Global Issues

How to defend Earth from asteroids: Phil Plait TED.com

Posted by: Ben Lillie

What’s six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant? An asteroid – and there are lots of them out there. With humor and great visuals, Phil Plait enthralls the TEDxBoulder audience with all the ways asteroids can kill, and what we must do to avoid them. (Recorded at TEDxBoulder 2011, September 2011, in Boulder, Colorado. Duration: 14:16.)

Watch Phil Plait’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Related stories:

Science

TED Weekends: A meditation on asteroidsTED Weekends: A meditation on asteroids

Posted By Shirin Samimi-Moore

In Phil Plait’s talk from TEDxBoulder, “How to defend earth from asteroids,” he astonishes the audience, sharing how a single rock hurtling through space could damage our civilization as we know it. This weekend, TED Weekends on the Huffington Post features Plait’s spine-tingling talk. Below, some of our favorite essays from this edition, about those big […]

Science

Can we deflect meteors and asteroids? A TEDx talk that describes howCan we deflect meteors and asteroids? A TEDx talk that describes how

Posted By Dan Powell

It’s a humbling day to be an Earthling. Just sixteen hours before the highly-anticipated flyby of the asteroid 2012 DA14, the skies above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia were shattered by the explosion of an incoming meteor. Although fortunately nobody appears to have been killed by the blast, more than 1,000 people reported injuries, mostly from flying glass and […]

Comments (3)