‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Laugh at Bill Nye Talking About Redirecting Asteroids and Shooting Them with Lasers

EXCERPT:

NYE: "Oh, I love that one. You know, so, everybody — understand that I have a day job. I’m head of the Planetary Society, which was started by a guy I took a class from, Carl Sagan, and we talk about this problem all the time. We’ll be presenting at the astronomical Congress in Paris in a few weeks. But coming up, everybody, we have the dual asteroid redirect test, the DART mission. 
(Laughter)
Well — so, people laugh, but, look, there is no evidence — you know, in Texas you see the dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River. There’s no evidence that the ancient dinosaurs had a space program. If they did, it wasn’t good enough. So, on the show, we present the traditional ways people propose to give an asteroid or a comet — the nucleus of a comet is just like an asteroid, it just has more water ice, so you get a tail when it’s in sunlight. I mean, it’s the same — roughly the same material. Roughly could be a pun. Anyway, so what you do is you cause some of the material on the comet to eject, to ablate, to burn off. The way you do that might be with a nuclear weapon in space, you know, there’s no sound in space, so — or the one I like is hitting it with lasers, which is actually reasonable. Hit it with lasers and cause the surface of the comet to ablate, to burn off, and the momentum of the burning off stuff would give it a nudge.”