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Space Science

What, Me Worry? 302

Posted by michael from the hakuna-matata dept.
Space.com dissects (or see the same story on MSNBC, with handy Torino scale graphic) the asteroid scare that's been in the news for the past week, asking some good questions about the roles of the news media and the scientific community. I suppose my take on it is something like this: given that truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely, at least in this case it was an insignificant threat to the entire planet.
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What, Me Worry? More

What, Me Worry?

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  • Daily Show (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @09:56AM (#3977981)
    I like Jon Steweart's comment:
    "The torino scale ranges from 0, no likely practical consequences, to 10, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
  • They cnap ut spin on it, of course. If people don't like it they won't read the paper. Credibility is always questionable; we assume newspapers (and other new-outlets) always tell the truth. If a person questions the honesty of the piece, they should do some research, and read articles from other sources. They'll pick the one that they like best.

    Seems they's quarreling over how to interpret data. Pretty petty.

  • Odds (Score:2, Informative)

    by McCart42 ( 207315 )
    In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited [stats.org] range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million. So was this asteroid statistically significant? Turn to Mark Twain for that one.

    The whole "on collision course" phrasing thing was, in my opinion, poor choice of a headline, but news is a product just like any other media item, and sensationalism sells.

    • Re: Odds (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 )

      > In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning.

      A few years ago Scientific American had a really interesting article on the risks of various things happening and the disconnect between the actual risk and the perceived (intuitive) risk. They had a scale which, IIRC, spanned two pages, and marked where lots of familiar and exotic was of kicking the bucket fell on that scale.

      The funny thing was that their baseline was a 1/1,000,000 chance - the risk you run by living off peanut butter sandwiches for a month.

    • In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited [stats.org] range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million. So was this asteroid statistically significant? Turn to Mark Twain for that one.
      Problem is, you have to multiply the oods by the consequences. The worst lightning strike I ever read about killed 5 golfers. Or you look at forest fires ignited by lightning: a few dozen deaths and a few hundered million in property damage.

      Then look at two possible consequences of an asteroid strike

      • A BIG ONE (tm) - Arizona sized - all human life on Earth destroyed.

      • A small one - say 10 Mt worth - comes across the Atlantic from the direction of Iraq and lands near a US city. Effects not easily distinguished from a nuclear strike during the first few hours. US launches "retaliatory" strike against whomever - a few hundred million dead.

      Multiply those consequences by the odds (remembering that asteroids of various sizes do strike the Earth from time to time, and you can see that keeping watch is a rational thing to do.

      sPh

      • There was a story out west somewhere of some people on an overlook platform getting hit. I believe several people died in that strike. (There's a picture in the Hallady, Resnik, and Walker Fundamentals of Physics book we just used in class of one lady with he hair standing on end shortly before the strike from the buildup of charge.)
      • A small one - say 10 Mt worth - comes across the Atlantic from the direction of Iraq and lands near a US city. Effects not easily distinguished from a nuclear strike during the first few hours. US launches "retaliatory" strike against whomever - a few hundred million dead.

        Dude, the idea of a big asteroid hitting us is scary enough, you don't need to make stuff up. I'm pretty sure that NORAD can tell the difference between an asteroid and a missle. Not to mention people on the ground, who would presumably see a big fireball streaking toward the impact site, which a missle wouldn't have.

        • Re:Odds (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Stonehand ( 71085 )
          1- The opinions of any surviving witnesses on the ground may not matter, if sufficient damage is done to impair communications for a significant time. And, FWIW, it might take less time to target, fuel and launch an ICBM than to repair the comm network.

          2- Don't worry /just/ about the US; worry about every power with WMDs, especially ones with aging systems and weak space programs.

          3- Any warning would have to be distributed /well in advance/ and widely, to everybody that would possibly have retalliatory powers and might hear of such an incident. You wouldn't want to have a SSBN captain miss the word, suddenly lose contact with a major city or two, and jump to conclusions.

          4- Not everybody might believe such a warning. Hopefully, everybody that matters would... but not necessarily. Imagine if, by bizarre coincidence (and, perhaps, some OT-style poetic justice/collective punishment...) a stellar object smacked into and obliterated much of Jerusalem (both Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods in it, that is). It wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of Palestinians might believe that it were an Israeli nuclear strike to destroy the Islamic holy shrines there, while radical Israelis might see it as a sign from God to do whatever the hell they were already thinking of doing, but just looking for an excuse to do.
        • > Dude, the idea of a big asteroid hitting us is scary enough, you don't need to make stuff up. I'm pretty sure that NORAD can tell the difference between an asteroid and a missle. Not to mention people on the ground, who would presumably see a big fireball streaking toward the impact site, which a missle wouldn't have.

          Absolutely correct.

          Unfortunately, given that an asteroid's gonna hit, there's a small - but certainly real - probability that the rock's gonna land in the Middle East, a land whose governments don't have distant early warning systems, nor satellites to detect missile launches.

          You try convincing a billion illiterate peasants that the rock that landed in the middle of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Iran wasn't a nuke. (The absence of fallout would be obvious - but it's not like every desert nomad's packin' a Geiger counter.)

          Hell, given our recent flip-flopping of policy on appeasement for the Palestinians, I think we'd be hard pressed to convince Israel we weren't bullshitting 'em if said rock landed in the Mediterranean and swamped the country. (Although at least the Israelis would check for fallout before deciding whether or not to launch the retaliatory strike.)

          (Evil Genius Idea - suppose we stick an ion engine onto a smallish 1-2t rock and smack it straight into Mecca - ya think we could spin-doctor it into saying "Dudes, it's just God giving you another Kabaa stone to go with your first one! He wants you to ditch the terrorism now or you'll collect the whole set!" :-)

          • Absolutely correct.
            Reference please? Everything I have read in the last 30 years indicates that NORAD does not have the capability to detect asteroids. A high-angle asteroid strike from over the Atlantic would look very much like a FOBS shot from a ship or submarine.

            Now, the powers that be may very well have capabilities they don't talk about. Or perhaps you have info I don't. But since "Not only is peace our profession, but we guard you from asteroids too!" would be a great PR win for the USAF, I think they would tout the capability if they had it.

            sPh

            • > Reference please? Everything I have read in the last 30 years indicates that NORAD does not have the capability to detect asteroids. A high-angle asteroid strike from over the Atlantic would look very much like a FOBS shot from a ship or submarine.

              I don't have any "information" (anyone who does had damn well better not be posting to Slashdot! :), I just like playing armchair general - all the speculative fun stuff, with none of the risk, of the real job. So, to clarify:

              Yeah, I assumed that we have enough satellite coverage of the ground to detect a launch from anywhere. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. (Rationale: Both sides in the Cold War knew where the other side's satellites flew. If our side had left a big gap in its coverage, their side have sailed their subs there, prompting us to ask "What are all their subs doing off the shore of Antarctica? Oh, right, the same thing ours are! Hiding where nobody can see the launch!" :-)

              I'd forgotten about sub-launched FOBS (thanks for the reminder), but will add that my statement was predicated on the assumption that everyone abandoned the idea in the 60s/70s. (And I think that today, any nation capable of building such a sub would rather build a sub full of SLCMs for the arsenal instead. Much less destabilizing, still a good deterrent, and doubles as a great conventional weapon the rest of the time. Win-win-win.)

              As for ground-launched FOBS hanging around up there, I've assumed they were a non-starter on all sides, for treaty reasons, budget reasons, and finally, because I don't think anyone's been spending much money on ASAT work lately. I've therefore assumed that no such system was ever deployed by either side.

              All that said - had such a rock hit in the middle of the Cold War, when about half the land mass of the planet was a target in one way or the other, and we didn't have launch detection, and we didn't have any idea whether either side had orbital bombardment tech - it could have sucked mightily.

              The one good thing about the limited/regional conflicts we're faced with today is that we can afford to wait a few hours for the fallout data to come in before deciding if it was a rock or a nuke. With "Use 'em or lose 'em" out of the equation, we have the time to think before we act.

    • I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited [stats.org] range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million.

      I was hit by lightning...OK, I was a very small parallel part of the circuit, but it hurt like heck!

  • NEO Information Centre (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lev13than ( 581686 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:02AM (#3978010) Homepage
    A good discussion of the asteroid/comet collision risk is covered by the Near Earth Object Information Centre's website, which is a not-so-secret agency maintained by the UK government:
    http://www.nearearthobjects.co.uk [nearearthobjects.co.uk]

    Also of note is a /. discussion along similar lines from back in September 2000:
    UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report [slashdot.org]
  • The only difference between "AAAAURGH ASTEROID!!!!" and "AAAURGHHG COFFEE GIVES YOU CANCER" is that the Asteroid story was leaked by NASA who want a bigger budget - and the coffee story was leaked by a company with a new 'CANCER FREE' brand launching, well, as it happens, TODAY!!

  • 3.9 in a million????? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lobsang ( 255003 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:06AM (#3978053) Homepage
    And people worry?

    That's the same probability of me waking up tomorrow with Cindy Crawford serving me breakfast in bed wearing Victoria Secret underwear...

    or...

    none...

    (I could easily bear an asteroid hitting the planet if that breakfast thingy happened though...) :)

  • John Stossel... (Score:2, Informative)

    by jeffy124 ( 453342 )
    A few weeks ago, John Stossel of ABC's 20/20 news show did a whole 1-hour special on media hype, exposing truths in things like road rage, car magazine reviews, and terrorism warnings. He also did a "Junk Science" special a few years ago, pointing out large-number scare tactics, hype over medical problems that never existed to begin with, etc.

    This story with the asteroid is right up his alley.
    • The great thing about the show was he even admitted a few times he had done it himself, or at least, reported something that turned out to be inaccurate in the end I think. At least he has the courage to come forth and admit it. I wish he was on more often, I remember watching his specials in school as well.
  • If this asteroid is coming so close, let's just blow it up anyway. Who knows, the knowledge gained might just come in handy some day.
    • If it's going in the other direction and will continue going in the other direction, don't bust bits off it which might come round and hit us in the ass! Did you never play Asteroids? :-)

      On a more serious note, we can't just blow it up anyway, bcos there's FA to blow it up *with*. Bruce Willis's space shuttles don't exist anywhere except in a DreamWorks rendering cluster. That's what the astronomers at SpaceWatch are scared of, that if something did genuinely come on round, we wouldn't be able to do anything except say "Oops".

      Grab.
      • That's what the astronomers at SpaceWatch are scared of, that if something did genuinely come on round, we wouldn't be able to do anything except say "Oops".
        And that is the most important reason why we need better monitoring systems; the sooner we hear about the big one we can't stop, the more time we will have to riot and pillage.

  • Economic reasons to scare John Q. Public (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikewas ( 119762 ) <wascher.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:11AM (#3978094) Homepage
    Declare war on asteroids. Like most wars, this'll increase government spending and provide stimulus to the global economy.

    Unlike other wars, in this one no one gets killed, only asteroids.

    This has nothing whatsoever to do with science, it's an attempt by politicians to justify deficit spending (rightly so in my view) by scaring the public at large.

    • More spending? It wouldn't take much more. After all, you'd only need to make one spaceship to fight the war.

      You get a bonus ship every 10000 points.
    • We should just make the assumption that a large object will threaten the planet in our lifetimes and make preparations accordingly. The US spends far more on missile defense than it does on asteroid protection, but asteroids have struck the earth before (just nearly a 100 years ago in Russia), but intercontinental missiles have never struck the US. Seems like we should at least spend a couple billion for interstellar garbage collection. Just push these things into the sun or something.
    • I used to be really good at Atari Asteroids. The trick is to take out all the little debris bits before blasting another large one, otherwise you end up fighting off a swarm of tiny ones.

    • Declare war on asteroids.

      Screw this defensive "homeland security against asteroids" shit. I say we take the fight to those damn bugs who keep hurling these things at us! And if our allies are queezy about toppling the Brain Bug dictator, then we'll just have to go it alone! Already we've got a plan in the works to take down BugCentral from the inside out.

      GMD

      • take the fight to those damn bugs who keep hurling these things at us!... the Brain Bug dictator... RIAA Headquarters: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

        Whoah! I knew the RIAA was bad, but I never realized they were a hive mind led by a Bug Brain dictator bent on destroying the earth by slamming asteroids into it!

  • Risks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:11AM (#3978095)

    > truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely, at least in this case it was an insignificant threat to the entire planet.

    Which happens to be entirely relevant. Suppose activity A poses you with a 1/100 chance of losing a dollar and activity B poses you a 1/100 chance of losing $100,000. Are they equivalent risks? In terms of raw probability, yes. In terms of the expected value of their cost to you, no - B poses a threat five orders of magnitude higher than A.

    For planet-buster asteroids we need to look at the expected value of the cost to our species, not at the raw probabilities. I.e., this is much, much less likely than having another solar flare disrupt our communication systems, but if it does happen it will hurt us far, far more than a mere communication disruption.

    • If you ever get involved in safety or security assessment you will come across things called risk-severity matrixes, that can be used as either a quantitative (probabilities and cost/lost lives etc) or qualitative method of ranking potential hazards (improbable... highly likly, negligable... catastophic). This normally gives you a partally ordered list.

      In this case the straight probability might be small, but the outcome is bloody big, so this would rank as fairly high as a hazard. On the other hand, the risk of small meteorites entering the atmosphere is high, but the outcome (severity) is tiny (I think there has only been a tiny handfull of cases of people being killed), so the hazard ranking would put this very low down on the list of things to worry about.

      Unfortunatly, most people only look at the severity (people scared of flying, or traveling by train because of the nature of the accidents) without the risks (car travel, more likely to die, but only a couple die at any one time).

      In this case the severity is so very high, and the risk not sufficiently low, that we really have to worry about it.

      Paul
    • Exactly. Consider the following comment from the article:
      Harris figures Americans tend to trust what they read more than Europeans, who know a misleading statement when they see one.

      Now, applying the same insightful reasoning as above, we get:
      If your readers are European, to get the same amount of attention you have to hype things more out of proportion (while making it sound real at the same time).

      That essentially seems to sum it up. The statement lends itself to other fun implications and conclusions which I will avoid here, I'm not trying to start an offtopic flame war. :-)

  • Torino Scale Graphic... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Omerna ( 241397 ) <clbrewer@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:14AM (#3978117) Homepage
    I think it may be a little out of order, considering:

    7: Extreme threat of collision capable of causing a global catastrophe.

    9: Collision capable of causing regional devestation.

    I hope I'm not the only one who think a global catastrophe should rank higher on the scale than regional devestation.
    (There are some other mix ups too, I just felt like posting those two.)
    • 7: is just a threat, even tho it's an extreme one. 9: is a collision that is going to happen and that will devastate a region.
    • I don't know for sure, but it depends on the definition of "catastrophe" and "devestation", and whether 9 implies 7 as well.

      If you assume a "catastrophe" is, say, "dust kicked up blocks sunlight, causing crop failures", and "devestation" is basically "rename the continent to Cockroach Crater", then it would make sense. In this case, 9 would also cause 7, and probably to a greater extent than an impact which caused 7 but not 9.

    • Or, I'm just an idiot who didn't check the scale and trusted what you said. Upon actually reading it (/me slaps himself) it's obvious that the primary ordering field is probability of a strike, and the secondary ordering field is the level of destruction (local, regional, global).

    • The scale is based on the probability of something happening, then on the amount of destruction. Number 7 is a high probability (90-95%? likely) that an object will collide with us and cause a global catastrophe, Number 9 means that a regional disaster will definitely (100% likely) happen.

  • Oxgyen di-hydride (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 )
    ...or something. I'm not a chemist - no doubt someone who is will correct me on the exact name.

    Literally years ago, I remember seeing a newsclip on the BBC which highlighted how easily people could be whipped up into a frenzy due to lack of knowledge and skewed facts. They interviewed a researcher into risk, who had asked people the following.

    Should this chemical (oxygen d-hydride) be banned?

    • This chemical is a major component of acid rain
    • It has caused many tens of thousands of fatalities over the last ten years
    • It has caused immense damage to property, and destroyed entire towns

    ...and so on. You get the point. The chemical under discussion was, of course, water. By giving it a scientific-sounding name, and describing it as dangerous a massive majority was immediately in favour of a ban.

    Oh, and will some kind chemist please put me out of my misery regarding the exact term that must have been used?

    Cheers,
    Ian

    • oxygen di-hydride
      hydroxide acid

      take your pick
    • Oh, and will some kind chemist please put me out of my misery regarding the exact term that must have been used?

      I'm no chemist, but I'm found this [att.net] on google:

      dihydro-oxide

    • Re:Oxgyen di-hydride (Score:3, Informative)

      by McCart42 ( 207315 )
      It was referred to as DHMO [dhmo.org]. Dihydrogen monoxide. First mentioned in the Washington Post--here's a link [stats.org] to an article about it, from the same site I posted earlier in the article about misleading statistics.
    • There are two main problems with this study as you sort of pointed out was that it was completely biased and conducted in a way to get the required results. SOP of course.

      1) How many people who don't have a background in science would realize the oxygen di-hydride is the same as H20? So the study purposefully used a non-common name in an effort to make the compound seem more "neutral" which was a good thing.

      2) Only the negatives were described without a listing of the benifits. Of course if you don't tell people of the useful features of something and only tell them the negatives they will favor a ban. Duh.

      There was also a really good episode of Yes, Minister (or maybe Yes, Prime Minister) that dealt with the same thing. They were going to build a plant that produced as a waste product metadioxin. The used the fact that the name was like dioxin to keep the plant from being built. I forget the entire plot, but as usual with this series, it was very good.

  • Hype = Good (sometimes) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:18AM (#3978140)
    Personally, I think this is a subject that's been ignored far too long. Frankly, I'd like the hype to scare the crap out of people because it's an issue we need to address sooner or later, if we want to continue to occupy this little corner of the galaxy. Some day, we're going to be in the crosshairs of an object big enough to wipe out all, or at least, most life on this planet. There is no question about this. It could come at any time and it could come entirely without warning, as we've seen recently. [cnn.com] We didn't even notice it until it passed us by.

    The point is, we need to address it sooner or later (or accept extinction as part of our future), and the longer we put it off, the better the chance we'll be unprepared when the time arrives.

    This isn't something we'll necessarily have a lot of time to prepare for, even if we do discover it before it hits. And even then, how much prep time will we need? What are our options?

    I would agree that we need to take care of problems here on Earth, but we also need to address the very real threat that NEOs pose. We need to start mapping them all out so that we can be sure we can at least know at what point we really need to start worrying. As long as only a small fraction of NEOs are mapped out, we're completely vulnerable.

  • Chance *is* significant, given the consequences! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aridg ( 441976 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:20AM (#3978153)
    People are posting that "3.9 in a million" is such a small probablility that even *mentioning* this is pure hype...

    But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.

    After all, an asteroid of this size could certainly kill millions of people, and depending on the effect on the climate, maybe hundreds of millions. A "four in a million" chance of killing, say, 10 million people, would mean that the expected (mean) death toll from this asteroid would be about 40 people -- roughly the amount of a major train accident or minor airplane crash. I don't think this story got more play than such an accident would have...

    So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
    • (1) If the chance remained 4 in a million until 2019, then it would be a very serious concern. But the exact trajectory will be determined well before that (seems like in a matter or days or weeks). So very soon, the odds will either be much greater than that, or zero. In this case, we can wait a year before we have to scramble to design the mission that sends up Bruce Willis or whoever.

      (2) I don't think anyone was saying that this was "pure hype", just that it was way over-hyped. If these articles said that the asteroid was "on a collision course" with Earth, that's wrong - they should say that there's a very small (but not zero) chance that it's on a collision course.
    • A "four in a million" chance of killing, say, 10 million people, would mean that the expected (mean) death toll from this asteroid would be about 40 people
      Uhm ... I know what you're getting at ... BUT (and this IS a VERY large but)

      If an asteoroid like NT7 hit earth it would release damage like ~70,000,000 nuclear bombs like the one that wasted Hiroshima.

      Granted - there is a fair chance that it could hit somewhere on earth, where the imidiate damage would be VERY small (say central Antartica or arctis), but if it hit basicly anywhere else, I think you could kiss the 40 people death toll goodbye.

      It's a ROCK that is ~2 km (~1.2 miles) in diameter traveling at 28 kilometer per second or 17 miles per second. If it were to hit a country like Denmark (souther Scandinavia), you can basicly kiss the population of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland and most of Germany goodbye as a result of the impact alone ...

      Okay, that's just 42 people, but still ...

  • Atari (Score:4, Funny)

    by kin_korn_karn ( 466864 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:21AM (#3978163) Homepage
    This is old news. Atari predicted the asteroid war in the late 70s.
  • If there has ever been a case where 'crying wolf' was appropriate, this is it.

    Really, think of all the ridiculus bullshit non-threats that people go nuts about.

    In the 80's we were warned about the dangers of salt. Later, we realized only about 2% of the population has to be concerned. Yet millions upon millions were spent developing and marketing salt substitutes (Mrs. Dash, Lemon Pepper, Potassium Chloride, etc.) all for what turned out to be a perceived threat.

    If humans are willing to spend millions because they were afraid of salt, imagine what they will happily fork over to protect them from an asteroid/comet/meteor slamming into Earth.

    Real threat, slim chance, whatever. Lots of good scientific research would come out of this.

    Money well spent, faux fear or not.

    Talisman

  • Does it worry anyone else, (Score:5, Funny)

    by ByteHog ( 247706 ) <chrisNO@SPAMbytehog.com> on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:25AM (#3978184) Homepage
    That the (not so) possible end of the world is named NT7 ?

  • This is getting rediculous! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:28AM (#3978203) Homepage Journal
    The FIRST time this asteroid story [slashdot.org] was listed on /., most Score:5's explained the likelyhood and how it was being blown out of proportion.

    Now, we are on the third story, and no one is relaxing, because we all relaxed after a few intelligent astronomy geeks pointed it out the first story. The slashback [slashdot.org] that pointed out that the astronomy geeks were right is a nice touch, but a THIRD story about the SAME THING that we ALREADY FIGURED OUT, in my opinion, is -1 redundant.

  • Hype has its place. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by elocutio ( 567729 )
    I suppose my take on it is something like this: given that truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely...

    Yes, but consider what hype can do. A man can learn to skillfully place a leather ball into a metal hoop and become a millionaire legend. A talented group of teenagers can cut a couple of albums and fill a stadium with frenzied prepubescent teenagers. Hype can overthrow governments. It can dictate the norms of a culture. Every fad has its day because of it. I don't like hype, because it distorts reality. But then again, if engineers sold software, I'd probably be looking for a job.

    My point is that, although I admit my idealism twinges in pain at the misuse of hype, I can see that it has a role to play. The "hype" of a large rock blowing away half of the world's population, which could fuel an intense public demand for more funding for the thirsty desert of scientific research and discovery.

  • I don't recall people screaming in the streets or anything. Just a popular topic of conversation.

    If anything, this "article" about hype, IS, in and of itself, blowing things out of proportion.

    I'd rather hear speculation that ends up being wrong, than not here anything at all.

    It's not a perfect world, after all.

  • This is George Bush's BIG CHANCE! He can declare a "war on asteroids," unite the whole country, and his party can ride the wave of popularity right into the fall elections!

    These objects all orbit around an "axis of evil" that we must root out and destroy. We will make no distinction between asteroids and those planets that harbor them. If you are an asteroid and you are listening to this, hear me: You cannot hide behind ANY planet's moon or in any planet's rings. Wherever you are, we will find you, and we will blow you up.

    My attorney general is drafting legislation right now giving our law enforcement agencies broad new powers to find the cells of asteroid sympathizers that are operating here on our planet. I ask all citizens of Earth to be on the lookout for any suspicous-looking rocks falling out of the sky that don't belong there.

    Thank you very much, and God Bless Earth.

  • Same instincts for huge payoffs unblinkered by reality of the likelyhood being statistically even more insignificant. (violent cataclismic event, 6.+*10^9 people killed [disregard probality of ballistic alignment 1*10^-11] = recipe for news headline.)

    Want to see a winning TV ad? "Total destruction of the planet predicted. Watch 'News at Ten.' But NOT at eleven."

    The certain heat-death of the universe get no air play even though its a certainty mostly because it is a certainty. What are the odds? (1:1 actually)
  • Great, a handy-dandy scale for precisely classifyiing a threat we are totally unprepared for. Hey, that's useful.

    So what's the motivation? A bureaucratic need to assign numbers to things? Somebody had a chance to get some grant money? Somebody's seen War Games too many times?

    • Well it depends on the size of the asteroid. In this case possibly yes.

      The reason that this is studied is so that we can find out what are these asteroids made of and is it or would it be possibly to deflect them or break them up. If the asteroid is all ice then breaking it up could result in smaller peices that could do less (or possibly more) damage. This is stuff we need to know.

      It is possibly that one asteroid could impact earth and if it hit in the ocean and we could predict where and how big of tidle waves there would be it may be possible to evactuate people and save lives.

      If we knew for sure that the asteroid was going to hit and when we could prepare for it so that the entire human race was not destroyed. Come on didn't you see "Deep Impact" the movie???

  • But wait a second. This is a pretty large asteroid, which happens to come close to earth's orbit (if not actually cross it) every 2.29 years, and has been detected less than a month ago. In the last few months another two (smaller) asteroids were discovered, both days after they closely passed earth.

    So here I am, not worrying about those asteroids they have found so far. But what the fuck about those they have not found yet?

  • The upside to the whole asteroid scam is the attention it brings to said asteroids. Asteroids contain a lot of really cool chemicals not found (At least in signifigant quantity.) on earth. As commercial space travel starts becoming more viable in the next few years, the possibility of mining asteroids for the cool stuff they contain could present some very nice opportunities for humanity. By drawing more attention to asteroids now, we help ourselves down the line.
  • I think the hype can be good. At least it raises attention about something much more devastating then an incorrectly issued Thunderstorm/Tornado Warning (issuing one when there isn't/not issuing one when there is but they can't find it). In recent years we have seen NASA's budget cut slowly but surely by our congress and our president (BOTH Clinton and Bush). Now, we have a space station, but no science can occur because of the budget cuts (unless you count studies on long exposure to zero g). Point is, the space station could very well be used as a science outpost to study these things as well as a launching point for anti asteroid shuttles. Spending more on finding them won't do anything to help repel them. NASA needs more money. Scientists who are studying antimatter and fusion reactors need more money. A nuclear warhead could help, but I doubt it would scratch an asteroid the size of NT7 2002. We need something with a little more kick (antimatter charges in a mag field maybe???). I don't know. All I do know is even with 19 years lead time, I doubt we could have killed this asteroid.

    Anyone who wants a better idea of the kind of problem something like this can create should read Thunderstrike! [amazon.com] by Michael McCollum. Besides being a decent sci-fi book, it discusses many ways of deflecting this kind of thing. Orbital Modification (basically slowing or speeding up the rock so it will not hit us...we speed by before it gets to where it would hit us.....), Destruction, and bringing it into orbit for mining are all in the novel. While, I know it is fiction, but how may things just in our lifetimes have been science fiction at some point? Maybe the device I am typing on now?? Point is, there is a very real danger. Sure, not as much of a danger as us being in a car accident or something, but there is a danger and it should definitely be looked at. Total extinction is something we can fight. The Dinosaurs did not have the brains to do this. We have the brains and with enough time, the means to get something done. Just starting this project after one is discovered though may not be enough time to get things done.

    Sometimes things should just be done for the sake of humanity and not for money. There is scientific proof that this will happen and has happened in the past. More proof then the global warming folks have anyway.

  • On Big Rocks (Score:3, Informative)

    by ZeLonewolf ( 197271 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @11:55AM (#3978997) Homepage

    I thought the whole asteroid thing was kind of neat, so I made a little box [eviljournalist.com] on my web site that grabbed the latest impact data from NASA and shows year of impact, probability of impact, and danger rating.

    Here's the (php) code [eviljournalist.com] .
  • Did they get MC Escher to create that thing, or what?

    They have two independent variables: collision probability and damage level, but they twist them into one scale, which gets all stupid in the 5-7 range.

    If they based it on some concept like damage expectation, they should just put the damage expectation on there, instead.

    And don't forget to estimate the economic damage expectation due to the hype and panic they cause.

    --Blair
  • I think this is a good example of why the media really need to look at what they are doing these days.

    Picture the scene.. around 7:15am.. I am in my bed, and at that stage where you are not quite awake and not quite asleep - I am listening to the radio before I get up to get ready for work and then they announce quite bluntly that there is a meteor, about two miles in size, heading for the Earth. That certainly got me out of bed pretty quick.. the worst thing about this is that the radio station in question is BBC's Radio 1 - one of the main radio stations for the UK - not some tin pot local station.

    During the day I headed over to Slashdot to get some more information, and it turns out that the risk is not quite as grave as the British media is reporting.

    So why the hell must they persist with these scare tactics.. I wish they could just report the news as it was, without terrifying the public with unfounded, half-assedly researched stories. Sheesh..
  • I am still of the opinion that we need to direct all the energy currently directed towards religous worship, into a program which gets a colony off the planet. If we were hit by a sun-side rock tommorow, it could destroy what could be the only intillegent life-form the universe has ever seen. I believe this is a responsiblity.

    M@
  • In all honesty, if on a second and third look the scientists all determined it was about 1:1 odds of hitting the Earth in 2017 (or whatever) do you REALLY think they would tell everyone?

    Imagine the headlines after all of that "we are looking further...preliminary estimates...yada yada".

    Scientist: After further study we have determined that it is a near certainty that the Northern Hemisphere will be vaporized in 2019.

    Yeah, right.
  • Wouldn't a collision with a meteor large enough to wipe out life as we know it steal money from the RIAA?

    At the very least I'm pretty sure that melting CDs is not in the RIAA's best interests and is therefor not considered to be a permissable use of the media that you have.

    Maybe we should just have the RIAA sue all Asteroids...

    Or perhaps they can Denial of Service Attack them so that they can never actually get to the Earth...

    </sarcasm>

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