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Rand Expert Says To Keep Mum About Killer Asteroids
crashnbur writes "NASA is conducting a survey of the sky to find asteroids large enough that a collision with earth could 'extinction-type impact', and none studied so far will threaten us in the next 200 years. Of course, if a doomsday asteroid is discovered, the current policy is not to say a word: 'If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all', says Dr. Geoffery Sommer. The issue may be making its rounds because an asteroid was discovered orbiting the sun between Venus and Earth earlier this week. Space.com presents a lengthy, four-part 'Impact Debate' (next three parts coming next three Tuesdays). Apparently we are just as likely to die by asteroid impact as in a plane crash."
Duct tape. Just be sure you have plenty of duct tape. It could save your life in the event of an asteroid collision.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
That's good news for me considering that I never fly.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all.
You might not be able to anything about it. Chances are nobody else will be able to do anything about it. But FFS issue a warning because the brains of the world can collectively work on saving our collective ass.
Thank you very much.
...we have the ISS. If there is an impact in the next few months, the three men on the ISS will come down to earth and repopulate. Yeah, that's it.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Maybe I have a super asteroid killer 1000 in my basement and they don't know about it? (Bruce Willis downstairs I swear) Or better yet what If I have a fallout shelter to protect me from the blast, quakes, tidal waves? It seems very closeminded to assume that no one can do anything about an incoming asteroid. If you have a weeks noticed maybe you could evacuate a city and save millions of lives?
How can that be?
Are they saying that as many people have died by asteroid strike as plane crash?
I call shenannigans.
Can someone explain the economic reasoning to me on why we are bothering to spend money searching for life-ending asteroids when:
a) We can do nothing but panic if we find one. and
b) If the people searching for them find one, they won't even tell us?
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
In the event of an asteroid impact, lay flat down on the ground, with your hands covering your head, and you will be protected.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
They could publish info about imminent space catastrophe and I wouldn't be able to read about it because somebody'd post it on Slashdot first.
Sweet oblivion.
The issue for me, is if they beleive that nothing can be done about it, maybe they have not thought of the clever solution to fix the problem.
Yes you will frighten the populice, yes the world may increase in suicides etc. The thing is, if you had undeniable proof that an asteroid WOULD hit the earth, and it WAS BIG ENOUGH to destroy it in a very convincing, end of the dinasours way, you could drive any arbitrary amount of money into finding a solution. Who is to say that with the combined ability of every nation on earth that there wouldnt be a way to put enough explosion on target to move such an object?
I mean, we have TONS of nuclear weapons, and possibly even the ability to create even more horrendous things that can explode quite violently, who is to say that a 100 year or so effort to put that much firepower into space to avert such an object wouldnt come to not? I mean imagine if you had the entire planet set forth to figuring out a solution, instead of a small relatively smallg roup going "welp sucks to be us lets not tell anyone that our kids or grandkids are going to explode in a fireball"
even if it was going to come within a few years, at least SOMETHING might be done, some way to preserve what as humanity are. I know it sounds a bit star trek, but having something aroudn to say "we were here" would be just as important as doing nothing.
Oh well, probably a lot more info in the article, but hey, can't just ignore it, especially if it won't go away.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Like hell. If I know Armageddon is coming, I can be finishing the last bottle of wine from my cellar just as the shockwave hits.
Sheesh, if I had a nickle for every false alarm our "Homeland Security" folks issued I'd be rich.
Actually, we should probably call it "Der Vaterland Sicherhiet." I never thought I'd see the day when you would see assault rifles and fatigues in American airports.
(Say, don't you thing that Green Camoflague is a bit inneffecting in an urban combat environment, like an Airport?)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
if you were under the plane when it went down, you would die in the crash, too.
Glad I could help. &:-)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"Apparently we are just as likely to die by asteroid impact as in a plane crash."
Since some 3000 people died as the result of airplane crashes in 2001, I don't find this terribly reassuring.
Well, if Bin laden is capable of hijacking an asteroid, then he must have gottten the rocket from somewhere. Yet another bit of missile technology Iraq failed to declare...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
'If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all', says Dr. Geoffery Sommer.
Would sopmebody pass this along to Tom Ridge and the rest of the Bush administration?
Edith Keeler Must Die
The real reason they are keeping mum is to prevent hoardes of geeks making fools of themselves camping outside Natalie Portmans house trying to get a date before they depart to techno heaven.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If they don't tell us then how will we know when it is time to start looting, raping, and pillaging!
me karma am bad
Apparently we are just as likely to die by asteroid impact as in a plane crash
Except one of the situations happens often enough to make headlines multiple times every year...and the other doesn't. So why are they listed as the same?
My guess is that somebody was considering that a great number of people would die as a result of a large meteorite impact. Taking this into consideration, then over a long period of time (long enough to include one or two significant meteorite impacts), then yes. If you counted the number of people that die from meteorite impacts and those that die from the sum total of all plane crashes, then they might be equal. But this is statistics, not probability. The probability of being killed by a meteorite would be much much lower.
The same thing is seen in a coin toss. For instance, say that you have flipped a coin six times, and each time it has landed on 'heads'. Statistically, you know that only 50% of flips will result in 'heads', so you might think that the odds are very low for the coin to land on 'heads' a seventh time -- 1 in 32 or so. BUT the seventh flip has the same 50/50 chance of landing on heads that any other flip had. That's probability.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
So if Dr. Geoffery Sommer goes to his physician and the physician finds he has 8 weeks to live, he should keep it a secret because Geoffery and his family may panic.
It is nice to know we have such people looking out for us. But it does not matter because their
is an asteroid headed our way. By the way, that is why all the aliens left, but they did not tell us that either.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
statistics comes in handy.
.days old. The so called "Life Expectency" has absolutely *nothing* to do with how old any particualar person might be at their time of death.
I've known several people who have died in plane crashes ( one of whom ended his life against the World Trade Center). I've never known anybody killed by an asteroid. Neither have you, or your parents, or *their* parents.
This statistic is derived because relatively few people die in plane crashes, whereas *IF* an asteroid hits a great many people will die.
Technically, mathmatically, the statement is correct, but really has nothing to do with whether or not *you* will die by being hit with an asteroid.
It's this same misunderstanding that leads people to believe there were no old people 200 years ago, because the *average* age was low. Whereas a quick study of the death age of America's founding fathers would put the lie to that idea.
The low *average* age is heavily weighted because so many people died before they were two. .
So don't bother spending the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for asteroids. *You* are far more likely to die by having a plane fall on you.
KFG
But would you want to survive?....but when your options are dying instantly or dying gradually over the next few years (blocked out sun = no photosynthesis = no green plants = no food = good luck) /.
I don't like to see this kind of pessimism, at least not on
Okay, so the asteroid hits, dust in the air, no sunlight. Check. Sounds like it's about time to crack open a couple of books on hydroponic gardening, and rigging up an impromptu electric generator.
I've never bought the whole "living will envy the dead" cliche. By god, I like to think humanity is made of sterner stuff. Asteroids. So you killed the Dinosaurs....big deal. If you can't pull off a mass extinction more than once, you can't do it at all.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
To qoute the movie Armageddon:
"Begging your pardon, sir, but it's a damn big sky."
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
If the government announced that everyone has been sentenced to imminent death (which is what such an asteroid announcement would be), I don't have enough faith in humanity to presume that the majority of people would act like grown-ups about it; rather I feel most people would go running around, screaming, looting, crashing cars, smashing things, blowing stuff up, etc. All religious people would immediately go insane.
If a doomsday asteroid is heading for earth, there's nothing we can do about it, and if you think there is you've watched too many Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay movies.
Bottom line, if we have one year to live, it would be better for everyone if that last year were not spent in anarchy.
That being said, I remember reading an article (wish I could find it and cite it) that said there were only 4 government employees whose job description includes looking for asteroids to hit earth; most of the people doing this are amateur astronomers. They won't keep it quiet. So, if there is such an asteroid on a collision course with earth (which there is, somewhere), the odds highly favor it being discovered by an amateur astronomer who will immediately tell everyone which makes this entire thread moot.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
here's the headline on another article linked to the one posted above:
David Morrison figures his long effort to keep the world safe from asteroids has been very successful. "In 11 years of protecting the planet, not a single human has been killed," he pointed out to me recently.
heaoeahoahaohea
oh, these wacky astrophysicists and their humor. and to think, i was beginning to believe that they were, you know, all brain, no penis.
I wonder if Taco Bell will sponsor this. If a killer Asteroid hits a special target (like the franchise on my street), they could give everybody on Earth free diarrhea.
It's been something like 200 million years since the last "extinction level event". If they happen statistically at random this suggests that the chances of one happening in the next 200 years is only one in a million. Not one in a million per year, or per rock, or per observation - one in a million total over the next 200 years. And that's assuming that we can't or don't do anything to improve the odds.
On the list of doomsday threats I'd say that asteroid impacts come pretty far down. Man made disasters are overwhelmingly more threatening.
Uh, no.
If, on average, a certain even over the course of a long time has some chance of happening, like, say, a plane crash or an asteroid hitting, then it's reasonable to compare them. If an asteroid hits, a ton of people are going to die, but it's unlikely. If a plane crashes, relatively few people are going to die, but it's much more likely.
The thing that isn't being taken into account is variance. Asteroid impacts are low-probability, high-variance events, kind of like winning the lottery in a really bad way. But, like the lottery, when it hits it has a much bigger impact.
So if I bet a dollar, and half the time I lose my dollar, and half the time I get back my dollar plus another 50 cents, I would expect to win as much money on average as if I bought a lottery ticket. The money won, on average, is the same. It's the same concept, except instead of dollars won in this case, you're picking people from the population to die. Grim, I know.
It seems to me that in a world of restricted resources, you should tend to put those resources not necessarily in the place that has the highest number of expected deaths, but rather in the place that will lower the number of expected deaths the most. So I think it's reasonable that we spend more money on airplane safety than on asteroid detection.
- target
Most of the asteroids >1km diameter that go anywhere near earth have been cataloged, and their orbits have been simulated hundreds of orbits in advance, with the closest match being like a 1 in 100 chance of being hit by a certain 3km asteroid in 8000 years. It would be pretty hard not to discover an asteroid that large with an orbit that intersects Earth's at least a few years in advance, in which case you could just blow it off course with a 100 megaton nuclear missle that NASA would build in a hurry. ;)
Repeal the DMCA!
I can't give my real name or tell where I work for obvious reasons...
The good news is, no matter how broke you are, if the rent's due after next Thursday, you shouldn't worry about it too much. You're probably better off blowing the spare cash on whores and booze.
You can buy yourself that Corvette you've always hankered after - trust me - the repayments will not be a problem - just do it quickly.
The bad news is you really should call your parents. Come on, a five-minute call versus an eternity of guilt!
Gotta go now: Cheyenne mountain won't just fill itself with faceless spooks, you know! Oh, and er Good Luck. You never know - we might meet up after "It", and I'll buy that Corvette from you for an MRE and a bottle of water.
Ciao,
T&K.
Political language
I propose that we:
A)Construct a large, white, triangular craft that shoots white dots
B)Launch it
C)Use an Atari 2600 controller to pilot it
Then we find the Twin Galaxies high score holder and get him to save the planet.
If, on average, a certain even over the course of a long time has some chance of happening, like, say, a plane crash or an asteroid hitting, then it's reasonable to compare them
:) especially the fact of variance
except if the 'long time' in which the certainty needs to happen exceeds a person's lifespan. that is why I bring up statistics vs. probability. statistically, over this 'long time' there might be as many people die from planes as meteorites.
but, that 'long time' is almost definately much much longer than your lifespan or mine. therefore the probability of me dying from a plane crash is much greater than my probability of dying from a meteorite.
now I'm no math expert, this is just my opinion generated from my limited knowledge. But probability is what defines every instance, versus statistics which are used to find out general patterns. This is where my coin analogy came from.
To look at this with another example, take the Black Death. It was a significant event, with large variance. Lots of people died. So, the history of the last 1000 years might show that 1 in 400,000 people die of the black plague. So does that mean that my odds are 1/400,000 in dying of the black plague? No, the probability is much smaller than that because probability must look at my lifespan, and events happening in my lifespan. Things that happened 700 years ago are as unconsequential to my lifespace as things that will happen 700 years in the future.
though you do bring up good points
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
if we're about to be hit with an asteroid, and they won't tell us.
Watch the astronomers. If all of a sudden they start mortgaging their souls to buy Porsches and big mansions with hot and cold running hookers, look out!
KFG
In fact, earth has not been hit by an asteroid in at least several hundred thousand years. Why do people suddenly feel protection is urgent now?
Tell that to the Russians... The last major impact was less than 100 years ago, and released about the same energy as a 10 megaton nuclear weapon. It wasn't nearly enough to cause any kind of extinction, but I sure would want to be able to push one of those off course if it was headed towards a populated area.
I was wondering what would happen if the moon was hit by an asteroid.... Do the earth would have to fear darker nights (maybe a coube of degree less at night), orbit change, no more tide.... sound like a strange question but im very curious about it....
Overuse of the Pumping Lemma causes blindness
What an idiotic policy. Just because they can't think of anything to do about it doesn't mean nobody can. What arrogance. Maybe they can't either, but worth a try.
I say if these idiots aren't planning to report Killer Asteroids, then their funding to look for them should be cut off. Give the money to someone who isn't so bloody arrogant, or to someone trying to do something about it (eg cheap access to space).
The analysis is the same if you want to discuss probability of dying in either event. There is a very good chance that there will be a plane crash (several, in fact) during your lifetime, but a relatively poor chance that you will be on one of the crashed planes. On the other hand, there is a very low likelihood that an asteroid will hit the earth, but if it does, there is a very good chance that you will be killed by it. This is why statistics and probability are very closely related, since the number of people killed in an event affects your probability of being one of those people (the more people killed, the more likely you are to be one of them, all other things being equal).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is what I get for being a newbie. Please accept my apologies. It won't happen again.
You may be right. Or you may be wrong. Rest assured that I was quoted out of context. My attempt at correcting the record is included below. It may or may not be an improvement from your perspective. Thank you for not lacing your e-mail with personal attacks - yours was one of the more level-headed responses.
Regards, Geoffrey Sommer RAND
I'm afraid that the AAAS press office quoted me rather severely out of context. Their press release (which I didn't get to see until two minutes before the press conference) has me saying "if you can't do anything about a warning, there is no point in issuing a warning at all. If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss". It prefaces that by saying that I "take the controversial stance of advocating silence and secrecy". I most certainly would not take such an absolute stand. Perhaps you will let me correct the record.
At the Western Psychological Association conference in Los Angeles last year, I wrote that "surveys confer social benefits only to the extent that mitigation is possible" but qualified certain exceptions in the disaggregate (not necessarily exhaustive): fatalists, religionists, criminals and the "yellow press". "Religionists" was meant to include the "make one's peace with one's God" case. By criminals I was thinking of looters and profiteers. My point, then and now, was that the primary purpose of a survey is to enable a response, and absent a mitigation capability that purpose is vitiated. The context of all this is an argument for mitigation.
The "ignorance may be bliss" argument is not trivial, however. Analytically, the question is whether the doom-warned population has a negative discount rate - a "dread" factor. Does the population as a whole have a "willingness to pay" to avoid bad news? It's hard to say. Certainly, in the micro sense, the effect is real. Do we prefer a quick (but ignorant) death for Columbia's crew, or do we wish for them more time to "make peace with their God" before their inevitable end? I would guess the former.
In the context of astro-doomsaying, is there an absolute right to information? Many passionately believe so. Yet, how many high-dread people are outvoted by one "tell me the worst" person? I don't know - hence, I don't advocate "silence and secrecy" as absolutely as the AAAS press release indicates. It all depends, as I have said many times, on valuations. What gives the government the right to decide? What gives the government the right to decide on any issue of social welfare?
I was able to clarify most of this during my AAAS talk, but unfortunately, the press release is now to the four winds.
This article reminds me of those who say that a patient diagnosed with incurable cancer should not be told about it, since there is nothing that can be done about it. The idea has been defunct in the medical world for many years. In the US it is extremely unethical to do this, though I am sure in some countries it goes on. The reason is quite simple - with a limited time left on the world, there are likely many things the cancer patient would like to do before he dies, e.g. apologize to that guy he was a dick to at work, tell some girl he loved her, beat civ3 on the hardest level.
On top of that, it is just plain dishonest. Not to mention that in the case of an asteroid, someone somewhere might have a bright idea that would avert disaster or extend human survival.
"Bah, duck tape won't do anything! Too fragile, too many cracks."
I think duck tape has too many quacks myself.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Nor should there be any reason to fear a so-called "killer asteroid." There have got to be ways to fight back. Here is my own, back-of-a-napkin plan.
Of course, there is no need to actually send the killer asteroid into the sun.
Surely improvements could be made. The point is, we can indeed fight back. It would be stupid and cowardly to not try.
In any case, we should bear in mind that it is extremely improbable that a killer asteroid will hit in our lifetimes.
If they were dead certain that extinction was inevitable what difference would it make whether we knew about it or not. Frankly, I'd rather go out in a riotous orgy of sex and violence than dragging my ass out of bed at 6 like it was a regular day. Those snooty eggheads want to cheat all of us out of our "what if you had one day to live" fantasies.
When a large enough asteroid hits, it will scorch a significant percentage of the planet's surface, and black out the sky for many years, throwing the planet into an ice age. As a result, most life on the planet will die. This has happened many times before.
Yet something survived. Something was able to withstand the ice age until it receeded, and it was enough to maintain the ecosystem, so both animal AND plant life persevered. Somehow. That means, despite how horrible it would be, there would be a CHANCE that humans could survive. Granted, life as we know it would be over, but we could find a way to hold out, hundreds of years if we had to.
The chances of any of this being possible relies upon the amount of time we've had to prepare. If we have minutes, then yes, there's little we could do. But if we have years, months, even days, there's plenty that could be done. The impact area would be known far enough in advance that it could be completely evacuated. Deep caves could be built to house the population of the world. Lord only knows, if we REALLY wanted to, we might find a way to push that asteroid out of the way in time.
And besides, how exactly would you keep it a secret? Half the space objects discovered are done so by people and equipment not under control by the government. Remember the 1 mile asteroid discovered a few years ago with a SLIGHT chance of hitting Earth? Even before they knew for sure that it wouldn't, it was on the front page of the newspapers. It was the effort to notify other scientists for peer review on the projected orbit that the press got wind of. There is no effort to keep these things secret, so how would you suddenly shut everyone up once several hundred people were aware of it?
The smaller asteroids can be just as dangerous. Something 50 to 100 meters wide, similar to what hit siberia in the early 1900's had a devastating effect locally, but today, if people didn't have advance warning, you better hope people figure out what it was before they start launching retalliation nuclear strikes.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
If they won't tell anyone, then they shouldn't be looking in the first place. Certainly not with my tax dollars anyway. Obviously someone thinks they're special. I'd like the last few days off work too.
As usual, I will update my journal as orbit model for 2003-CD30 changes.
There is a delay small in announcing significant potential impactors. The purpose of the delay is to allow for additional technical review of the data. This review period is designed to last about 72 hours. I recommend that you read FAQ #2 in my journal for more details.
And speaking personally:
chongo (was here)
The more frightening point is the underlying attitude behind the notion. Essentially he's dividing the world into two segments: those who know what is going on, and everyone else who is properly kept in the dark...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
And yes, I know its a quote from a game, but it seemed quote appropriate.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003