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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"
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
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
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...)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is old news. Atari predicted the asteroid war in the late 70s.
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 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!
It was referred to as DHMO. Dihydrogen monoxide. First mentioned in the Washington Post--here's a link to an article about it, from the same site I posted earlier in the article about misleading statistics.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
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.
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.
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
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."
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
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.
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