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What, Me Worry?
Space.com dissects (or see the same story on MSNBC, with handy Torino scale graphic) the asteroid scare that's been in the news for the past week, asking some good questions about the roles of the news media and the scientific community. I suppose my take on it is something like this: given that truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely, at least in this case it was an insignificant threat to the entire planet.
I like Jon Steweart's comment:
"The torino scale ranges from 0, no likely practical consequences, to 10, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
People love to take things out of context, hype up situations and take things to the extreme to liven up their own lives. There are alot of people on the planet that are not bored... but there's alot more that are. Take the flat earth society for instance... these people just have nothing else to do, I refuse to believe that they are that stupid in this age.
This is a strange case of sciense using the techniques of religeous belief.
....and now we have "Pay us money, to tell you about asteroids, only we can see or you will burn"
For example, for centuries the church said "Pay us money, to tell you about God, who only we can see properly or you will burn"
Uncanny.
They cnap ut spin on it, of course. If people don't like it they won't read the paper. Credibility is always questionable; we assume newspapers (and other new-outlets) always tell the truth. If a person questions the honesty of the piece, they should do some research, and read articles from other sources. They'll pick the one that they like best.
Seems they's quarreling over how to interpret data. Pretty petty.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
My conviction tells me that when it is time to go, it is time to go. Call me a pessimist but I doubt that mankind would have the power to go up against the Almighty. This is okay because if you're saved this is only the first phase of your existence and there is a much better phase awaiting you! I know lots of people don't believe this, but very few people believed that the Earth orbited the sun in Galileo's time. :-P
Anything to sell more papers...
The Ottawa Citizen had a big banner at the top of the paper last week just after this story broke, claiming the world was going to end, regardless of the fact that every other story about this asteriod stated quite clearly that even then the chance of this happening was very low.
I'm sick of the media's selective reporting and skewed stories. Can we not get responsible journalism anywhere?
In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million. So was this asteroid statistically significant? Turn to Mark Twain for that one.
The whole "on collision course" phrasing thing was, in my opinion, poor choice of a headline, but news is a product just like any other media item, and sensationalism sells.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Or, in other words, sensationalization of facts.
We have to remember this, even if the asteroid hits planet Earth, the Earth itself will survive. The asteroid is not big enough to obliterate planet Earth.
Granted, the human race might perish, but so what ?
We, the humans, are killing the Earth anyway.
So if the asteroid hits Earth and all of us die, the Earth may have a second chance !
Sometimes we gotta look at the bright side, y'know ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A good discussion of the asteroid/comet collision risk is covered by the Near Earth Object Information Centre's website, which is a not-so-secret agency maintained by the UK government:
/. discussion along similar lines from back in September 2000:
http://www.nearearthobjects.co.uk
Also of note is a
UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
"at least in this case it was an insignificant threat to the entire planet. "
Nope, not even close.
A scientist notes that an asteroid has a potentially interesting orbit that shows the vaugue possibility of a close flyby. He passes his observations on to the astronomical community for analysis and verification, along the way the media get wind of it and BOOM, its the end of the world as we know it.
Before any data has been properly analysed the media has decided we are all going to die in a huge fiery impact. Cue ridiculous artists impressions etc. Two days later the scientific community has finished checking the figures and guess what, its not going to hit us after all.
Yet another example of the media silly season. Desperately looking for stories in the slow spells while every one they usually talk about is n holiday.
for humanity to have as monumental a task as saving the planet from an asteroid to concentrate their efforts on, rather than all the BS little conflicts and skirmishes we seem to be wasting time and trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on worldwide these days - it might really pull nations together, a sort of space race with everyone on the same side.
If you knew it was all coming to an end in 2019 (or tomorrow, a year from now, whatever), would you spend more time working or more time playing? I thought so... -A
we assume newspapers (and other new-outlets) always tell the truth
Not if you read the NY Times, you don't.
Actually, ever since my class in Critical Thinking, I've pretty much assumed whoever wrote the piece has some ax to grind.
It's a fairly safe assumption.
The opposite of progress is congress
The only difference between "AAAAURGH ASTEROID!!!!" and "AAAURGHHG COFFEE GIVES YOU CANCER" is that the Asteroid story was leaked by NASA who want a bigger budget - and the coffee story was leaked by a company with a new 'CANCER FREE' brand launching, well, as it happens, TODAY!!
Is it just me, or has Science started to seem a little too, oh, I don't know, spammish? It seems like most of the scientific announcements are either hoaxes or have to do with losing weight.
Maybe we're just in a slump, but a lot seems to have changed since the days when Einstein unleashed the power of the atom, Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity, and Archimedes invented the bathtub. These days we just get to look at circus-freak mice with ears on their backs (yuck) and get told that Twinkies (gasp) make you fat.
So, I pose this question to those of you in the [non-Computer] Scientific community: is Science dead? Will it rise again? What will take its place?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Can we not get responsible journalism anywhere?
Not likely. Fear sells and facts don't.
The opposite of progress is congress
And people worry?
:)
That's the same probability of me waking up tomorrow with Cindy Crawford serving me breakfast in bed wearing Victoria Secret underwear...
or...
none...
(I could easily bear an asteroid hitting the planet if that breakfast thingy happened though...)
Hmm.. let me see, what else does the media moguls of US wants us to read :
The Attorney General and the FBI releasing the umpteenth terrorist threat with in the last two months. Do we care ? No!
How Ozzie's dog escaped (for obvious reasons) and how it was re-united with Ozzie and his family (my sympathies to the cat).
How Britney concluded her tour in Mexico after giving them the thumbs up gesture of universal harmony. (Yes, we needed to know that too).
How Bush would now start litigating against CEOs and their cronies who wanted to make a fast buck. (I heard Sullivan of Worldcom fame just shat in his pants). Yeah right!
Amidst all this, CNN had a small article about an Asteroid which might be on an impact collision with earth and we think we dont need to know.
America, Its Govt and its public, thinks a Terrorist Attack is more likely to happen than lets say a humongous Asteroid which wipes out half of the civilization. You know why ? Primarily because of Sept 11 (Imagine what we would have said about terrorist attacks on the american soil prior to Sept 11) and because Bush and his war mongers needs something to keep themselves in spotlight and away from all the other shit thats happening to this country.
Yeah sure, let the Asteroid come. And since only 5% of the space is currently being monitored by us to see if theres anything lurking in the void on a direct collision with earth, and since we devote satelites to probing Saddam Husseins rear, yes I damn well need to know if we should get our fricking priorities straight
This is no troll, this is no flamebait, I am just tired of hearing whats news and whats not.
Rapid Nirvana
A few weeks ago, John Stossel of ABC's 20/20 news show did a whole 1-hour special on media hype, exposing truths in things like road rage, car magazine reviews, and terrorism warnings. He also did a "Junk Science" special a few years ago, pointing out large-number scare tactics, hype over medical problems that never existed to begin with, etc.
This story with the asteroid is right up his alley.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
If this asteroid is coming so close, let's just blow it up anyway. Who knows, the knowledge gained might just come in handy some day.
This is journalism, not a scientific report. We want people to be attracted to it and read it.
Declare war on asteroids. Like most wars, this'll increase government spending and provide stimulus to the global economy.
Unlike other wars, in this one no one gets killed, only asteroids.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with science, it's an attempt by politicians to justify deficit spending (rightly so in my view) by scaring the public at large.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
> truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely, at least in this case it was an insignificant threat to the entire planet.
Which happens to be entirely relevant. Suppose activity A poses you with a 1/100 chance of losing a dollar and activity B poses you a 1/100 chance of losing $100,000. Are they equivalent risks? In terms of raw probability, yes. In terms of the expected value of their cost to you, no - B poses a threat five orders of magnitude higher than A.
For planet-buster asteroids we need to look at the expected value of the cost to our species, not at the raw probabilities. I.e., this is much, much less likely than having another solar flare disrupt our communication systems, but if it does happen it will hurt us far, far more than a mere communication disruption.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think it may be a little out of order, considering:
7: Extreme threat of collision capable of causing a global catastrophe.
9: Collision capable of causing regional devestation.
I hope I'm not the only one who think a global catastrophe should rank higher on the scale than regional devestation.
(There are some other mix ups too, I just felt like posting those two.)
No sig for you.
I'm glad this was reported to the extent it was. If my news has to be filtered so that it won't scare the ignorant masses, then perhaps the ignorant masses should stop reading news. I don't have the time to search out news that's purposefully hidden from the majority of the populace. I heard about this from a couple of sources, and dismissed it as a threat. The interview where the man says that we could paint one side of the asteroid white and change its trajectory enough to avoid a collision with Earth is what convinced me I was safe.
Of course, if the asteroid is as fickle as that, isn't it a tad early to say it's utterly impossible for it to hit Earth? It's 17 years away from us, and all factors can't be predicted. It's also important to remember that a couple of months ago, a meteor (metorite? what's it called when it's still out in space?) passed between the Earth and the moon, and it wasn't caught until afterwards. Three point nine in a million is still not zero.
Finally, I haven't seen many reports on The Killer Asteroid of Death, but I have paid attention to the few I've come across. The Daily Show was the first place I heard mention of the Torino scale. Good job guys.
The real danger is that people might become complacent if false alarms like this are seized upon and played up by the media every time.
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Innovation has been stilted by the requirment that scientists have degrees, research labs, follow scientific methods, etc.
This is much the same way that software development is hindered by things like the DMCA, proprietary code, intelletual property rights, etc. The Open Source model has proven to be a beacon in the darkness.
Thus, I propose that the scientific community begin to resemble that of the Open Source community, rather than the proprietary community. Just think of the possibilities of millions of eyes having access to the latest research data and projects! A global community that never sleeps, never takes breaks, constantly checks its work for errors and progresses all for the love of science.
I donno. When I read the article, I wasn't worried about asteroids crashing in 17 years or the end of life. There were the key points of "more research and measurements needed" and "not for sure".
I don't actually blame the media for reporting something that people can take the wrong way. It's up to the reader to read intelligently and take everything with a grain of salt. At least with the media report this, I learned a few things I would have otherwise been ignorant of had they not darkened my screen.
Literally years ago, I remember seeing a newsclip on the BBC which highlighted how easily people could be whipped up into a frenzy due to lack of knowledge and skewed facts. They interviewed a researcher into risk, who had asked people the following.
Should this chemical (oxygen d-hydride) be banned?
Oh, and will some kind chemist please put me out of my misery regarding the exact term that must have been used?
Cheers,
Ian
Send up Bruce Willis now!!!
Solve two problems with one, er... , stone.
Personally, I think this is a subject that's been ignored far too long. Frankly, I'd like the hype to scare the crap out of people because it's an issue we need to address sooner or later, if we want to continue to occupy this little corner of the galaxy. Some day, we're going to be in the crosshairs of an object big enough to wipe out all, or at least, most life on this planet. There is no question about this. It could come at any time and it could come entirely without warning, as we've seen recently. We didn't even notice it until it passed us by.
The point is, we need to address it sooner or later (or accept extinction as part of our future), and the longer we put it off, the better the chance we'll be unprepared when the time arrives.
This isn't something we'll necessarily have a lot of time to prepare for, even if we do discover it before it hits. And even then, how much prep time will we need? What are our options?
I would agree that we need to take care of problems here on Earth, but we also need to address the very real threat that NEOs pose. We need to start mapping them all out so that we can be sure we can at least know at what point we really need to start worrying. As long as only a small fraction of NEOs are mapped out, we're completely vulnerable.
The astronomers better n ot be crying wolf so often.
... where the tidal wave/tsunami warning system gave a lot of false alarms and when there really was a tsunami nobody paid attention ... some people died as a result.
Remember the story from kindergarten./
When there's really an asteroid heading towards us, nobody will believe 'em.
This happened in either hawaii or guam a few decades ago
Even if this particular event was rather unlikely, the news coverage over it likely raised public awareness that this sort of thing can happen, and has happened before. Despite the overwhelming evidence that we need to be watching for planet killer collisions, we are not, and we won't until the possibility of one happining is real and scary to John Q. Public.
Look at what happened with terrorism: two major attacks on Americans abroad (the embassy bombings and the attack on the ship in Yemen), but people didn't take notice. It would be a real shame if, for lack of public intrest, we were unprepaired for a planatary September 11th.
Narrative
People are posting that "3.9 in a million" is such a small probablility that even *mentioning* this is pure hype...
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.
After all, an asteroid of this size could certainly kill millions of people, and depending on the effect on the climate, maybe hundreds of millions. A "four in a million" chance of killing, say, 10 million people, would mean that the expected (mean) death toll from this asteroid would be about 40 people -- roughly the amount of a major train accident or minor airplane crash. I don't think this story got more play than such an accident would have...
So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
It seems to me that this was a good opportunity to use the event to stir up more support for the study and cataloging of near earth objects. Haven't you noticed the stories in the past few months where scientists warn that we need better tracking (which I am in favor of)?
2 0/1916206&mode=thread&tid=160
1 2/1730229&mode=thread&tid=160
a ce/20020711/sc_space/hunt_for_potentially_deadly_a steroids_underfunded__panel_says
a ce/20020711/sc_space/asteroid_hunting__bigger_tele scopes_aren_t_always_better
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/sp
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/sp
This is old news. Atari predicted the asteroid war in the late 70s.
If there has ever been a case where 'crying wolf' was appropriate, this is it.
Really, think of all the ridiculus bullshit non-threats that people go nuts about.
In the 80's we were warned about the dangers of salt. Later, we realized only about 2% of the population has to be concerned. Yet millions upon millions were spent developing and marketing salt substitutes (Mrs. Dash, Lemon Pepper, Potassium Chloride, etc.) all for what turned out to be a perceived threat.
If humans are willing to spend millions because they were afraid of salt, imagine what they will happily fork over to protect them from an asteroid/comet/meteor slamming into Earth.
Real threat, slim chance, whatever. Lots of good scientific research would come out of this.
Money well spent, faux fear or not.
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I think you'll find fusion has been possible for a long time. Cold fusion may be of more interest however.
That the (not so) possible end of the world is named NT7 ?
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
Remember Armageddon? We'll just send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck back up there. Only this time we'll make sure they both blow up with the asteroid.
The FIRST time this asteroid story was listed on /., most Score:5's explained the likelyhood and how it was being blown out of proportion.
Now, we are on the third story, and no one is relaxing, because we all relaxed after a few intelligent astronomy geeks pointed it out the first story. The slashback that pointed out that the astronomy geeks were right is a nice touch, but a THIRD story about the SAME THING that we ALREADY FIGURED OUT, in my opinion, is -1 redundant.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I suppose my take on it is something like this: given that truly insignificant threats to individuals get hyped all out of proportion routinely...
Yes, but consider what hype can do. A man can learn to skillfully place a leather ball into a metal hoop and become a millionaire legend. A talented group of teenagers can cut a couple of albums and fill a stadium with frenzied prepubescent teenagers. Hype can overthrow governments. It can dictate the norms of a culture. Every fad has its day because of it. I don't like hype, because it distorts reality. But then again, if engineers sold software, I'd probably be looking for a job.
My point is that, although I admit my idealism twinges in pain at the misuse of hype, I can see that it has a role to play. The "hype" of a large rock blowing away half of the world's population, which could fuel an intense public demand for more funding for the thirsty desert of scientific research and discovery.
Few data are collected.
Probability of impact in 2019 is 1/500,000.
More data are collected. Two cases:
1) headline becomes "we're all going to die"
2) headline becomes "it's not going to hit us after all"
It's easy to whine when you know we're in case 2. But someday a 1/500,000 probability will settle to case 1.
Perhaps you think my post was in jest, but believe it or not, we ARE killing the planet Earth.
The pollutions that we have done to Earth has causes many side effects, one of them, Global Warming, and that, in some sense, has expanded the volume of the AIR that surrounds the Earth.
The mass of the Earth is not just the mass of the Solids, but also the liquids, and the gasses, all combined.
Although we don't actually increases Earth's mass, the "bigger air ball" that surrounds the Earth has created more "drags", and that, in one way or another, has altered the orbit of planet Earth.
I know, I know, the alteration is really minute, but then, however minute the orbit is altered, it may bring unneccessary consequences to the Earth - not only ecologically, but also, astronomically.
So far, planet Earth is the only known planet in the Solar System that supports life, and the position of planet Earth is the KEY - it's not too far away, nor too near, the sun.
And if Earth's orbit gets altered more and more, it may shifted Earth's ability to support life.
Life itself is a phenomenon to planet Earth. We might argue that living things are kinda "parasites" to Earth, but for better or for worse, the "parasites" have made planet Earth a unique place in the Solar System, if not the whole universe.
If we humans continue do what we do, we may destroy all lifeforms, and not only that, we may destroy planet Earth beyond its capability to support life itself.
That, in other words, is the destruction of planet Earth.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't recall people screaming in the streets or anything. Just a popular topic of conversation.
If anything, this "article" about hype, IS, in and of itself, blowing things out of proportion.
I'd rather hear speculation that ends up being wrong, than not here anything at all.
It's not a perfect world, after all.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
They've been using this method to get funding for global warming research for years. Before that is was global cooling.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Well, maybe a little....
"Just because you're a genius doesn't make you a smart guy!" -- Narrator, Powerpuff Girls
Even if the odds were only 3.9 in a million those are still better than the odds of winning the lottery :).
You sez:
"Actually we aren't killing the planet. The planet consist of non living materials such as rock and water.
Things like trees, animals, and humans are really just viral growths and are not "the planet" itself.
Mars has no trees or people and it's still a planet."
What are living things ? Where do they get their building materials from ?
From the "rocks and water" of planet Earth !
In other words, all the living things, the lifeforms on Earth, are a unseparatable part of planet Earth !
And if we kill the lifeforms, and the planet's ability to support any lifeforms forever, we have killed a part of the planet.
Yes, Mars is still a planet, but is it as WHOLE as it was before, when it had water, oceans, rivers, and perhaps, lifeforms ?
An empty cupboard is STILL a cupboard, but a cupboard filled with things is a much better cupboard than the empty one.
What we humans are doing to the planet is akin to making the cupboard a place that can no longer be used to store things.
So what's the use of a cupboard that can no longer store things ?
Yes, it's still a cupboard, but is it as "lively" as before ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dihydrogen monoxide is much more dangerous. We should be more concerned about that instead.
I think it's sort of ironic that the public regularly ignores significant news that affects tens of thousands of people (if not more) -- AIDS, war in Africa, human rights violations en masse in China, rampant ethic lapses in our capitalism -- in favor of the latest weight fluctuations of J.Lo or even minimally influential events such as the mining accident in Virginia (which affected 9 men and their families but made great for great edge-of-seat drama), but then whine when we give them a false positive.
What the shit do they care?
They'll support the slashing of funding to scan the skies and the second we find a real threat they'll drag somebody in front of congress to explain what "went wrong."
People aren't mad that we gave them a false tip, they're mad becaues it is a false tip.
My
Limekiller
I would really like to see this comet hit the Earth. You don't get the chance to die like that every day! What a great way to go! Pity that it MAY hit Earth in 2060 or so...
-- Cheers!
This is George Bush's BIG CHANCE! He can declare a "war on asteroids," unite the whole country, and his party can ride the wave of popularity right into the fall elections!
These objects all orbit around an "axis of evil" that we must root out and destroy. We will make no distinction between asteroids and those planets that harbor them. If you are an asteroid and you are listening to this, hear me: You cannot hide behind ANY planet's moon or in any planet's rings. Wherever you are, we will find you, and we will blow you up.
My attorney general is drafting legislation right now giving our law enforcement agencies broad new powers to find the cells of asteroid sympathizers that are operating here on our planet. I ask all citizens of Earth to be on the lookout for any suspicous-looking rocks falling out of the sky that don't belong there.
Thank you very much, and God Bless Earth.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Same instincts for huge payoffs unblinkered by reality of the likelyhood being statistically even more insignificant. (violent cataclismic event, 6.+*10^9 people killed [disregard probality of ballistic alignment 1*10^-11] = recipe for news headline.)
Want to see a winning TV ad? "Total destruction of the planet predicted. Watch 'News at Ten.' But NOT at eleven."
The certain heat-death of the universe get no air play even though its a certainty mostly because it is a certainty. What are the odds? (1:1 actually)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Here are the risk reports from JPL's Sentry system. Until yesterday 2002 NT7 was still at the top of the chart, but the probability of a collision has dropped a couple of orders of magnitude. It won't hit in 2019, but it might be possible in 2060. Incidentally, the most likely to hit (1 in 600 that it hits between 2068 and 2101) is only 40m across, but it'll still hit like an atomic bomb.
The page for the asteroid has lots of interesting numbers. How much damage would a trillion tons of TNT do?
http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/
[From the link above:]
Dihydrogen monoxide:
* is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
* contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
See also:
http://www.dhmo.org/
(1) If the chance remained 4 in a million until 2019, then it would be a very serious concern. But the exact trajectory will be determined well before that (seems like in a matter or days or weeks). So very soon, the odds will either be much greater than that, or zero. In this case, we can wait a year before we have to scramble to design the mission that sends up Bruce Willis or whoever.
(2) I don't think anyone was saying that this was "pure hype", just that it was way over-hyped. If these articles said that the asteroid was "on a collision course" with Earth, that's wrong - they should say that there's a very small (but not zero) chance that it's on a collision course.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/30jul_ny40 .htm?list151306
So what's the motivation? A bureaucratic need to assign numbers to things? Somebody had a chance to get some grant money? Somebody's seen War Games too many times?
Aaahhh, shucks.
If thought it would help, I would stand out on a street corner, directing all my energies towards that asteroid, trying to get it on course for a direct hit on planet earth. I would raise my arms up in the air and say "Come to mamma baby", in the hopes that at least one of your diseased societies would receive the fate it so richly deserves: total obliteration via space asteroid holocaust.
But no, it's not going to happen this time. Well I can keep hoping anyway.
Assuming that those odds don't change, you have a 9.5% chance of Cindy cooking you breakfast at some point in the next 70 years.
--
E_NOSIG
This reminds me of a certain simpsons episode where a comet is headed towards springfield, but burns up because of all the pollution in the atmostphere.
So I think the answer is to pollute! Pollute like there will be no tomorrow! (Besides, if this plan fails, there won't be anyway!)
C.M.Burns
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
I think you flatter yourself and your species if you think you or your species could wipe out all life on this planet. If it will make you feel any better, the natural geologic processes of this planet and this solar sytem (supervolcanoes, life-threating meteors, etc.) will probably/eventually take of all of these worries for you. (again) And won't you feel silly for getting so worked up when you could've been enjoying life.
MadDad32
I was as smart as you when I was your age.
the Daily Show.
at least Jon Stuart admits it:)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
If you ever get involved in safety or security assessment you will come across things called risk-severity matrixes, that can be used as either a quantitative (probabilities and cost/lost lives etc) or qualitative method of ranking potential hazards (improbable... highly likly, negligable... catastophic). This normally gives you a partally ordered list.
In this case the straight probability might be small, but the outcome is bloody big, so this would rank as fairly high as a hazard. On the other hand, the risk of small meteorites entering the atmosphere is high, but the outcome (severity) is tiny (I think there has only been a tiny handfull of cases of people being killed), so the hazard ranking would put this very low down on the list of things to worry about.
Unfortunatly, most people only look at the severity (people scared of flying, or traveling by train because of the nature of the accidents) without the risks (car travel, more likely to die, but only a couple die at any one time).
In this case the severity is so very high, and the risk not sufficiently low, that we really have to worry about it.
Paul
Paul Leader
Wow, if we can't trust [i]the media[/i], who can we trust??
the two things i don't get about living in london:
1) the press (the sun, daily mirror, trash, etc)
2) the people who read them
the brits seem to love to overdo, overhype, overanything anything that is printable; even things that aren't.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Yeomans then watched as the stories (with his cautious quotes often subordinated to others) spun out of control, begetting more reporters' calls and flooding JPL's online asteroid pages to the extent that at one point even he couldn't view them.
umm... i doubt that was reporters doing that. awww yea, slashdot victim #456,363
Educate > Enlighten > Evolve http://www.neuroatomik.com
Both me and my friend was like "awwww.... shucks" when we heard the news that the asteroid has decided not to come down in a hurry; seems like 2060 might be hazy too.
before anybody label me as genocidal: think about it.
if it was gonna hit, there are two possible outcomes
1) in a small chance, i die, but take the world with me.
2) some *major* space developments, including but not limited to moon bases and zero-g sex, etc.
hmm.....
My life in the land of the rising sun.
So here I am, not worrying about those asteroids they have found so far. But what the fuck about those they have not found yet?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The upside to the whole asteroid scam is the attention it brings to said asteroids. Asteroids contain a lot of really cool chemicals not found (At least in signifigant quantity.) on earth. As commercial space travel starts becoming more viable in the next few years, the possibility of mining asteroids for the cool stuff they contain could present some very nice opportunities for humanity. By drawing more attention to asteroids now, we help ourselves down the line.
As of this time we have no way of determining the real risk of a NEO strike because our ability to track incoming bodies is incomplete. We may have no risk, or tomorrow out of the blue the Earth may be completely destroyed. Automobile manufacturers frown upon driving cars with the hood up because it obstructs the vision of the driver. Try it some time. Do so and you will immedeately come to the conclusion that it is an insane risk to take. Right now we do not have an unobstructed view of the space around our planet, yet we know there are large NEO's wizzing by us regularly without our knowledge. Early detection of NEO's should be a priority of at least NASA, if not the Defense establishment. In my opinion we, as a group, the entire human race, face extinction. My religeous upbringing tells me that it is a mortal sin to commit suicide. To not mount a credible defense against NEO's is tantamount to suicide of the entire human race and dooms all of us to eternal damnation. Yes, that means no rapture, no going to heaven etc... we all go to hell because we didn't try hard enough not to die.
After a brief press conference today, president George W. Bush was seriously mauled, when he declared war on The Rock, actor/wrestler Dwayne Johnson, which resulted in a surprise drop kick attack followed by a head butt and a pile driver by the professional wrestler, before White House Spokesperson Ari Fleisher managed to stop laughing out loud and informing the press and Dwayne Johnson that the President meant "rock s " and not " The Rock". President Bush was rushed to the local hospital where doctors feared severe brain damage, but concluded that "there was nothing there to begin with, so it couldn't be hurt anyhow".
The President later appologised for his mistake blaming it on terrorists who had sabotaged his statement.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I think the hype can be good. At least it raises attention about something much more devastating then an incorrectly issued Thunderstorm/Tornado Warning (issuing one when there isn't/not issuing one when there is but they can't find it). In recent years we have seen NASA's budget cut slowly but surely by our congress and our president (BOTH Clinton and Bush). Now, we have a space station, but no science can occur because of the budget cuts (unless you count studies on long exposure to zero g). Point is, the space station could very well be used as a science outpost to study these things as well as a launching point for anti asteroid shuttles. Spending more on finding them won't do anything to help repel them. NASA needs more money. Scientists who are studying antimatter and fusion reactors need more money. A nuclear warhead could help, but I doubt it would scratch an asteroid the size of NT7 2002. We need something with a little more kick (antimatter charges in a mag field maybe???). I don't know. All I do know is even with 19 years lead time, I doubt we could have killed this asteroid.
Anyone who wants a better idea of the kind of problem something like this can create should read Thunderstrike! by Michael McCollum. Besides being a decent sci-fi book, it discusses many ways of deflecting this kind of thing. Orbital Modification (basically slowing or speeding up the rock so it will not hit us...we speed by before it gets to where it would hit us.....), Destruction, and bringing it into orbit for mining are all in the novel. While, I know it is fiction, but how may things just in our lifetimes have been science fiction at some point? Maybe the device I am typing on now?? Point is, there is a very real danger. Sure, not as much of a danger as us being in a car accident or something, but there is a danger and it should definitely be looked at. Total extinction is something we can fight. The Dinosaurs did not have the brains to do this. We have the brains and with enough time, the means to get something done. Just starting this project after one is discovered though may not be enough time to get things done.
Sometimes things should just be done for the sake of humanity and not for money. There is scientific proof that this will happen and has happened in the past. More proof then the global warming folks have anyway.
Gorkman
In a way, the alarmist stories about 2002 NT7 are more comforting to the public than the reality of asteroids like MN 2002 that blindside us. If people really realized how little control or even knowledge that we have about such things, they would be pretty freaked.
Declare war on asteroids.
Screw this defensive "homeland security against asteroids" shit. I say we take the fight to those damn bugs who keep hurling these things at us! And if our allies are queezy about toppling the Brain Bug dictator, then we'll just have to go it alone! Already we've got a plan in the works to take down BugCentral from the inside out.
GMD
watch this
If an asteoroid like NT7 hit earth it would release damage like ~70,000,000 nuclear bombs like the one that wasted Hiroshima.
Granted - there is a fair chance that it could hit somewhere on earth, where the imidiate damage would be VERY small (say central Antartica or arctis), but if it hit basicly anywhere else, I think you could kiss the 40 people death toll goodbye.
It's a ROCK that is ~2 km (~1.2 miles) in diameter traveling at 28 kilometer per second or 17 miles per second. If it were to hit a country like Denmark (souther Scandinavia), you can basicly kiss the population of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland and most of Germany goodbye as a result of the impact alone
Okay, that's just 42 people, but still
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I thought the whole asteroid thing was kind of neat, so I made a little box on my web site that grabbed the latest impact data from NASA and shows year of impact, probability of impact, and danger rating.
Here's the (php) code .
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Did they get MC Escher to create that thing, or what?
They have two independent variables: collision probability and damage level, but they twist them into one scale, which gets all stupid in the 5-7 range.
If they based it on some concept like damage expectation, they should just put the damage expectation on there, instead.
And don't forget to estimate the economic damage expectation due to the hype and panic they cause.
--Blair
Harris figures Americans tend to trust what they read more than Europeans, who know a misleading statement when they see one.
Now, applying the same insightful reasoning as above, we get:
If your readers are European, to get the same amount of attention you have to hype things more out of proportion (while making it sound real at the same time).
That essentially seems to sum it up. The statement lends itself to other fun implications and conclusions which I will avoid here, I'm not trying to start an offtopic flame war. :-)
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
I think this is a good example of why the media really need to look at what they are doing these days.
Picture the scene.. around 7:15am.. I am in my bed, and at that stage where you are not quite awake and not quite asleep - I am listening to the radio before I get up to get ready for work and then they announce quite bluntly that there is a meteor, about two miles in size, heading for the Earth. That certainly got me out of bed pretty quick.. the worst thing about this is that the radio station in question is BBC's Radio 1 - one of the main radio stations for the UK - not some tin pot local station.
During the day I headed over to Slashdot to get some more information, and it turns out that the risk is not quite as grave as the British media is reporting.
So why the hell must they persist with these scare tactics.. I wish they could just report the news as it was, without terrifying the public with unfounded, half-assedly researched stories. Sheesh..
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I hear your frustration and I agree that the message of these protestors is getting lost in the carnage. But I don't think you can blame the media entirely (or even at all). The media does not exist to provide a free forum for special interest groups. The protestors realized they could get widespread publicity by inciting violence. And they have. However, all they've managed to do is get their pictures on TV. Their message has still not come through. These anti-globalization protestors need to go back to the drawing board and figure out a GOOD way of getting their message across. They've had a couple of years now to see that the violence approach doesn't work. It's time for them to quit the nonsense and figure out something that does. It's their fault now and not the media's. And the leaders of these protest groups need to demonstrate a bit of leadership skills here and make sure everyone "under their command" understands that they're not going to do the "violence thing" anymore.
The problem is not unlike Yasser Arafat and the suicide bombers. Blowing up Israeli citizens is turning into a PR nightmare for Arafat but all he does is give an occasional (and usually coerced) condemnation. He needs to really crack down on the troublemakers, else the world will view the PLO as a gang of terrorists. This is obviously a larger and more serious problem that the globalization protestors but I think the idea is still the same. The responsible protestors need to crack down on the idiots who giving the whole group a bad name.
GMD
watch this
I am still of the opinion that we need to direct all the energy currently directed towards religous worship, into a program which gets a colony off the planet. If we were hit by a sun-side rock tommorow, it could destroy what could be the only intillegent life-form the universe has ever seen. I believe this is a responsiblity.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Perhaps the chance of this one hitting the Earth is only 1/16,000,000, but it could kill off half the world population if it does.
That's an expected value of 187.5 deaths, which is comparable to an average days killings by automobiles in the US. Of course, that's over the next 17 years, so actually, it's not something that people should worry about that much...
But still, on average, that rock will kill 11 people a year for the next couple of decades :-).
In all honesty, if on a second and third look the scientists all determined it was about 1:1 odds of hitting the Earth in 2017 (or whatever) do you REALLY think they would tell everyone?
Imagine the headlines after all of that "we are looking further...preliminary estimates...yada yada".
Scientist: After further study we have determined that it is a near certainty that the Northern Hemisphere will be vaporized in 2019.
Yeah, right.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think in the meantime, we should just continue our everyday lives, just keep an umbrella with you all the time, just in case :-)
The original British estimate was a 16 in a million chance of a collision, very small, but also very far from zero, particularly for a potentially disastrous strike. Assuming an actual strike would kill roughly a billion people, the mean expected death toll at the time of the announcement is about 16,000 or roughly 6 times the 9/11 death toll. 9/11 apparently justifies tens of billions in spending and gutting our civil liberties, but this should not even be mentioned. Interesting reasoning ....
A hundred years ago we would never have know or could do anything about it. Now we have made two movies and a half dozen slashdot sotries have been posted. Progress!
I read an article in the science section of the SF Chronicle a couple years back. It was talking about a new theory that the water from the earth had actually come from small icy meteors that burned up in the atmosphere.
The largest piece of supporting evidence was that when the atmosphere was viewed threw some high powered telescope there were a bunch of small lights that some scientist theorized were actually these small meteors hitting the atmosphere and burning up.
The article went on for another half a page about different supporting and disagreeing evidence (the disagreeing being the more convincing, but nothing too disproving) and finally stated that under closer inspect, the lights that the scientist viewed through the telescope moved when he moved the telescope. They were actually small imperfections in the lens.
Someone deserves a Pulitzer for getting me to read that.
So what are the odds of us EVER seeing a story in ANY mainstream outlet that is both accurate and not sensationalist?
I'm 50 and I've never seen one.
Does this mean we're all going to die? Please tell me a giant rock from space is going to crash into the big round rock we live on and kill us all. That's what I want to hear because maybe then I won't feel so insane.
God damn, normally I believe in freedom of speech but extreme leftist garbage like this is such crap that it should be banned. F***ing kids might read this and believe it. This should be banned in the interest of national security. Expanding atmosphere? Global warming? Je*** Chr***.
Wouldn't a collision with a meteor large enough to wipe out life as we know it steal money from the RIAA?
At the very least I'm pretty sure that melting CDs is not in the RIAA's best interests and is therefor not considered to be a permissable use of the media that you have.
Maybe we should just have the RIAA sue all Asteroids...
Or perhaps they can Denial of Service Attack them so that they can never actually get to the Earth...
</sarcasm>
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Imagine that you're inspecting a plane to determine whether you want to fly on it or not. If you determine that the probability of crashing while flying that plane is roughly the same as flying on a random plane, it would have something analogous to a Palermo score of 0. If it is 10 times more likely to crash, it would have a palermo score of +1. If it's ten times *less* likely to crash, it has a Palermo score of -1. (This is a rough analogy, of course.)
This rock has a Palermo score of -3. This means that this particular rock is much, much less likely to hit us in the next few centuries than a random, as-yet-undetected massive chunk of rock.
You've got to take backgrounds into account when you look at risks like this, otherwise you'll waste your worrying on the wrong things -- kinda like spending lots of effort and money on a crash-safe Volvo SUV and forgetting to buckle your seatbelt.
Did you read the article? It's less about the fact that the asteroid strike was being blown out of proportion and more about HOW it was blown out of proportion, and the dangers of overblown media hype with this sort of an issue.
Yes, we know it was overblown. Yes, we've known it for a while. But no, I did not know exactly how it happened. Apparently it's one guy who commented to the BBC in a very dangerous manner - something along the lines of "this object is the most dangerous object thus far encountered." The BBC then took this completely out of context and mediafied it.
Look, this is dangerous: it's more dangerous than the asteroid. This is the classic story of the boy who cried wolf, except in this case, it'd be better described as "the detached aloof boy who commented on a wolf-like smell in the air often and the other little boy who cried 'wolf' every time the first boy mentioned it." Media's been jumping on every factual statement that NEO scientists have been making, and people are getting to the point where any asteroid strike is going to be laughed at. This is dangerous. Very very dangerous. It's not like asteroid strikes don't happen. It's not like it wouldn't kill us. It's not like it wouldn't be very, very difficult to stop.
We're on NT 5.1 right now (Windows XP). By the time we get to NT 7, we'll be praying for a planet-killing asteroid to come and put us out of our misery...
Assuming that a astronomer could tell us with absolute certainty that a particular asteroid would strike the earth, how long do you think it would take for the Government to tell him "retract or die"? If such an event were to be predicted, only the families of senators and presidents and other elites would be spirited to underground centers for safety. The rest of us would be left to die in our uninformed ignorance.
Announcements that a particular asteroid may impact the earth will always be retracted regardless of truth so why bother?
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Yeah, and that one is the THIRD closest astroid to come close to us the next ones are in 2027, and 2080.
0.0035AU! Too close for me.
This one is due AUGUST 18, 2002
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
Asteroids as weapons are even better than asteroids as hype!
And the last time we've been able to get a limited-government pro-seperation-of-church-and-state Republican at the top of the ticket was ... 1960?
I've read several accounts that claimed a "really big" asteroid hits the earth every million or so years. The articles defined "really big" as life extinguishing size.
Lets not forget that a few years ago, Jupiter was absolutely punished by Shoemaker-Levy(sp). Tough day for friends vacationing in the Red Spot.
Sounds to me as if the only way to guarantee the survival of the species is to get the hell off our tiny little rock. (Even if it is a nice little rock.)
Colonize mars, terraform venus and mine the moon.
After all, what are the odds of three asteroids hitting three separate celestial bodies?
Urm, the whole point was that this asteroid scored the _highest to date_ on the threat scale, thus it was a valid story.
Duh.
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.[snip]
So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
Uhm... OK
News at seven: Sun might fart and obliterate Solar System.
It's a potiential risk, but what are you going to do about it anyways? And what are you going to do about the asteroid as well? (And no, you can't hire Bruce Willis... ;)
I'm a lot more worried about the unwashed masses than I am a disaster that I can't control (although I suppose I can't really control the unwashed masses either; that takes money... =)
ID-10-T is a way of life
You obviously don't understand probabilty and expected value.
With odds like that, chances are I would have won the lottery by then.
And knowing my piss poor luck, it'll be *right* before the asteroid lands smack on top of Los Angeles.
I won! I won! ..................
SPLAT!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
When something is improbable - but with dire consequences, it's
worth looking at the *mean* outcome rather than the most likely
outcome.
3 chances in a million of billion people dying (which is what would
probably happen if a lump of rock this big hit the earth)...is the same
average outcome as an absolute certainty of 3,000 people dying. So, this
is (on average) about as big a deal as the 9/11 incident.
OK - my statistics are probably completely bogus - but that certainly
makes this newsworthy - and it *should* have shaken everyone into the
same kind of galvanised response as 9/11 has done. After all, your
*personal* risk from this meteor is comparable to your chances of being
killed by terrorists on 9/11 - and that got a lot of people very scared.
OTOH, I think the BBC handled it poorly with way more hype than
it needed and a low emphasis on fact. That's fairly uncharacteristic
of them IMHO.
Like it or not, Media is the plural of Medium in the original Latin. In English, unlike Latin, nouns are pluralised by tha addition of an -s. So in English, the plural of Medium is Mediums. The affectation of taking a Latin plural form for a latinate noun is just that - a recent affectation imposed in the 19th century by the grammars used in the new, widespread schooling - which were based on Latin grammars. Mediums is not only correct in English, it is arguably more correct - no one made it up, it's how the language works. Simpliarly, the plural of Octupus, in English, is Octopuses, not Octupi.
Bugdhad?
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
Maybe not quite, but in cases like these theoretical death numbers go flying out the window, because either noone dies because it doesn't hit the earth at all or HUGE numbers of people die because it does hit. Sure, this leaves us with a mean death toll, but that is pretty useless for anything.
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
they burn, therefore they must be made of wood..
witches burn.. therefore...
WTF? Perhaps the definition of "News" is such (capital 'N', as in sensationalist reporting), but the definition of "news" is 'new information' and 'fresh events reported'. I agree that a great deal of protest is frivilous. Many activist type organisations have lost sight of what a protest used to achieve when used sparingly. Perhaps this is part of the problem? So many protests mean that they are rarely displayed as positive. BUT...
To suggest that protest activities surrounding events like the WTO meetings and G8 summits are NOT news? Take your head out of the sand and realise WHY major media agencies refuse to pass on the facts of such demonstrations! It is, in the end, all about their companies, their interests, their feedbag... They choose what to deem as 'Newsworthy' based on desired demographics, sensationalism, sales, ratings, advertiser interests, etc. Media and Communication are what it is all about - who has it, who controls it, who controls the opinions and attitudes of society...
History is what grants more perspective on the fallacies and propaganda of particular moments in time. Until then, we only get to see small parts of any story.
In the 80's one of the U.S. based science magazines ran an adevertisement for an "all-natural pH balanced skin moisturizer" IIRC for April 1st. The next issue had to explain to too many people that it was a joke.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Or, more cautiously, it is a good chance to gather data in preparation for testing those methods.
Besides the marketing, political and economic benefits of the War on Freedom (aka War on Terrorism) can be gained from transfering the momentum to a War on Asteroids. The former being an internal (to Earth) conflict further holding back advancement.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
There are countless ways that you could have a 1/100 chance of losing a dollar. There's only one way that you could have a very tiny chance of being killed by this asteroid -- and it's likely that there's very little that you can do about it if it was going to.
Worry all that you want, but keep the worrying in perspective, knowing that a reasonable amount of observations are needed before a collision can be confirmed... and if it's not confirmed then there's virtually zero chance that it's going to happen.