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.

Comments

Hype = Good (sometimes)

[Pedrito]

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.

Re: Odds

[Black Parrot]

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

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

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