Asteroid Risk Greatly Overestimated By Almost Everyone 236
StartsWithABang writes: When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes, when we're far more likely to die from something mundane, like getting hit by a truck. One of the examples where science and this type of fear-based fallacy intersect is the science of asteroid strikes. With all we know about asteroids today, here's the actual risk to humanity, and it's much lower than anyone cares to admit.
Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with the premise of the article. I don't think most people are even remotely concerned about an asteroid strike.
I also disagree with the facts of the article. More people die in plane accidents than are run over by trucks. They should pick a better example of a "mundane" cause of death, like heart disease induced by obesity. They also use the fact that only one person has ever been killed by an asteroid to show it is not a concern. But if a big one comes, it could kill everyone, or nearly everyone. An ELE shows up about every 60 million years. If it kills 6 billion people, then that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply.
So you're in fact agreeing with the facts of the article. That's the exact number they give in the article. 100 per year.
RTFA FTW.
Also (Score:4, Interesting)
We are much more likely to experience catastrophic death counts and other horrors from Yellowstone erupting. In fact, it is guaranteed. It is just a matter of time, and Yellowstone is already overdue.
In theory, we would get a good decade or more advanced notice. But even so....nobody is scared of that, even though we know for a fact that it will happen, it will kill most of north America, and it will plunge the entire planet into a year-long winter. Guaranteed.
But...OMG ASTEROIDS!
Re:Also (Score:5, Interesting)
But even so....nobody is scared of that, even though we know for a fact that it will happen, it will kill most of north America, and it will plunge the entire planet into a year-long winter.
Well, almost. A good sized fraction of North America gets buried in ash, which is dangerous to inhale, and makes a mess of machinery, but it isn't immediately deadly if you make any effort at all to avoid inhaling it. It will definitely result in another Year Without a Summer, possibly two. But the ash in the upper atmosphere, the lightest and finest stuff, tends not to cross the equator, so the southern hemisphere won't suffer the serious crop failures that the northern hemisphere will. Given how much of North America's food (and Europe's food, these days) comes from South America, the resulting famine will only be bad, rather than catastrophic.
The problem is how many volcanoes get set off by a large asteroid strike, including possibly Yellowstone itself. Given the probability of an ocean strike (high), you get all possible fun: massive steam cloud and tidal waves, followed by volcanic ash everywhere.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
If an extinction event kills everyone but is so rare so its average deaths per year is low (100), then that's a great argument that looking at the "average deaths per year" statistic is absolute horse-shit.
You can only meaningfully quantify "deaths" as long as the greater backdrop of society is around. Something that results in humans huddled in caves for two thousand years before finally coming back to prominence, or eliminates humanity completely, is almost the worst conceivable thing that can can happen (only events that involve the extinction of entire other hypothesized alien races would be worse).
Obviously, an event that could kill all of humanity is not one we can just put up with or tolerate. Stating that even with that nightmare scenario, the odds are too low to be worth trying to mitigate, is fine- but it sure as shit is not related to "average deaths per year".
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
A large impact in a shallow ocean area might well in every human dying within a decade. Most immediately. It would also first steam clean the planet, and then set an ice age in motion.
Now I'll grant that this is unlikely in any century, less likely by far, in fact, than that we'll do the same thing to ourselves via war or some other means. (War seems the most likely, but it's not the only contender. An escape from a biological warfare lab is a possibility. I'm not counting natural evolution as "doing it to ourselves", but it's happened to other species. In fact it is currently happening to a large number of amphibian species, some of which have already gone extinct.)
But I do consider asteroid impacts worth worrying about. Not worth obsessing about, however, as they are a bit down the ladder when it comes to humanity exterminators.
I also question his method of assigning proper degree of concern. And the reliability of his assertions. E.g. he claims that only one person has ever been hit by a meteor, but there's no evidence that that's true. He should have said only one person is known to have been hit by a meteor. But how many people in remote areas of the planet could have been hit and the reason for death, or even the fact of death, not officially acknowledged? And clearly nobody could cite an instance before around 1700, as even the existence of meteors was denied. So you need to ask what is the probability of someone being hit by a meteor and the fact being officially recognized. This is a quite different question. He performs the same type of factual manipulation (less obviously) in a few other places.
That said, it's not a major concern while other concerns rate higher. But a species ending event is worthy of particular concern over and above the concern over the individual lives lost, as you also need to consider the future lost, and not just a few personal futures, but all human futures.
Personal vs. Species Survival (Score:3)
People who worry about asteroids don't do it because of the
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In fact, as soon as civilization breaks down, ebola and highly fatal diseases like it would burn out before they killed everyone because transport systems would stop transferring infected over long distances faster than the incubation period.
Of course, then you'd have the loss of civilization which could kill everyone down to the carrying capacity of what was left, but humanity would still survive most likely.
Nevertheless, a big asteroid strike or nuclear winter, which would affect the whole planet for exte
It's not about the math! (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a plan to deal with an asteroid/comet strike is more like having an emergency parachute. It's FAR better to have one and not need it, than need one and not have it.
Re:It's not about the math! (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a plan to deal with an asteroid/comet strike is more like having an emergency parachute. It's FAR better to have one and not need it, than need one and not have it.
That is probably a good allegory for both sides of the argument. After all, while technically true, how many people do you see carrying emergency parachutes onto their commercial airline flights, and how much good do you think it will do them if something does go pear shaped?
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
But if a big one comes, it could kill everyone, or nearly everyone. An ELE shows up about every 60 million years. If it kills 6 billion people, then that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply.
Thank you, that is just it...
I don't "fear" this as a cause of death for myself, the odds of this happening to me personally are almost nil.
The real concern is the big one, which is NOT likely to happen in our lifetimes, but on the off chance that it does, it renders everything else we do pointless.
It is a very binary outcome, if it hits, we're gone and all our "save the children, save the planet" efforts amount to nothing.
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I think 'being run over a truck' was loose way of saying 'dying in a traffic accident'
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I disagree with the facts of your comment. I don't have data about trucks specifically, but thousands of pedestrians are killed each year just in the United States. Even in the deadliest years air crashes resulted in less than 2500 deaths world-wide and since 2001 that number has been less than 1000.
Heart disease induced by obesity is a terrible example, not because it isn't common because it is, but because it doesn't strike out of no where. You don't wake up one morning obese and die of a heart attack.
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You don't wake up one morning obese and die of a heart attack.
XD
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thousands of pedestrians are killed each year just in the United States
That number might be a lot less as it likely includes people who commit suicide. Same things with many traffic accidents. However, you cannot commit suicide by asteroid strike.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
However, you cannot commit suicide by asteroid strike.
You could if you control the asteroid defense system, and intentionally cause it to fail.
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The other problem here is trying to quantify by "deaths" is silly.
An obese person who dies of a heart attack (and I assume we're using the bro-narrative that obesity is entirely self caused, by willpower which pretend isn't genetic, and a bad metabolism which we'll pretend is based on lack of exercise and not largely genetic) still lives a life. That person still accomplishes a lot for society, contributes, makes people happy, has kids, etc. And dies at 50 instead of 80, or something.
It's unfair to qualif
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
like heart disease induced by obesity
That's probably what got the woman in the picture of 'only person to be directly hit by a meteor'.
What I don't get is the jump from: 1000 people were injured in Russia two years ago, to: because only one person was ever directly hit by a meteor therefore strikes should be of no practical concern.
A detection system for the size of meteor that can injur 1000 might yeild all kinds of interesting side discoveries and technologies beyond just being a detection system.
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That's probably what got the woman in the picture of 'only person to be directly hit by a meteor'.
I heard it was waiting for her in an alley.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:
Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.
A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.
And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.
And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.
Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?
Just a lot of really bad arguments.
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It's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN.
Our solar system still has billions of objects hurling about the sun. Nothing is static. Everything is dynamic. It's only a matter of time before the earth gets hit again by a space rock the size of a mountain, more or less, .. doesn't really matter.
As many comments previous & following involve the "buried head in the sand" approach, which is just fin
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
Biased sample. Did they ask any dinosaurs?
They did... (Score:2)
Dinosaurs replied that they will cross THAT particular road when they get to it.
Re: Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are Larry Niven and/or Jerry Pournelle, and I claim my five pounds.
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Extinction of our species is a big fucking deal.
Why? You won't care. I am,pretty sure of this. It is not a big deal methinks as something like 95% of all living things have gone extinct already and they are not complaining.
Re: Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
What a stupid argument. If I kill you tomorrow you won't care because you're dead. So why worry about if I'm out to kill you?
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I also disagree with the premise but in the opposite direction.
Risk is the probability of something happening times the damage if it happens.
If Damage = Death of All (functionally infinite), the Probability need only be more than infinitesimal for the Risk to be significant. Is the probability of a mankind-killer asteroid more than infinitesimal? Well, it's happened a couple times before, so while the probability appears quite small it's certainly more than infinitesimal.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's happened a couple times before
Mankind's ancestors survived every single one of them.
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And mankind's successor will match the same criteria. But there is no guarantee that it will be descended from us, and it will suck if we happen to be the generation that is going to win that lottery ticket.
Yes, the risk is low. We do things to mitigate low-risk things all the time. I also don't think this is going to happen in the next million years (statistically a one in sixty chance). But it behooves us to be able to more accurately gauge that risk. Right now, we can only give a very granular risk
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I don't think there would be a Hollywood blockbuster [imdb.com] and funding of related programs if there wasn't at least some social awareness. Ethan Siegel's audience is a little more targeted.
I find it likely that one of Siegel's friends didn't get funding in favor of a more "cockamamie" program related to asteroid detection (which itself is more likely a cover for a US military radar installation).
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The same premise applies to plane crashes and nuclear meltdowns.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because first of all, we don't what the risk actually is until we deploy a system for detecting NEOs.
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Right, and this is one threat that if we do detect it far enough in advance, we can actually prevent it from happening! And having a good detection system is the key, if we detect the threat many decades in advance even the largest "planet killers" can be deflected for modest amounts of money.
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Not afraid, but wary. After all, tame cards are safer than wild ones.
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I for one have *never* been afraid of asterisks.
It's good to have a healthy fear of asterisks -- there's a big difference between "rm -rf *.tmp" and "rm -rf * .tmp"
Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
I for one have *never* been afraid of asterisks.
It's good to have a healthy fear of asterisks -- there's a big difference between "rm -rf *.tmp" and "rm -rf * .tmp"
But surely the space is the villain there.
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Motorcycle Safety Perceptions (Score:3)
I'd also argue that's why so many people fear riding motorcycles.
If you remove the non-helmet/minimal safety gear and drunk rider accidents the rates are significantly lower than presented.
That said, when I have a kid I'll take a hiatus(mostly) until they're out of diapers.
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Every rider thinks like you until they have their first real wreck.
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Every rider thinks like you until they have their first real wreck.
Every planetary population says asteroids are low risk until they get hit by the big one.
Every swimmer thinks shark attacks are unlikely until they get bit by one.
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Except statistically, bikers are wrong and the others are right.
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Most riders who ride for more than a few years DO end up in a major wreck.
Call up Geico and ask about full coverage motorcycle insurance rates for different age brackets.
Ask any old biker about it.
Re: Motorcycle Safety Perceptions (Score:3)
Therefore, the vast majority (something close to 80-90% of riders) never have a major accident and never will have a major accident.
Sure, most motorcyclists know other motorcyclists that have had major accidents,
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I thought the same thing about the bike laid down in front of him. Definitely too close!
I can't say that I'm 100% perfect on the speeding bit (I usually go with he flow of the fast lane on the highway ~80mph).
That said, I also treat every car like they're trying to kill me. I think of the dumbest thing they could possibly do and what I would do to avoid that situation. That has saved me more than once. ABS brakes also helps for incredibly quick and safe panic stops.
Mostly wrong (Score:2)
Sure, the chances of getting hit by an asteroid were probably over blown. That people panic about non-threats or believe they can win the lottery is not normal, and not because of the person as much as the hype other people put on these things.
Advertisement, people wanting power and your stuff, those are the big problems. The pressure to keep people in the cave has not changed since the allegory was first written.
Re:Mostly wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, large, mass-extinction asteroids are only a problem every 70 million years.
By that logic, why even bother worrying about AGW, since even by the worst predictions it won't have any horrible effects for the next 100 years or so. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy life! .... there's nothing that could possibly happen that Earth wouldn't completely recover from in a couple million years.
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-cont... [weknowmemes.com]
Trolling? (Score:2)
If you are not trolling then you are confusing dwelling on something you can't change with something we can change. The sarcasm and snark can only be justified if you were correct in your analogy but since it's bananas to orangutangs your statements are just being a prick.
To bring in AGW which is not any where near what I or TFA were discussing. Yet somehow you got modded insightful.. go figure
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Er, just trolling for mod points, and I guess I know my audience for the most part... I was really just looking for a nice place to link to that funny image, and your post sounded smart (though TBH I didn't really understand what position you were arguing for or against, but I agree with the statements you made).
But just to explain my AGW analogy... should we be worried about asteroids enough to spend money on asteroid interceptors, even though any kind of payoff is likely only once every 70,000 years or
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why even bother worrying about AGW, since even by the worst predictions it won't have any horrible effects for the next 100 years or so
Some bad effects are already starting now, and depending on your age, your children or grandchildren may be hurt by it. Worrying about your direct offspring, that you know and love, makes a lot more sense than worrying about descendants 50 million years from now.
Exotic (Score:4, Insightful)
People fear exotic deaths.
Death by lethal injection or beheading, results are the same. One is much scarier than the other, why?
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Most "lethal injections" imply a drug with some sedative/hypnotic properties that renders you unconscious, not much different than being administered anesthesia where you just "fall asleep" quickly.
Beheading? A very effective beheading (guillotine) sounds like there's at least a chance of some very terrifying moments of consciousness of your head separated from your body.
Worst is one of the Islamic terrorist beheadings where they just kind of saw your head off with a knife, which sounds like a mixture of e
"One is much scarier than the other, why?" (Score:2)
People fear exotic deaths.
Death by lethal injection or beheading, results are the same. One is much scarier than the other, why?
Well, presumably it's because you happen to know when you've murdered someone, you aren't going to be beheaded for it, but the risk of lethal injection is actually real?
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i'd prefer a presumably very very effective gunshot to the brain, while i'm asleep.
but an execution style gunshot would probably be the quickest and most pain-free death possible.
you're literally dead before you can realize you're dead.
risk is extremely low, consequences extremely high (Score:5, Interesting)
I skimmed TFA, and it seems a lot of it talks about why I shouldn't be afraid of dying to an asteroid strike.
I'm NOT. Never have been. My risk is so close to zero as to not even matter, so it would be purely irrational to fear that. But that's not the point! Every hundred of million years or so, an extinction class impact does happen. The risk to humanity as a whole over the short run is also very small, but over the long run, it becomes large.
Yes, there are other ways we can take ourselves out, some of which are much more likely, but many of those are in our own hands. By making smarter choices we can reduce those risks, and either we'll learn to do so, or get what we deserved. But asteroid impacts are an external risk, something that just comes along and smites us down. It seems worth devoting a minuscule amount of our species' resources to studying what to do about that. And minuscule effort is all we're doing.
The risk year over year is almost zero. The consequences are the ultimate ones for our species and every other large animal life form on the planet.
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I skimmed TFA, and it seems a lot of it talks about why I shouldn't be afraid of dying to an asteroid strike.
I'm NOT. Never have been.
The article generalizes that we are all as stupid and the general population, which has a tremendously skewed risk perception, in part due to media that also doesn't understand risk and/or intentionally ignores it. Unfortunately that ignorance drives our policy makers as well.
Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
The article appears to only consider the risk of an individual dying, not the entire human race. The latter is much harder to recover from (we'd basically have to evolve all over again).
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to be fair the biggest threat to the entire human race is the human race.
Odds of winning the lottery are low too. (Score:5, Insightful)
But people win them all the time. Do we really want to gamble we'll never "win" this particular lottery?
I think the author's point is that we should be exploring for positive reasons. Sure, that's a feelgood strategy to take... but I don't put smoke alarms in my house for positive reasons.
It's about having control (Score:2)
I thought the risk was Rumsfeldian (Score:2)
As in Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. We know that the risk of an asteroid strike, but we don't know about all the potential asteroids that could hit us.
While the overall risk is low, we don't know what could possibly hit us.
Stupid premises (Score:2)
The article is stupid. Where to begin?
Averaging is not a good way to estimate things here. No one is concerned about a 100 people dying on average every year. Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. This is not akin to killing by (relatively) mundane causes like terrorism or a specific disease or automobile accidents.
It took 4 billion years to develop an intelligent civilization on a planet which is highly suitable to life. Which shows what the probability of intelligent civilizations is.
This is not a minor i
Standing on a planet that's evolving (Score:4, Funny)
And it's 200 light-years away, so we'll probably never get to meet them.
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This is not a minor injury for a civilization. This is death
Death is death. Doesn't matter if you die because you got hit by an asteroid or a car.
Unintended consequences (Score:2, Interesting)
Pot, meet kettle (Score:3)
Excessive hyperbole is silly, yes...
Each year that passes sees roughly a 0.0000005% chance of a species-threatening asteroid coming our way, while real threatsâS - âSenvironmental, medical and political (i.e., war)âS -âScould literally wipe us off the face of the Earth in the blink of an eye.
Global warming is a sloooooooooooooooooow process and even if you burned every bit of coal and oil you wouldn't make Canada into Sahara, it's hardly an extinction level event. A modern day pandemic could presumably kill millions, but it's hardly an existential threat to the human race. Same goes for total thermonuclear war, there's be a lot of direct deaths and many more indirects deads from nuclear winter and starvation but not enough to wipe us out.
Tsar Bomba (most powerful nuke): 50 MT
Chicxulub asteroid (dino killer): 100,000,000 MT
We're not even remotely in the same league. The odds are small that it happens tomorrow but in terms of "worst case" asteroids have everything us humans can come up with beat by far.
Risk Management (Score:2)
The feeling of having some control (Score:4, Interesting)
higher than you think (Score:2)
"between 36 and 166 meteorites larger than 10 grams fall to Earth per million square kilometers per year. Over the whole surface area of Earth, that translates to 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites"
It's not consequences. It's the lack of control. (Score:2)
People aren't so much scared of what could happen as they are about inability to do anything about it.
Being careful around traffic makes getting hit by a big truck less likely. Diet and exercise are not panaceas but are mitigating factors for lots of medical conditions even if you're genetically or epigenetically predisposed to them. Modern medicine, although imperfect, gives us far greater control over both of those types of things even after the fact.
In a plane crash, unless you're the pilot or mechanic,
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People aren't so much scared of what could happen as they are about inability to do anything about it.
That's silly. If you can't do anything about it, there's no purpose to being scared.
Not so sure (Score:2)
It's very trendy to say "When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards" but I'm not so sure that's true?
These kind of talks seemingly always look at risk/reward calculations as symmetric, which they very abundantly aren't.
The fact is that people are extraordinarily conservative when it comes to the rare-risk, high-cost cases, but rather daring when it comes to rare-but-high-reward cases because, well, we'r
Overestimation (Score:2)
Asteroid Risk Greatly Overestimated By Almost Everyone
Number of people who overestimated asteroid risk greatly overestimated by headline.
You need to look beyond the math. (Score:2)
When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes.
Playing the lottery is a daydream that anyone can indulge in for the expenditure of a few dollars --- an impulse buy and a month's entertainment for the price of two rentals from the Red Box.
On 9 November 2005 a Boeing 777-200LR, dubbed the Worldliner, completed the world's longest non-stop passenger flight. It traveled 21,602 kilometres (11,664 nmi) eastward...from Hong Kong to London, in roughly 22 h 22 min
Non-stop flight [wikipedia.org]
Ebola is simply a reminder of how quickly in the modern world a new and deadly infectious disease can spread beyond its origins. Replace West Africa with Central America and the Caribbean and see how you like the odds against containment.
The geek is not particularly good at distinguishing between sing
Asteroids aren't the greatest risk (Score:2, Funny)
And don't even get me started on the little ones! Those f'ers aim!
I completely disagree (Score:4)
First, they talk about asteroids like they're just a risk to be calculated. The problem is that a large enough asteroid wouldn't just kill a lot of people, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, and quite likely would cause the extinction of humans. So even if the odds are low, the consequences are bad enough that we should be worried about it. Also, it's not like it hasn't happened before. An asteroid hurt a bunch of people in Russia a few years ago, and a really big one killed off most of the dinosaurs in the K-T Event. The dinosaurs learned the hard way how foolhardy it is to not have a strong space program.
Second, a danger like this is good for us as a species right now, if we take it seriously. We need to get into space for a lot of reasons; we're destroying our ecosystem, using up our resources, polluting the planet, and there's no end in sight. There's huge opportunities in space: there's untold resources ready to be mined in asteroids or on the Moon nearby, and if we could come up with the technology, we could even live there just in case this planet becomes uninhabitable. However, if we wait around until it's too late, we won't be able to take advantage of space-based resources (or deflect a killer asteroid); we have to start now, developing our capabilities.
Finally, a threat like this is good for us to focus on, because it gives us a reason to be more unified. We humans are stupid and fight with each other when there's no external threat; the only time we band together is when there's an even bigger external threat which forces us to look past our differences and work together. Killer asteroids are good for that, forcing us to develop our space technology without needing to demonize some other group of people.
Honestly, the authors of this article should be ashamed of themselves. Even if they were right, they shouldn't publicly proclaim this because of the negative effects on society. What would they rather we do, give up on space technologies and work instead on building more ground-based weapons systems so we can fight each other more and pollute our ecosystem even more? Good job, assholes.
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zero * infinity = ??
?? depends on how the factors are approached.
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\\ for very large values of 1
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How exactly does one evaluate the overall risk when that very-low-probability is multiplied by global extinction?
An asteroid may kill a lot of people, but it will not cause global extinction. No asteroid strike has ever completely wiped out life on earth. The closest was the Permain Extinction [wikipedia.org], and it isn't even clear if an asteroid was the root cause. People are far better prepared to survive a strike than other species. We are dispersed all over the planet. We can build shelters, stockpile food, etc. Since any asteroid big enough to be an ELE [wikipedia.org] will be easily detectable, we will have many months, and more likely,
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Just because it has never happened in the past doesn't mean it can't happen in the future. Granted, it would take a very large asteroid and it is highly unlikely, but it is possible.
From http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/asteroid-hits-earth.htm [howstuffworks.com]:
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do we have the technology to alter the course of a mile wide asteroid in 2 months?
My guess is we'd soon find out if ICBMs work.
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Actually the survivability isn't completely known either. There is a good theory that I heard about the K–Pg Extinction which stated that surface temperatures reached about 700 degrees Fahrenheit about 2 to 8 hours after the impact. The theory is that the asteroid threw a ton of earth into the atmosphere, which all then began to fall back to the earth, which created the temperature change almost completely around the world. This explains the death of all insects, the death of all plankton and why a
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An asteroid may kill a lot of people, but it will not cause global extinction. No asteroid strike has ever completely wiped out life on earth.
Isn't that argument a bit like "I plan to live forever, so far so good"? After all, if it did wipe out all life well then we'd be dead so obviously it hasn't happened yet. Some large extinction event seem to happen once every 50-100 million years [wikipedia.org], what does a once in a billion year event look like? Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt is about a million times bigger (10^20 kg vs 10^14 kg) than the dino killer. That one isn't going anywhere, but there's clearly quite a few potential total extinctio
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So, that would be like hitting on Megan Fox, in otherwords. Can't really judge that one very accurately either, because I'd do it every time.
I think you mean low chance high punishment.
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This. You can't simply run these sorts of numbers on an ELE because the risk isn't the risk that *I* might die, but rather, that my entire species might die. It's a totally different thing that asteroid hunters are worried about. And the chances of all of humanity being wiped out in one is actually much higher than the probability that all of humanity gets wiped out in a giant plane crash, or series of plane crashes.
It's like complaining that people who are worried about getting hit by a truck shouldn't
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One man, Harry Daghlian, working alone at night, let slip one cube too many, frantically grabbed at the mound to halt the chain reaction, saw the shimmering blue aura of ionization in the air, and died two weeks later of radiation poisoning. Later Louis Slotin used a screwdriver to prop up a radioactive block and lost his life when the screwdriver slipped. Like so many of these worldly scientists he had performed a faulty kind of risk assessment, unconsciously mis-multiplying a low probability of accident (one in a hundred? one in twenty?) by a high cost (nearly infinite).
(Emphasis mine). That quote is from Genius, James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman - the author of TFA apparently makes the same mistake.
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Man-made climate change won't cause humans to go extinct.
A 6 mile long rock can.
Neither risk should be ignored.
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Not true. Climate change alters basic acidity of oceans, revives ancient diseases trapped in polar ice, and the interconnected nature of society and trade may result in conflicts where one person decides to start a nuclear war as billions are forced to migrate or die.
Look, I love that you civilians think it's not a problem, but you've never had to deal with what people pushed to the edge actually DO when they either leave their nation state or die. They will do whatever they have to, and that is very very
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Sure it is true...
Even if 6.5 billion people die, there will still be plenty left... I'm not suggesting that is a good thing, but it isn't an extinction level event.
A 6 mile wide rock is.
Global warming/cooling/climate change is not going to erase humans from the Earth, even if it removes more than half of them. A really, really big rock would.
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Big rocks don't necessarily kill all humans either. Previous big impacts didn't kill all life on earth either, and they didn't have an early warning, or capability to build deep underground shelters.
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No, they didn't kill all life, but they killed all life the size of humans...
An underground shelter only helps if you have many years to prepare in advance, if it hit tomorrow with no warning, we'd be toast...
The skies would be dark for awhile, large animals and plants would be killed or burned...
The odds of the human racing surviving at all would be low.
The odds of it happening are crazy low, but the damage done if it does happen is crazy high.
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If 6.5B people die, that's the end of civilization. If humans are lucky, maybe they'll repopulate and rebuild a new civilization 2000 years later, but at this point, it's more likely they'll all die of starvation and then we'll be extinct.
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You might want to look back and see how recently we had 600 million people total on Earth...
You might be shocked at recent that really was... And last I checked, we had civilization when there was "only" 600 million people in the world...
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Back then, we had far more resources because they hadn't been tapped out. People also knew how to live without technology and agriculture back then. Not any more.
It's not like we'd suddenly go back to peacefully living like they did thousands of years ago. The survivors would be fighting over what little resources are left.
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I think you overestimate how many resources are "tapped out".
As the number of people drop, the land and resources for each are increased. This makes it easier to avoid fighting over them as they become more plentiful.
Sure, it will be messy getting there, lots of people will die, but we're talking about the species as a whole, not every specific person.
Plenty of people in the world today know how to live just fine without technology. Maybe not your average American or European, but all of them can die and
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Not sure what your point is, your reply really makes no sense.