Episode 0038 · Jul 24, 1994 · 2h 1m
July 24, 1994: The Great Pyramid of Giza - John Zajac
Key Moments
Open transcript1989 asteroid missed Earth by six hoursLinda Moulton Howe reads from a House of Representatives report: in 1989 a half-mile-wide asteroid crossed Earth's orbit only six hours after the planet itself had passed that exact point, and would have been an unprecedented disaster.
100 billion pieces in the Oort Belt, delicately balancedZajac describes the Oort cloud as roughly 100 billion pieces of one-to-ten-mile space junk a thousand times farther out than Pluto, held in by extremely weak gravity - meaning small disturbances can drop them inward toward Earth.
More likely to die from a comet than a plane crashZajac argues that for the average person taking multiple flights in a lifetime, the probability of being killed by a comet or asteroid impact actually exceeds the probability of dying in an airplane.
1990 found 25,000 more Earth-crossing asteroidsZajac says that when Yale and Harvard launched the Spaceguard study, only 40 half-mile-plus Earth-crossing objects were known - and within two years they had found 25,000 more, with the count rising daily.
Could we have stopped Shoemaker-Levy 9? Absolutely notAsked directly whether we could have deflected Shoemaker-Levy 9 had it been aimed at Earth, Zajac flatly says no - and explains we likely would not have spotted any deep-space impactor with enough lead time, since Shoemaker-Levy was only seen because Jupiter had captured it.
Zajac begins with a sobering discussion of asteroid impacts, explaining how the Oort Belt holds 100 billion pieces of space debris in a delicate gravitational balance. He reveals that since 1989, close encounters with near-Earth objects have been increasing at an alarming rate, prompting a Congressional appropriation of $125 million to search for potentially catastrophic asteroids. The conversation weaves through Nostradamus prophecies and the Book of Revelation before turning to the Great Pyramid itself. Zajac argues that while human laborers supplied the physical effort, the pyramid's design is so mathematically precise that no earthly intelligence could have conceived it. He contends the structure encodes a prophetic message in the universal language of numbers, left in stone to endure for millennia.
A sweeping conversation that connects cosmic catastrophe, ancient prophecy, and one of humanity's greatest architectural mysteries through the eyes of a scientist unafraid to think beyond conventional boundaries.
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