THE END Is Coming, APOPHIS Signals EXTINCTION Danger For Us All

On Friday, April 13th, 2029, an asteroid as big as the Eiffel Tower will pass closer to you than the satellites that beam you TV. Its name? Apophis. It's named for the Egyptian serpent of chaos, enemy of the sun god. When it was discovered, the people whose job it is to calculate these things got scared. In December of 2004, the odds of it hitting Earth in 2029 reached 1 in 37. No asteroid before or since has ranked that high on the scale scientists use for impact threats. Today, NASA says relax, no risk of impact for at least 100 years. So here's the question. If it is harmless, why are NASA, Europe, and Japan all racing to get spacecraft to it before it gets here? What will Earth's gravity do to it when it does pass? Will you be able to see it? And what are they really preparing for? Let's get into it. June 19th, 2004, Kitt Peak, Arizona. Three astronomers, Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi spot a faint moving dot, a near-Earth asteroid a few hundred meters wide. That's normal. They find those all the time. What wasn't normal was what happened six months later when they ran the orbit forward. December 23rd, 2004. NASA puts out a notice. This asteroid has about a 1 in 300 chance of hitting Earth. April 13th, 2029. Low, but not zero. A level 2 on the impact scale. Then more telescopes start watching it. And the number moves the wrong way. By that night, with 64 observations, it's now 1 in 62. Then Christmas Day. 1 in 45. December 27th, two days after Christmas, 176 observations. The estimated chance of an impact on April 13th, 2029 peaks at 2.7%. 1 in 37. That would be like if you placed $10 down on a roulette spin and your number hit. This happens all the time. Apophis was rated level 4 on the Torino scale. That's the scale for how dangerous an incoming object is. Level 4 had never happened before. It's still the highest rating any object has ever received. Then, later that same day, astronomers dug out older images of the asteroid from March 2004. More data points meant a better orbit, and the 2029 impact disappeared. Think about how close that came to being a very different holiday. One old photograph moved the line. December 30th, nothing on the list was rated above zero. But Apophis wasn't off the hook. Not even close. Here's the problem with an asteroid that passes this close. Earth's gravity bends its path. And if it passes through just the wrong spot, a tiny region of space scientists call a keyhole. Earth's own gravity can set up a hit on a later pass. For Apophis, the keyhole that worried people led to April 13th, 2036, seven years later to the day in 2005, the discoverers gave it its name, Apophis, the Greek form of Apep, the evil Egyptian serpent, an enemy of the sun god Ra. And yes, that name sounds familiar. Two of the discoverers were fans of the TV show Stargate SG-1, whose villain is also named Apophis. Tolan has said the asteroid wasn't named after the character, he calls it a coincidence. By August 2006, better tracking made the 2036 risk negligible, but then there was 2068. That one lingered for years. Why was it so hard to rule out? Because sunlight also pushes asteroids. The rock soaks up heat during the day and gives it off at night, and that faint glow works like a tiny thruster. Scientists call it the Yarkovsky effect. In 2020, Tolan and NASA's David Farnocchia measured it on Apophis. Its orbit drifts by about 170 meters per year. Over decades, that's the difference between a miss and a hit. For a while, 2068 was moving the wrong way. In 2013, the odds of a 2068 hit were put at 2.3 in a million. By 2015, after new observations, they were 6.7 in a million. About 1 in 150,000. Tiny, but climbing. Nobody could close the book on it. It finally ended in March of 2021. Apophis swung past Earth, and NASA bounced radar off of it. The Goldstone dish in California transmitted, the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia listened at a distance of about 17 million kilometers. On February 21, 2021, Apophis was finally taken off of NASA's impact risk table for the first time since it was found. David Farnocchia at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies put it simply, 2068 impact is not in the realm of He also said something telling. When I started working with asteroids after college, Apophis was the poster child for hazardous asteroids. Now, why did everyone care so much? Because of what it would have done. NASA's 2021 risk estimate, with the energy of an Apophis impact at about 1,200 megatons of TNT, the Krakatoa eruption is put at about 200. That's six Krakatoas in one hit. It wouldn't have been an extinction. Scientists put the damage at regional, not global. No impact winter, but regional is plenty. A stony rock this size hitting land would leave a crater about five kilometers wide and devastate thousands of square kilometers around it, hitting deep ocean. It would throw up a tsunami that could flood coastlines about a thousand kilometers away and farther in some directions. For some coastlines, the reach is much bigger. The same estimates put the danger zone at about 3,000 kilometers for Japan. And up to 4,500 for parts of Hawaii, a rock you could walk across in five minutes, threatening coastlines on the other side of an ocean. Back in 2008, the B612 Foundation mapped where a hit in the 2036 scenario could land, a narrow band crossing southern Russia, the Pacific, off California and Mexico, Central America, northern Colombia and Venezuela. Then the Atlantic toward Africa. Their estimate for Colombia and Venezuela alone, more than 10 million casualties. That was a hypothetical, and it's off the table now. But it's why people took Apophis seriously for 17 years. So it's likely not going to hit, but it is still coming. And when it gets here, something strange is going to happen. April 13th, 2029, 2146 UTC. Apophis will pass around 31,600 kilometers above Earth's surface. That's around 19,600 miles. The geostationary satellites, the ones for TV and weather, sit higher than that. Apophis will slip inside their ring. The European Space Agency calls it the closest approach of an asteroid of this size that humans have ever been aware of in advance. You'll be able to see it. ESA says it will be visible to the naked eye from parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. A moving point of light with binoculars, most people of the planet will catch it. At its brightest, about magnitude 3. It'll look like an ordinary star, except this one moves. At its fastest, it crosses 42 degrees of sky in one hour. About a fist's width every 15 minutes over roughly a day. It sweeps from the southern constellation Centaurus all the way to Pisces. Sixteen hours after it passes us, it passes the moon too. It'll pass about 89,600 kilometers from the lunar surface. Two close encounters in one day. And our aim on this thing is now sharp. The uncertainty in how close it comes is about three kilometers either way. Here's the part almost nobody talks about. Apophis doesn't just pass Earth. It changes Apophis. At closest approach, our gravity speeds it up about 7.4 kilometers per second. It bends its orbit so hard that it changes the asteroid's whole class, from an orbit mostly inside Earth's to one mostly outside it. NASA says its orbit will change in a way that happens only during a very close encounter. In the asteroid itself, ESA says Earth's tidal forces will stretch and squeeze it, perhaps triggering quakes and landslides. Its spin could change. Parts of its surface could get scraped off and reshuffled. It's a strange object to begin with. Radar suggests it's about 450 meters long, possibly two lobes stuck together, and it doesn't spin cleanly. It tumbles with one full cycle, taking about 263 hours. Scientists think the pass could even change its color class by scraping off old weathered surface and exposing fresh rock underneath. Think about that. A mountain-sized rock, shaken by our planet as it goes by, and nobody has ever watched that happen up close before. Which is exactly why we're going. People have wanted to go to Apophis almost as long as it's been scary. In 2005, the B612 Foundation asked NASA to consider putting a tracking transponder on it. In 2007, the Planetary Society ran a $50,000 design contest for a mission to Apophis. It drew 37 entries from 20 countries. In 2009, Russia's space agency said it would study a deflection mission. In 2011, a team at China's Tsinghua University proposed slamming a solar sail-powered impactor into it. None of those flew. What's flying now is a lot more serious. NASA is first in line, sort of. In 2023, its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped off a sample from another asteroid, Bennu. Instead of retiring it, NASA renamed it OSIRIS-APEX. The Apophis Explorer pointed it at Apophis. NASA approved the new mission in April of 2022. The spacecraft is already on its way. It arrives a few days after the flyby and stays for about 18 months. NASA even plans to fire its thrusters near the surface to stir up rocks and dust, just to see what's underneath. Europe wants the before and after. Its mission is called Ramses. Member states approved the funding in late November of '25. In February of 2026, ESA signed an 81.2 million euro contract to build it. Ramses is supposed to launch in spring of 2028 on a Japanese H-3 rocket, sharing the ride with Japan's Destiny probe, which flies past Apophis first. Ramses gets there by March 1st, 2029, six weeks before the flyby. It will sit about five kilometers away and take a picture every minute as Earth goes by. It even carries a little lander called Don Quixote that will try to touch down. China was interested too. Its Tianwen-2 mission had Apophis on the list at one point, before it launched in 2025 to other targets. So that's three space agencies and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing a rock NASA says won't hit us. So why? Well, because Apophis is practice. ESA says it plainly. Getting a spacecraft to Apophis is practice for responding to a dangerous asteroid. If one is ever coming for real... The first thing you need to know is what it's made of. A solid rock and a loose pile of rubble behave very differently when you try to push them. And we've already tried pushing one. In September of 2022, NASA slammed its DART spacecraft into a small asteroid moon called Dimorphos. It cost about $330 million. NASA needed to change that moon's orbit by 73 seconds to call it a success. It changed it by 32 minutes. The details are wild. DART launched in November of '21, flew for 10 months, and hit at about 14,000 miles an hour, almost 7 million miles from Earth. The crash threw off so much debris, it left a tail at least 30,000 kilometers long. Here's the part that matters for Apophis. The debris did more pushing than the spacecraft did. Scientists measured a boost of about 3.6 times. The rock blasting off the surface acted like a rocket engine. But how much boost you get depends on what the asteroid is made of, solid rock or rubble pile, dense or porous, which is exactly what Apophis is about to show us. For scale, Dimorphos is about 160 meters wide. Apophis is more than twice that. Europe has already sent a follow-up spacecraft, Hera, to go back to Dimorphos and inspect the damage. Neither Dimorphos nor its parent asteroid was ever a threat. It was a test. Apophis is the next test. Watching what a planet does to an asteroid, so we know what an asteroid is made of before one is ever aimed at us. Now, the skeptic's view is simple, and NASA's on it. Apophis is safe. No impact for at least 100 years. The 1 in 37 scare was a calculation with too little data, and more data killed that prediction. That's how it's supposed to work. But think about what that What that scare really tells you. For a few hours in 2004, the best numbers anyone had said 1 in 37. The only thing that changed them was finding an old photograph. And Apophis was the one we caught early. It was found 25 years before its close pass, and it still took months of tracking, radar from two giant dishes, and the measurement of sunlight pushing on a rock to be sure. Now imagine one we find with a few years of warning or a few months. That's the scenario all of this practice is for. Apophis is the one we saw coming. 25 years of warning, three spacecraft, and a front row seat. But what about the next one? What if we miss it? Will we be ready? Thank you all so much for hanging out. 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