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Astronomers Upset About Asteroid Panic
DrMorpheus writes "According to the New Scientist, astronomers are horrified by press scares over asteroids - including the recent furore over QQ47 - which briefly had a one-in-a-million chance of crashing into our planet in 2014. So much so that they are toning down the scale they use to rate the threat posed by asteroids in an attempt to discourage journalists from covering potential collisions. Some even want the way asteroids are assessed to be completely overhauled."
Even as the commotion over QQ47 was dying down
Umm... what commotion exactly? I know it got some coverage on a slow news day, but seriously, was anyone actually worried about this?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Having a 1 on the Torino scale is kind of like having a Blue on the Terrorism Threat Scale, or a DEFCON 4 instead of 5. It's kind of cute but it's not very meaningful.
Changing the scale won't change the sensationalist, advertising-powered press at all. They'll continue to report asteroids as "harbinger of the approaching eschaton" whether it's on the Torino or Donuto scale (instead of covering, say, the deleterious effects of gasoline consumption by SUV's on the environment, or the tobacco industry's clever solicitation of candidates for DEATH).
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
What gets me is that people actually panic even when they put the statistics right there in the page, 1 in a million chance. There is greater chance that we would nuke ourselves out of existance. Or yet maybe I could win the lottery, think ill go buy a ticket.
Serenity|Chaos
I understand that the scientists should be concerned that their data not be misrepresented, but the blame for any panic that ensues following one of these press releases lies on the media that reports it, not the scientists.
As long as the information the Astonomers release is accurate and fully explains the likelyhood of an impact, I think they're covered. There is enough of a peer review process involved that keeps inaccurate information from being disseminated. And the scale they use to rate the impact probability seems quite satisfactory to me. (granted, I'm no astronomer)
Maybe I'm assuming too much, but media hype doesn't usually make it past my BS filter. Until I hear a report from a multiple reliable media sources, I'm unlikely to believe in wild claims of global destruction. But that's just me.
Traxman
The question is, do you really think we'll be notified if there is an asteroid that has a 99% chance of earth collision? I think not......
This really isn't anything new. The amount of sensationalism that is poured through journalism now is gotten silly. It has really become a form of entertainment, rather than a reliable source of information. Its really too bad that you have to take the news with a grain of salt generally, since everything is jumping to conclusions, rather than giving you the facts and leaving out the opinions.
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
What will it take before we get more money for watching the skies and funding for technologies that can divert a disaster?
Watching the skies for asteroids is comparatively inexpensive. The distances that telescopes are required to resolve in order to detect a threatening asteroid within sufficient lead time are far shorter than those routinely resolved by Hubble or Chandra, and lower-power telescopes = lower cost. It's the research into asteroid diversion techniques that really must be beefed up. I can almost understand the bureaucracy's reluctant attitude toward funding such projects -- why, they reason, should they pump money into research for circumstances that in all likelihood will never occur?
Nevertheless, the price for such an event, one asteroid at the expense of the human race, is far too high. This presents its own kind of pragmatism, which mustn't be ignored by those with the power to decide.
The coolest voice ever.
Michael Moore seems to have hit it on the head about the U.S. news organizations jumping from remote possibility to remote possibility getting everybody as scared shitless as they can. film at 11.
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
Obviously, the people that panic because of a one-in-a-million chance of an asteroid hitting the earth are the same ones that buy lottery tickets because of a one-in-sixty-million chance of winning the lottery. Apparently a large segment of the population suffers from a Rainman-like inability to comprehend either large numbers or statistics. Perhaps we SHOULD be careful what we tell these people. It's like when I was babysitting the 7-year old next store, and causually mentioned that because rivers meander, some day the river slough a half mile from his house would be where his house his. He started screaming and crying -- he couldn't comprehend the fact that "some day" would be long after he was dead and his house had been torn down anyway.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The gotcha is without mainstream media coverage and public opinion there is no way they are going to get additional funding. I think that the occasional bit of overwrought journalism is the cross they are just going to have to bare if they want to stay in business. Personally, given the trillions spent worldwide on "defense", I'm quite happy for a few billion to go on the effort to detect an killer asteroid in time to do something about it.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The human brain is immensely bad at assessing risks and consequences. Just look at the relative frequencies of fear-of-flying vs. fear-of-riding-in-a-car and compare those frequencies with the objective safety data for the two modes of transport. Add in fear of the unknown vs. complacency with the commonplace and all logic of probability and expected value go out the window. Since most people have never experienced an asteroid strike and since most asteroids never strike the Earth, it is easy to discount the possibility of the event.
And even statistics is inadequate for assessing the threat. On a deeper level, no single asteroid threat scale can work if different people have different levels of risk aversion. Which would you prefer: 1) an event that has a 1-in-a-million chance of killing 1 billion people or 2) an event that has a 100% chance of killing 1000 people. Different people will argue for different preferences despite the fact that both events have the same expected value of 1000 people dead. Some, who are risk averse, would abhor even the remotest possibility that a billion people might perish. Others, who are risk seeking, would rather take a 99.9999% chance of nobody dying to avoid the option in which 1000 people are most certainly killed.
Overall, I can see why the scientists want to downplay all the preliminary sightings of asteroids. With too little tracking data, nearly every rock they find looks like it might hit the Earth sometime. The real question is: how many false alarms can the public tolerate? If it is 1 false alarm per month, then scientists should only publish a threat assessment once a month.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'll start worrying about the accuracy of asteroid collision prediction after they manage to figure out how to predict rain 3 days from now with better than 70% accuracy.
On the other hand we are able to predict the position of a lot of stellar objects far into the future with a quite astonishing precision. And people were able to do so already 3000 years ago, for instance in a region that is now called Iraq.
If an astronomer tells me, that the collision of a specified object with Earth within the next 50 years has a probability of X, I believe him more than a meterologist who tells me, that it will rain with the probability of X in the next 5 hours.
What will it take before we get more money...
Everyone keeps complaining, "We need more money", "more money", "more money", "more money". What will it take for people to realize we can't have the resources, environment and honesty everyone needs until we do away with money and the waste, excuses and corruption that are associated with it?
Answer: A new type of media.
I think we can all agree that asteroids pose a potential threat to our way of life, yet we're unwilling to admit it in a social context. I think we can all agree that nuclear weapons pose a potential threat to our way of life, yet we continue using them with each new war we choose to fight. I think we can all agree to continue to disagree, forever, until nothing gets solved.
I'd work for free for the right group of people. Y'know, those freedom loving people we used to read about in our history classes. Not democrates or republicans or capitalists, but real humanitarians.
But why do we want to divert a disaster? Why save humanity? I have faith that it can save itself, or fade into extinction. Both are the natural way of life. What part of humanity is worth saving? Why save humanity? Because we're conscious! Because we can learn what it means to love! Because is it possible for the universe to have meaning without us?!?!
I think we have some social problems to tackle before we continue bitching about money or the end of the world.
You basically need two things: Power (as in energy) and manpower. You can make air and water from the locally-available supply, you can grow food in greenhouses and you can live underground or in shielded areas to get away from the radiation on the surface.
Terraforming would be cool long-term, but it hardly required.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Astonomers should embrace the public's irrational fear and push Congress for more funding on the locations of earth intersecting asteroids.
It worked for the PATRIOT act, why not astronomy?
Let's say it takes x years to make Mars livable. Every year we spend waiting to go there makes that x + 1.
My Systems
the ones we see. So far every one that we see has been studied for a couple more days and the threat has been eliminated. Even if they found that it was absolutely going to hit the the planet, there's 10 years for them to come up with a way to send up some nukes and blast it out of the sky.
The REAL problem is the ones we DON'T see coming. It's all well and good to say "yes, we're watching, and we're making sure that nothing will hit the planet", but we can't possibly watch every corner of the sky all the time. And it will be one helluva shock to the powers that be when someone comes along and says "This asteroid is bearing down upon is, we weren't watching and we now have three weeks to come up with a plan".
Hmph. Been there, done that, didn't get a T-shirt, either. Young? No. Be forty pretty soon...and I find that the older I get, the angrier I get. Might be part and parcel of knowing more about the world :)
:-)
:-)
Now, back in the early 80s, during college, when I *was* young, idealistic, and really wanted to go live on an asteroid; well. Nowadays I'm halfway burnt out from working too many overtime hours and wondering when the layoff notice comes; and watching the planet go to hell (with more knowledge vs. idealism than I used to have). Ah, well. Life happens.
I'd still love to be somewhere using the skills I've learned to do something useful rather than just contributing to the corporate onslaught, however. I suspect I'd be just as busy, if not more so, but I think there' d be less reason to watch the News From Earth
"Take it all in stride": What are you, a quitter? Guess that's your problem, but son, let me tell you, quitting is easy, but you sleep better if you follow what you believe in, "no matter how crazy it seems".
As to "spirits being crushed";
Hey, I can dream, can't I? That's one thing that can't be taken away from me, it only disappears if I let it go. Hm?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
How disengenuous. For years astronomers have whipped up a frenzy about the latest asteroid encounter, presumably to compete for funding with the other "natural disaster" sciences of climatology and volcanology. The amount of funding they is proportional to how much fear they can produce in the the public. slashdot.org dutifully assists by publishing these stories.
an ill wind that blows no good
All that's changed is our assessment or understanding of that chance.
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