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

Daily Show

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Jon Steweart's comment:
"The torino scale ranges from 0, no likely practical consequences, to 10, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

NEO Information Centre

[Lev13than]

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:
http://www.nearearthobjects.co.uk

Also of note is a /. discussion along similar lines from back in September 2000:
UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report

3.9 in a million?????

[Lobsang]

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...) :)

Economic reasons to scare John Q. Public

[mikewas]

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.

Re:Economic reasons to scare John Q. Public

[The_Shadows]

More spending? It wouldn't take much more. After all, you'd only need to make one spaceship to fight the war.

You get a bonus ship every 10000 points.

Risks

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

Atari

[kin_korn_karn]

This is old news. Atari predicted the asteroid war in the late 70s.

Does it worry anyone else,

[ByteHog]

That the (not so) possible end of the world is named NT7 ?

This is getting rediculous!

[FortKnox]

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.