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Astronaut: 'Single-Planet Species Don't Last'
An anonymous reader writes "Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle astronaut John Young, due to retire in two weeks, says that the human species is in danger of becoming extinct: 'The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.' He says that the technologies needed to colonize the solar system will help people survive through disasters on Earth. Young has written about this topic before in an essay called 'The Big Picture'." In related news, the Shuttle overhaul program is on track for a May 2005 launch.
What other higher order specie that has multi planet colonization did he do his evaluation against? What was the success rate of the multi planet effort - would it have been better to spend those resources maintaining quality on one planet?
So he writes about volcanic activity, planetoid impacts and solar disasters. What if we spent all our resources on keeping the planet safe? We could drill out pressure of volcanoes and build super bombs for planetoids. If our sun goes all bets are off though we need to find another solar system but I bet we could figure out something in 4.5 billion years.
But all in all he is correct I am just point out a con; however, I don't think that ~5 billion people could be wiped out by any single event that left the planet habitable afterwards.
Yes. Manned missions are risky and expensive. Unmanned and remotely controlled probes are just fine and dandy and they yield plenty of useful information about the conditions in space and on other planets, but what's that information good for if we're never going to leave our planet and/or when we're going to get hit by an extinction level event?
As a species we have definitely become too concerned about safety in exploration. Can't shoot people up to space because they might get killed? Well, duh? What if the explorers like Magellan or Vasco da Game had thought about it like that?
The saddest comment I once got was: "we'll never be able to colonize other planets because the conditions are so fundamentally hostile, so let's not waste any funds/effort on manned space flights." What the hell happened to the human will to explore and survive? What's the point in sending out probes if the information gained will certainly be lost in the (near) future when the big one hits the earth?
The owls are not what they seem
Just cause some retired guy in an interview says it, doesn't make it true.
So there's a 1 in 4550 chance of me dying in an airline crash? That figure sounds suspiciously high.
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455
Dare I ask how that number was dervied? It seems awfully arbitrary, and full of doom-and-gloom.
From the article: It's not the point that we should move (to another planet). It's the point that the technologies that we need to live and work in other places in the solar system will help us survive on Earth when these bad things happen.
/. article is misleading...
Hello - the title of this
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years [...] is 1 in 455. You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash
Let's see.. this would put the odds of getting wiped out in a commercial airline crash at 1 in 4550 -- meaning, if this were true, that there would be dozens of commerical airline crashes every day. Three per week out of O'Hare alone.
That alone makes me call BS on this whole article.
The
It would be nice if the meek inherited the Earth; seeing as the stupid have it at the moment.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Wouldn't this have been the same chance of being wiped out "in the next 100 years" for the past (how long have humans been on the planet?) Call me skeptical, but either that statistic is wrong or it's pulled out of...
Nevermind, the point is if the chances are 1 in 455, that means that roughly every 455 years a civilization-ending event must be occuring. I don't see that, do you?
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
While I agree with the overall idea (we need to get stable off-planet colonies ASAP), we need more than just the moon or Mars.
Most of the possible "civilization-ending" events will actually leave quite a few humans alive, certainly enough to reestablish civilization over a few centuries. The "really big" problems involve our primary, the Sun. If that stops behaving in a very calm, consistant manner, we all die, no recovery possible.
At the very least, we need a colony beyond the asteroid belt. Sadly, no large rocky planets exist out there (though perhaps one of Jupiter's big-4 moons would suffice). Better yet, a truly extrasolar colony, but that would require information we don't quite have yet (such as a likely Earth-like planet around another star).
Tell that to the cockroaches...
Of course in this case it's all kind of irrelevant anyway because, as many posters have already commented, the guy seems to have pulled the statistic directly from his ass.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I find it slightly interesting that the majority /. response here appears to be cynicism, even ignoring the spurious statistic and the misleading headline.
/.ers, the cutting edge of geekery, people weaned on Asimov and Star Trek, have such a cynical response..
Surely it is simply good sense that species resident on multiple planets, and particularly in multiple solar systems throughout the galaxy, and indeed the universe, are more likely to survive?
Don't put all your eggs in one basket and all that - multiple planets in one system means the species has a better chance of surving a planet level extinction event, multiple solar systems means the species survives past the end of one star, multiple galaxies...
And of course, that's ignoring the other benefits potentially offered. I just find it a bit unexpected that
fortune -o
...as you might think.
I'm not sure where your stats came from, but world-wide there were WAAAY more than 83 fatalities in 2000. There were even more fatalities than that in 1945 when commercial airline service was in its infancy and passenger volumes were vrey low (no jumbo jets).
The link I supplied only counts commercial, multi-engine airliner accidents. There are likely many more airplane fatalities then that--military, spacecraft and non-commercial or crew-only flights (trainers, cargo flights, bush pilots, crop dusters, leisure/personal aircraft etc). Add those in world-wide and a worldwide annual death rate over 10,000 is possible, which would make a 1:4500 probablility over 100 years a reasonable statistic.
The chance you'll die on any particular flight is still very remote--almost down to 1 in a half-million.
I still don't know how one could say the chances of a catastrophic armageddon-type event is 10 times more likely than that however, given there's never been such an event in recorded history--ice ages only occur once in several millenia for example. One can surmise about things (terrorists setting off nukes creating nuclear winter, or an asteroid scientists did not see coming) but there is no hard data to analyse (how many organisms were wiped out in the last ice age...when the dinosaurs disappeared, etc? We have no way of knowing for sure).
Even if somebody else has already remarked it: What is the evidence from which we could conclude that "Single planet species don't last?" Obviously there were many species that have died out; equally obviously, there were many species that have not died out, namely those species that are with us today. Some of them have been around pretty long - think of some types of insects. If more species may have died out than are with us today, then we can just hypothesize that "Many single planet species don't last." We could belong to the more lucky group. The fact that no species has been around all the time bears no significance here.
and what is he basing those odds off of?
unless there has been some significant new discovery about the cosmos that i am unaware of, the odds for the occurance of some cataclysmic event severr enough to wipe out all human life should be about the same for the next 100 years as for the last hundred years, and the hundred before that.... if there is a 1 in 455 chance of it happening in the next 100 years, then that should mean that there is a 1 in 45,500 chance of such an event happening in any given year.
given the fact that the human race has been around for ~2 million years so far, i think his odds are a little off. otherwise we should have been wiped out around 20 times already.
and this ignores the fact that the odds are most likely going down over time, as the level of event that would be required to wipe out the human race gets rarer and rarer the more we advance. an event that could have wiped out all of human life 2000 years ago wouldn't be nearly enough to do the job now...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
... are also safety engineers, database developers, holders of advanced degrees, and other sorts of /. denizens. You might want to beware of generalizing.
Sean