Slashdot Mirror
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"
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!
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
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
The creature in the sky Got sucked in a hole Now there's a hole in the sky And the ground's not cold And if the ground's not cold Everything is gonna burn We'll all take turns I'll get mine, too
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!!
Slashdot is the only place where one can find responsible journalism...
My Stuff: pspChess and foobar2000 plugins
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...)
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.
My favourite example is any time there's a protest against the WTC, G8, etc. The media immediately labels the protesters as "anarchists" and focus on the tiny portion of them that are inciting violence. In the hours of news coverage that these protests get, I've seen a total of 5 minutes devoted to what the people were protesting. The rest of the time was video footage of police firing tear gas and spraying people with water cannons.
So why doesn't the media want to report on what it is that the protesters are protesting for? Because that doesn't get ratings. Showing someone get tackled by 3 cops does.
I think that answers your question right there, doesn't it? Every story I saw about it clearly stated it was a remote possibility, and most likely would found to not be on any kind of course with Earth at all.
What?
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.
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.
Now if a tree falls in the woods and nobody cares, does it really matter that it fell? It wouldn't really matter if the Earth was destroyed since we're the only ones that care and we'd be dead.
So the real bright side would be knowing that regardless of what happens, it really doesn't matter.
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
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.
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.
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
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..
The problem is that many of the protesters are just young teenagers trying to get out of school. If they went up to the average protester and said "Why are you protesting?", I'm sure the response would be along the lines of:
"Well dude, there's like, this world bank, and it's just wrong man, it's so wrong!"
There are dumb folks on both sides, but the media at least is shooting for higher ratings, which prevents tripe like that from making it on the air.
Practical fusion power is only thirty years away. We just don't know when that thirty years starts...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
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.
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.
Amen! I feel the same way about conspiracy theorists. Ever notice that the same people that think the government can't do anything right also think that the government can successfully keep these bizzare secrets for years and years?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
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.
So why doesn't the media want to report on what it is that the protesters are protesting for? Because that doesn't get ratings.
That's certainly true, but it's also because it's not actually news. There are probably several dozen medium-to-large protests about something each year. The definition of "news" is something that's out of the ordinary, which means that only the violent, or extrememly large, protests really qualify.
I've seen a total of 5 minutes devoted to what the people were protesting.
Just because someone is protesting, that doesn't make their cause newsworthy.
This helps people get interested in something that still is important: science and research. Furthermore, it makes sense that searching out asteroids that could plough into earth is an imporant task even if this asteroid is not a threat.
Without the media and movies like armageddon to hype things up, there would no absolutely NO public interest and support in such things, thus relegating public funds to other areas.
The media may be stupid in the way it does things, but it does hype the importance of scientists to the average joe.
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.
(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.
The cry of "Save the Planet!!!" always makes me laugh.
The planet is doing just fine. It was doing fine before we got here and it will do fine even if we somehow are not here in the future.
I'm not saying humanity isn't damaging the biosphere, because I think we are, but "Save the Planet" oversimplifies to the point where it's nonsensical.
You are just really, really confused.
Global Warming is not about expanding the volume of AIR around the earth. The "air ball" is no bigger, and not dragging on anything, and not changing the earth's orbit.
Even a nuclear war is unlikely to destroy all lifeforms. There are many changes we could, and maybe are, making that could upset the balance of ecology sufficient that modern "civilization" would no longer function, i.e. produce and distribute enough food to keep everyone alive.
Civilization is much more delicate than humanity which is much more delicate than life.
The earth is mostly a ball of iron.
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?
The original post actually reminded me a Carlin bit about how the planet might want things like plastic, so it created humans to manufacture it.
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
I propose we build a rocket and shoot you into the sun to compensate for the change in orbit.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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
"Ether, man! Invisible ether! Or maybe Phlogiston! Where the hell do you think homeopathic medicines come from? We have to stop polluting the ether of space with our evil nookyular space probes or Gaia will be consumed by the Great Sun God!"
(The sad thing is, despite the fact that the original author was just trolling, I'm sure there's some envirol00n group out there that believes something like this.)
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.
HIGHLY-PROPAGABLE MEME ALERT
"Planetary September 11th" - an unanticipated asteroid collision resulting in local or regional devastation. You wake up in the morning, turn on the TV, and read that $CITY is a smoking ruin, or that there's a 30 mile hole in the Australian outback, or that 500 miles of coastland have been swamped. And you see footage of the resulting devastation for days on end.
I like this meme. I like it a lot.
Up until now, we've been talking about "impact scenarios", and "probability of impact", and other scientific-sounding stuff that means nothing to Joe Sixpack other than "Huh? Big rock. Guys in white coats. Whutever."
Unlike current literature on asteroid impact risks, the meme "Planetary September 11th" works - it sticks in the head not just for the image of being caught unawares, but because our response would be just like our repsonse to 9/11 - lots of fingerpointing from politications about how NASA, ESA, NEO should have seen it coming, lots of requests for more funding, lots of bureaucratic crap - all of which happens after the rock's hit us and tens of thousands are dead.
Anyone in a PR/news position who wants to support visibility for NEO searches - try passing the phrase "planetary September 11th" in front of a few focus groups and see if they "get it" any faster.
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
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!!"
Very few ppl, except for those who read Jane's, perhaps? The truth *was* out there, and the fact that very few ppl could be bothered to look for it doesn't mean it was totally secret.
Grab.
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
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.
As the others say, a read of Jane's or Aviation Week and Space Technology could have told you of the F-117. Just as those same texts will tell you lots about the successors to the SR-71 though NIMA keeps that quiet. Moreover, there was nothing *illegal* about the F-117 while conspiracy theorists want to you to believe that what's being covered up is illegal, immoral, or fattening! :-)
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
As far as the earth's biosphere is concerned, an asteroid would likely do more damage than man has managed to do since we evolved on the planet. Indeed, compared to some of the non-human ecological disasters suggested by the geological and fossil record, we're still pretty small potatoes. The earth has survived worse than us, many times.
We are dismayed because we've managed to kill off a handful of species that are appealing to us as humans--things that we enjoy seeing, like birds and whales. Meanwhile, most of the biomass on the planet is microorganisms and insects, most of which have hardly noticed our presence, and would hardly notice our absence.
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.
Media, the plural of medium should not be used as a singular. Your headline should read, "The media are pathetic." So many people don't get it that the plural of medium is media, that they have cooked up a new word, mediums. That really annoys me. The media have always been purveyors of entertainment, not information. "Responsible journalism" is, and always has been, a fairy tale. Journalism's highest prize, the Pulitzer is named after one of the original yellow journalists, Joseph Pulitzer. Sensational headlines sell papers, and it is, after all, a business.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
That's not scientists. That's environmentalists, who are like the bastard step-children science left on the side of a snowy mountain, hoping they would just freeze to death. Unfortunately, some bleeding heart woodsmen rescued them and now we're stuck with them.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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...
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
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.
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.