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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.
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.
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.
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...
Until we have some way to cope with a real threat, it should be beaten into the general public that big stuff falls out of the sky and does very bad things to most of the living creatures on earth.
America has great infastructure thanks to scaremongering of the cold war. There are parallel pipelines through most of the country, there are very good roads in places that could never justify the cost of an Interstate highway. The highways are there only because of the threat of the evil commies back years ago and the pipelines are a result of parinoia of Japanese spys from WW2. If the congress gets confused enough about the issue there might be some money to fund it but right now I'm guessing over 75% of congress thinks that "God will not let this happen to us".
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?)
"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.)