed in that trail.
And the 13,000 year event may not have been the first time we did it.
So we really don't know.
This is such new science that it's really hard to nail down.
That's why I say we probably don't know nearly as much as we think we know.
We certainly don't know enough about this event.
Well, that's why I really enjoy talking to intelligent scientists like you, because I'm right with you.
I don't think that we as a species know as much as we think we know either.
I think there's too much arrogance and there's too much sort of dogma in science.
And I appreciate people who question it with new theories, which...
Many of which may be proven inaccurate, which is fine.
But sometimes a theory comes along that is a game changer, like plate tectonic theory, for example, or quantum physics theory, or what have you, right?
And I think that this impact theory and how it changed human history, I think it's in that same category in my mind.
And that's why I appreciate you talking about this.
Any comments on that?
Or I've got a ton of questions after your comments.
Yeah.
Well, we tend to agree with that, that it was certainly a pivotal event in human history.
You know, our research is...
There was one experiment that I did in that first paper, which was suggested by the archaeologist at the site, Al Goodyear, where we took some flakes of...
Of the typical stone that you use for making points.
We call it debris.
And that debris sat on top of a layer that was the Younger Dryas boundary layer.
Which is the start of that Younger Dryas period.
And we looked above it and there were these impact proxies.
We looked below it and there were none.
And also above that debris trail was no debris.
So we knew that whatever was going on at that quarry ended, stopped.
You know, full stop.
There was no more human activity for another thousand years.
And then the quarry was still quite liable.
And Native Americans did return.
But at the time of the event, they were gone.
We don't know what happened to them.
They may have moved somewhere, maybe to Mexico, to get to a warmer climate.
We don't know.
We do know that it affected human lives profoundly.
Oh boy, yes.
I want to ask you about that.
But first, can you talk about some of the physical evidence?
Because I've read Graham Hancock's books, Fingerprints of the Gods, Magicians of the Gods, and he talks about nanodiamonds and I believe carbon spherules and I think distribution of iridium or platinum, other kind of rare earth elements that are distributed following impacts and so on.
What is the physical evidence that you and others are citing?
For this impact theory?
Typically, a few of us have specialties.
And what I typically look for are the magnetic spherules, the glass spherules, and the melt glass.
Those are the three.
And if I want to find platinum, platinum seems to be the signature.
Now, the dinosaur killer is the KT boundary event that was 65 million years ago.
Iridium was the signature thing.
Platinum group element that is typically rare on Earth, but more common in extraterrestrial objects.
That was the signature element for that event.
Platinum seems to be the signature element for this event.
Whenever we look, we find a platinum layer, we know we've got the Younger Dryas Poundry.
That's pretty much the case.
Not always, but it's pretty much.
So that's one of the primary proxies we look for, is that layer of enhanced platinum.
Now, it's not huge.
It's not like you could go and make yourself rich by mining a boundary for platinum.
But there's enough there that's above the background levels to say, that's the layer.
Right, so the platinum might go from like 200 parts per billion to 400 parts per billion in that layer or something like that.
Yeah, exactly.
And the others are, well, if you take an object and you throw it against the Earth and it explodes with enough violence to excavate a crater or to excavate a certain amount of what we call the target rock, You get essentially vaporized target rock.
So imagine a rain that is melted iron, melted silica, melted aluminosilicate objects, just spherules, and that's the raindrops, but they're all melted in molten form at 1400 degrees Celsius or something in that range, 1200 to 1400 degrees Celsius.
And that's a hot rain and that'll hurt.
You're in that kind of a rain.
And that's what you look for is that layer of enhanced magnetic spherules and glass spherules that say that that was the rain that was falling out of the sky at that time.
So the instrumentation that's used to find this, I would imagine, you know, I run a mass spec lab for food science.
We do, for example, ICP-MS for elemental analysis in foods, but that wouldn't tell us the shape.
You must be using a combination of microscopy plus mass spec.
I mean, what kinds of instruments are you turning to for this?
Well, in my home lab, I use a microscope.
I can identify spherules.
But there are all kinds of processes that create spherules.
There are anthropogenic processes.
Humans create them.
Brake pads, when you put your brakes on, you're producing spherules that spin off the brake pads.
So there are many processes.
You have to separate the...
The things that create spherules from those that you're looking for.
And they typically have very specific surface features and very specific composition.
So we look for the composition and the surface features using imagery on an electron microscope.
So I can take out from a sample the spherulitic objects that look like they might be spherules, and then I've got to go through and ensure that they really are the things we're looking for.
Wow.
That is tedious.
Oh, God, yeah.
I mean, at magnification, the landscape of one sample is enormous.
I mean, you can spend weeks plowing through something on one slide if you're magnified enough.
That's accurate.
Yeah, that's exactly accurate.
Tedious is the word.
That's the word that I use and the word everybody tries it uses.
Well, I've earned a few badges in this area.
I spent many days plowing through bio sludge looking for plastics because they were everywhere in it.
So this is the composted waste, the human waste that's sold by cities like Austin, Texas.
They sell it as a fertilizer or a garden soil amendment.
It's called Dillow Dirt.
So you can go to the hardware store, buy Dillow Dirt, stick it under the microscope, And it has like ground up plastic pieces from tampons in it.
It's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, that's not an exaggeration.
Every crazy thing is in there.
People put it in their gardens.
Humans are good at soiling their own nests.
Yeah.
As a species, we soil our own nest.
That's a shame.
That's tragic.
Well, it makes me wonder, you know, if future archaeologists take a look at our current epoch, wouldn't they characterize it as the plastic trash layer of humanity or something like that?
I'd be surprised.
Yeah.
Where did all these DVDs come from?
You know, things like that.
Yeah, exactly.
I haven't thrown mine out yet.
Right.
It's like, what process formed these shiny discs?
Okay, but getting more serious here again.
So do you get into the...
Well, actually, let me ask you a different question.
How do we understand the differences in where a large extraterrestrial object strikes Earth?
For example, ocean impact versus land versus an ice shelf?
Because each of those three would have very different effects, would it not?
Ocean survey...
Sonar or otherwise, some other means of determining depth in pilot resolution.
Of course, the land is the easiest, but even the land can be difficult.
In fact, establishing the An impact crater or that a feature was created by an impact is one of the hardest things in geology, I think.
It goes through...
This is why I think our research is so controversial.
We don't have the crater to prove, so that makes it...
It's like...
Opening up a can of worms.
Because how do you prove it?
We're just...
Really, humanity is just developing these techniques to identify airburst events that affect the ground.
Chelyabinsk was a high-altitude event, but it also affected the ground.
It didn't excavate much in the way of ground soil, as far as we know.
But it leveled trees.
It leveled forests, didn't it?
Yes.
It leveled buildings.
And...
Had caused damage from everything from sunburn to blown glass damage to 1,500 people.
It was a bad event, and it was nothing like the stuff that we're looking at.
Right, and what year was that over Russia that that happened?
2013.
Wow.
Wow, okay.
And that was caught on some people's video, as I recall, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yep, it certainly was.
And you have the thermal event that comes from when those things hit.
The thermal event is usually above ground, you know, if the thing reaches the ground or It comes near the ground.
The thermal event, the thermal pulse that's generated by what's effectively a small sun, because the temperature of that will be probably an order of 5,000 to 6,000 degrees.
And that thermal pulse will incinerate anything close by.
And that was like 20-some miles away from Chelyabinsk.
People had pretty good sunburns.
Wow.
So, of course, it drops off.
By one over r squared is the distance.
So the square of the distance diminishes the intensity of the thermal pulse.
But if you were close, it would really do serious damage.
Absolutely.
That is extraordinary.
I wasn't aware of that...
But let me ask you about airburst events.
What is it that determines whether an object actually reaches the ground with an impact?
I mean, obviously, composition and density and things, but does the angle of entry into Earth's atmosphere, I mean, I would imagine that would be a big factor, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The thing's got to get further down if it comes in.
At a vertical angle coming straight down.
Right.
If it comes in at a great grazing angle, it's not going to go very far and probably end up being an airburst like Chelyabinsk.
That was a kind of a grazing low angle incidence object and exploded at high altitude.
So why are there meteorites?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was going to say that it's really a complex question and there's models that you use and you have to factor in the density of the object, the internal strength of the object, the composition of the object, the angle of incidence, and the velocity of the object.
So there's a lot of variables to try to figure this out.
It's not easy.
Well, that makes sense because I would imagine if it's very sensitive to heat-based expansion, then it could crack.
Once it cracks, then its surface area massively increases and then it can be vaporized in the atmosphere from increased surface area contact.
Yeah.
And of course, something like an iron object is going to penetrate deeper than something that's a rock or a carbonaceous chondrite, something that's a mixture of all kinds of things, volatiles and non-volatile materials.
So it really depends on the composition.
Well then, what's in the tail of this comet that we're talking about 12,800 years ago?
I mean, comets are...
At least understood to have a lot of ice.
At least that's my understanding.
I mean, you correct me, but what's in the tail of a comet that can reach the surface of the Earth?
Parts of the comet.
We don't know that anything reached the surface of the Earth.
That's the thing.
We're still looking to see if there's a crater.
There was a lot of excitement a couple of years ago when there was a crater found up in...
In fact, there were two craters found.
One is completely unknown, unexplored.
But the one that's Hiawatha crater is at the northern end of Greenland.
And there were some features in that research that suggested it might be very young, but sort of the smoking gun or the big piece of the comet that might have hit.
And the only reason, you know, really, we don't know what it was.
It may have been a comet.
It may not have been.
But we think the evidence leans toward a comet because there are sites that, Let me explain more about the proxies.
We have examples of sites that we've...
And I should give you a summary of the sites we've looked at.
We've got about 30 sites in North America.
There's like three sites in South America.
There's about half a dozen sites in Europe, as I recall, and a site in South Africa.
And they've all produced the platinum.
Some of them have produced the spherules.
And in terms of the melt glass, which are much larger than the spherules, spherules are about the size roughly of half the diameter of a human hair.
Oh, my.
You know, the vaporized sediment, the vaporized target rock.
The milk glass can be...
The biggest we've seen, I think, is probably a couple of millimeters across.
And that's not going to go very far from whatever was the source.
So if you've got milk glass, you're close to where the event took place, where that local event took place.
Because if we have a dozen here, a few weeks somewhere else, you know that there's a lot of these things.
It's more like a shotgun.
And you're getting hit with a lot of pellets, but it's hard to find where the pellets landed.
And when we find the milk glass, we say, well, it was near here.
And we've got a bunch of those, one up in New York State, a couple in New York State, and a couple in New Jersey, one, I think, in South Carolina.
Not too many at Westbrook, because as we've evolved the research, we've been more conscious of looking when we find some of the milk glass.
But that's the indication that it may have been something like a comet that fragmented.
And you see some of these comets fragmenting, and they go into thousands and thousands of pieces.
Not just the tail, but as it gets closer to the sun, it fragments.
Okay, this is truly fascinating.
I've got questions for you about relative velocities.
But how do you eliminate, or how do your researchers eliminate, solar events that could possibly explain this, too?
For example...
And pardon me, because obviously this is not my area of expertise, but is it possible there could be a large solar flare that would do this, or some kind of a solar outburst that mimics what you're seeing?
Is that a possibility?
There are some people who claim that that's the case.
I think the amount of evidence that's compiled so far leads to an impact by objects.
What exactly the nature of that impact was is a little not clearly understood, to say the least.
We don't know.
I mean, something might have hit the moon and showered the earth.
We just don't know.
I mean, some people have proposed Tycho, greater Tycho, as having been formed at that time.
Basically, at this point, I'm still working at the level of trying to find sites with dated soil and seeing what's in them, and maybe that'll help us move forward.
Okay, so there's a lot of research yet to be done on this.
Absolutely.
We know that something happens, a big event that changed...
The Earth's climate.
It seems to have changed the Earth's climate.
We don't have...
Even that is a hard thing to nail down.
Did it cause the Umbridge rise or was it contributory to the Umbridge rise in a warming climate?
Because the Earth was warming, had more solar insulation then than it does today.
And the question is, why did the Earth go back into a deep freeze?
Almost late to near glacial conditions.
And it seems to have occurred about the same time as the event occurred.
Well, that would be explainable, of course.
I know you already know this, I'm just sharing this with the audience, but that's easily explainable by the impact debris being ejected into the stratosphere and mesosphere and so on, and circulating for years, blocking sunlight, right?
Yeah, and also the shutdown of the thermal hailing circulation, if that's what it caused.
There's some evidence of that.
Well, that's the conveyor of warm water.
That's the Gulf Stream.
Basically, it warms the Northern Hemisphere.
If it shut down that, that would alter the climate tremendously.
If it shut off the solar insulation, even with two effects that could have contributed to sending the Earth into a deep freeze.
Yeah, no more nice French summers on the south of France when that's happening, right?
No.
It would be as cold as North UK right now.
But what about...
Let me give you an example of...
Yeah, go ahead.
An example of what the weather was like.
There have been models of what, during the Emirates riots, what the winds were like.
In the southern U.S. So imagine Louisiana, Alabama, Florida.
The winds at that time were cyclonic force on the average.
That was the average wind was essentially 40 miles or plus miles per hour.
Whoa.
I mean, think about that.
That's every day, you know, on average, you've got a wind that's essentially a cyclone.
Right.
There's a tropical, I'm sorry, tropical storm force.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Well, yeah, I mean, it makes you wonder, how do pollinators function?
How do plants spread seeds?
Well, I guess the seeds would spread quite far, but how do pollinators function in winds like that?
How do you have...
Well, I guess at that time there was no organized agriculture.
That's a really interesting proposal there.
It just never occurred to me, but I've been thinking that what this thing may have done was collapse the ecosystem.
And that would explain the deaths of the megafauna.
We certainly accelerated the process.
So we lost 36 species of large animals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, think about it.
You know, insects can't fight a 40-mile-an-hour wind.
No.
That just doesn't fly.
Right.
So if you're a honeybee, how do you get back to the flower that your friend told you about when the wind is sending you sideways?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
That's fascinating.
We'd have to get a...
What's the study of honeybees?
I forgot the name of that area of study, but we need to get a honeybee expert and talk about that.
Right.
I know api-therapy is bee sting therapy, I believe, so maybe it's api-something.
Apiary?
Apiary.
Yeah, probably something like that.
Let me ask you, has anybody done the math on calculating possible relative velocity of this comet that is believed to have impacted or objects from it have impacted Earth?
I'm sure Bill Napier has.
There's such a wide range of possibilities.
It's really tough to nail down.
Like I say, we're still trying to establish the full extent of what the earth contains as far as the evidence that we need to really nail this thing down.
So we're groping at that level, basically working in the dirt.
Getting our heads above the dirt is not easy.
We just have just submitted a paper on low shock quartz, which was not expected to be.
But we made the analogy with nuclear weapons.
And you can make that analogy in many ways.
You can make it with the collapse of the ecosystem by the essentially nuclear-style winter that would have followed an impact of this magnitude.
There's just a lot of threads that you can use to...
Estimate the severity of the event, but the velocity can range from roughly, I don't know, roughly 20 kilometers per second to comet speeds are typically 40, 40 or 50 kilometers per second.
So the range is huge, and the energy that the comet release, if it impacted at that type of velocity, would have been catastrophic.
So I assume that these were small Relatively small fragments of the comet.
Because if it's one of the big, potential big comets that come from the outer solar system, that could be a threat.
That would put an end to us.
I don't think there's any doubt that it would be an extinction event.
That brings up the next question, then.
I suspect that one of the reasons why a lot of mainstream scientists in this area may not want to talk about this is that...
There could be more impacts.
I mean, and we're not really watching the sky that much, as I understand it.
We're only watching NASA or, you know, other groups watching very tiny sectors of the sky in terms of degrees of what's...
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
Fortunately, there's been a real increase in the number of observation programs.
I can't list them all.
At one point, I could list them, and some of the more productive ones that are finding these objects and estimating the threat.
But unfortunately, that's the big problem.
There's a portion of the threat that we can't estimate.
We've got something on the order of...
There's the near-Earth asteroid population that's relatively close to the Earth all the time.
They're within the orbit of Venus and Mars, so they're circling roughly in our general vicinity.
And the initial thought was, well, they've got to be the biggest problem.
They've got to be the biggest threat.
There was a class of these objects that are called the potentially hazardous objects, asteroids and comets.
They're burnt-out comets, typically, so they don't have the velocity they once had, and they're in roughly orbits that go along with the The Earth's orbiter were the inner planets on us.
So they're not as...
They're good-sized, but not necessarily huge.
Maybe a few kilometers at most.
But the...
So if they hit, they would cause a big problem, but it wouldn't be a catastrophic problem the way a large comet coming from the outer solar system would.
And they're the ones that, in some respects, are a bigger threat because we don't know.
We can predict them for a longer period in advance of a potential impact.
But the population out there are in the trillions, going into the Oort cloud.
And there's different populations.
When you get past Jupiter, there's different populations of these objects.
And they range from hundreds of kilometers to thousands of kilometers.
Whoa!
And if a thousand kilometer object hits the Earth...
It's over, yeah.
It's over, yeah.
Fortunately, that's probably the age of the universe kind of a probability event.
But the smaller ones we know come in.
I mean, they come in on a regular basis.
And they're coming in from the outer solar system and are from that population of up to trillions of objects.
So this reminds me of the Schumacher-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter.
Absolutely.
And that was, I think, was that 94?
When did that happen?
I think 94 was right, yeah.
So that event, I even remember seeing at the time, I mean, I was fascinated by it, but I remember the scientists at the time saying on the news that they were shocked at the size of the, you know, of the visible impact that, like, I don't know, the crater, the...
But was that a big eye-opener event for impact theorists?
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes, it was a very big eye-opener.
And to some extent, it may have implications for what we're talking about at the Younger Dryas Boundary.
Not nearly as severe as that was.
I mean, we can't imagine how bad that was.
It was so bad.
Those plumes were bigger than the Earth that you saw on the surface of Jupiter.
That's what I remember hearing, yeah.
And I also remember hearing that this, I believe it was a comet that impacted it, but the comet broke up because of the gravitational pull, and so there were multiple impacts over a sequence, right?
I think there were nine.
Nine or ten, as I recall.
Wow.
Nine or ten big impacts, yeah.
So imagine getting peppered in a line as your planet is rotating, and you're just getting zippered by these high-velocity impacts right in a row.
Right.
Yeah.
Man.
Yeah.
I mean, wouldn't that also set off plate tectonic, you know, earthquakes and volcanoes, just because of the shocks?
Yeah.
I mean, those, if it was something akin to the Shoemaker levee, which is Jupiter, that would certainly have done major damage to Earth's crust.
Yeah.
There's a Sudbury Loppel that is thought by something to be a crater.
And it differentiated to the magma, and the magma came out, and this is where you mine nickel.
So this stuff would have perforated the crust of the earth.
And just imagine the amount of magma coming out of these multiple holes.
I mean, as I say, it does the earth in.
Well, and ocean impacts, can't they...
They can go all the way through the ocean and then hit the crusts at the bottom of the ocean, right?
They can.
And they can be very severe.
There's a...
In fact, a long time ago I read an article that posited that an ocean impact would be worse for the Earth than the crustal impact, the continental impact.
Partly because, I guess, the...
The crust is so much thinner at the ocean bottom than it is on the continents.
We're just islands floating on the ocean, the crust, if you will.
But you would think that the water would absorb a whole lot of energy, but then, of course, it would unleash these crazy tsunamis all over the world, all the coastal lands.
And the vaporized water would go into the ozone layer and eat it.
Oh boy.
Right.
One more thing to worry about.
Plus the water vapor reflecting sunlight.
Yes.
And the coming back down to Earth.
I mean, a torrential downpour.
So we don't know what a torrential downpour is.
Yeah.
Which, you know, compared to what that would be.
It would be raining.
Cubic miles of water vaporized.
Oh, good point.
Yeah, right.
And it would, like, throw ocean fish into the air all over the...
It'd be raining swordfish or whatever.
It's raining squid!
This is a biblical event, for sure.
So, okay, let me ask you a question that you are free to skip, if you wish.
If an object were approaching...
Now, the reason I ask this is because some of my other guests have mentioned this as a possibility, but if an object were approaching and our government knew about it, do you think they would tell us?
If it were going to hit, would they bother to tell us, or it's too late?
What do you think about that?
I think that the word would get out, because I think there are enough maverick astronomers that would say, bullshit, I'm not going to keep this to myself.
Yeah, you'd get a lot of Twitter or YouTube videos until the impact, right?
You'd be popular until Impact Day.
Yeah, let's differentiate, though.
We are trying to address the problem of the hazardous...
Nearer the asteroid population that could potentially come in and blindside us.
Those are typically the smaller objects, so they're not going to be catastrophic.
Nobody's going to hide those.
That'll come out.
They might kill a city, but they will not kill a nation or a continent.
Very unlikely.
On the other hand, something coming in from the outer reaches could be detected up to six months to a year, perhaps, in advance.
If you've seen the movie Deep Impact, I think that's relatively accurate compared to, say, Armageddon, which is, to me, ridiculous.
I agree with you.
Armageddon was ridiculous.
All the physics in that movie are so bad.
Oh, yeah.
I can't stand watching it.
Yeah.
But the idea that the government tried to suppress it and keep it from people, I was trying to develop some means of response.
That's the option you have, I guess, if you've got something coming in 60 months to a year in advance.
But whether or not you could do what they did, that little time remaining, You have to give it to Elon Musk, I guess.
I don't know.
Yeah, right, right.
Well, but it brings up a question.
You know, the trajectory calculations of those objects seemingly would be very accurate if the object experienced no further thrusting, and thrusting could happen from the heating of ice and off-gassing in certain vectors off of the object, right?
Absolutely.
So you can't really tell where it's going exactly.
That's correct.
I mean, then there's the gravitational perturbations it's going to experience coming into the solar system.
It's relatively unpredictable.
And so you've got all that working against you.
So you may or may not get hit.
You may get lucky or not.
Wouldn't that be wild to wake up one day and have like a thousand kilometer object just streaking across the sky and not hitting us, but you could see it?
Yeah.
You know?
I think a lot of people would get religion real quick if that happened.
I think so, yeah.
Like a mountain going through the sky.
You know?
Actually, probably more impressive.
I mean, you've seen depictions of that in films.
There have been a couple of films going back to the 1950s that kind of depicted that event.
But...
But yeah, seeing a mountain go by would be impressive.
Get your attention, certainly.
For sure, for sure.
But now, if something came that close to us, then depending on its approach, Earth's gravity could cause a slingshot effect, and it could accelerate this object's velocity, right?
Couldn't it?
It could sort of slingshot it back...
Into the outer orbit of the solar system to haunt us again another day.
I don't know if we've got that much energy to imbue, but it could certainly put it into a new orbit.
We do it with satellites all the time, have them slingshot past the Earth to get an additional velocity and they go after the outer solar system.
Right.
So, yeah, that's a sound observation that could be done.
Yeah.
Yeah, interesting stuff.
Well, what have I not asked you that you think is important for people to know?
Because I'm such a curious person, but I don't mean to dominate with questions here.
What do you want to say?
I think that the potential for catastrophic damage, whether it's to a city, to a region, to a nation, or to the Earth itself, is...
Something that needs to be understood and addressed, and we need to deal with it.
That's part of our existence on this earth, is that we're in a shooting gallery, and we need to recognize that fact.
And that the potential threat comes in many varieties.
There's many sources for it, different objects, different locations, different sources, and address that threat.
So in doing that, let's suppose then the primary establishment gatekeepers of scientific funding, right?
Because that's what's behind a lot of this is where the money comes from.
But let's suppose they all decide, okay, this is real.
We're going to fund this.
And the next step is they have more programs to watch the sky.
Okay, so they map everything that's happening out there, objects, velocities, trajectories, and so on.
But then what?
I mean, suppose you identify ten objects that might strike Earth.
What can you do about it?
Well, that's exactly what's being thought about and developed.
As we speak, I mean, there are people that, projects that are ongoing that are trying to determine what's the best approach to deflecting, to moving these objects in a timely fashion.
The trouble is if we get blindsided, there's one comes in that we don't see, we can't predict, and we have no options.
As they say, the possibility of blowing one up is probably a bad idea because then you turn something that's an object into a shotgun and a reproduction of what you think happened at 12,800 years ago.
But there's strategies for moving the object into a different orbital path, and you hope that that doesn't come back to bite you sometime downstream, sometime into the future.
Because once again, you've got these perturbations that can go on that can...
I can change an orbit.
And you hope that you haven't caused something that you were trying to avert to happen more seriously some other time.
So there's a lot of unanswered questions.
There's different methods of moving an object.
You can attach some sort of...
A screen to it that might be able to reflect sunlight and by a very small push, move it into a different orbit.
You can put rockets on it, I suppose.
That doesn't seem very practical, but maybe it will be sometime in the future.
Or you can do what's called a tractor, which puts a small object nearby and effectively changes its orbit because of its proximity.
It's another gravitational force on that object that you can manipulate.
Oh gosh, that seems like you'd need a lot of mass to make a difference unless you're planning well ahead.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
You need a lot of warning.
It seems like the Moon would be the obvious base from which to launch such projects because the Moon's already escaped Earth's gravity.
Well, it's the high ground, it's got better observation, no atmospheric interference, and so on.
Doesn't this really lead to the importance of using the Moon strategically in Earth's defense?
I think it's a good idea.
Strangely, the Moon itself has been kind of a vacuum sweeper, but it's helped defend us.
If you look at the surface of the Moon, you see it's picked up a lot of the stuff that might have hit us eventually.
So, perhaps it's been doing that for a long time and we just haven't recognized it.
But you're right, if we can get facilities established on the Moon that can do monitoring that we might not be able to do as well from the Earth, it might be a big help.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, you also have the Moon's relative orbital velocity around Earth to use in aiding your trajectory to get to the target more quickly, right?
Well, you know, depending, of course, on where it's coming in from.
Yeah.
Because it's got its own limitations as far as, you know, the path of the Moon and the speed that it's going.
You may have to cancel some of that out.
Sure.
It's probably...
There are spots, orbital positions that might give you...
A bigger advantage.
Some of the Lagrange spots, the spots that are sort of null gravity that encircle the Earth and the Moon, they might be better.
I haven't studied this at all, so I'm just, you know, it's a spitballing possibility.
But I think generally having a good capability and bases established, whether they're orbiting bases or bases on the surface of the Moon, I've got to give you a capability that we don't now have to protect the Earth.
Yeah.
Well, that's an interesting conversation all by itself, but it brings up a lot of issues.
Wouldn't it be great if our militaries of the world would focus on maybe protecting people instead of figuring out how to kill more people all the time?
They're busy doing that.
Right.
So, I mean, we have all this great technology, but we're aiming it at each other instead of maybe...
Let's look at a bigger picture, but We're coming up on time.
I want to be respectful of your time.
But let me give this out.
Folks, if you want to help support this organization, there is a donation button on their main website, cometresearchgroup.org slash donate slash, or you can just find the button on the homepage.
And may I ask you, Dr.
LeCompte, what would this group do with additional funding?
What do you need funding for?
Oh, analysis of the samples we collect.
From all over the world.
I'm going to Jordan to get samples for analysis, but for a different event.
It was a much more recent Middle Bronze Age event that took out a city.
We've established that that's happened, and that city was probably at 50,000 people or so and apparently died in an incident.
That was one event that we've been researching.
And then the analysis of samples from the Younger Dryness Boundary 12,800 years ago.
We're going to Greenland.
I've got a bunch of sites in New York that I'm going to be collecting samples from.
So that's one of those spots that we have melt glass from.
So we know we're near the epicenter of one of these events.
So we're going to be looking at samples from there, from those sites.
Very carefully.
So what we do is we use the funds to buy the instrumentation time, because all that instrumentation time is expensive, you know, thousands of dollars per hour.
And typically we have hours and hours of time in those labs.
So let me ask you this then, because, you know, I have a lab.
We do food science analysis.
We actually have two ICP-MS instruments in our lab, plus some other triple-quad LC-MS instruments.
Instruments for pesticide analysis, things like that.
We've got a really good digital microscope, too, with a nice lens.
It's capable of 2000x optical, but, of course, you can't tell what you're looking at.
It's like, what is this?
It's a really good digital microscope, very high-end, but can we offer some ICP-MS analysis services as a donation?
I think we would appreciate that immensely.
I think that would be very, very helpful to us.
Both the microscope and the ICP-MS. Well, we recently hired a microscope expert.
They're doing some biological samples with some staining and we're looking at weird things in food like cricket protein.
No, seriously.
That's one of the things we're doing.
But we should talk after this because I'd love to donate some lab time to you and About the ICP-MS, we do a nitric acid with a little bit of hydrochloric for sample prep, but we don't like to run hydrofluoric acid because we don't have nebulizers on the ICP that can handle that acid.
So typically we don't do geological samples.
That might be a limitation, but...
Well, not for us.
I don't think we use much of that at all, except for one application for...
The shock quartz, I think, uses some of that.
Oh.
The stuff that I'm doing uses no chemicals.
What?
You might coat something with gold or something just for charging, to minimize the charging of the sample.
Yeah.
But that's about it.
Well, what kind of samples are you analyzing then, and what kind of materials?
Well, it's looking at serials and analyzing their composition.
So, some of that can be vaporized and run through an ICP-MS. Certainly, sediment can be done, and we can isolate things that we never treat beforehand.
Yeah, absolutely.
We do fire assay, so I don't know what chemicals are used in that.
Well, we do a...
Yeah, I think we could help you, because our instruments run both what's called a full quant and a semi-quant simultaneously.
The full quant uses external standards, so we have multi-element external standards for the elements that we want to look for, which includes things like mercury.
But the semi-quant method, which does not use external standards, scans the entire table of elements, with a few exceptions, obviously.
Yeah, that would be very helpful.
And it gives you kind of a ballpark of things.
And then if you find something interesting, then you could maybe send it to a lab that's actually got standards for those elements.
Yes, exactly.
Getting that estimate of what's there is so crucial, and we're continually running up against that.
Otherwise, we have to basically send it off and pay a lab to do their highest-end test And get results that a lot of which is we don't need.
Getting that initial estimate of what's there is something we've been struggling with for actually a couple of years.
Wow.
And kind of pushing our capabilities for the instrumentation that we have access to to the limit.
Well, look, we could absolutely help in that respect.
So we'll talk after this.
And we also remember in the semi-quant mode, it also gives you a read on radioisotopes.
I mean...
Oh!
Well, in that case, let's talk.
Yeah, because, I mean, mass is mass, right?
I mean, the instrument's looking at masses.
Isotopes are...
The isotopic composition of these materials...
It's really critical for establishing whether it's extraterrestrial or terrestrial.
Yes, yes.
And by the way, our lab is ISO accredited, 17-025.
So it's, you know, it's legit results that you can cite as long as we are accredited for that specific method that we're using.
Of course, our methods right now are food methods, but we could expand our methods over time.
So anyway, this is fascinating.
I hope we can help.
I hope so, too.
Yeah.
I'm excited about this.
We'll inform the group immediately.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's nice to have, like, mass spec equipment laying around.
Oh, yeah.
We have one that doesn't work.
Oh, yeah.
There are a lot of those.
Most things are hard to keep up.
Oh, you don't have to tell me.
What it costs just to do maintenance annually could buy a car, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
A nice one.
And, of course, a small university doesn't have those kind of funds.
So we're having to funnel off Funds that we get from donations to maintain some of the equipment.
We don't even get to use it for analysis.
We get to get it just for maintenance.
Right.
You have to replace the turbine.
There you go.
30 grand.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So after we finish here, don't hang up and I'll give you my direct contact information so we can coordinate some of this and I'll get in touch with my lab techs and so on.
We can help make some of that happen.
But in the meantime, I just want to thank you for taking the time here.
Thank you.
This has been really fascinating.
This has been terrific.
I really enjoy this.
Well, me too, and I think what's cool about this is we get to educate people about this subject that, honestly, not a lot of people think about day to day.
But they should, I think.
Well, I think it should be aware.
It's something that we all should be aware of because it's part of our life.
It's part of the hazards of existence.
Yeah.
Not to cross the street, the middle of the street, wait for stoplights and things like that.
This is one of those things that can, if we aren't aware of it, can kill us.
Yeah.
All of us.
Yeah.
Right.
We truly are in this together.
Yeah.
We don't have another planet to go to right now, so we better protect this one.
My doubts about Mars.
Yeah.
Seems like something's lacking in the atmosphere there for some reason.
Yeah.
Not to mention the...
The climate is a lot to be desired.
Right, right.
I'm not too sure.
How's the magnetosphere there?
Kind of on the weak side, yeah?
Yeah.
That's what I figured.
Well, this has been great.
So, folks, the website is cometresearchgroup.org, and I want to thank you, Dr.
LeCompte, for taking the time, and this has been fascinating.
I hope you'll come back and join us again with more discussions about this in the meantime.
We're going to see if we can help you with some analysis using our lab.
That would be terrific.
Yeah, it would be a blast.
I'd love to do that.
Okay.
Well then, folks, feel free to repost this interview on your own channels.
You have our permission to do so.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com and, you know, the food science guy.
That's what I usually do with my lab.
But now, hey, maybe we'll study some geological samples.
This will be fun.
Thank you for listening, everybody, and I hope you enjoy this.
Have a great day, and we'll be back with you with more updates later on.
Take care.
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