607: Asteroid Apophis is Coming | Ground Zero: California

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On April 13th, 2029, an asteroid named Apophis will come within 19,000 miles of Earth.

It will fly under our communication satellites.

It'll be visible to the naked eye.

NASA says we're safe.

But on a cosmic scale, 19,000 miles is nothing.

A nudge from solar wind, a tap from another asteroid, or a simple miscalculation is all it would take.

We already know where it would hit.

We know what would happen.

Apophis is coming, and it's a killer.

The story begins on June 19, 2004.

Two astronomers at Kitt Peak Observatory found a faint dot moving against the stars.

They logged it as 2004 MN4 and went back to work.

Within weeks, observatories around the world were tracking it.

The more data they collected, the more concerned they became.

This asteroid's path looked like it might intersect with Earth's.

The picture got clearer and scarier.

The asteroid was big, 1,480 feet long, larger than the Empire State Building.

In December, scientists made a shocking announcement.

2004 MN4 had a 2.7% chance of hitting Earth on April 13th, 2029.

A 1 in 37 chance of impact.

67 million tons of rock and metal were roaring toward us at 19 miles per second.

The asteroid was officially named Apophis, the Egyptian serpent god of darkness and destruction.

It was rated a 4 on the Torino scale.

The Clines would have met that.

No.

No, the Torino scale measures the hazard of an impact.

A zero on the Torino scale means no threat.

A 10 means no planet.

Even a four is a concern.

Apophis was the first object in history to reach that level.

This was bad.

The media went wild.

Headlines screamed about the god of chaos.

Cable news ran countdown clocks.

Were their countdown clocks more accurate than their election predictions?

No.

Uh-huh.

But scientists worked around the clock.

In 2005, they announced Apophis would miss the Earth.

But they found a new problem, a region in space about half a mile wide.

If Apothis passes through it, the chance of impact on the next pass isn't 2.7%,

it's 100%.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 3 a.m.

looks abandoned.

Most buildings are dark.

But in the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, Marcia Singh stares at her monitor.

She's running the Yarkovsky drift calculations for the third time.

Solar radiation pressure on rotating asteroids causes tiny changes in orbit, tiny changes that add up over decades.

This can't be right.

The numbers came back wrong, again.

Apophis isn't following its predicted path.

The deviation is small, 0.003 degrees, but that's enough.

The asteroid will thread Earth's gravitational keyhole, a 1200-foot region of space that will bend Apophis' trajectory, bend it directly into Earth.

Outside, Los Angeles sleeps.

14 million people who don't know they have 90 days left.

The impact models show Catalina Island as ground zero.

Billy, check the path of 2004 MN4.

Are you seeing this?

Hang on.

Oh my god.

What are you gonna do?

I have to call the president.

Marsha, go home.

Be with your family.

We now go to the White House, where the president is about to make an emergency announcement.

My fellow Americans,

I speak to you now with a heavy heart.

CBS News can now confirm that asteroid Apopis will hit Earth on April 13th.

This is a Fox News alert.

NASA says the asteroid Apopis will impact Earth on April 13th.

Global preparations are underway.

Apopas will hit near California on April 13th.

Coastal regions are urged to prepare for immediate evacuation.

The Department of Homeland Security has activated emergency protocols.

We've now entered the final phase.

Apopis will strike Earth on April 13th.

Prepare accordingly.

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On Friday, April 13th, 2029, humanity will witness something beautiful and dangerous.

Oh, sounds like my second wife.

If you're going to interrupt me right at the top, can you at least make the joke a little less hacky?

You're the street man.

Leave the comedy to the professional, huh?

Apophis will pass just 19,300 miles from Earth's surface.

That's closer than our communication satellites.

For millions of people in the eastern hemisphere, it will appear at sunset, a bright point of light as bright as any star.

But this star will be moving fast.

So fast you'll see it cross the sky in real time.

From the ground, the event will be a spectacle.

But for Apophis, the flyby will be violent.

As it passes, Earth's gravity will grab it, squeeze it, and twist it.

These tidal forces could trigger landslides and quakes on the asteroid's surface, changing its path.

This brings us to the keyhole.

A gravitational keyhole is a small region of space.

For Apophis, it's only about 2,000 feet wide.

If the asteroid passes through it in 2029, Earth's gravity becomes a slingshot.

It'll pull the asteroid back to where it started for a guaranteed impact on April 13th, 2036, Easter Sunday.

Current calculations based on years of radar data from Goldstone and Arecibo show Epophys will miss the keyhole.

Barely, Unless something changes.

And that's what makes Apophis so dangerous.

It's not solid rock.

It's a collection of boulders and dust held together by gravity.

And it's not a sphere.

It's shaped like a skyscraper, so it has no primary axis.

It doesn't rotate.

It tumbles.

And this chaotic motion makes subtle forces almost impossible to predict.

The most important thing is the Yarkovsky effect.

The sun heats one side of the asteroid.

As it tumbles, that heat radiates back into space and this creates thrust hold on hold on not everybody is mike the grass tyson that's that's not

how does that make thrust well the heat causes gas to vent which creates the thrust ah now i get it i can also create thrust by venting gas

pardon me classy

this is just a tiny push about the weight of an apple a tiny push is hardly noticeable But over millions of miles, it can change in orbit.

NASA's own measurements show it's already drifting because of this effect, about 650 feet closer to us every year.

Right now, Epophas is impossible to see.

It's lost in the glare of the sun.

It won't be visible again until 2027.

And during this blind spot, a small nudge from another rock could alter its path completely.

And we would have just two years to recalculate everything.

And two years to prepare for a city killer might be enough.

But sometimes we only get hours.

Sometimes city killers aren't found until they fly by.

In fact, this happened last year.

The president hasn't been seen in five days.

His last public appearance was the announcement.

We have 90 days to solve this problem.

America's best minds are working on it.

Then he vanished.

Official word secured at an undisclosed location.

Everyone knew that meant Cheyenne Mountain.

Anyone who had the means to escape didn't waste any time.

Once the risk hit X, they were gone.

Politicians, celebrities, people you've watched your whole life evacuated while the highways jammed.

What we saw was an orderly panic among the ultra-wealthy.

Beverly Hills emptied almost overnight.

It was Beverly Hills first, no surprise there.

Gulf streams and Learjets lined up like limos, taking off every 90 seconds.

The 405 is a graveyard of abandoned vehicles.

Families walked for days into the Mojave.

The poor headed to tent cities in Nevada.

Desert camps with no water, no power, no plan, just distance from the coast.

Fuel ran out, roads clogged.

Now, tent cities rise like new towns, only no one planned them.

Three million people have fled Los Angeles in just 14 days.

Three million people gone in two weeks.

Gas hit $47 a gallon, then the stations just closed.

The tanker drivers stopped showing up.

Why deliver fuel for worthless paper?

Markets remain volatile as the Apophis timeline advances.

Commodities like iodine tablets, fuel, and food stocks have surged in value.

The new currency is water, ammunition, and insulin.

A vial of insulin costs three gallons of water.

if you can find it.

We all got to watch Apophis grow larger in the sky.

A red star visible during daylight getting bigger every day.

Suicide hotlines stopped answering.

Too many calls, not enough volunteers.

The volunteers had their own lives to worry about.

Apophis, prepare for the light.

Religious movements started sprouting up.

As the world edges closer to impact, religious fervor has surged.

The Church of the Final Days and the Apophis Witnesses have emerged, offering hope and salvation for those who believe.

Apophis,

guide us to the light.

When official authorities dissolved, the local population took control.

The Los Angeles Police Department dissolved last week.

Over half the force simply didn't show up.

The chain of command collapsed overnight.

The 405 belongs to the Crips now.

Their blue flags fly over improvised roadblocks.

They're not attacking rival crews.

They're screening vehicles and controlling movement.

Crips and surroundings are distributing food, rationing medicine, even setting curfews.

Ma'am, it's not safe to be out.

If you need anything, check with me.

What used to be gang turf in Los Angeles has now hardened into checkpoint states.

Neighborhoods that once feared violence are now relying on it for structure.

Call them gangs, call them militias, but right now, they're the only thing resembling law and order in the city of Los Angeles.

Society didn't collapse, it reorganized itself.

The powerful fled, the poor waited, and Apophis kept coming.

While some astronomers celebrated, another rock caused global panic.

In late 2024, asteroid 2024YR4 became the most dangerous object in modern history.

A building-sized rock, its impact probability kept climbing, 1.5%, then 2.8%,

then over percent that threat prompted china to establish its first ever planetary defense unit they're recruiting astrophysicists under age 35 their 2030 mission will try to deflect asteroid 2015 xf 261 using a dual spacecraft approach one to impact another to evaluate the results

international cooperation is growing because the truth is we have no idea what's coming.

NASA estimates there are 25,000 city killers crossing our orbit and they've only found half 13 500 are still out there somewhere completely hidden somewhere completely hidden huh uh you mean like the moon landing tapes

this detection gap creates nightmare scenarios in 2019 asteroid 2019 okay was found it's 400 feet wide it was spotted less than 24 hours its closest approach it missed earth by only 40 000 miles a direct hit would have released 30 megatons of energy That's 300 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, all with less than a day's warning.

The problem is the sun.

Our telescopes have to look away from the sun.

Objects approaching from that direction remain invisible until they hit us, like in 2013, the meteor that hit Chelyabanks.

NASA's NEO Surveyor Telescope is set to launch in 2027.

It will finally close this blind spot.

It will use infrared and should find 90% of the remaining city killers within 10 to 20 years.

But until then, we're defenseless against an attack from the direction of the sun.

To understand how devastating that kind of surprise can be, you don't even have to look up, you can look down.

Because buried in a layer of sediment around the world is evidence of an impact that reset civilization.

The last Chinook lifted off from UCLA Medical Center at 6 a.m.

Doctors stood on the helipad watching it disappear.

They had patients on ventilators, premature babies in incubators.

They were not leaving.

LAX has gone silent.

No departures, no arrivals, just grounded planes and flickering monitors.

The terminals are empty now.

The last jet out of LAX lifted off at 2.17 p.m.

United to Denver.

It was half full.

Those who could afford to leave already had.

Those who remained made their choice.

The elderly couple in Brentwood, who'd lived there 50 years, they sat on their porch holding hands.

They weren't leaving either.

For those still in Los Angeles, officials have confirmed that all remaining power will be shut off today at exactly noon.

The blackout is deliberate to reduce fire risk after the strike.

Please take this time to shelter and remain off the streets.

The power grid shut down at noon.

Controls shut down to prevent fires after impact.

The emergency alert system broadcasts its final message:

Seek shelter.

Stay away from windows.

God bless America.

Then static.

Maggie Powers, an ICU nurse, writes her patients' names on their foreheads with a sharpie.

She figures when the building collapses, someone should know who they are.

She has 14 patients on ventilators.

The backup generators have 30 hours of fuel.

That means her patients only have 30 hours of life.

Animals flee inland.

Coyotes run through downtown.

Birds fly east in massive flocks.

Dogs howl constantly.

Every animal except humans understands what the receding ocean means.

Scientists warn this is not a tide, it's a gravitational response.

Something massive is pulling on the ocean.

The Pacific has pulled back over 20 feet since yesterday, like it's holding its breath.

Entire reefs are exposed.

Seismographs are now detecting microquakes, gravitational pulses, every 90 seconds.

They're weak, but rhythmic.

Every 90 seconds, the Earth flinches.

Experts say it's the gravity of what's coming, literally, and the ocean is trying to warn us.

The last text messages go out before the cell towers shut down.

I Love You is sent 847,000 times in Los Angeles County.

Most messages are never delivered.

Apothis filled three degrees of sky.

You could see it tumbling end over end, a mountain in space.

The last thing 50 million people would ever see.

12,800 years ago, Earth was emerging from the last ice age.

Temperatures were warming.

Massive ice sheets were melting.

Then suddenly, everything reversed.

A comet about 62 miles wide broke apart and bombarded the planet.

The evidence is found in a thin layer of rock found across four continents, the Younger Dryas boundary layer, also referred to as the Black Mat.

The Black Mat contains evidence called impact proxies, iridium, shocked quartz, nanodiamonds, microscopic spherules of melted rock.

At over 40 sites, the concentrations of impact proxies are millions of times above normal levels, all date back to exactly 12,800 years ago.

A series of objects hit the North American ice sheet, causing mass flooding.

Continents sank beneath the sea.

The impacts triggered global wildfires.

Then came the freeze.

Ooh, a song of ice and fire.

Yes, the freeze lasted 1,200 years.

That's how long it's going to take George Martin to finish the books.

The devastation was total.

Mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, American horses, all gone.

75% of North American megafauna went extinct.

Two-thirds of the human population disappeared.

The first widespread human culture in North America vanished from the archaeological record.

This wasn't climate change.

This wasn't over-hunting.

This was a civilization reset.

And comets are different from asteroids and far more dangerous.

Asteroids follow predictable paths.

Comets arrive from the outer solar system.

They have long elliptical orbits, so they can show up with little warning and sometimes as little as six months.

As I write this, Comet 3i Atlas is headed our way.

It was spotted a few weeks ago.

It'll make its closest approach to Earth in December.

That's fast.

So fast, there is not a thing we can do but watch and wait.

Asteroids hit Earth at 19 miles per second.

Comets come in at 45.

A comet delivers more than nine times the destructive power than an asteroid of the same size.

The most dangerous comet we know is Swift Tuttle, 16 miles wide.

A land impact would release energy 27 times greater than the Chickshu Lube dinosaur killer.

One astronomer called it the single most dangerous object known to humanity.

Now, despite what mainstream scientists say, asteroids hit Earth all the time.

But what about comets?

How often do they hit us?

Every hundred million years?

Every 10 million years?

One million years?

Nope.

Comets of all sizes hit the Earth on average every three days.

The flash came first.

The sky turns white.

Not bright, white.

Everything within 100 miles ignites simultaneously.

The thermal pulse pulse travels at light speed.

By the time your brain understood the flash, your body was already vapor.

That's mercy.

Instantaneous conversion from matter to energy.

The blast wave expanded at Mach 2, a wall of superheated air traveling 800 miles per hour.

It flattened everything from San Diego to Bakersfield.

The fireball climbed 60 miles into the atmosphere so high it pierced the mesosphere.

It was visible from space.

From Phoenix to Vegas, people saw it light up the sky.

It didn't look like fire.

It looked like a second sun.

Then the horizon vanished.

Is that

Los Angeles?

The temperature of the plume exceeded 10,000 degrees Celsius.

What erupted wasn't smoke, it was Earth itself turned to gas.

Seven states were hit by ejecta.

It wasn't just ash, it was fragments of Earth's crust fused and glowing.

Some of it traveled faster than sound.

Chunks of vaporized ocean rose miles into the sky, then hardened mid-air before slamming down across the southwest.

Reports of burning fragments came in from as far as Colorado.

It rained fire.

The earthquake was a 10.5 on the Richter scale.

The ground rippled like water.

Then silence.

People were too frightened to notice.

The Pacific Ocean was moving.

Every year, our planet flies through invisible minefields left by disintegrating comets.

We call them meteor showers.

We give them pretty names, the Perseids, the Leonids, the Geminids.

But these aren't harmless light shows.

We're flying through the shattered remains of giant comets at 67 miles per hour.

And some of those fragments are massive.

Remember Swift Huddle, the most dangerous object known to humanity?

The Perseid meteor shower is caused by the Earth flying through trillions of pieces of debris from Swift Huddle.

Trillions.

And we're not just crossing one minefield.

We're crossing a dozen.

The Leonids can produce storms of hundreds of thousands of meteors per hour.

The Lyrids come from a comet two and a half miles wide.

There are 12 or 13 meteor storms every year, sometimes more.

It takes the Earth several days to pass through the torrid meteor stream.

It's so big.

The torrid meteor stream is full of filaments of debris.

Some of those filaments are very small debris.

Some of them are much larger debris and much more dangerous.

We pass through it twice a year.

I've likened it in the past to strapping on a blindfold and crossing an eight-lane highway and just hoping that you don't get hit by a truck.

The meteor meteor shower that's most relevant to us is the torrents.

The debris field is almost 20 million miles wide.

We cross it every year.

It has trillions of objects that range from the size of grains of sand to the size of cities.

How many big objects?

Nobody knows.

It could be 10, it could be 100.

The government doesn't like to talk about it.

The government knew that they couldn't do anything about it, and they were starting to get worried calls from their constituents.

What can we do about these things?

You got to do something about it.

You got to stop it.

And they couldn't so what they decided to do was to just pretend that it wasn't real

they had the public fears about the impacts they decided to just deny deny deny just say don't worry there's no problem we've got it under control when they didn't

the tunguska event in 1908 happened during the peak of the torids a fragment just 200 feet wide exploded over siberia flattening 80 million trees if that happened over new york paris Paris, or London, those cities would be gone.

We don't really need to be hit by a giant object to cause planetary chaos.

We don't have to be hit at all.

Every year, about 50 objects pass closer to the Earth than our satellites.

Losing our satellites would cripple the global economy.

Phone service, the internet, the banking system, all gone.

And that's terrifying.

But in 2022, for the first time in history, humanity fought back.

The Pacific Ocean recoils from the impact.

Eight minutes ago, Apophis punched a 12-mile hole in the sea floor.

The water rushed in, hit molten rock, exploded into steam.

Now it's coming back.

What was once shoreline is now seabed.

Fish carcasses rot beneath a baking sun.

Downtown has four minutes left.

A tsunami of unimaginable scale, 150 meters high, is sweeping through Los Angeles.

Entire districts have been erased in seconds.

The whole ocean is coming.

Imagine a skyscraper made of water moving at 450 miles per hour.

That's what hit Los Angeles this afternoon.

Entire neighborhoods are gone.

We are witnessing the unthinkable.

A wall of water over 500 feet high has torn through Los Angeles, moving faster than a commercial jetliner.

The wall of water doesn't break, it maintains its height.

What hit LA was no wave, it was a moving cliff of ocean, 150 meters high, traveling faster than fire.

I have to get to the roof.

It tears through the city at 200 miles per hour, dragging cars, homes, and people with it.

Mom!

Initial estimates suggest tens of millions are gone.

Entire cities, entire families simply vanished.

We don't have exact figures yet, but we know what's missing.

The silence from Los Angeles.

That silence speaks for millions.

But more than California is affected.

This is not just California.

This is not just the United States.

This event is global.

Catalina Island is gone, not underwater, gone, erased.

The impact event struck with such force, it ceased to exist.

The Pacific shelf fractured.

We are no longer talking about local devastation.

This is global.

There was no debris, no island, just a column of plasma where land used to be.

Catalina didn't sink into the ocean.

It was atomized.

This is going to affect all of us.

This impact event is global.

The dust and debris in the atmosphere blocked out the sun.

Photosynthesis stopped.

The Earth's temperature dropped by almost 10 degrees.

A new ice age was triggered.

And humanity went underground.

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Right now, we're working on technology to spot asteroids and comets early enough to give us time to prepare.

So what if we spot one coming?

What can we do?

I could stay awake just to hear you breathing.

Please don't.

Watch your smile while you are sleeping.

While you're far away, I'm dreaming.

Okay, that's...

I could spend my life in this great serena.

That's enough.

Fine, fine.

You might be blind to asteroids, but you should have seen an Abigail Joe coming.

On September 26, 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour.

The concept was simple, but revolutionary.

Take a 1,200-pound spacecraft, crash it into a 500-foot-wide asteroid, see if we can change its orbit.

The results exceeded expectations.

DART changed the asteroid's orbital period 25 times more than than required.

It proved we can move space rocks.

But the mission also revealed a problem, the rubble pile dilemma.

DART was far more effective than predicted because the asteroid wasn't a solid rock.

It was a loose pile of rubble.

The impact created a massive plume of debris that acted like a rocket engine, supercharging the push.

This means our best defense is also messy, chaotic, and difficult to predict.

Yeah, like Spirit Airlines.

That was a cheap shot.

Spirit Airlines is on time about as often often as my alimony checks.

Anyway, to move an asteroid requires years of warning.

For a surprise city killer, our only short-notice option is a nuclear device.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits placing nuclear weapons in space.

Now, in an emergency, the world would probably waive this restriction, but it's never been tested.

We have the technology, the talent, and the money to create the tools we need to defend the planet.

The one thing we can't manufacture is time.

And time

is not on our side.

The first days underground were chaotic.

Two million people crammed into the Moscow Metro, half a million in the London Underground.

Every subway system on Earth became humanity's last refuge.

People fought for platform space, killed for corners to sleep.

The strong took the train cars, the weak got the tunnels.

The filth was unbearable.

No working toilets for millions.

Disease spread fast.

Cholera, dysentery, bodies piled up in maintenance tunnels.

The smell made people vomit, which just spread more

Then organization emerged.

Not democracy, survival.

We're going to need everyone to pitch in.

It's the only way we survive down here.

Former military officers established order.

I think we can convert most of these tunnels to living quarters.

Top priority is getting power back online.

Engineers got generators running.

What's the volts on this?

12?

15?

That's right.

Nice.

Doctors created triage stations.

The dead were processed into fertilizer.

Nothing could be wasted.

We lived off mushrooms until LED lights were brought in from abandoned cannabis farms.

Thousands of hydroponic gardens came online.

Subway tracks were ripped up, replaced with growing beds.

The circle line became London's farm.

Still, we mostly ate mushrooms.

But within six months, the tunnels transformed.

Art appeared on walls.

You better not write any dirty poems over there.

No promises.

Children's classrooms and old ticket booths.

An economy emerged.

Calories for labor.

Labor for medicine.

Medicine for hope.

Take three drops with a meal and you'll feel a lot better.

Thanks so much, Doc.

Moscow's metro became a city.

Same with Paris, New York, Tokyo.

Organized, efficient, alive.

Babies were born underground.

They'd adapted perfectly.

They'd never known the sun, so they didn't miss it.

Ham radio networks connected the colonies.

Tulsatown, this is Dallas.

How copy?

Tulsatown here.

Solid copy Dallas.

Detroit, do you read?

Any chance you have a spare diesel?

We might be frozen, Toronto, but we're still Motown.

We got you.

Appreciate it, Motown.

Baltimore's got you back.

You can count on us.

Hang in there, Milwaukee.

We've got water filters to spare.

Chicago saves our bacon again.

Thanks again, Windy City.

Thank you, Boston.

We owe you one.

Go, Red Sox.

Don't push it, Boston.

Break one nine.

Breaker one nine.

Minneapolis here.

Anyone reading this?

Winnipeg here.

You are five by five, Minneapolis.

Loud and clear.

It is so good to hear your voice, Winnipeg.

How are you doing up there?

Cold.

Copy that.

The surface was still too cold and dark to survive.

The air was still toxic.

But small trading parties would go from colony to colony moving goods.

In just a few years, trade routes were established.

Every colony soon had access to all the others.

The martial law that first organized the colonies naturally fell back to elected leadership and cooperation.

This was more than survival, this was civilization.

The story began with a single asteroid, Apophis.

That threat led us to a hidden history of cosmic impacts and the terrifying realization that thousands of other city killers are still out there.

So let's separate fact from fiction.

Fact: Apophis is no longer a threat.

The initial 2.7% impact probability was real, but current data says it will miss us and the gravitational keyhole in 2029.

Probably.

Fact.

We can move asteroids.

NASA's DART mission proved it.

The kinetic impactor worked, but because asteroids aren't solid, there's no way to predict the outcome.

Fact, a major impact happened in human history.

The evidence for the Younger Dryas impact 12,800 years ago is overwhelming.

Platinum spikes, nanodiamonds, and the black mat point to a fragmented comet that reset civilization.

It's not a question of will it happen again, but when.

And the big fiction, we're perfectly safe.

We are not.

But we can change that.

For 4.5 billion years, life on this planet has been at the mercy of random cosmic violence.

That's no longer true.

We're the first species in Earth's history capable of seeing the threat coming and the first with the power to stop it.

The question is no longer about ability.

It's about will.

Apothis was transformed into a symbol of fear.

I think that's a good thing.

These objects should inspire fear.

One medium-sized asteroid releases more energy than all the nuclear weapons in the world.

We need to pressure our leaders and the scientific community to take this seriously.

Apophis will be here in a few years.

It'll be hard to ignore a mountain zipping across the sky.

I hope it becomes the wake-up call we desperately need.

Because we have two choices: be motivated by the disaster that almost happened, or be ignorant of the disaster that definitely will.

will.

Blue sky.

Just a patch above Boulder, Colorado.

Real blue.

The first clear sky to cut through the green haze that covered Earth for almost two decades.

18 years after impact to the day, the first baby was born above ground.

Dawn Mitchell of the Boulder colony.

Well, I guess technically she's from Boulder, Colorado.

The first child in a generation to grow up with a clear sky overhead, not concrete and rebar.

Sky.

Of course, Dawn doesn't remember any of this.

Dawn doesn't understand the irony and importance of her name.

All 10-year-old Dawn knows is that she's a celebrity and she loves it.

She's here to celebrate her birthday and the 10th anniversary of Sky Day, as we now call it, and the opening of the Catalina Crater Memorial.

Wow, 10 years went fast.

It took 18 years for the dust to settle, literally.

Atmospheric models said 50 years.

They were wrong.

Earth heals faster than we calculated.

When the sun returned, the Earth warmed quickly.

The extra CO2 in the atmosphere saw to that.

The plants loved the CO2.

By the time humans had the courage to take off their helmets, nature was already back in full swing.

Grass, trees, green everywhere.

Most of the planet's infrastructure was destroyed.

But the Svalbard sea vault survived.

Norway's ice protected it.

After the impact, our ancestors had to reorganize society down here, in these metro tunnels, to survive.

About six months after Sky Day, the first wheat harvest came in.

8,000 tons.

Enough to feed thousands of people real bread.

Not mushroom paste, not fungus cakes, actual bread.

My colony had to wait almost a year for our wheat rations, but for fresh baked bread, it was worth the wait.

Nobody who lived through the impact is on a low-carb diet.

I promise you that.

And this, children, is what scientists call an extinction-level event.

The thermal pulse alone would be devastating.

Almost 80% of animals are gone.

Extinct.

Elephants, rhinos, hippos.

Just about every large mammal too big or too slow to find cover is gone.

Dawn won't miss the elephants, but a lot of us older folks will.

Cities rose again, but different.

Every building has a deep bunker.

Impact shelters are mandatory.

School children run drills every month.

Asteroid warning, 90 seconds to shelter.

They practice in the dark.

They practice holding their breath.

They practice saying goodbye.

I love you.

I'm not gonna make it.

Stay safe.

I love you so much.

I hope you're safe.

Me and the boys are heading east.

I hope you get this.

I love you more than anything.

Mom, please text me back.

I'm so scared.

I wish I could tell you.

I'm sorry.

I'm so sorry.

The memorial at Catalina stretches around the entire crater, 12 miles of black granite.

4 billion names.

Where is Grandpa's name?

The International Apophis Detection Grid went online last year.

10,000 satellites.

Armed ground stations are in every continent.

If an object larger than a basketball gets within a million miles of us, we can see it.

Our ground and space-based railguns can kill it.

It took a third of the Earth's wealth to build the system, but with 4 billion dead, nobody complained about the cost.

The grid is there to make sure that no matter what the universe throws at us, we'll never worry.

The memorial is here to make sure that our children never forget.

Happy Sky Day.

Hecklefish right there.

Yeah.

There's a heckle fish, yeah.

Oh my goodness, there he is.

Yeah.

Yeah, can you give him a kiss like you always do?

Yeah, you always give Hecklefish a kiss.

Oh, that's so nice.

Oh yeah.

Give Hecklefish hugs.

Say thanks, Hecklefish.

Thanks, AJ.

Oh,

so good.

Yeah.

That's so good.

That's so good of you.

Yeah.

Thank you, Hecklefish.

Thanks, AJ.

Thank you so much for hanging out today.

I'm AJ.

There's Hecklefish.

Yeah, you're hanging, sister.

This has been The Y Files.

If you had fun or learned anything and you're not scared to death, do us a favor, hit like, subscribe, share, comment.

That stuff used to help out the channel a lot.

I'm not sure if it does anymore.

And like most topics we cover here on the channel, today's is recommended by you.

So if there's a story you want to hear, a story you want to learn more about, go to the wifeiles.com slash tips or send me an email and we'll get right on that.

Remember, The Wild Files is also a podcast.

Twice a week, I post deep dives into the stories we cover here on the channel and also post episodes that wouldn't be allowed on the channel.

And you'll see those marked redacted.

So those, those are not for kids.

Anyway, the podcast is called, it's really creative, the Wi-Files operation podcast.

And it's available everywhere.

Now, if you need more Wi-Files in your life, And I don't know why you would, but some people do, check out our Discord.

I think we're around 80,000 members on there.

So 24-7, there's something going on.

There's people hanging out.

We're talking about the same weird stuff we do here on the channel.

It's a great community.

It's a really supportive community.

It's a lot of fun.

And it's free to join.

Now, if you want to know what's going on with the Y Files at any given time, you can check out our production calendar.

It's thewifiles.com/slash Cal.

We post our episode schedule, podcasts, live streams, all that stuff.

A special thanks to our patrons who made this channel possible.

Every episode of the Y Files is dedicated to our Patreon members.

Could not have done this without you.

Still,

Out of the first maybe 100 members, I think 95 of them are still with us.

And you guys are the heart of the channel.

Now, if you'd like to support this channel, keep us going, become a member of this amazing community, consider becoming a member on Patreon.

For as little as three bucks a month, you get access to perks like videos early and podcasts early with no commercials.

You get merch available only to members, plus two private live streams every week just for you.

And my camera's on.

You get to meet the whole team.

You can turn your camera on, jump up on stage, ask a question, tell a joke.

discuss a topic, ask for advice.

You shouldn't ask me for advice, but people do.

I think it's the best perk there is.

You get get to know us as people.

Another great way to support the channel is grab something from the Wild File store.

Grab a Hangler's t-shirt or one of these festival coffee mugs you can stick your fist in.

You might as well get your fists in because the asteroid's coming to wipe us all out.

You might as well have yourself a good time with your fist and your mug and your beverage or whatever you're going to do with it.

Or a hoodie or somebody face on it.

Or get one of these creepy YouTube dolls or a squeezy animal.

Stuff.

Toilet Hangler's dolls all.

But if you're going to buy merch, make sure you become a member on YouTube.

I know, I know another membership, but hear me out YouTube members get 10% off everything in the Wild File store.

You get a new code every month for 10% off anything you want.

So if you're gonna buy $40 worth of t-shirts, become a member, get the coupon code, and it pays for itself.

And if you want to cancel after you make your purchase, that's totally fine.

The coupon code is there to save you money, not make me money.

I don't keep any of that.

That goes to support my great team.

Yeah, we'll be quiet with the DiscTOP codes of put me in a poor house for credit alone.

Those are the plugs.

And that's gonna do it.

Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

I played Bolivia scenario 51.

A secret code inside the Bible said I would.

I love my UFOs and paranormal fun, as well as music.

Songs singing like I should.

But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends.

And it never ends.

No, it never ends.

I feel the crap guy down, got stuck inside Mel's home.

With them chaotrup, I've been only two aware.

Dude, Stanley Kubrick face the moon landing alone

on a film set, or with a shadow people

there.

The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told.

And his name was Cole.

And I can't believe

I'm dancing with the bitches.

And the fish on Thursday nights with J2.

And the rap balls have been all through the night.

All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

So the rap was lovely all through the light.

The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to Uganda, the secret city underground.

Mysterious number stations, planet Surfo to Project Starcade, and what the Dark Watchers found.

We're in a simulation, don't you worry though?

The Black Knights had a lot of told me so

I can't believe

I'm dancing with the field sheet.

Had no fish on Thursday nights with day changing, and Wampa's lips me all through the night.

All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

So we're coming

all through the night.

Had to fish on Thursday nights when they changed you?

When my clap with me all through the lie

All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So one ball's up with me all through the

lies

Gurdy loves to dance

Gurdy loves to dance

to dance

Gertie loves to dance on the dance ball because she is a camera.

And camels love to dance when the feeling is right away

within time.

Gurdy loves to dance.

Gertie loves to dance.