B612 Foundation Loses Partnership With NASA; Asteroids Not a Significant Risk 182
StartsWithABang writes: Yes, asteroids might be humanity's undoing in the worst-case scenario. It's how the dinosaurs went down, and it could happen to us, too. The B612 foundation has been working to protect us by mapping and then learning to deflect potential threats to our planet, but their proposed mission needed $450 million, a goal they've fallen well short of. As a result, NASA has severed their partnership, which is a good thing for humanity: the risk assessment figures show that worrying about killer asteroids is largely a waste.
Black Swan (Score:2, Troll)
Yep, the chances of one getting us is small. On the other hand, if one does come, we'll look like foots just before we kiss our asses goodbye.
Risk Assessment (Score:4, Informative)
We humans are incredibly bad at dealing with a low CHANCE of really really bad things happening. The problem is that, as shown in the discussions here, the idea of RISK is misunderstood. There is a CHANCE of something happening, yes. But that is not the same as the RISK of something happening. The RISK is the CHANCE multiplied by some metric of how bad the thing is. It is RISK that should guide policy, not the CHANCE. (I'm capitalizing these to indicate they are mathematical variables) . When it comes to nuclear plant meltdowns or asteroid collisions, people tend to look only at the CHANCE of it happening in their own lifetime. I that is low, the RISK is forgotten. The problem with this thinking is that eventually a species that guides policy this way will become extinct. If we are the "thinking species" it's high time we got on with some serious thinking. CHANCE X "DEGREE OF BADNESS" = RISK
RISK vs CHANCE (Score:3)
We humans are incredibly bad at dealing with a low CHANCE of really really bad things happening. The problem is that, as shown in the discussions here, the idea of RISK is misunderstood. There is a CHANCE of something happening, yes. But that is not the same as the RISK of something happening. The RISK is the CHANCE multiplied by some metric of how bad the thing is. It is RISK that should guide policy, not the CHANCE. (I'm capitalizing these to indicate they are mathematical variables) . When it comes to nu
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I agree with absolutely everything you said.
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There are others who are willing to accept risks and are aware, also, of the probabilities. Yes, an asteroid might harm us in very meaningful ways. The RISK (as you so eloquently state it) is acceptable, at this time, as we've more important things to resolve. It would, indeed, appear that bombing little brown men is one of them and while I don't agree with that directly I do think there's plenty of other things to worry about before worrying about a big rock making us go the way of the dinosaur. Like, how
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Maybe YOU do not but some of us do, in fact, understand the consequences and the probabilities and can associate a risk level accordingly. Thus my solution of getting off this rock in a meaningful manner. I suspect my poor writing skills are to blame for your confusion.
Re:RISK vs CHANCE (Score:5, Interesting)
One has to weigh the cost of preventing something from happening vs. the benefit of preventing it.
Humans will obviously become extinct on Earth at some point. We are a young species and we adapt slowly. It takes us over 10 years to reach sexual maturity, we have few births per woman/year, each member of the species requires substantial resources which severely limits the number of humans that can be on the Earth at any one point in time. This all leaves comparatively few opportunities for genetic alterations as opposed to, say, cockroaches. To make matters worse (although, as civilization declines, this will no longer happen so it's a temporary impediment), we interfere with natural selection via medical procedures and social programs so resources are consumed on "survival of the weakest" rather than on "promoting the strongest".
So, it's only useful to consider the chances of a catastrophic asteroid strike before we become extinct via other mechanisms. An asteroid strike 100 million years from now is completely irrelevant to humans as there will be no humans to experience it (or to maintain the infrastructure to prevent it). More adaptable species will survive it anyway.
Not as relevant to this specific case, but to be considered in discussions about extinction of the human species in general. Extinction of the human species is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to humans (esp. since it's going to happen anyway). If the cost of delaying human extinction by N years is so high that all humans live in substantially less "comfort" for the remaining M years of human existence and N << M, it's likely incurring the cost of delaying extinction makes no sense (esp. to someone whose lifespan is much, much less than M or N).
Its analogous to, hypothetically, offering a healthy 30 year old two options. The first option is eating a distasteful, but extremely healthy, calorie restricted diet which will leave them feeling weak all the time but they will live, on the average, to be 87 years old. The second option is to eat pretty much whatever they want to enjoy and maintain a caloric count that does not interfere with their daily life or motivation or pleasure but they will live, on the average, to be only 86.75 years. A rational person would, I think, choose to live in comfort for their remaining 56.75 years rather than to live another three months but at the cost of being in discomfort and too weak to do much for their remaining 57 years.
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"Extinction of the human species is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to humans"
Are you from the continent that has come to hate science and engineering, or from the continent that is about to be plowed under by a tsunami of jihadist scum?
Fortunately, there are still lots of Asians, and they have other plans.
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I'm just being realistic.
In my view, it's extremely likely that there are many intelligent "species" (by some definition of species/life) who are "superior" (obviously a subjective evaluation) to humans elsewhere in the universe. Although, there's no realistic chance that humans living today (or perhaps ever) will encounter them because the search space is so large and it's entirely possible that those species see no reason to look for us. Humans, as a species, are very important on Earth (from a selfish st
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Neither.
I'm just someone who understands something about science, including evolution, and who isn't blinded by a notion that I'm somehow special because some book (choose one from the religious institution of your choice) purports to claim that humans are somehow unique from ants, spiders, beavers, sea gulls, sloths, lizards and the like in some way beyond simple differentiating attributes that evolution has yielded. And, I'm intelligent enough to be completely comfortable and unalarmed by that reality.
If
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The universe doesn't care about us. We care about us. And since the good book that I thump is The origin of Species, I have every reason to believe that we will adapt to new environments as we simultaneously modify the environment to suit ourselves. Because single-celled organism cannot think, they have no ability to modify their environment in a planned way. The modifications they can make might be very large (rise of the cyanobacteria, for example) but they are unwitting. Humans have the potential, if we
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I don't recall The Origin of Species speculating much about how humans can modify the environment to compensate for their very limited ability to evolve quickly and how long that strategy would be viable. As I recall, it focused on organisms evolving to adapt to the environment rather than some select organisms figuring out how to change the environment to adapt to that organism's feeble evolutionary abilities.
My money is on single celled organisms being around long after humans are gone no matter how we at
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If you follow that logic, then we also MUST take steps against:
- Global warming
- Killer viruses
- Rogue black holes
- Rogue artificial intelligence
- Aliens
- Gamma ray bursts
- Giant solar flares
- Magnetic field reversal
- Supervolcanoes
- Biotech disaster
- Nanotechnology
- Particle accelerato
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The notion of "risk" kind of breaks down for extreme events like that. In one sense it's not unreasonable to put the model value of your own life at "infinity", since for you at least the entire universe literally comes to an end.
That would be just a quaint little artifact leading to the usual paradoxes that come when you arbitrarily set infinities, but it actually matters for more realistic risk assessments like health care and safety standards. You end up asking questions like "how much is a human life wo
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- Global warming - working on it, although it's just moderate quality speculation
- Killer viruses - working on it, very much so
- Rogue black holes - no way to design a recourse
- Rogue artificial intelligence - not a defined problem yet, no way to design a recourse
- Aliens - not a defined problem, not even known to ever present one, no way to design a recourse
- Gamma ray bursts - can't be fixed with any practical tech means we know of or can imagine
- Giant solar flares - for some values of "giant", already a
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Let's see: :)
- Global Warming: High chance, high risk, slow action. Will happen over generations (5+).
- Killer viruses (I assume you added bacteria as well): Low chance, low risk, slow or fast action. I'd bump it down significantly.
- Rogue black holes: frankly they fall into the same category as asteroids (celestials dangerous to us)
- Rogue artificial intelligence: Pah-lease. That's coming after global warming takes care of all of us
- Aliens: I'd lump them into "celestials dangerous to us".
- Gamma Ray Burst
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The mitigation plan for most of these terrible events is "be somewhere else when it happens". Some humans need to leave the Earth and live elsewhere as the ultimate insurance plan against mega-disasters. Mars. The Moon. Space habitats in the Asteroid Belt. Ceres, or Ganymede, or Titan, or all of these.
Re:RISK vs CHANCE (Score:4, Interesting)
Divine intervention is not a legal worry, as there is no god
You seem very sure of yourself, but what if He's just hiding? Sure, the odds of that seem small - quite small. But are they higher or lower than the chance of an asteroid strike? Even if the odds are "infinitesimal" we're multiplying by infinity here, right? Ahh, Pascal's wager [wikipedia.org] - everything old is new again.
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Look at it this way. You can compare the odds of God acting to the odds of finding an exception to the Law of Conservation of Energy. Just because no one has ever observed a violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy, doesn't mean that the entire thing couldn't be totally invalid tomorrow, or that tomorrow God comes out of hiding.
Difference is, we've been looking for a violation of the Law of Conversation of Energy for far far less time than we've been looking for God, so we're statistically more likely
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Meh, we found so many holes in the Law of Conversation of Energy 100 years or so ago, we had to completely redefine it to include "mass" as a kind of energy. I bet we do that again, one day - broaden the definition to maintain something being conserved. (Also, did you know there is no conservation of energy in General Relativity? Strange but true.)
More fun: an act of divine intervention could conserve energy; it would just require a statistically unlikely sequence of events. Plenty of energy coming from
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You seem very sure of yourself, but what if He's just hiding?
How big is his penis and why does he even have one? Are galaxies his sperm that he shot out into the universal womb?
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Odds are zero as there is no proof or reason to think that there is a god. Asteroids? Yes we have proof of those.
We had no proof or reason to think that there was dark matter, until a few decades ago. Turns out it's most of the matter in the universe. Funny how things turn out. That's the point of Pascal's wager after all: even if the odds are "nearly 0 - as sure as we can really be of anything that it's 0", when you multiply that by infinity you still get infinity.
The flaw in Pascal's wager is more subtle than that - think a bit more about it.
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Space Nutter == people who think expansion into space should be ignored
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There seems to be a lot of people on here who equate expanding into space with colonizing the new world and seem to think that in the near future we'll have a self-sustaining colony on Mars, the Moon and/or on the asteroids.
Seems pretty nutty to me.
Now the idea that we should explore and learn isn't a bad idea
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How do you decide which to spend money on?
In reality, the odds of an asteroid hitting us are relatively much higher than the sun suddenly exploding tomorrow, so you would have to base yor decision on the CHANCE and not worry about the (equally infinite) RISK.
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You are so, so silly. Those "terrorist groups" are a near zero threat to us. The risk -- the chance multiplied by the badness -- is just about zero.
Your problem is that you base your reasoning on nonsensical hysteria built on the baseless rhetoric instead of fact.
As for the rest... well, the answer there is clear, and it's my fault for not being specific enough: Brown people with natural resources we covet. The others (like Africa and Bangladesh) we just let stew in their own juices. Iran, them... we're cou
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Science. Technology.
You should really learn about these things before you proclaim what we can, or cannot, to.
Re:Risk Assessment (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, there's always a risk of being hit by an asteroid, but what about the saucers? Those are much harder to avoid and they shoot back.
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Consider the fact that every single solar system body that does not have an erosive atmosphere or recent melting is plastered with easily visible impact craters. On Earth, it is not hard to look beneath the erosion to find the same geologic record of sudden contact. I live near a big one, and elsewhere there are some nice recent examples, like February 2013.
Re: Risk Assessment (Score:2)
Mod parent more up. Exactly this. It is basic project management. If the danger is "seize to exist", you'll need to avoid that danger, even if the chance is low. Insurance, for instance. You are nat supposed to accept that risk.
Look it up, even his equation is basic project management.
We have the means to avoid this
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Humans are tough and ingenious. We'll live through an extinction level event. Heck, we appear to be one. It would take something far more than the typical dinosaur killer to take us out. There's no reason to think a hit hard enough to wipe out humanity is at all likely in the next fifty million years. There are a lot of things that are much more likely to kill us in the next fifty million years, most of them caused by us.
I don't stop doing things just because they may kill me. For example, I drive
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The "chance" is perhaps one in 15,000 per year (but we can't be sure, since it's pretty rare; the Barringer Meteor Crater, the Younger Dryas, Tunguska, Chelyabinsk are examples within the last 100,000 years) but the level of damage can be anywhere from "ouch!" to "civilization-ending". So I think it's not worth getting panicked about, but definitely something to work on the long-range plans for. The risk is low, but non-zero.
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Footfall, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle.
http://www.amazon.com/Footfall... [amazon.com]
I'm astonished that a Slashdot reader isn't familiar with that already.
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We're not otherwise spending the money fixing the world's most pressing problems
We (presumably you mean the United States) is indeed spending lots of money on world problems. If you rank the relative risk and potential consequences of things like over-population, genocide, disease, famine, extreme poverty, pollution, depletion of resources, etc, etc, versus the risk and consequences of an asteroid strike, it's easy to see why the money is better spent elsewhere.
The odds are very low... (Score:2, Insightful)
In a human's lifetime, the odds are unbelievably low, as in, almost nonexistent.
In the next 500 years? 1,000 years? A bit more, but still low.
However, while very low, if it were to happen, it makes everything else pointless and redundant. If we're wiped out, then our saving $450 million doesn't really matter much, now does it?
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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I think in that case a-salt rifles would be more appropriate
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boooo
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The price of the human race is everything.
All of it. No amount of stuff or money is worth what the whole human race is worth.
That was easy, I need a Staples big red button. :)
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Yea, I knew some snark would come along with that silly point.
Earth has been hit by multiple large rocks already, we know they exist, we can see them today, right now.
That makes it a real, if unlikely, threat. Space slugs are not a real threat.
Re:The odds are very low... (Score:4, Funny)
Space slugs are not a real threat.
Sure... That's what they want us to think. Wait - are you one of them and trying to fool us into a false sense of security? I'm on to you!!!
On the internet, nobody knows you're a space slug.
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But please, do talk to us more about what threats are real and likely in our lifetimes.
You win a prize for being unable to read what was written, rather than reading what you wanted to read.
And you worked so hard to type all that out too!
Asteroids are a real threat, but they aren't at all likely in our lifetimes.
It's clear that you're a master of risk management.
I'm able to understand the difference between what might kill me, and what might kill all of us.
A billion people could die tomorrow, and that would be sad, but life would go on. We could have global thermonuclear war tomorrow and 6 billion people could die, and that would suck, but l
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A 10 km rock hitting Earth tomorrow would not wipe out the human race. Assuming iron meteorite hitting at a 90 degree angle at 17 km a second in deep ocean is 1.45 x 108 MegaTons TNT. On the other side of the world the initial impact excepting the tsunami is hardly noticeable and even tsunami is only about 350 feet high.
Things would be bad with the majority of the human race dead but we're pretty resilient. The odds of any 10 km object hitting over the next year is about 200 million to one (actually less as
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2 points...
1. You're assuming that calculator is accurate... it is perhaps a good guess, but that doesn't mean it will be correct. The rock that hit Earth and killed the dinos likely did its worst damage via firestorm, but we can only really guess.
2. You're correctly that it is very, very, very unlikely. Really, really low chances... of course if it did hit, it would be bad beyond measure.
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The energy released is simple math, how the energy reacts with the Earth is an educated guess and there are a lot of variables
Too lazy to check as it's bedtime here, but if I remember correctly, oxygen levels were much higher in the age of dinosaurs, which would make a firestorm more likely. Also IIRC, the dinosaurs were on the way out at the time and the asteroid finished them off.
What is more likely is a small rock hitting. A 500m rock hitting in the middle of Europe would cause a lot of damage and likely
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The energy released is simple math
You'd think so, but no, not really...
It depends on the real density of the object, what it hits, etc. And while you can computer model it, we don't have a lot of practical experience with it...
Just curious, but have you read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Could we survive that? Maybe, but not many of us. The dust would block out the sun and it would have stayed dark for years. The whole planet was covered in debris and dust. This was not a small impact.
It is interesting to note that if you put t
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sigh... who lets these people in here? (Score:2)
We need a crash program to build a space ark so our celebrities like Snooki & Kanye can escape destruction.
Mars One is valiant first effort...
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What if giant alien slugs attack? We should probably spend the $450 million developing space-capable salt-guns, just in case.
Well, since a couple of tons of rock salt travelling at a couple of km/s in the opposite direction would do a number on an asteroid/comet as well, I'm all for that.
Dual use technology is just smart economics. So while we wait for the slugs (any day now) they could shore up our asteroid/comet defences.
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A far more likely problem is the inevitable idiot with a spare ion drive after humans start mining asteroids.
While still 50 years away minimum, deflection needed due to asshole is far more likely.
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make their defensive/offensive tech as far ahead of us as a modern naval battle group would be ahead of some revolutionary war army with muskets and cannons
I am going to disagree in a manner. An alien race with such technology would, compared to us, be like the US Army vs 12 sheep and a dog. We probably wouldn't even know they were attacking. In fact, the moronic stuff we see here, they probably already are. They have discovered a dino-killing asteroid heading our way, and now they are making sure we'll never see it coming.
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Are you sure about that? 100% completely sure?
What if we had 50 years warning? Still sure?
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No, I'm not... maybe they aren't the people to be doing this... perhaps someone else should...
As far as what would work on an asteroid, even a very large one, there are multiple ideas on what could work. Depending on your time frame, everything from solar sails to long duration ion engines to nuclear weapons.
Simply painting it white might work, if you have 50 years notice, since it would affect the orbital path very slightly which works over time.
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First .. the stupid: ..
"What if we had 50 years warning? Still sure?"
"We already know where 99% of the extinction event type asteroids are. We'll have plenty of warning."
Yea, right .. Then this [youtube.com]
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Deflecting an asteroid is anything but trivial. We really don't know the best way to do it. We can put a small amount of mass anywhere in the Solar System, but that's not really impressive compared to the task.
However, the more precisely we have plotted the city-killers, the better off we are. If we can predict an impact in 30 years, for example, we can avoid collision if we can nudge the rock just a very, very little. We can study the rock in detail and come up with a specific engineering plan. We
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Deflecting an asteroid is anything but trivial.
Technically it is trivial. It will have a significant cost, but compared to losing a major city, the cost is going to be trivial. We can deflect very large masses at a cost significantly below the cost of the Iraq war. In some cases, as someone pointed out, "painting it white" could be sufficient. The only important factor is detection. Given enough time we can move just about anything that is likely to impact us. The easiest wold be to increase (or perhaps decrease) the objects orbital velocity a tiny amou
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I maintain that it it not currently trivial, and that if we find we need to do it we're going to find problems we haven't considered. It's definitely doable, but even technically it's non-trivial.
As far as nukes go, why would they be dumb? They're the most compact energy we've got, and if we can put even some of the force into nudging an asteroid that might work. Maybe it can blast some of the surface off for use as reaction mass for the rock. That's probably the technically easiest way, if it works.
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technically it's non-trivial
As they say - rocket science isn't exactly rocket science...it's easy bordering on trivial, but might be a tad expensive.
As far as nukes go, why would they be dumb?
Generally because blowing the blasted thing up isn't really going to help much. However, your question shows you have not read up on this stuff. You should. A tug is far easier, and has far less unknown side-effects.
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Every time I look at rocket science, it seems to be simple. Every time I look at rocket engineering, it seems to get really hairy.
Yeah, I should read up more on this stuff. It's interesting, and apparently my previous reading is now out of date.
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People are notoriously bad at rationally assessing risk and this is a clear example of one common pattern. People are much more worried about uncommon, but catastrophic risks than they are about common, moderately costly risks. This is exacerbated by risks which reinforce an existing world-view.
It should then come as no surprise that people who believe we should be investing more in space technologies would have a distorted view of the risk posed by asteroid impacts.
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Don't misunderstand...
I'm not afraid of terrorism or being attacked by sharks, etc.
I fully understand that I'm far more likely to be killed in my car, or by my bad eating habits, then any of those risks.
The issue with an asteroid is that if it is a big one, then it can end the entire human race. It is very, very, very, very, very unlikely, even within my great, great, great children's lifetime.
But if it happens, then everything else is meaningless. It is such a binary outcome that we should at least care
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There is also the problem with impactors we don't know about. NASA has a pretty good handle on the major potential impactors, true, but from the article you link to:
NASA has said that roughly 95 percent of the largest asteroids that could endanger Earth — space rocks at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide — have been identified through these surveys.
95% is not 100% (or 99.9%), so there is some significant distance to go yet.
One problem though that asteroid charting projects will not help with this that ~20% of the potential threat comes from long period comets that we only see for the first time as they fall in past the outer planets, a matter of months, rather than years before they cross
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How about saving 450M off military spending right now and do the damn Asteroid Research with it? Just sayin'.
450M can be saved by having each American donate 1.5 dollars once to research. One less cheap beer this month would pretty much cover it for two people.
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Stupid article. (Score:2, Insightful)
450 million is chump change for the knowledge that we need to eliminate a 1 in 100,000 risk for the entire planet. One single subway line for one US city costs upwards of a billion dollars.
The project was cancelled because NASA is underfunded, not because it's not worthy of funding.
Stupid assumptions (Score:3)
No, the project was cancelled because the B612 Foundation failed to uphold it's end of the contract - they've routinely failed to meet deadlines and to make the reports they're contractually obligated to do.
Stupid Headline (Score:5, Informative)
B612 lost their Space Act Agreement because they were missing their deadlines and because they weren't talking to NASA about it. I had several people at NASA tell me that they were frustrated about the lack of communication from B612 about their problems. It was only a matter of time before the SAA agreement was canceled.
Talk about the worst summary imaginable (Score:1)
Hate on asteroid detection all you want, call it a waste of time and money if you must, but the partnership drop is actually due to a recent asteroid detection proposal accepted by NASA for consideration called NEOcam. [caltech.edu]
NASA policy as laid forth in the institution's founding charter, the Space Act, is to avoid competing with private institutions using public money (their baby, JPL).
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Hate on asteroid detection all you want, call it a waste of time and money if you must, but the partnership drop is actually due to a recent asteroid detection proposal accepted by NASA for consideration called NEOcam. [caltech.edu]
NASA policy as laid forth in the institution's founding charter, the Space Act, is to avoid competing with private institutions using public money (their baby, JPL).
No, I don't think so. Amy Mainzer's NEOCAM proposal has been in play for several years now, NASA has very broad authority about space act agreements, and the particular SAA with B612 was a no-exchange of funds trade of DSN support for a first cut on asteroid data. If B612 had flown, it might have made the JPL proposal overtaken by events, but that would have made the Discovery program officers happy (by freeing up time and money for the other candidates). I don't thin that the SAA was canceled as JPL prote
The Last Darwin Award Will go to The Human Race (Score:4, Insightful)
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From the looks of things it's not like they're just giving up. It looks like they're giving up because this group isn't meeting goals, being open, and because there are other options that are capable of doing those things. I don't even think they're being miserly - or myopic - but are just going with an alternative because this group of people appear to be complete and utter failures. Perhaps someone else can opine but that's what I've gathered.
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huge waste? (Score:1)
Watching for a rock heading to destroy our planet such that we can try to prepare and strategize in advance is a huge waste.... Oh I would love to understand your basis for establishing value..
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Not like we can stop an asteroid anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
So one program to find giant space rocks has ended. There are others.
But in any case, we don't have the ability at the moment to DO anything about it even if we found a rock heading for us. We'd probably need several decades to get our act together, and we have a terrible track record about responding to things like aging sewers where we can pay somebody minimum wage to fix it, versus tens of years of heavy spending (way beyond 450 mill) to come up with a way to stop the asteroid. I don't think humanity is capable of working together in the way it would need to happen.
Risk assessment in article absurd (Score:2)
So with all of this taken into account, what are your odds of dying in an asteroid strike in any given year? About 1-in-70,000,000.
So all-in-all I can assume I personally die from an asteroid strike about three times in 200M years while ignoring that the entire human species is wiped out twice.
And if I wanted the US Department of Transportation to handle this, based on personal risk to individual US citizens alone, they could spend about $30M a year [wikipedia.org] on asteroid prevention.
The article sucks. It just says the risk is low and makes no attempt to compare the risk or the cost to anything
Now we know why the US is in trouble (Score:2)
I am amazed that people simply do not understand the difference between, as other have pointed out, risk and chance.
The cost of fixing the problem the B612 foundation are trying to fix is close to zero. A few hundred million is close enough to zero to be discarded entirely. The potential upside - saving a major city from an impact is enormous. Are there anyone at NASA who are not morons?
Condensing the article and sentiment behind it (Score:2)
"[extinction 50% of species events] Every 100,000,000 years or so on average..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"we know city-killer events happen at least every few millennia..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"Tunguska-level events... may happen as frequently as once per century..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"City-killer asteroids...will be incredibly rare: only occurring once every 100,000 years or so."
NOPE. Hey I thought you said 'every few millennia'! But NOPE. They happ
The Chixulub impact didn't DEFINITELY kill dinos. (Score:2)
Within the geological profession, there is no dispute that the Chixulub impact happened, or that it was a pretty bad day, and started a pretty bed few millennia.
Whether it was what actually "did" for the dinosaurs is a more challenged question. There was a serious environment-degrading long term terrestrial
Remember Chelyabinsk! (Score:2)
Meteor impacts are as much a hazard today as yesterday.
Re:Just send the cosmonauts (Score:4, Funny)
Blanche, Dorothy, Sophia, and Rose can save the day should an asteroid ever threaten humanity again.
I had a double-take there for a sec, as those were names of four of our chickens. I imagined a snippet of several hens flying off to save humanity.
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That. Is. Awesome.
It really is. Did you have the chickens before the "Happy Monday from the Golden Girls" guy came around? (They've gone missing, I kind of miss them. I looked forward to their posts wishing me a happy day.) If you did then it must have been almost as strange when they popped in.
Either way, that's an excellent choice of names for your critters. A group of chickens followed the path from my neighbor's house (which is actually quite a ways away but she and he both do some work for me) and have
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Four of them escaped the clutches of the evil tyrannical chicken at the neighbor's house and sought asylum at my house. One of them must have been an asshole because my dog chased it into the woods and it has never been seen again - he doesn't mind the rest of them. Since then three more have arrived - each separately. I am at a loss to explain how they know to come to my house, why they moved in, or why they've never returned.
I didn't feed them at first but they stayed long enough so that I felt compelled
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Hmm... I need to get a life. I didn't actually preview and then I saw how long that post was. Well, have a novel about David's Life With Chickens.
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Rusty Schweickart tells me there are an estimated one-million asteroids of 45-ish meters which is Tunguska size http://www.asteroidday.org/ast... [asteroidday.org]
The B612 group has done a poor job of keeping the community (and apparently NASA) informed of their progress and challenges. Perhaps a more transparent effort would work - even showing lack of progr
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Ah rubycodez... Your secret is out. Also, you should stop replying to yourself, it looks silly and nobody actually gives you any credibility. I suppose that's not enough to break through your mental illness but I feel better for having done the socially responsible thing. Seriously, we care. Go get help. I don't mind paying taxes to help you out. In fact, I hope you get good mental health care. I really don't mind paying my share to help pay for it.
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You make an interesting and valid point about U.S. spending on domestic surveillance because terrorism. But you overstate the risk of terrorism.
Since 2001 there have been on average 5 terrorism deaths in the United States per year, and annual rate of 1 in 60 million, and it is a hazard with no potential for fatalities of more than a few thousand people (the deadliest attack since 2001 killed 13 people). Yet this is deemed dangerous enough that billions are spent annually on domestic spying.
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Use Kickstarter or another crowd funding to make it work. 450 mil is a bit steep though.
Been there, done that [indiegogo.com]. Despite two month of press releases and a reasonable well-documented deliverable (plans for HAIV mission payload vehicle), a panel of international experts willing to donate their own time, a mere $200,000 target to help with other expenses, even a Slashdot article to promote it [slashdot.org], should I even mention cool items (the shoulder patches arrived today)...
Only 187 human beings (2 were me) from planet Earth put in a grand total of $8,834 towards their $200k goal.
May we now have a moment o
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[CORRECTED LINK to ARTICLE, 150 comments]
Ask Slashdot: Best Payloads For Asteroid Diverter/Killer Mission? [slashdot.org]
TheRealHocusLocus [slashdot.org] writes:
The Emergency Asteroid Defence Project [asteroiddefence.com] has launched a crowdfunded IndieGoGo campaign [indiegogo.com] to help produce a set of working blueprints for a two-stage HAIV, or Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle. This HAIV paper [nasa.gov] (PDF) describes the use of a leading kinetic impactor to make a crater --- a following nuclear warhead would detonate in the crater for maximum energy transfer. The plans would be available for philanthropists to bring to prototype stage, while your friendly local nuclear weapon state supplies the warhead. This may be a best-fit solution. But just ask Morgan Freeman [youtube.com]: these strategies could fail. What --- if any --- backup strategy could be integrated into an HAIV mission as a fail-safe in case the primary fails? Here is a review of strategies [wikipedia.org] (some fanciful, few deployable) if we have to divert an asteroid with very short lead time. A gentle landing on the object may not be feasible, and we must rely on things that push hard or go boom. For example: detonating nearby to ablate surface materials and create recoil [researchgate.net] in the direction we wish to nudge. Also, with multiple warheads and precise timing, would it be possible to create a "shaped" nuclear explosion in space?
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The dinosaurs made the same decision and look what happened to them.
Survived for a couple of hundred of million years?