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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.
Asteroid? Not worried. Vaguely worried. Sorta worried. Kinda worried. Somewhat worried. Fairly worried. Worried. FEAR FEAR FEAR
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Most people didn't read about the discovery of those bipedal sapient weasels in Burma because of all the ruckus over Bob Hope dying.
This is old news. We discovered lawyers a long time ago.