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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.
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
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
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.
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?
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