No, a Huge Asteroid Is Not "Set To Wipe Out Life On Earth In 2880" 123
An anonymous reader writes "Phil Plait wants you to know that asteroid 1950 DA is very, very unlikely to hit the Earth in 2880, despite what you may have read. He writes: "As it happens, 1950 DA is what's called a 'near-Earth asteroid', because its orbit sometimes brings it relatively close to Earth. I'll note that I mean close on a cosmic scale. Looking over the next few decades, a typical pass is tens of millions of kilometers away, with some as close as five million kilometers — which is still more than ten times farther away than the Moon! Still, that's in our neighborhood, which is one of the reasons this asteroid is studied so well. It gets close enough that we can get a decent look at it when it passes. Can it impact the Earth? Yes, kindof. Right now, the orbit of the asteroid doesn't bring it close enough to hit us. But there are forces acting on asteroids over time that subtly change their orbits; one of them is called the YORP effect, a weak force that arises due to the way the asteroid spins and radiates away heat. The infrared photons it emits when it's warm carry away a teeny tiny bit of momentum, and they act pretty much like an incredibly low-thrust rocket. Over many years, this can change both the rotation of the asteroid as well as the shape of its orbit."
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything I've read said it's very unlikely to hit Earth in 2880. One chance in three hundred does not "likely" make.
On the other hand, 1 in 300 is pretty close to the chance of a Straight coming up without a Draw....
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At least the asteroid exists, your "Singularity" does not
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At least the asteroid exists, your "Singularity" does not
Thanks, man from the future. We were very worried until your insightful and illuminating post reassured us.
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Technological Singularity [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, that is the one that doesn't and will not ever exist.
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...because...?
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Human brains are not binary computers and there is no hope of a binary finite state machine becoming a concious entity. A bunch of relays (or pneumatic or hydraulic values for that matter0 is not self-concious, and no amount of them however interconnected will become conscious, self-aware, or have feelings. The stupidity and illogic of otherwise intelligent people believing that nonsense is amazing.
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Human brains are not binary computers and there is no hope of a binary finite state machine becoming a concious entity.
That's nonsense. The human brain is a physical entity, therefore it can be simulated with arbitrary precision. And simulating brains hasn't been shown to be the only way to give rise to consciousness.
Also, the finite state machine is not the epitome of computational models.
A bunch of relays (or pneumatic or hydraulic values for that matter) is not self-concious, and no amount of them however interconnected will become conscious, self-aware, or have feelings.
There's no reason to believe that's true.
The stupidity and illogic of otherwise intelligent people believing that nonsense is amazing.
Have you ever heard that saying about how when an old, learned scientist says something is impossible, he's probably wrong? It does quadruple for J. Random Slashdotter.
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The finite state machine is the only model your digital computer can do
Actions of human can't be simulated with arbitrary precision (nor can animals nor the stock market nor the weather nor even something as simple as the path of an electron held in a potential well), your assertion that any physical thing can be simulated with arbitrary precision is laughable and naive in the extreme. You might want to research a concept known as quantum mechanics.
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The finite state machine is the only model your digital computer can do
I was thinking of Turing machines, although you might be able to simulate any finite Turing machine on an FSM. It'd be a massive waste of resources, though.
Anyway, why must it be impossible to simulate a brain on an FSM?
Actions of human can't be simulated with arbitrary precision
They can't yet. My use of the word "can" was meant in the timeless sense. How do you know we'll never be able to simulate a human brain, or create another conscious entity with a digital (or analogue, for that matter) computer? There's nothing special about us meatbags.
You might want to research a concept known as quantum mechanics.
The possibilty of simu
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Yet he states it as if true with the unshaking certainty that is normally associated with the raving lunatic (who has stopped taking their prescription drugs) or the religious. not that there is much perceivable difference between the tow groups.
I'm hoping my lunatic friend stops t
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Suppose the activation potential of a neuron is a quantum mechanical quantity that is probability driven (we know the light sensors in the eye are, sometimes a single photon can activate them). Your computer can't model that to arbitrary precision, the probability density function is continuous, analog, not discrete.
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Suppose the activation potential of a neuron is a quantum mechanical quantity that is probability driven
Or let's not suppose. Is it or isn't it? Even then, ultimately everything is probability driven, but that doesn't stop us doing very accurate simulations of physical phenomena. Balls interacting on a pool table touch and collide because they have molecules and atoms, but you don't need to calculate the position of every one of those to achieve realistic simulations.
Your computer can't model that to arbitrary precision, the probability density function is continuous, analog, not discrete.
Then model it with an analogue component - if you really do need such accuracy. It only really needs to be good enough that end result (consciou
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Rational induction is all that is needed to debunk "the singularity". Instead, fear war and other dirty rotten things humans can do to each other.
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The chances of us wiping ourselves out before the asteroid arrives is better than the odds of the asteroid wiping us out.
Isn't that Ironic
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Isn't that ironic
Nope.
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I wonder on what basis you make those assumptions...
Look where mankind was 800 years ago. Look where we stand today. Although such a leap forward isn't assured, it can nonetheless be assumed without too grand risk for error.
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By 800 years from now, all it will take to deflect the asteroid will be emailing the manager of the Chinese steel mill on it and having him blip the thruster jets for long enough to nudge it in the proper direction.
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800 years is not that far off. There is no way that humans will advance to the stage where we can manipulate asteroids or explore space by then. Chances are, we will be extinct.
100 years ago man was barely grasping the concept of manned flight a few hundred feet off the ground.
Now we have rovers on Mars chatting back and forth, and astronauts Tweeting "backyard" pics from the ISS.
I find it a bit of a slap in the face that you assume what man is capable of 800 years from now when you can't even begin to fathom where we will be 100 years from now from a technological standpoint. We can't even imagine an environment devoid of the internet anymore, and that was a concept that only to
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, 1 in 300 is pretty close to the chance of a Straight coming up without a Draw....
That number is an old estimate which appeared in the article that TFA was actually complaining about for sensationalizing things. The current estimate is more like 1 in 4000, which is more like drawing 4-of-a-kind in five cards... not exactly a common poker hand.
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The current estimate is more like 1 in 4000, which is more like drawing 4-of-a-kind in five cards... not exactly a common poker hand.
I dunno. 1 in 4000 is not such great odds when it's an asteroid destroying the earth.
If a doctor recommended surgery, and the mortality rate was 1 in 4000, I'd make damn sure the benefits outweighed the risk. And I'd update my will.
Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
I hope that whenever a risk comes along of 1 chance in 4000 of destroying the world, people take care of it.
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
Yeah, sure. But the thing here is that it's not a 1 in 4,000 chance of this asteroid hitting us every day; it's 1 in 4,000 that it'll hit us once. 800-odd years from now.
1 in 4,000 is a small enough chance to be a virtual certainty over a few hours for events happening once a second - does that mean anything at all to a 1 in 4,000 once-in-a-lifetime chance? No. And this event is not even a once-in-a-lifetime event; it's once-in-several-tens-of-lifetimes.
Or to put it another way: People suck at probability assessments.
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It's a 1 in 4000 chance of destroying the entire world. The risks are low, but the damage is great.
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Suppose somebody built a nuclear power plant next door to you that had a 1 in 4000 chance of going critical on any one day. That's a median of 11 years, right?
Yeah, sure. But the thing here is that it's not a 1 in 4,000 chance of this asteroid hitting us every day; it's 1 in 4,000 that it'll hit us once. 800-odd years from now.
1 in 4,000 is a small enough chance to be a virtual certainty over a few hours for events happening once a second - does that mean anything at all to a 1 in 4,000 once-in-a-lifetime chance? No. And this event is not even a once-in-a-lifetime event; it's once-in-several-tens-of-lifetimes.
Or to put it another way: People suck at probability assessments.
Let's put it another way. By the time this 1 in 4,000-chance event comes around, we will have invented new math that will make it equal to a pint of blueberries. But that's OK, because the holodeck was invented in 2350, so it's all good. Like we need to worry about the real world. It's not even on MTV anymore.
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Boy are you in for a rude shock. Even a common place apendectomy has a mortality rate of about 2% last time I checked.
Have fun never having surgery for anything!!
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Informative)
Even a common place apendectomy has a mortality rate of about 2% last time I checked.
You must have checked it a VERY long time ago. It is true that the rate of complication is about 2-3%, but the MORTALITY rate (i.e. the number of people that die as a result of the surgery) is
estimated at one to two per 1,000,000 cases of appendicitis
(Source: http://www.surgeryencyclopedia... [surgeryencyclopedia.com])
Not 1 in 50 as a 2% mortality rate would indicate.
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Boy are you in for a rude shock. Even a common place apendectomy has a mortality rate of about 2% last time I checked.
Have fun never having surgery for anything!!
You think the odds of surviving the appendectomy are low? Try surviving without one...
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I had a nephew who didn't have an appendectomy in time. That was really scary. (He doesn't have normal pain reactions, and the doctor didn't account for that.) Fortunately, the only remaining effect is a large scar.
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If a doctor recommended surgery, and the mortality rate was 1 in 4000, I'd make damn sure the benefits outweighed the risk. And I'd update my will.
If you are having surgery and the mortality rate is 1 in 4000 (0.025%) those are excellent odds. Usually surgical mortality rates vary between 1% and 6% depending on the procedure.
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If a doctor recommended surgery, and the mortality rate was 1 in 4000, I'd make damn sure the benefits outweighed the risk. And I'd update my will.
If you are having surgery and the mortality rate is 1 in 4000 (0.025%) those are excellent odds. Usually surgical mortality rates vary between 1% and 6% depending on the procedure.
Actually you're right. I had to look it up. I remember a mortality rate of 1% in the 1970s for anything with total anesthesia, and since then the rate has gone down. Not as far down as I thought.
More precisely, the mortality rate varies with the procedure and the patient. Lung function, kidney function, heart function and the presence of diabetes are usually the big ones.
I think an angiogram of the heart or brain has a mortality of 1 in 1,000 or less. I wouldn't take it lightly.
Suppose I had a jar with 1,00
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Last time I had somebody run a catheter (or whatever) into my heart, I was having a heart attack. Having the clot simply removed is worth a bit of risk. I wouldn't do it for fun (particularly since lying still while the groin incision healed enough for me to move was agonizing).
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Last time I had somebody run a catheter (or whatever) into my heart, I was having a heart attack. Having the clot simply removed is worth a bit of risk. I wouldn't do it for fun (particularly since lying still while the groin incision healed enough for me to move was agonizing).
It sounds like you either got a thrombolytic like TPA, or you got a stent placed.
In principle, the doctor should be able to say, "In randomized controlled trials, when people in your situation are treated with this procedure, their survival rate is X, and when people are untreated, their survival rate is Y."
I haven't been following the literature carefully lately, but in my understanding there's a small but significant advantage to using a thrombolytic or a stent.
Cardiology has a lot of treatments with smal
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Yup. Thanks for the figures.
When my father had his first heart attack, they put him in a hospital bed and essentially let him recover by himself. Things have improved a lot since then.
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That's right in the ballpark for general anesthesia [wikipedia.org] by itself. When I signed the release form, it said 1 in 2000, but then they knocked me out (yay, propofol), so my memory might be faulty :)
Relative risks of common events is something people are just not good at estimating.
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Re:Actually... (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully Morgan Freeman will still be around to save us from ELE!
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Hopefully Morgan Freeman will still be around to save us from ELE!
No, clone Bruce Willis and send him to blow it up.
Only a 0.0248% chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything I've read said it's very unlikely to hit Earth in 2880. One chance in three hundred does not "likely" make.
Especially since it is actually 1 in 4,000 or 0.0248%. Still I'd actually think it would be a good thing to have the odds a lot higher, like 90%, with a lead time like this of 800+ years. To date the existential threat posed by wars have caused science to make massive advances but this has come at a huge cost of misery and death
Think of the scientific advances that could come from an existential threat that, instead of pitting us against each other, actually puts all of humanity on the same side for a change. In the past 800 years we have come from the dark ages to the internet age. If we can't get it together enough to develop the technology needed to cause a small deflection to an asteroid in the next 800 years then I'd say it was probably time for evolution to give it a second roll of the dice.
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Everything I've read said it's very unlikely to hit Earth in 2880. One chance in three hundred does not "likely" make.
On the other hand, 1 in 300 is pretty close to the chance of a Straight coming up without a Draw....
If we can't figure out a way to reduce that probability to approximately zero sometime in the next 866 years, we deserve to get smashed.
Who cares? YOLO isn't it? (Score:1)
It's not like any other unknown celestial body could just show its ugly face from behind the sun and hit us while we are happily spending billions in stupid wars.
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Right. Drop what you are doing and go over the mideast and tell the Islamic nutjobs to stop it. The world has more important things to worry about. I'm sure they'll listen to you. Swing by Putin as well and tell him to be a nice boy.
Re:Photon pressure is a joke. (Score:5, Informative)
Especially when you compare it to the gravitational changes induces by each pass by the Earth/moon system and its pass of Mars and (more weakly) Jupiter.
Each one affects it FAR more than anything from photon pressure.
Yeah, TFS makes it sound like the YORP [wikipedia.org] effect is something significant, but if you read TFA (I know, i know...) you discover that the YORP thing seems to be there to point out: (1) there are lots of very small effects that make long-term predictions for orbits difficult, and (2) one needs to do a LOT of observations to be able to predict all of these factors, but (3) we HAVE an unusually large set of observations on this asteroid (including enough to predict things like YORP effect factors).
Hence, from TFA:
They accounted for a lot of small effects on the asteroid, including the YORP thrust, the gravity of the planets, the gravity of other asteroids, and so on. They found that the probability of an impact [nasa.gov] in 2880 is about 2.48 x 10^-4, which is about 1 in 4000.
I realize that lots of people out there are idiots, and everyone here thinks that they can immediately think of something obvious that no expert doing a study would ever consider... but, you know, sometimes the experts actually have thought of the obvious thing before you posted about it on Slashdot.
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Re:Photon pressure is a joke. (Score:4, Informative)
"The Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect, or YORP effect for short, is a second-order variation on the Yarkovsky effect that changes the rotation rate of a small body (such as an asteroid)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorp
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Also, I thought that it was the Yarkovsky effect, not YORP, that changes trajectories.
You may be right -- I've heard of the Yarkovsky effect before, but I'm not sure I've heard of YORP before I read this. The way the wording is done in TFA, it certainly sounds possible that he's just conflating Yarkovsky and YORP into one thing:
The infrared photons it emits when itâ(TM)s warm carry away a teeny tiny bit of momentum, and they act pretty much like an incredibly low-thrust rocket. Over many years, this can change both the rotation of the asteroid as well as the shape of its orbit.
You seem to know more about this than I do, but it does sound like TFA may be lumping all these small effects of photons on motion into one thing and calling it "YORP effects."
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If this does become a problem, perhaps NASA will need to actively hunt down and recruit those champion asteroid blasters who dominated the arcades back in the 80s.
Anyone know the whereabouts of the ace pilots known only as FUK, ASS, and DIK?
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Sometimes I think what America needs is mother nature hitting the proverbial reset button on us.
It'll be amazing if "America" is still around in 2080, much less 2880.
The entire population of the 13 Colonies was less than the current population of Iowa and they stood up a country just fine. China doesn't keep itself together by playing nice, and we really need to avoid going the Mao Zedong route.
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Tunguska, Chelyabinsk, you see the pattern.
The heavens punish always those evil comunists.
Yes! At Tunguska, even before they existed!
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The USA is only 4 percent of the globe's population, get your head out of your ass and consider the whole human world.
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Humans in general have been greedy and hate riddled since before written history.
Um... (Score:2)
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It makes me think of the steamroller scene from Austin Powers. It's a very tiny chance of us hitting us to begin with, but we have plenty of time to dodge it (or rather, make it dodge us) even if technological advancement were to stop today.
For some reason (Score:2)
I wasn't particularly worried about a 2880pocalypse to begin with.
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An Asternado hasn't been ruled out. Nor Sharkroids, which is like Goatse x million
Small correction... (Score:2)
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THAT specific meteor isn't, another may be.
Another small correction: it's not a meteor :) Not yet, anyway, and hopefully never.
Re:Asteroids are a threat - let's deal with them (Score:5, Informative)
This asteroid is only around 1 km in diameter. An impact would be distinctly annoying, but civilization, and most people, should survive.
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And who knows, 2880 AC's might get a grasp on statistics. (1:10E6 chance of a global event does not give you 7000 casualties - that's not even wrong.)
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Size doesn't matter. It's the kinetic energy that counts!
Phew! (Score:1)
science and religion agree! (Score:1)
according the some billboard on I-35 the bible says the world will end in 2017
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Good deal. That means we can ignore this!
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Steal the dude's house late 2016 and say, "you ain't gonna need it, your billboard says so."
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according the some billboard on I-35 the bible says the world will end in 2017
Does it say when we can start looting?
We carried wrong (Score:2)
It's really 2018, sorry for the miscalc. We'll be more careful next time.
Ambiguity (Score:2)
So they're saying they're not sure which year it will hit? That's worse!
Out of luck (Score:2)
Damn. The over/under was set to 2881 and I put $50 on the under.
Dam! (Score:1)
Kind Astronomer (Score:2)
Kind enough not to point out that by that time 'man himself' has already long accomplished what said asteroid some 800 years before was assured not to be able to do for other reasons.
Oh crap (Score:1)
Safely ignore all long-term predictions (Score:1)
There are way too many variables involved to be able to predict that something is going to hit us in the medium to long term.
You would need to precisely map the trajectory and momentum of every single object, large and small, which could have a gravitational influence on the candidate impactor, then calculate the effect of each on the other, then iterate for the change in trajectory and momentum imparted.
Predicting a hit in 2880 is just clinically absurd.
Stupid scientists (Score:1)
Every time I turn around I hear things like "The polar ice caps are gonna melt due to global warming, flood the earth, and wipe out all life on the planet", or "A giant earthquake is gonna cause California (where I live) to sink into the ocean killing everybody", or "A giant asteroid is gonna hit the earth, cause the sky to become black, and wipe out all life on the plaent".
And every single time some scientist come out and says "Don't worry guys, it's not gonna happen" and my hopes and dreams are crushed. :
Honestly (Score:1)
Like most of us care if the world will end in 2880.
The majority of our planet only cares how their profits will turn out next week.
2880, not 2080 (Score:2)
If its 2080...yes we may have something to think about.
Pity it wont hit (Score:1)
Then again, if we're still stuck on this rock, arguing over pieces of land by then, I guess we deserve it...
Too Bad. (Score:1)
I was kind of hoping for a global wipeout.
Not going to hit us eh? (Score:2)
That's what they WANT you to think...
You seriously should not worry about asteroids (Score:1)
When Yellowstone goes, you'll have no place to stay, oh no.
Mean old National Park, taught US to weep and moan
Mean old Supervolcano, taught US to weep and moan
Thinking bout my baby and my happy home
re: Headline (Score:2)
Blowing some karma on this one...
>> No, a Huge Asteroid Is Not "Set To Wipe Out Life On Earth In 2880"
Damnit.