Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
Speaker 1: dot com. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Savior.
Speaker 1: Today we're gonna talk about even more ways that humans
Speaker 1: have devised to kill one another. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: this is one of the most creative ways I've ever
Speaker 1: heard of. Yeah, and we're talking about weapons here, a
Speaker 1: crazy weaponized scheme that this will disguise ultimately doesn't really
Speaker 1: hold any water, but but it's a It just shows
Speaker 1: to what extent we'll we'll think about what are our
Speaker 1: greatest technological achievements and then how can we use those
Speaker 1: as a grandiose means to reign death on our enemies? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I will get into it, but I can sort
Speaker 1: of understand the justification for guys sitting around the room
Speaker 1: trying to come up with all these grizzly ways to
Speaker 1: destroy one another. Before we get into that, though, I
Speaker 1: want to remind our audience that we are periscoping every
Speaker 1: week now. So we did our first episode last week
Speaker 1: as of this recording, and we are going to be
Speaker 1: doing it every Friday at noon. You can find us
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Speaker 1: preview of what we're gonna be doing that week. I
Speaker 1: think this week coming up, which will be in the
Speaker 1: past for our listeners, Uh, we're going to be talking
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Speaker 1: our favorite gateway drug horror literature. Yeah, for for Halloween
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Speaker 1: it's we're having some fun with it. It's very loose,
Speaker 1: very free form, very casual. We're just shooting the breeze
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Speaker 1: stuff with all your Mind material and sort of the
Speaker 1: sort of jibber jabber on the side. Last time we
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Speaker 1: another great way to check out the your favorite episodes.
Speaker 1: So let's get into Let's let's get into the meat
Speaker 1: of this episode though, which is something that's referred to
Speaker 1: as Rods from God. And I know that sounds like
Speaker 1: a horrible title for our pornography film, but it is
Speaker 1: actually a space weapons system that has been devised and
Speaker 1: has not actually been built to my knowledge. But but
Speaker 1: the the idea is basically as simple as this um
Speaker 1: space is already weaponized. Okay, so we know, like the
Speaker 1: Corona was launched in the early nineteen sixties, is the
Speaker 1: u S is for spy satellite so they could gather
Speaker 1: information on the Soviets and their military arsenal uh Global
Speaker 1: Positioning System, the GPS that we use in our cars
Speaker 1: and on our phones that was originally designed to offer
Speaker 1: navigation and timing for the U. S military. So the
Speaker 1: idea here is that because space is becoming a an
Speaker 1: area that is getting weaponized not only by the US
Speaker 1: by but by other large nations like you know, uh,
Speaker 1: former Soviet Union. We'll talk about China in a second,
Speaker 1: these military teams are actually assigning the goal of trying
Speaker 1: to find out other ways of developing technology for both
Speaker 1: range and accuracy from space in the same way that
Speaker 1: they did for land, sea and air. So space is
Speaker 1: becoming a war zone and weaponized, right, And that's where
Speaker 1: Rods from God came from. Yeah, a k A. Project
Speaker 1: thor or. This is the more technical title that I like,
Speaker 1: hypervelocity rod Bundles, not to be confused with pro wrestler
Speaker 1: Rod hypervelocity bundle, um who I couldn't help but created
Speaker 1: my own head when I was reading this, uh, but
Speaker 1: hypervelocity rod bundle. And it all comes down to just
Speaker 1: this single stupendous idea. As a as a superpower, I
Speaker 1: have the ability to put things into orbit and then
Speaker 1: bring them back down again, which is just god like
Speaker 1: in terms of human technology. So god like is this
Speaker 1: power that I don't even need to use a weapon. Theoretically,
Speaker 1: I could just put some tongusten up there. I could
Speaker 1: put some steel up there and then just drop it
Speaker 1: on you, and it's reintrigud alascity would be enough to
Speaker 1: take out an enemy encampment, to dig down into a
Speaker 1: bump bunker and blast that out. Doesn't even need any
Speaker 1: explosives or munitions, just a big beam of steel. We're
Speaker 1: literally talking about telephone pole sized bars of tungsten or
Speaker 1: the other one that is proposed as uranium, and I'll
Speaker 1: get into that in a minute, but that you just drop,
Speaker 1: uh like handing a bus to god Zilla getting him
Speaker 1: to throw it a well. One of the alternatives you
Speaker 1: wrote was death pennies from Heaven. I mean, the idea
Speaker 1: here is essentially the same principle as that old urban
Speaker 1: myth of the Union throw a penny off the Empire
Speaker 1: State Building and it kills somebody, right, So it's the
Speaker 1: same kind of principle here that that the idea being
Speaker 1: that they would take two satellites, they'd launch them into orbit.
Speaker 1: These two would work together several hundred miles above earth.
Speaker 1: One of them is for targeting and communications back to
Speaker 1: the ground. The other one carries a bundle of twenty
Speaker 1: foot long tungsten rods that are one foot in diameter,
Speaker 1: so these are pretty big. Between the time that somebody
Speaker 1: on the ground says, uh, drop the rods, it takes
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes for them to hit their target. They followed
Speaker 1: a speed of thirty six thousand feet per second, and
Speaker 1: when they hit they have the same destructive force as
Speaker 1: a meteor strike. So that's essentially what we're talking about here. Uh.
Speaker 1: The math goes like this. The energy is greater the
Speaker 1: higher the orbit that you drop them from, right, but
Speaker 1: so is the fall time. So in order to get
Speaker 1: the energy the same energy of like a high explosive munitions,
Speaker 1: you would need a material speed of three kilometers per second,
Speaker 1: and to do that you have to at least get
Speaker 1: up to an altitude of forty four hundred and sixty kilometers.
Speaker 1: This corresponds roughly to about twelve minutes falling time, and
Speaker 1: that I think they probably added another three minutes for
Speaker 1: you know, I'm assuming communications and mechanics of the technology
Speaker 1: and such, But that's how this idea works. You're literally
Speaker 1: dropping telephone pole pulls of metal on people on your targets,
Speaker 1: and it just hits so hard that it will supposedly
Speaker 1: just create this incredible explosive impact digging down into the earth. Right,
Speaker 1: And like you said, the idea here is that if
Speaker 1: somebody like you're, you know, Osama bin Laden style target
Speaker 1: is in a deep underground bunker, this is the way
Speaker 1: that you get them without radiating the entire land around them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again it comes back to that it's very reminiscent
Speaker 1: of the myth of the penny off the top of
Speaker 1: the Empire State Building, which again, as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: wouldn't kill anybody. It's it's only a gram. It tumbles
Speaker 1: as it falls, so there's too much air resistance for
Speaker 1: it to do any damage. But even still, if you
Speaker 1: were to throw a fifty gram nut off the Empire
Speaker 1: State Building a roll of pennies, which is certainly more
Speaker 1: like a rod um a bullet now you're talking, that
Speaker 1: could actually kill somebody. And so that's the basic idea
Speaker 1: here is just an epic death pennies from having kind
Speaker 1: of scenario. And the other so I mentioned uranium. So
Speaker 1: the tungsten and uranium, with the two materials that were
Speaker 1: specifically listed. I originally wrote about this on a sister
Speaker 1: site for How Stuff Works called Stuff of Genius, and
Speaker 1: one of the readers they're actually suggested that titanium would
Speaker 1: be better. And I don't have any inkling about materials sciences,
Speaker 1: so you know, I'd love to hear from the listeners
Speaker 1: on what they think on this. But they were saying
Speaker 1: that basically, tungsten is flammable, so of course it's going
Speaker 1: to burn up on re entry, which we'll talk about later,
Speaker 1: and uranium is reactive. Uh So it seems to defeat
Speaker 1: the purpose because the gist here is that you want
Speaker 1: to have the same explosive impact as a nuclear weapon
Speaker 1: without leaving behind radiation, right, and essentially having that kind
Speaker 1: of high powered explosive weapon without actually having to use explosives.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking about guys sitting around thinking up ridiculous
Speaker 1: high tech ways to tosh out some death. Who thought
Speaker 1: this one up? So this is guy named Jerry Cornell,
Speaker 1: and you out there may be familiar with him because
Speaker 1: he's primarily known as a science fiction author. I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, that's that's this name ring a Bell from
Speaker 1: Path to Sci Fi section Perusals. Yeah. So Cornell, he's
Speaker 1: an engineer. He's a science writer. He's primarily known for
Speaker 1: science fiction. H He has degrees in experimental statistics, systems, engineering, psychology,
Speaker 1: and political science. He worked for Boeing in the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and the idea was that he was going to
Speaker 1: help develop the aerospace industry. But this is where he
Speaker 1: came up the idea with dropping metal from outer space
Speaker 1: to kill people. Um. I don't know if that was,
Speaker 1: you know, on his action item list from a meeting
Speaker 1: or something, but this is where it came up. So
Speaker 1: the idea is a kinetic energy weapon. That's kind of
Speaker 1: the herm that's used for these style weapons. It's been
Speaker 1: around since something called the Rand Corporation proposed placing rods
Speaker 1: on the tips of I C B M s way
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen fifties. And we'll get back into
Speaker 1: that later because that seems to actually be the more
Speaker 1: plausible method of kinetic energy deployment. Yeah, attaching to the
Speaker 1: front of an intercontinental bollistic missile. A little bit more
Speaker 1: about Jerry Parnell. I want to get into though, before
Speaker 1: we get into to the rest of the science behind
Speaker 1: Rods of God. So he's, like I said, he's best
Speaker 1: known as a sci fi novelist. I haven't read any
Speaker 1: of his books, but I'm really curious about them. He
Speaker 1: maintains a pretty active blog. Uh. He attracted attention from
Speaker 1: politicians in the eighties. Ronald Reagan actually applauded a tract
Speaker 1: that he wrote that was called Mutually Assured Survival as
Speaker 1: space age solution to nuclear annihilation. And then he and
Speaker 1: Newt Gingrich actually teamed up and worked together on a
Speaker 1: novel that is so far unpublished. I want to read
Speaker 1: this though. It's called The Faction, and here's the premise.
Speaker 1: The Yakuza worked together with big corporations to overthrow the government,
Speaker 1: and the way that they do it is by using
Speaker 1: kinetic kill type weapons. They use Rods from God. So
Speaker 1: he's repurposed his own idea for for this novel that
Speaker 1: he's working on with Nuke king Rich. Unfortunately, he suffered
Speaker 1: a stroke in he's still writing. My understanding is that
Speaker 1: he's still active, but not as much as he used
Speaker 1: to be. By the way, and I have not read this,
Speaker 1: but apparently he wrote the novelization of the movie Escape
Speaker 1: from the Planet of the Apes. Oh wow, Which that's so?
Speaker 1: Is that the one that has a nuke in it
Speaker 1: as a central theme? Is that the one with the
Speaker 1: undergo cool letter ground stuff. Um, I always get them
Speaker 1: mixed up. I later escape from Planet of the Apes,
Speaker 1: the one where they go back in time and they
Speaker 1: actually two Apes come to present day America and they
Speaker 1: end up trying to convince like Congress or something like
Speaker 1: that that they shouldn't uh, you know, proceed with war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was I timed out before they really got to
Speaker 1: that point. In my viewing, this one would be the third.
Speaker 1: I've just looked it out. Yeah. The first one that's
Speaker 1: Planet of the apeses we know and love it. Second
Speaker 1: one is Beneath the Plant of the Apes is a
Speaker 1: few of us know and love. But I love it
Speaker 1: because it has those more locky in creatures that live
Speaker 1: underground and worship the bomb. This would have been the
Speaker 1: third one he wrote for the So, so keep in
Speaker 1: mind that the guy who came up with this idea
Speaker 1: and that the US government has actively worked on, and
Speaker 1: also the weapons industry has has actively worked on, also
Speaker 1: happened to work on the Planet of the Apes franchise. Uh,
Speaker 1: and So in particular, in the last decade alone, there's
Speaker 1: been two big reports that are public and have been
Speaker 1: written about this. The first was in two thousand three
Speaker 1: and it was the U. S. Air Forces Transformation Flight Plan.
Speaker 1: And then in two thousand two that RAND Corporation again, uh,
Speaker 1: they wrote a report called Space Weapons Earth Wars, which
Speaker 1: were probably gonna reference a lot in this because we
Speaker 1: read it for the podcast. Um and I'll link to
Speaker 1: some of these resources on the landing page of this episode,
Speaker 1: at least the ones that are easily accessed by everyone.
Speaker 1: So this is a concept that people are taking seriously.
Speaker 1: They're they're doing the math, they're doing the science. They're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out can we drop these telephone polls
Speaker 1: on our enemies and destroy them without irradiating them. And
Speaker 1: there's one other benefit to this too. The other benefit
Speaker 1: is that weapons like this wouldn't technically violate the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. So if you put
Speaker 1: them up and you were dropping them in the way
Speaker 1: that we're we've described, I think you could you know,
Speaker 1: work your way around that. Now, I want to point
Speaker 1: out that just just as this relates nicely to dropping
Speaker 1: pennies off the mentire state building. There have been a
Speaker 1: number of missile weapons that achieve the same ends, though
Speaker 1: in a smaller scale. You know, make a payload go up,
Speaker 1: bring it back down. Uh As for achieving enough altitude
Speaker 1: that the descent speed weaponizes the payload, well, we have
Speaker 1: a couple of interesting examples from the twentieth century. Um
Speaker 1: in World War One that you saw air dropped fletchets,
Speaker 1: which were essentially just look like metal arrowheads that were
Speaker 1: dropped out the same ideas. So you dropped them from
Speaker 1: an airplane, they can achieve enough velocity to do some
Speaker 1: damage when they hit. Those are the things that the
Speaker 1: X Men archangel shoots out of his wings. Yet yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like they flashettes show up his um as
Speaker 1: immunition and the sci fi properties as well, Like I
Speaker 1: think Gibson deployed them. Roment idea of using them as
Speaker 1: kinnecticut like railguns or something like that is popular because
Speaker 1: again the ideas of it's moving fast enough, there's enough
Speaker 1: kinetic energy you don't need explosive energy. Additionally, there's something
Speaker 1: called lazy dog bombs, and these are developed in World
Speaker 1: War Two and deployed in Vietna and Vietnamic Korean wars,
Speaker 1: sometimes called buzz bombs, sometimes called lawn darts, because essentially
Speaker 1: that's what you're talking about, a bunch of small, unguided
Speaker 1: kinetic projectiles. They're not technically bombs. Often they're dropped in clusters,
Speaker 1: sometimes for a mounted casings underneath the wing of an airplane,
Speaker 1: other other times supposedly just hurled out in a bucket,
Speaker 1: you know, very very loose, very Hey, we're up here
Speaker 1: just by virtue of being in the air at a
Speaker 1: certain altitude, we have the kinetic advantage by throwing these
Speaker 1: things out. So the idea itself pretty simple. But when
Speaker 1: you take it up, when you take it up to
Speaker 1: an orbital level, that's where you get some real, essentially
Speaker 1: cosmic destructive possibilities. Yeah, and so this kind of reminds me,
Speaker 1: I know, this is like an actual explosive munition, at
Speaker 1: least as my understanding. But around the time of the
Speaker 1: beginning of the war in Iraq, Uh, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of attention being paid to the Daisy Cutter. Do
Speaker 1: you remember that it was a specific kind of like
Speaker 1: bunker buster type weapon, uh. And I think the attraction
Speaker 1: was that, like it was so incredibly powerful that it
Speaker 1: could defeat our enemies, and yet it wasn't as horrific
Speaker 1: as like the nuclear bomb right in off exactly, yeah,
Speaker 1: shocking off. So I think this is the same sort
Speaker 1: of principle, although it's kinnectic and not explosive. UM and
Speaker 1: I do want to take a second here too as
Speaker 1: an aside. These are different from what you may have
Speaker 1: heard about in the news lately, being referred to as
Speaker 1: anti ship ballistic missiles or a s b M. S UM.
Speaker 1: These have been They were something that the US actually
Speaker 1: tested in the nineteen sixties and had two successful flights
Speaker 1: with the Soviet Union developed them in the past, but
Speaker 1: more recently, in January of two thousand and fourteen, China
Speaker 1: conducted a test of a hypersonic glide vehicle that was
Speaker 1: designed to carry missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers. UH.
Speaker 1: This thing flies at mock ten. It isn't the first
Speaker 1: time that they've developed an a s b M, but
Speaker 1: it's thought to be like the stage, the second stage
Speaker 1: of their program essentially, UH and the idea is that
Speaker 1: it's very similar to this. It launches an I C
Speaker 1: b M up into outer space and then sends that
Speaker 1: back down at mock ten, so there's no satellite up there.
Speaker 1: It just launches it up and brings it back down.
Speaker 1: And the ideas that one of these things would hit
Speaker 1: an aircraft carrier and just completely take it out, and
Speaker 1: that uh they move. I think the idea here is
Speaker 1: like that they move so quickly, uh faster than actually
Speaker 1: like traditional munitions, that they're difficult for anti air defenses
Speaker 1: to take down. So there's some concern about that. But
Speaker 1: this is not the same not the same thing. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: well we're gonna take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to get into the feasibility of
Speaker 1: rods from God's and this is where it gets a
Speaker 1: little more fun and ultimately where everything falls apart. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, Yeah, so let's talk about how feasible rods
Speaker 1: from God actually are. It's nice a bunch of guys
Speaker 1: sitting around in a room smoking cigars, talking about sci
Speaker 1: fi ideas on how they could kill each other. Then
Speaker 1: let's get down to the nuts and bolts of this thing.
Speaker 1: So first of all, uh, there's some scientific reasons why
Speaker 1: it wouldn't work. Uh. One is vaporization. So the thing
Speaker 1: that that we see with with meteorites. Yeah. Uh so
Speaker 1: even a giant tungsten rod would probably vaporize on impact. Um.
Speaker 1: There's been some ideas that, like you could attach to
Speaker 1: retro rockets to each one of the rods that would
Speaker 1: slow their re entry slightly, but some the calculations basically
Speaker 1: say that if you did that, the non explosive rod
Speaker 1: would then be no more effective than the commit conventional
Speaker 1: munitions that we already have it And you're kind of
Speaker 1: betraying the spirit of the thing, right, because the whole
Speaker 1: idea is I have all this technology and I can
Speaker 1: use it to destroy up drop a big chunk of
Speaker 1: metal lining. If we're putting rockets on that, then we're
Speaker 1: kind of getting back into the area of just creating
Speaker 1: a space missile. Yeah, and it's going to be more
Speaker 1: expensive to which is another drawback that the physics just
Speaker 1: wouldn't work. High velocity impact would limit the actual penetration depth.
Speaker 1: So remember, like you know, part of the idea behind
Speaker 1: this is to bust bunkers, right to get those underground
Speaker 1: uh headquarters, I guess that are usually unreachable. If you
Speaker 1: look at high speed photography of a bullet impacting steel
Speaker 1: at one kilometer a second. And remember, to achieve the
Speaker 1: rod from god uh impact, you have to hit three
Speaker 1: kilometers per second, but just at one kilometer a second,
Speaker 1: Apparently the jacket fragments right off of the bullet and
Speaker 1: leaves a small crater on the on the steel that
Speaker 1: it strikes. So the idea here is that like there
Speaker 1: would be probably a similar effect on a larger scale
Speaker 1: that the rods would chatter vaporized. They might leave a
Speaker 1: little bit of a crater, but for the most part,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have the explosive impact that they're looking for.
Speaker 1: In fact, the Sandy A Laboratory, which I didn't know
Speaker 1: about until doing this research, it's a national security nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons testing facility. They've actually confirmed predictions about this UH
Speaker 1: looking that at that even the hardest materials will max
Speaker 1: out their penetration capabilities at one kilometer per second. So
Speaker 1: you go any faster than that, the tip of the
Speaker 1: rod will probably liquefy. Uh. It will cause the penetration
Speaker 1: depth to fall off, and then you get this situation
Speaker 1: where even if they're delivered from low altitudes, they would
Speaker 1: only deliver one ninth of the destructive energy per gram force.
Speaker 1: As a conventional bomb. So again, what's the point of
Speaker 1: that where we're totally losing the spirit of our beautiful,
Speaker 1: uh death dealing device exactly. Yeah, And also keep in
Speaker 1: mind too that even if the entire rod doesn't vaporize,
Speaker 1: the tip would probably deform or something like that, which
Speaker 1: would change their flight path considerably and you end up
Speaker 1: striking a nearby town or something rather than the bunker
Speaker 1: that you're trying to strike. Yeah, because each rod would
Speaker 1: need to follow eight percies nearly vertical flight path they
Speaker 1: wanted to reach its target. Again, assuming you don't have
Speaker 1: any kind of thrusters on there that are turning into
Speaker 1: a missile more of a guided missile anyway. So I
Speaker 1: mean it's difficult enough to figure this out without factoring
Speaker 1: in a rod it's partially disintegrated or warped due to
Speaker 1: all this re entry friction. Yeah, and so this is
Speaker 1: the thing like for me, like again, not knowing a
Speaker 1: lot about material science, I'm wondering why tungsten is the
Speaker 1: metal that they chose for the proposal, given that it's
Speaker 1: flammable and it's you know, going to be just on
Speaker 1: re entry alone, probably gonna catch on fire. So I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure, there must be a reason, though, I
Speaker 1: would think, or maybe maybe it's literally just like a
Speaker 1: sci fi novel pitch and just in with it. Uh So,
Speaker 1: Actually to get to the you know, the the actual
Speaker 1: proposal in that Rand Corporation Space Weapons, Earth Wars, the
Speaker 1: authors suggest that one way that they could address this
Speaker 1: is by quote extruding material through pores in the nose
Speaker 1: tip of the rod for evaporation. Another option, they pitch
Speaker 1: is abletative cooling, where the outer layer would be designed
Speaker 1: to melt away on purpose. But again, then you get
Speaker 1: that thing where the nose potentially deforms, and then you know,
Speaker 1: it's just completely unpredictable where this thing is going to hit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you again, we just see it at time and time again. Here,
Speaker 1: with just the basic physical design, it sounds like it'll
Speaker 1: be a simple, yeah, procedure, a simple design. But even
Speaker 1: then you have to tweak it. It's like, all right,
Speaker 1: we gotta put thrusts on it. It needs the tip
Speaker 1: needs to use and it needs to be reflective, and
Speaker 1: and what what next? It needs to crew. All this
Speaker 1: stuff essentially makes it untenable. Not to mention that there's
Speaker 1: something called the absentee ratio for the satellites that are
Speaker 1: circling around in orbit carrying all these rods. So because
Speaker 1: satellites circled the planet every one dred minutes, they won't
Speaker 1: always be in position to hit their target. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember that whole thing, like, oh, yeah, you just
Speaker 1: call it from the ground fifteen minutes later boom, right,
Speaker 1: But no other side of the exactly, You've got to
Speaker 1: wait for it to actually be in position to hit
Speaker 1: the target. And satellites as we have them right now
Speaker 1: can't really change their speeds that easily or maneuver around
Speaker 1: in orbit because there's no atmosphere, so they might not
Speaker 1: even work because of this. And then you know, there's
Speaker 1: also the whole idea of like if you're up in
Speaker 1: orbit again, like you have to break the atmosphere for
Speaker 1: re entry, so you need some kind of thrust too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one thing that's important to keep in mind is that, yes,
Speaker 1: you have to use all of this energy and effort
Speaker 1: to get something into orbit, but then you also have
Speaker 1: to use energy and effort to get it out of
Speaker 1: orbit um at least to get it out of orbit
Speaker 1: along the timeline that you're looking at to weaponize the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the satellites as well. Here's another like the whole
Speaker 1: reason why this isn't feasible, the satellites would probably be
Speaker 1: vulnerable to ground based attacks. Right, So let's say, uh,
Speaker 1: China puts one of these up in the in the
Speaker 1: in orbit and it's floating around there. We're going to
Speaker 1: be able to detect that and we'll probably be able
Speaker 1: to shoot it down. Yeah. Yeah, we've been able to
Speaker 1: bust satellites for a while, so that's yeah, that's not
Speaker 1: even an issue. So then to improve efficiency there, they'd
Speaker 1: have to launch even more satellites, which costs even more money.
Speaker 1: And these things are not cheap but crazy expensive. So okay,
Speaker 1: how expensive is it? So we know from NASA that
Speaker 1: it costs ten thousand dollars per pound to put something
Speaker 1: into orbit, no matter what the object is. Right, So
Speaker 1: somebody actually broke down the math and I brought it
Speaker 1: here for us today. If one of these rods weighed
Speaker 1: point one tons and there were three tons of propellant
Speaker 1: on it to stop its orbital motion, basically to give
Speaker 1: it the thrust to get through, because that the wise,
Speaker 1: it's just going to continue to orbit. H That means
Speaker 1: that launching one rod would cost thirty million dollars and
Speaker 1: you need at least ten rods per satellite. So this
Speaker 1: is just insanely expensive. Uh. And like we said, there's
Speaker 1: just you know, a lot of feasibility shoes science wise,
Speaker 1: strategic wise, and then it's just incredibly expensive. Yeah, cost
Speaker 1: a ton of money. And you're you're ultimately going to
Speaker 1: have to do so many things too. You're gonna have
Speaker 1: to turn that rod into a into a guided missile
Speaker 1: anyway to make it work. So why I just use
Speaker 1: a guided missile? Yeah, absolutely, And that's one of the
Speaker 1: proposed solutions, right to just use an I C d
Speaker 1: M instead. Yeah, And ultimately it goes all the way
Speaker 1: back to that nineteen fifties rand proposal. So the idea
Speaker 1: there was that they would attach the rods to uh
Speaker 1: intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are the I C b M
Speaker 1: s that you know, only a few nations actually have
Speaker 1: access to that launched missiles around the world. The downside
Speaker 1: is that these could be detected a lot easier. So
Speaker 1: I was saying earlier about how like the kinetic drop
Speaker 1: makes it so that they're so fast that they can
Speaker 1: it's a lot harder for them to be detected by
Speaker 1: anti air defenses. Um. But so here's some more math
Speaker 1: for you to get the one kilometer per second speed
Speaker 1: that would be needed an acceleration of thirty times that
Speaker 1: of gravity. So this is something that a nominal solid
Speaker 1: rocket motor could probably provide. It would take three point
Speaker 1: three seconds over a distance of one point six five kilometers.
Speaker 1: So that actually doesn't sound like all that much, right,
Speaker 1: especially compared to what we've just been talking about with
Speaker 1: dropping these telephone polls. But this would only cost us
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollars or less, plus the cost of
Speaker 1: a terminal guidance system. I don't know how much of
Speaker 1: those run for nowadays, where it's like an iPhone, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's as the next box one. Yeah, uh
Speaker 1: so it's cheaper, sounds like it would probably work better.
Speaker 1: I think the disadvantages the speed factor, and and then
Speaker 1: also that it's not coming downward exactly, it's coming at
Speaker 1: an angle, right, so that possibly would lead to less penetration.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure. Um. But the other proposal from
Speaker 1: that space weapons Earth wars proposal, I would love to
Speaker 1: just be a fly on the wall for the writing
Speaker 1: process of that, Like the people sitting around just putting
Speaker 1: that together for the RAM Corporation, there's no bad ideas
Speaker 1: in brainstorming space weapon. So their ideas to try conventional
Speaker 1: ordinance that delivered from space, so basically just space bombing
Speaker 1: space rockets. Um. So the idea here is that they
Speaker 1: would have the direct destructive force, but it would be
Speaker 1: outward instead of downward like I was talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: They'd be slower, but they wouldn't erod uh. And they
Speaker 1: would require explosives in fusings. And here's the problem with
Speaker 1: that that they'd have to survive the impact, right, but
Speaker 1: then they'd also have to be able to determine their
Speaker 1: depth penetration before they exploded. Getting back to that bunker
Speaker 1: busting exactly. Yeah, the ideas that these got to drill underground,
Speaker 1: so and again they're more susceptible to terminal defenses than
Speaker 1: kinetic weapons would be. So when you put it all together,
Speaker 1: Rods from the Gods, Operation thor whatever you want to
Speaker 1: want to call it, kinetic strike force, raw, kinetic strike force,
Speaker 1: rod bundles, Uh, it just doesn't make a lot of sense,
Speaker 1: but it's such a captivating idea. And again I think
Speaker 1: it comes down to just the idea that technology, our
Speaker 1: technological advancement could be such, our power could be such
Speaker 1: that it would be akin to having a slingshot, Like, right,
Speaker 1: the the slingshot is the technology. The thing that goes
Speaker 1: in the sling shot needs to be nothing more than
Speaker 1: a pebble. Yeah, absolutely, I think. I think the attraction
Speaker 1: here is like we're just harnessing the physics of the
Speaker 1: universe essentially, right when having to build the specific devices
Speaker 1: designed to kill I mean it is, but but you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like you could put other things
Speaker 1: up there too and drop them and they would kill
Speaker 1: people as well. It's just they wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: do it with precision and range. Yeah, I mean statues
Speaker 1: of Walt Disney, um, you name it, giant oscars, I
Speaker 1: guess something of statutes for some reason, just lots of statues.
Speaker 1: A statue of Lenin, a statue of Darth Vader. There's
Speaker 1: something kind of nicely space opera about that. I can
Speaker 1: imagine being the merciful Us using rods from God and
Speaker 1: each rod is just a statue of me. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: glad that you brought that up, actually, because this idea,
Speaker 1: having come from a sci fi writer, has actually worked
Speaker 1: its way into a lot of our popular fiction. UM
Speaker 1: two I can think of. I first heard about this
Speaker 1: reading the War and Ellis comic Global Frequency, which was
Speaker 1: adapted into a television show. So he had clearly read
Speaker 1: about it somewhere, and UH decided to incorporate it as
Speaker 1: like a I think a terrorist group had access to
Speaker 1: one of these. The other one I believe the second
Speaker 1: G I. Joe Live Action movie, the premise was that
Speaker 1: they were going to use kinetic weapons. I saw that
Speaker 1: on the airplane going to or from China, so it's
Speaker 1: pretty distracted at the time. Yeah, but yeah, there was
Speaker 1: some sort of rods from God, I think, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure there's others. Joe brought up something he
Speaker 1: I was talking to him about this before we went
Speaker 1: to the studio, and he said that he thinks that
Speaker 1: in the Mass Effect games and universe that there's like
Speaker 1: a similar netic velocity kind of idea behind UM A
Speaker 1: lot of the weapons, not just like ship to ship weapons,
Speaker 1: but also the like guns that weapons. I think, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, the idea is really cool. It's fun
Speaker 1: for stories, but it doesn't really it doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: it's gonna work until we spend a couple more than
Speaker 1: a couple million dollars to put these things in outer
Speaker 1: space and then drop them and see what happens. All right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it, rods from God. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we get a little time here. Let's call over the
Speaker 1: robot and see if we have a little listener mail.
Speaker 1: Who in the robot is founding a little more satanic
Speaker 1: than usually? It? Is it Carney or Arnie at this time?
Speaker 1: I can never remember when he's possessed by the devil.
Speaker 1: I don't know it's Carney, but with sixes in there,
Speaker 1: somehow he felt it really weird. But yes, it looks
Speaker 1: like we have. We've received a couple of new listener
Speaker 1: mails regarding our Satanic Pack episode, which was the first
Speaker 1: episode that we did together. Yeah. Yeah, this one comes
Speaker 1: to us from Katie. Katie writes, and he says, so,
Speaker 1: first off, id Or your podcast discovered it a few
Speaker 1: months back, and it's been my been a wave to
Speaker 1: keep my mind from um atrifying at my mind numbingly
Speaker 1: boring job as an overnight grocery stalker. I listened to
Speaker 1: the new episodes as they come out and have been
Speaker 1: slowly working my way back through the rest of them.
Speaker 1: My co worker hates me because I always stopped midway
Speaker 1: through the work, take my earphones out, and insist on
Speaker 1: educating him on topics he has absolutely no interest in. Luckily,
Speaker 1: family members and roommates are much more accepting of my
Speaker 1: need to tell people of my newfound knowledge. So Katie
Speaker 1: goes on to mention that she just listened to the
Speaker 1: Satanic Panic episode and uh, and she shares some some
Speaker 1: personal family stuff here, uh, which I'm not going to
Speaker 1: get into the details here, just because I'm not certain
Speaker 1: she would want to share with everyone, and some of
Speaker 1: the details are probably a little bit too much for
Speaker 1: the the average listener, but she can, she continues in
Speaker 1: the email, and say so, Obviously, when I first heard
Speaker 1: were that this whole Satanic panic thing was most likely
Speaker 1: mass hysteria, I was personally offended by it. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to think that someone I cared about could have
Speaker 1: had it, could have such a big part of her
Speaker 1: life based on something entirely fake. I honestly skimmed the
Speaker 1: article that first brought it to my attention, got angry
Speaker 1: and closed it and never went back. When I started
Speaker 1: your Satanic Panic episode, I had a moment of thinking
Speaker 1: I should just skip it once I realized it was
Speaker 1: what it was going to be about. But at this point,
Speaker 1: you guys had kind of totally won me over, so
Speaker 1: I decided to give it a shot. And there was
Speaker 1: one line in there, just to throwaway line, where you
Speaker 1: guys acknowledge that while they're most likely wasn't some huge
Speaker 1: satanic craze in the seventies, that there were still some
Speaker 1: people who are suffering horrific abuse. Hearing that kind of
Speaker 1: wiped out my whole personal offense at the topic, and
Speaker 1: I was able to enjoy an incredibly interesting podcast. I
Speaker 1: honestly really like stories about mass hysterias, and this was
Speaker 1: definitely an incredibly fascinating one, more so when I could
Speaker 1: put aside my personal feelings and consider it in relation
Speaker 1: to my story. So thank you Katie for writing in
Speaker 1: uh it's yeah. I really appreciate listener mail in general,
Speaker 1: but this in particular. You know, thank you Katie for
Speaker 1: sharing your personal story with us, but also for letting
Speaker 1: us know that you know this is something that you
Speaker 1: weren't inclined to want to listen to, but that because
Speaker 1: you know you trusted us as hosts. I'm assuming you
Speaker 1: went ahead followed us on the journey, and we're happy
Speaker 1: that you know, you learned what you did afterwards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I guess I have two thoughts on all time.
Speaker 1: And first of all, and that's one of the things
Speaker 1: that's so fascinating and disturbing about the Satanic Panic scenario
Speaker 1: is that there is this pure fantasy and pure fiction
Speaker 1: and hit and mass hysteria. But the pain that that
Speaker 1: that spiraled out from it, it was it was real. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think I said that during the episode that like,
Speaker 1: I may not believe their stories, but I believe that
Speaker 1: they believe in them, and that's real enough to them
Speaker 1: that it, you know, requires us to be sympathetic as
Speaker 1: you know, emotional human beings to the things that happened
Speaker 1: to them. Uh. And and also I think it's important,
Speaker 1: you know, we tried to do this with every episode
Speaker 1: and with whatever we're talking about, whether it's Satanic panic
Speaker 1: or dropping giant metal telephone polls from out of space. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's more than one side to every story, right, And
Speaker 1: so obviously, like you have to keep that in mind.
Speaker 1: You want to also be open to the possibilities of whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, somebody else's perspective, whether it's subjective or not.
Speaker 1: And in the Satanic Panic situation, there were hundreds of incidents.
Speaker 1: So we're never gonna know all the stories, you know,
Speaker 1: We're never gonna know that how things all matched up
Speaker 1: with one another. But you know, by and large, I
Speaker 1: think we we covered the the hysteria part, the mass
Speaker 1: media part of it fairly well. Yeah. And I also
Speaker 1: like how Katie talked about how when we first heard
Speaker 1: about the mass hysteria aspect of about Satanic Panic, that
Speaker 1: she was offended, that she was turned off, and then
Speaker 1: she but she knew coming back to it. And I
Speaker 1: always think about that a lot when I when we're
Speaker 1: engaging with listeners, particularly on social media, because there's always
Speaker 1: gonna be somebody who who has a reaction to some
Speaker 1: sort of article or study or material, and they're kind
Speaker 1: of defensive about it, and maybe they're, you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're a little up in arms. And I often think
Speaker 1: back to times in my own life where I've come
Speaker 1: across some new way of looking at the world, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times there is this gut reaction. There's
Speaker 1: something that challenges your personal history, challenges your ideology, and
Speaker 1: there's a the reflex is to put the guards up,
Speaker 1: and it takes some time sometimes to come back around
Speaker 1: and open yourself up to this idea and put it
Speaker 1: put yourself in a and really in a state of
Speaker 1: open minded vulnerability to uh, to consider it. I think
Speaker 1: that that gets down to the ethos of this show
Speaker 1: overall for Joe, Robert and I is that, like the
Speaker 1: overall quality that I'm shooting for with every episode is
Speaker 1: that we're trying to connect to that one of looking
Speaker 1: at the world and going, oh wow, I didn't know that,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, and and then thinking about the thing
Speaker 1: that you go oh wow at and kind of criticizing it, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh wow, it would be really cool if you could
Speaker 1: drop metal from outer space and destroy your enemies, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's like a like a thing that it like
Speaker 1: five year old does in the sandbox, like playing with
Speaker 1: their toys. Right. But at the same time, like you
Speaker 1: kind of step back and you look at the science
Speaker 1: of it and you go, huh, well, that's a wonderful idea,
Speaker 1: probably not feasible, probably doesn't work, but look at our
Speaker 1: human imagination work working at this, or look at the
Speaker 1: wonder of science that we could even begin thinking about it.
Speaker 1: All right, well, what is that? What does the robot
Speaker 1: have to looks like? It looks like he has another one.
Speaker 1: Another one's coming out here? Hold on. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: from Hannah and she writes in to let us know
Speaker 1: that she's a long time listener and that she had
Speaker 1: some thoughts that she would also like to share on
Speaker 1: the Satanic Panic episode. Uh. It turns out that she
Speaker 1: I'm going to read this uh verbatim. The first is
Speaker 1: in response to your Satanic Panic episode. Robert and Christian
Speaker 1: mentioned how some teenagers may have explored Satanism to shock
Speaker 1: the authority figures in their life and find a sense
Speaker 1: of individualism, and it reminded me of a song by
Speaker 1: folk rock band The Mountain Goats. I'm vaguely familiar with
Speaker 1: the Mountain Goats. I don't listen to them a lot,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, I have some friends with a real
Speaker 1: big fans. Uh. So they have a song apparently that's
Speaker 1: called the best ever death metal band in Denton. I
Speaker 1: like the Tyble, and we're gonna have to listen to
Speaker 1: It tells the story of childhood friends Jeff and Cyrus
Speaker 1: and how their dream of becoming a famous death metal
Speaker 1: band was dashed by the adults in their lives, but
Speaker 1: all hope is not lost, says Hannah. The song ends
Speaker 1: by saying, quote, the best ever death metal band out
Speaker 1: of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you,
Speaker 1: followed by a couple of rousing hail Satan's. In this
Speaker 1: the hail Satan's are not so much an actual hailing
Speaker 1: of Satan's but more of a to the people that
Speaker 1: told them too. I kind of like that idea. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess I'll add on to this Hannah that I'm
Speaker 1: a big fan of the band Ghost, which is a
Speaker 1: they're associated with metal, but I think they're more kind
Speaker 1: of like a hard rock band. But the premise behind
Speaker 1: the band is that they're supposedly uh Satanists, uh and all.
Speaker 1: The leader of the band is a guy called Papa
Speaker 1: Emeritus who dresses up like an anti pope with like
Speaker 1: an upside down cross. And I've seen plenty of pictures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so it's all theatrical. It's all ridiculous. The
Speaker 1: lyrics to the songs are supposedly about summoning Satan and
Speaker 1: you know, worshiping him and all these things. Honestly, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a big circus performance. That's what I love
Speaker 1: out of it. I love the theatricality and it's that
Speaker 1: appeals to me. Um So I can see why this
Speaker 1: song would kind of do the same thing. It sounds
Speaker 1: to me like this Mountain Goats song might be about
Speaker 1: a proto version of ghost Nice. All right, Well, there
Speaker 1: you have it. Hey, you want to reach out to us,
Speaker 1: you want to see what we're up to, you want
Speaker 1: to explore some of these past episodes, see what's coming up.
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Speaker 1: We're gonna be on periscope every Friday at noon, uh
Speaker 1: and you can interact with us directly on their last time,
Speaker 1: people were able to ask us questions right through the app,
Speaker 1: and we were able to talk right back to them,
Speaker 1: talk about things like melt movies. Some people give us
Speaker 1: suggestions for new episodes, like a one on strange weather,
Speaker 1: which sounded like it would be kind of fun to me.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh, you know you can listen to us
Speaker 1: talk about our favorite horror movies. Uh, and maybe even
Speaker 1: some horror literature as well. Things that we you know,
Speaker 1: we probably talked about casually on the show, but aren't
Speaker 1: usually the themes of the show. Yeah, and hey, maybe
Speaker 1: one of these days we'll spend the periscope session for
Speaker 1: Joe to find, like cook those that use that recipe
Speaker 1: for cookies that he found. Yeah, great, dude, cook He's
Speaker 1: especially we can give that spice. So one last thing, though,
Speaker 1: if you want to write into us directly, like the
Speaker 1: listener mail that we just read out loud, you can
Speaker 1: always send us an email at blow the Mind at
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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
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