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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."
The hype and panic brings needed attention to an often overlooked scientific field: watching out for big ass shit that could annihilate us. We spend far too little on this kind of work as it is.
do we really need to be notified every time an asteroid is within a percentage of a collision course? the media should focus on the more interesting statistics of astronomy.. like.. uh.. mars!
The Torino scale is trying to represent two completely orthogonal scalars (chance of collision and consequences of collision) with a single scalar. It's going to end up misrepresenting something.
What will it take before we get more money for watching the skies and funding for technologies that can divert a disaster? I think inciting panic or fear without exagerating the risks or facts can have a positive social change.
Right now, most of the sky is ignored and there is no solution to moving a huge asteroid just a little bit to avoid collision with the Earth or the moon. If Joe Sixpack demanded some kind of plan eventually something would be debated in Congress. The alternative is to watch a small part of the sky and do nothing if a real threat is detected.
Well, it would be funny if I had someway to get to another earth-like planet ...
Of course, with essentially no space program, there's nothing we could do even if we DID believe them, so maybe they're worrying over nothing.
See what I've been reading.
than the people who declare we're all going to die after only a nights worth of orbit data (And yes I am an astronomer dammit!). There are too many people trying to do sloppy science by deriving an orbit after only a night's worth of data and then send out a press release (*cough* University of Pisa *cough*)
It makes us look bad that they declare we're all going to die and then later late week after they've gotten more data and re-crunch the numbers have to come back and say "Ohh, yeah, please ignore what we just said"
Some even want the way asteroids are assessed to be completely overhauled."
What needs to be overhauled is how the astronomers interact with the press. Perhaps they should simply not hold press conferences on "maybes". Especially when certainty will be available within a few days anyway.
The problem isn't the system, the problem is the people. Glory hungry amateurs and stupid journalists, feeding off of each other.
To hell with 'em all.
It's depressing to think that we continue to keep all of mankind's eggs in one basket when we don't have to. Zubrin says $20 billion and 10 years to get to Mars and $2B a launch after that -- that's 70+ Mars missions just for what we're spending for W's war in Iraq, which I suspect would do a lot towards addressing the idea of permanent colonization.
Get some puny dictator who poses no threat to the US or do something so great that it'd be remembered forever so long as humans draw breath...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The media craziness would be solved if people just applied a simple rule: Don't assign a Torino rating to an object until you have observations covering 1% of the time between now and the first potential collision.
All these level 1 rated objects have been reclassified as level 0 as soon as a couple weeks of data have been obtained; why not wait those couple weeks before publising anything?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
but seriously, I think part of the problem is that scientists want to be the first to publish something about important things they have found, so we end up with people racing to the press to say they found something before other people found it.
Maybe what they need is some sort of identifier showing how much data has been collected to tell people how certain the track is. Right now, they just say, ooh, 1 in a million chance based on small dataset with huge error bars. But in reality it should be 1 in 5 billion because our error bars are huge. I really think this is the scientists fault for publishing really early data that has not been corroborated yet or refined--not the press... its not like they are hacking into the scientists computers and misinterpreting data, its the scientist trying to impress a good looking journalist or something or get some recognition...
--if only coffee and techno came in the same drink...
The trouble is that the News has stopped being about the News and has instead become about pandering to the lowest common denominator's interests (there are an awful lot of stupid people out there, and they just happen to be the ones most impacted by advertising).
It's like Bill Murray's character in Scrooged pointed out: "[People wanting to see the program] isn't good enough! They have got to be *so* *scared* to miss it!"
Watch any news program tonight and you'll see it. If you want to avoid it, I recommend something halfway intelligent like News Hour on PBS.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
After the second civil war, we'll be much more worried about the next world war, which will make a mere asteroid crashing into the earth look like a tiny drop in the bucket.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I know this is a little off topic, but...
I was thinking about the various reports I've heard about deflecting an asteroid or shooting it with a missle. One idea I just thought of would be to somehow increase the speed of the asteroid so that it would miss earth. Maybe by using a solar sail or attaching rockets to it that would increase it's speed. If you had enough warning ahead of time then maybe you wouldn't actually have to have much acceleration as long as it was continuous (such as the solar sail idea).
Do you think that would be possible? Would it work any better than blowing it up or deflection?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
So...what do they do? Instead of waiting the two days and seeing if the risk is real, they announce right away.
Let's consider the possibilities if they had waited a couple of days. In the overwhelmingly most likely case, they find after a couple days that things are OK, and so say nothing. No panic. All is well.
In the extremely unlikely case, it turns out it does have a reasonable chance of hitting the Earth, perhaps high enough that we actually need to do something about it. In that case, would a delay of TWO DAYS OUT OF 11 YEARS really have made a difference?
Either someone was very irresponsible in announcing in the first place, or someone was trying to get publicity for astronomers (perhaps to help with funding?)
it occurs to me that "sorry for the misunderstanding" would make an excellent sig!
-pyrrho
Asteroid scares (along with virii and genetic engineering) are an important part of contemporary mythology, just like radiation in the fifties. Until there are proper anti-asteroid mechanisms in place we need to exaggerate and fret over these percieved threats. It dulls our eyes to the pain of everyday problems and frustrating hierarchic structures. Give the people dreams of threats from space lest they get restless and rise anew.
"Chance of rain" in a weather forecast actually means "probability that you personally will get rained on," not "probability that it will rain somewhere in the area in question." Watch a time-lapse radar animation -- if those blobs travel across x% of the area, that's considered an x% chance of rain, even though the actual probability that rain will occur is 100%. (And of course weather patterns are vastly more complicated than simple celestial mechanics.)
Your meteorological office is obviously a hell of a lot better than ours then. Here in Perth, Western Australia the accuracy is about 45% for predictions for the same day. They would get statistically better results if they simply said "the weather today will be pretty much like it was yesterday".
A while back I read an article (I don't remember where) which explained that the comets in the highest eccentric orbits are only moving a couple of meters per second at the apogee. The tiniest perturbations at this point, including gravitational pulls from nearby stars, drastically affects the actual path the comet will take the next time it swoops through the solar system. (The disturbances get proportionally amplified as the comet accelerates from a few m/s to 30000 m/s or so.) The net effect is that these comets seem to follow a random unpredictable path on each orbit.
Of course, this doesn't really matter that much because we can't detect the comets at that distance, and the orbits are longer than a human lifetime. I just think it's interesting how our planet's long term fate may depend on the tiniest forces tugging on some comet.
Actually sensational journalists are right. Look, do you think that a train derailing and killing a hundred people should be reported? OK, I thought so. Asteroid marked 1 on Torino scale has a 1 in a million chance to collide with Earth and to destroy a continent, killing 2 billion people in the process. The expected value of damage to the humankind is thus a couple billion dollars and 2 thousand people. Do you still think this should not be reported? Do you still think this is not dangerous and scary?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.