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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.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
At some point in the future, Earth will get hit by a global-killer! That's statistically probable, too! (given infinite time... well, ok... maybe we don't have INFINITE time, but... close enough for government work).
;)
Oops! Shouldn't have posted this... now the National Inquirer will have fodder to run with this overly-used story for another 10 years.
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. 8/
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
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!
Reporters: The Sky is Falling, The Sky is Falling!
Scientists: STFU!
Reporters: Aw, damn.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
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.
Asteroid? Not worried. Vaguely worried. Sorta worried. Kinda worried. Somewhat worried. Fairly worried. Worried. FEAR FEAR FEAR
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.
Don't believe them!! They're trying to... hey, get out of my room!, AARRRRGHHGHH.....
[NO CARRIER]
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.
Please stop paying attention to us! We don't need funding or publicity! Give our money to the effort to stamp out terrorist bad breath!
This sounds suspisciously like an Onion article in the making...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Space.com had a nice piece about this too.
karma capped
Oh wait, they are all dead, I forgot.
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
Multiply probability of impact by consequences of collision and you get a meaningful weighed probability of disaster.
Low probability * Low damage = Low danger
High probability * Low damage = Medium Danger
Low probability * High damage = Medium Danger
High probability * High damage = High Danger
Seems reasonable to me
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
10. Fox News: "TERROR FROM ABOVE!"
9. CNN: "We now go to our Washington bureau for the latest on the Bush administration's responsibility for this catastrophy.
8. PBS: "If you send us $100, you'll get this nice Yanni videotape."
7. MSNBC: "In Scarborough country, asteroids are held accountable"
6. C-Span: "Tonight on Book Chat, the author of the "Meteor" tie-in novel weighs in."
5. CBS News with Dan Rather: "This meteor will sweep through the South like a tornado through a trailer park"
4. The View: "What do you think we should wear for this?"
3. Good Morning America: "Is your pet psychic? These and more stories after the asteroid report."
2. MTV News: "With this new asteroid in the sky, Meat Loaf has a few words to say about the fact that he is no longer the biggest `Rock Star' around"
1. James Carville on Crossfire: "Ken Starr is bringing this upon us! This asteroid will kill minorities and poor children!"
0. Springfield News: "This is Kent Brockman. I for one, welcome our...."
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.
All we have to do is put a little white triangle in space that we can control on the ground using a conputer. We can then just spin it around and around and fire little white dots of light to blast the asteroids into smaller and smaller pieces...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
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 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.
... be VERY afraid.
. . . by the awful news about Jo Lo and Ben Affleck.
Or was it Johnny Cash and John Ritter?
Nothing to feel bad about. Most people didn't read about the discovery of those bipedal sapient weasels in Burma because of all the ruckus over Bob Hope dying.
Stefan
Ha! That was easy! Surprisingly you use the exact same password as I do! What are the odds?! Needless to say I changed it.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
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?
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
I've been following the Current Impact Risks page ever since I found out about it over a year ago.
In order to report on this issue responsibly, all that's required is to ignore any object on the list until the NEO survey folks has collected observations over a span of 20 days or more. Before that, the orbits are too unclear to be worth reporting upon. Practically all objects fall of the list before the obeservations span 20 days.
Sadly, some reporters want to get the story out first, so they jump the gun.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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?)
Astronomers Upset About Asteroid. Panic!
I don't think it misrepresents anything. Each value is associated with both a specific kinetic energy and a specific probability. The Torino value not just the result of multiplying the two numbers (which would introduce the orthogonal vectors issue you mentioned) but rather a unique area on the plane defined by those two 'vectors'.
~Idarubicin
"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.)
The BSD syslog Protocol already has a scale that can be adapated with a little tweaking. And then we can have notification relayed to a plethora of Syslog consoles that can take appropriate action (backup, shutdown, pager, send T101 back in time to stop it, etc). So we have:
which with a little tweaking becomesThe only downside I see is that it is the BSD syslog protocol, and I understand that BSD is dead...
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
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