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What To Do About an Asteroid That Has a 1 In 625 Chance of Hitting Us In 2040?
The Bad Astronomer writes "The asteroid 2011 AG5 is 140 meters across: football-stadium-sized. Its orbit isn't nailed down well enough to say yet, but using what's currently known, there's a 1 in 625 chance it will impact the Earth in 2040. It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something close to 0. But does it make sense to wait until then to start investigating a mission to deflect it away our planet? Astronomers are debating this right now, and what they conclude may pave the way for how we deal with an asteroid threat in the future."
Praying it hits. That would be so awesome!
Just threaten to sue it out of existance.
There is a 1 in 625 chance that I will be taking a long holiday and be unavailable for comment in 2040...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's far too distant to deal with now. Let's re-evaluate the situation when it's a couple years out, and hope Bruce Willis hasn't retired if our odds haven't improved.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
If it hits, it wipes out the major cause of habitat destruction, global warming and talk radio. If it misses, the sales of tinfoil hats and doomsday billboards will restore the global economy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We should definitely consider putting Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Aerosmith into cryo right now. Without them, we won't have a chance.
Isn't that around when social security is slated to go bankrupt? I say we deflect the asteroid towards the planet! I'll be 70 around that time.
Decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/republicans-vote-to-repeal-obamabacked-bill-that-w,19025/
Yes it makes sense to wait. Why waste 18 months coming up with solutions to deflect it only to find out it won't strike 27 years from now? If September 2013 rolls around and it looks like it will hit in 2040, 27 years is practically as much time as 28 years to develop a solution.
Oh never mind that won't do anything.
I always liked the plans that involved speeding the asteroid up, or slowing it down just slightly.
I saw a recent idea that involved painting it white in order to decrease absorptivity.
I'll be 78 .... everything must end one day.
Plan a party. Get wasted, and get laid.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Given the size you would want to put a tracking and probe package on it and use it as a platform for further exploration and of course track it's ultimate course the next time around.
If we weren't so hopelessly political and ignorant as a species we might have been prepared to slow it to an Earthly orbit and make use of it as a habitat or some other purpose, as it is just drop the package on it and use it for furthering science.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
or who even is under him
Wherever it hits, those are the people that God hates most. End of debate.
Am I the only one that gets terribly frustrated by statements like "the asteroid has a 1 in X chance to hit earth"?
There's no probability here - the asteroid either will or will not hit. Why can't they say just say this is the measure of uncertainty in the curve fit rather than a "chance to hit"?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
It's another year before we can get data, it'll be another 27 years before it'll hit if it does. Don't you think it'd be better to wait a year, see what the odds are. If they start coming closer to hitting us in a decade etc, then we should looking into it. At this point in time, it'd be a complete waste of time. Even if we waited 20 years before knowing it's going to hit us, our level of tech will be much greater then, then it is now and it'll basically obsolete any work we do on it before then - making it a waste of time and resources, isn't there better things we can be doing with our science dollars?
I'll take those odds. I bet my life savings we survive.
Ignore it.
Look I agree, only 1 in 625?! That hardly seems like a threat at all. Anyway, gotta run, I'm off to by a lottery ticket.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I have not done the calculations but I think deflecting a big asteroid is difficult considering energies required to change its trajectory. Hell, it takes a lot to simply move a spacecraft from one orbital plane to another. I know it's all great in the movies (and references to Bruce Willis) but almost all who have an opinion of asteroid deflection don't seem to be knowledgable of astrodynamics (Fundamentals of Astrodynamics (Bate, Mueller, White), http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Astrodynamics-Dover-Aeronautical-Engineering/dp/0486600610/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331078557&sr=8-1
mfwright@batnet.com
No, if anything Hollywood has taught me is that every second counts. If we have to deflect that asteroid, the big red LED counter will by ticking away and the heroes that will be deflecting will be cursing that they really could have used that extra 18 months! And what will happen is that some poor bastard will have to sacrifice his life in order to save his family and the LED countdown timer will be down to '2' seconds instead of 18 months AND 2 seconds!
And let the solar wind push it out. You only need to alter its orbit by 5 minutes in the next 22 years to miss completely.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
"The asteroid 2011 AG5 is 140 meters across: football-stadium-sized. Its orbit isn't nailed down well enough to say yet, but using what's currently known, there's a 1 in 625 chance it will impact the Earth in 2040. It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something close to 0. "
Let me guess...the odds of that happening are approximately 624/625?
Whoa! I had a dream about something like this last night. In my dream, a meteor/asteroid hit the water and caused a flood and I thought I was going to die. However, I survived and the water receded. Due to the flood, all electrical/electronic stuff basically died and people basically had to survive without technology.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
The bookies have a different opinion, i think there is already an open bet with very good odds at bwin.
I got this.
*shakes fist at sky*
Do statements like "The coin has a 1 in 2 chance of coming up heads" also bother you?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Build a spaceship and put in all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, advertising account executives, MPAA executives, RIAA executives, and politicians and send them into space.
Fight Spammers!
The Mayans didn't factor in the leap year, so by their calculations the world should have ended months ago.
Who knows?
Maybe that big knock at 2040 will wake me up and I then can crawl out of my (future) coffin
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds" ... Either: you are speculating, and future observations MAY reduce the odds; or you have some data that isn't in the current calculation, and the odds won't probably be reduced in the future, they ARE reduced NOW.
. . . .run it for President !! Sweet Meteor of Death in 2040 !!
After all, it couldn't be WORSE than a politician. . . . .
"the asteroid either will or will not hit"
It's like saying the chance to roll a 1 on a d6 is 50/50 it will or it won't; which is fail.
And the uncertainty are in the asteroids orbit. The more you remove those, the better you can define the probability.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At this point just over 25 years out, if the odds go up next year, then just send a spacecraft to splatter a few gallons of white paint on it and let the solar wind reflection push it an extra fraction of a percent and move it however many thousands/millions of miles in the next quarter century.
You're shitting my pants!
The Mayan calendar was more accurate... 365.2420 days, vs. Gregorians 365.2425, when the actual value was 365.2422.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Let's make a commission to study the possibilities and then claim there's no consensus.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Is there any reason why NASA can't start working out a 'asteroid impact playbook' right now instead of scrambling to make one when the big one does come, even if it's not this one? I fail to see how that would be a worse use of taxpayer dollars than, say, the shuttle program was.
The right question is: Who launched it at us?
As a non-astronomer, can somebody explain to me roughly what we're talking about with a 140m asteroid?
I'm assuming (I could be way off) that a 1m "beach ball" asteroid probably just breaks up and burns in the atmosphere, with little appreciable hitting the ground/ocean.
How about a "car" sized asteroid? Does it burn up? Possibly take out a house? City Block?
How big do asteroids have to be before they could take out a whole city? How about to create a Tsunami (since they are most likely hitting ocean anyhow). How big to impact yearly weather patterns and destroy crops?
I know the Chicxulub one is supposed to have been 10km, so that's "extinct most species" territory -- What does 140m mean in comparison?
After all, Putin is back! He'll certainly deal with it - shoot it, wrestle it, somehow force it to submit to his iron will.
#DeleteChrome
"You know life is like a train. It's bearing down on you, and guess what? It's gonna hit you! So you can either start running when it's far off in the distance, or you can pull up a chair, crack open a beer, and just watch it come! "
But if you're smart, you stop, turn to the side, and walk away from the tracks until you are a safe distance.
We drill. We send in the worlds best deep core driller.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
What we need is to construct a collection of arcs to rescue important parts of the population.
The A Arc would be used to protect the president and a few important government officials. The B Arc would rescue essential civilian leaders and members of the .0001%.. The C Arcs when finally constructed, would rescue the rest of us.
It can be done.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Based on what we know about the asteroid, specifically the fact that it's 140m in size, we're not looking at the end of the world here. The impact crater will be about 2-3 km in size and major effects felt up to about 100-200 miles away. This is not an armageddon situation and even at the worst case that it's made of something really dense, it's not going to cause global damage. We won't have a chunk of the planet missing and the axis won't change. Once we know what the deal is we should have more than enough information that even if we miss our target, there will be plenty of time to evacuate whatever town is going to get flattened.
Large asteroids - far larger than this one! - have hit the Earth before, and it WILL happen again. Probably not in 2029, or in 2037, and probably not in 2040 - but why wait? Preparing now - or at least, starting to THINK about preparing now - will pay major dividends in the long run.
With any luck, by 2040 we'll be able to capture it into one of the lunar Trojan points, and that'll save money in the long run from paying to lift mass from the Earth or the Moon to build that habitat.
There's no probability here - the asteroid either will or will not hit. Why can't they say just say this is the measure of uncertainty in the curve fit rather than a "chance to hit"?
Actually.... quantum characteristics do effect the motion of objects relatively low in mass (like asteroids) over sufficient time and space.
But there are other probalistic things that will effect the path of an asteroid as well, such as the motion of other unobserved bodies, actions of humans and other high-entropy phenomena which do not have a deterministic defined outcome; it's an intractible problem, so the outcome is really not a binary thing; there really is a certain probability of a collision.
How precisely we can know what that probability actually is, is another matter altogether. The fact that 1 in 625 is what has been indicated so far, does not mean 1 in 625 is as precise a number as possible for that probability. Methodological improvements in the future will likely improve the accuracy of the prediction of the probability of a collision
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
Sentry Risk Table
The following table lists potential future Earth impact events that the JPL Sentry System has detected based on currently available observations. Click on the object designation to go to a page with full details on that object.
Sentry is a highly automated collision monitoring system that continually scans the most current asteroid catalog for possibilities of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years. Whenever a potential impact is detected it will be analyzed and the results immediately published here, except in unusual cases where an IAU Technical Review is underway.
Do statements like "The coin has a 1 in 2 chance of coming up heads" also bother you?
The coin has a 50% chance of coming up heads, unless a butterfly flaps her wings at the behest of an EMACS programmer with the right shortcut key.
by then i will be 81 years old if i am still alive so it wont make any difference to me, maybe my children or grandchildren will be concerned about it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No, because a (proverbial) coin flip is a probabilistic event.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Make it run for GOP nomination. That has a good record at making people go away.
Table-ized A.I.
Someone had to post it: http://xkcd.com/618/
2023 is the year that the asteroid will either pass through the "keyhole" and be bent into an orbit that will strike the earth, or it won't and we're safe for the foreseeable future.
Deflecting the asteroid so that it misses the keyhole (~300km) is much easier than deflecting it so that it misses the earth (~13000km).
In that timeframe, 18 months can matter.
Also, the time spent developing solutions is anything but a waste. We never know when we'll discover an asteroid that's on a collision course with earth on a much smaller time frame than 28 years. Eventually we will need this capability. I don't see any effort spent getting ready now as a waste.
On the other hand I'm not arguing too hard that we need to start working now. Odds are very good that in 2013 we'll look closer and realize that there's 0 chance of it passing through the keyhole.
Still, we need to take the problem of asteroid impact seriously. It is only a matter of time before it kills us all if we aren't prepared.
The enemies of Democracy are
Just ask the dinosaurs how they handled the last......never mind.
Table-ized A.I.
Does it run Linux?
Table-ized A.I.
What's your address? I have a really cool gift for you. Delivery is a bit slow, though, arriving in 2040.
Table-ized A.I.
Asteroid 2012 DA14
Size: 60-meters
Arrives in February 2013
How close? 27,000 km (16,700 miles)
That's a little too close for comfort!
Man those guys were smart. Too bad no one living today is that smart. I bet anything they wrote down must be more true than anything modern people write down. Too bad they didn't actually write down when the earth was going to end and it is only stupid modern people who misinterpret those smart Mayan overlords.
A coin flip is exactly as probabilistic an event as this possible impact.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Even if this asteroid hits, it is not likely to hit a populated area. The money spent on trying to deflect it would likely save more lives on average if spent on medicine, water purification, food distribution, or some such thing.
The only real reason to try to deflect this asteroid is to practice for a larger one, but techniques that work on small asteroids like this one won't necessarily work on large ones.
If the calculated target is the North Atlantic Ocean, it'll be cheaper to deflect it than to reconstruct the Tsunami damaged New England coastal areas.
Close enough and big enough to make some finer measurements.
Then we can decide whether we need to do anything. Chances are pretty remote that it needs action and we have a few years to decide what.
I suggest possibly covering as well.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Sadly, no, you aren't.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Summary states:
It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something close to 0
I don't understand how the probability of a hit can be 1 in 625 now, if it is probable that the odds will be reduced to close to 0 in 18 months or so.
The only way I can reconcile this is if we say that 1/625 is close to zero, but then why the article?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
90% of Asteroids are "hidden" and we have only started to become more sophisticated and active in trying to detect them. We do not know where these 100 meter asteroid's orbits are in relation to Earth.
We know that some asteroids which travel such that the Sun obscures them most of the time (rocky ones with no "comet tails"), are EXTREMELY hard to detect.
Given that we have a Tunguska size (100 meter) impact about once per century, I would give a 1 in 4 chance of an impact or aerial explosion inside of 2040. It is all statistics with a fairly high degree of certainty. Am I an astrophysicist? No, but as an engineer, I read what they write and it is pretty well settled on the information with which to judge chances of an impact of something "sizable",
But does it make sense to wait until then to start investigating a mission to deflect it away our planet?
Well lets see, a potential catastrophe is 28 years away and there is 1/625 odds based on the data we do have that it will happen. We will know evidently with much better certainty what that odds are when its a mere 26-27 years away. Given we are talking about altering the path of a massive object in space, I say wait.
If we can't solve the problem in 26 years we mostly likely could not solve it in 28. The odds are already quite low, the cost to do anything about it quite high. If the numbers change after we can see and measure it better thats different. If we had to wait until it was much closer to get the better data that would be different. I don't see any advantage in getting a 12-24 month jump on this, given the time scales, and the complexity of solutions to the problem and risk.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Get out of momma's basement and GET LAID! Make damned sure your partner (a) has reproductive organs and (b) actually gets pregnant. With any luck your progeny will be a teen genius who invents and builds cheap DIY backyard space transport and shares the plans on Instructables before The Big Day arrives....
African immigrants in the US? Yeah, I actually would ask them:
African immigrants to the U.S. are among the most educated groups in the United States. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is more than double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans.
Dilbert RSS feed
1 in 625 chance it takes out Congress. And Ellen DeGeneres. And Larry Ellison. So worth it.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Writers who think of that option usually put the characters and track inside a tunnel or onto a long, narrow bridge (but don't let the characters hang off the side or whatever).
No, it's because we know that the uncertainty will go way down in 2023 when it does or does not "pass through the keyhole". If there's a 1 in 625 chance that it passes through the keyhole, then there's a 624 in 625 chance that observations after that will reduce the odds to essentially zero. If it does pass through the keyhole, then the odds go to nearly 1. So the overall distribution hasn't changed, but we'll have a much better idea which part of it we'll be sampling.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Seriously, we end up with some in our orbit that are 10 meters. Why not work on moving it into a stable orbit, or out of orbit? We have some nice small asteroids that are ideal to practice on. Lets start using them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"I don't know what their doing on your end of the line but over here their putting their money in canned goods and shotguns."
I "get" why astronomers are best suited to tell us the likelihood that we would be hit.
I don't "get" why astronomers are best suited to decide what to do in the event it is determined that we would be hit.
I'm not sure who would be best suited for such a task....
-CF
I would suggest attempting to knock it down so that when a serious threat comes along we already have some experience.
Whatever we do, don't let Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser find out about this, or they'll be making another over-financed, poorly-written, badly-acted, scientifically-laughable movie about it. Oh, phew, Michael Bay already beat them to it.
You can always turn a deterministic problem into a probabilistic one if enough variables are hidden. But this doesn't mean that the underlying mechanics of the situation are necessarily probabilistic.
The gasoline example you gave above is inherently probabilistic, because you do expect that, given the same perceived initial conditions many times, the outcomes would vary each time the "experiment" is carried out.
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers. No matter how many times you measure a fair die roll, the probabilities will always come up the same.
More measurements won't help you with a coin toss, quantum mechanics, or your gasoline example, because it's not possible to gain enough measurements (or in QM's case, there is strong evidence that no such parameters even exist to measure in the first place).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Remembering it has a 624/625 chance of NOT hitting us?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
NASA should build it powerful space tug (or really learn a LOT about using nuclear explosions to nudge large objects) and place it into geo-sync orbit.
Then sell it to that Japanese construction company that wants to build a space elevator by 2050! It'll be right on schedule to be used as raw material or as a counterweight. (Well, hopefully it's a carbonaceous asteroid that can be made into carbon nanotubes/diamond fiber).
Probability is never inappropriate! And, one chance in 625 is not a small chance really, it's a little MORE likely than selecting a black ace twice in a row from a deck of cards. Easily doable!
This time, it's for real!
That "housing prices always go up" advice worked out just peachy, huh?
85 year old Dirty Harry tells some tough kids in his neighborhood to get off his lawn.
Well said! +1 Insightful and +1 Informative.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The obligatory joke about Unix time rolling over before this happens goes here.
Kriston
Pfft, if they're so smart then where the hell are they now?
The appropriately named submitted writes:
"The asteroid 2011 AG5 is 140 meters across: Nearly three hundred breadboxes long and able to contain an entire Library of Congress within. Its orbit isn't nailed down well enough to say anything useful yet, but using our completely incomplete data set, we conclude there's a close-to-zero chance it will impact the Earth in 2040. It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something closer to 0. (Or perhaps farther away from 0. The chance of the odds of impact being recalculated to something else are close to one-in-one.) But does it make sense to wait until then to start figuring out ways to use this non-event to beg for government funding for our solution-in-search-of-a-problem project? Astronomers are debating how to write alarmist grant proposals for this non-crisis right now, and what they conclude may pave the way for yet another increase in NASA funding that will be quickly cut by the next administration and thereby completely wasted."
Liberty in your lifetime
Hiding in their space ship.
I will be nearing retirement, for fucks sake if it hits ... and the first 30 some odd years are any indication, it will be one glorious final joke on me from god
"there's a 1 in 625 chance it will impact the Earth in 2040, though there's only a 10 percent chance of that"
What does this statistic even mean if its "expected to be reduced to 0"?
to do something about this. Check out the B612 foundation, or watch Ed Lu's TED talk at TEDxNASA
I hate to think where a well-intentioned mission will direct the asteroid in 624/625 cases that it's not already headed there.
It depends on whether you view probability as frequentistic or Bayesian. Your worldview is frequentistic, but a lot of the way we talk about probabilities on makes sense in a Bayesian worldview. Sibling posts have given plenty of examples.
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers.
In the frequentistic worldview, yes. In the Bayesian worldview, they really are probabilities. One of the differences is that the frequentistic worldview is only able to handle probabilities for occurrences that can, at least in principle, be repeated many times. For one-off occurrences, whether they are dice rolls or meteor strikes, they either happen or they don't, so they have probability 1 or 0. The Bayesian worldview is perfectly capable of handling probabilities for one-off occurrences, as it is more focused on what you would expect, given the information at hand. Both are valid worldviews, and both contain valid definitions of "probability", but they do not mix, so if both are used in the same discussion, the discussion goes nowhere, as both parties wonder why the other just don't get it.
The Mayan calendar was more accurate... 365.2420 days, vs. Gregorians 365.2425, when the actual value was 365.2422.
Ugh. Every time I see garbage like this modded insightful, I loose a little more hope for my fellow slashdotters. Goddammit people, when you read something and think "huh, I didn't know that!", your first reaction should be to look it up, NOT to hit the "mod insightful" button!
Here's a link to a book that talks about where that claim originated, and why it's wrong. Link should take you to the relevant page, but, just in case, it's "Early Astronomy" by Hugh Thurston, page 202/203.
For those too lazy to read it, here's the tl;dr version: the Mayan calendar is 365 days. It has no leap days or leap years. While there's evidence that the Mayans knew that the solar year was longer than 365 days, their calendar doesn't reflect that knowledge. The original claim was made by a guy who died in 1931, and he got his conclusion by making some silly mathematical mistakes.
A coin flip is exactly as probabilistic an event as this possible impact.
Erm, nope. A coin flip is an exact statement about the probability of a random event, the chance of an asteroid impact represents our ignorance of the true state. One is frequentist probability, the other is a Bayesian posterior probability.
No worries about IP: 30 years to wait and no more P \o/
I heard there are a few guys who were experts with BP that are still looking for jobs...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(Modding your post as troll is somewhat harsh.)
But what's the over/under?
Nothing (at least nothing I know) beats the Iranian calender in accuracy. But then again, it might be a tad bit space consuming to implement a calender with a 2.8 millennia cycle in a computer. Still, an error of one day in 3.8 million years (or 0.022 seconds a year) is quite impressive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
More measurements won't help you with a coin toss
Of course they will. The effects of quantum mechanics on something as large as a coin are insignificant.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
They already know at this point what 1/2 of the earth it could hit. I do not know at the moment but I am sure the calculations have been done. As time goes on and more observations are made, if it is to hit we will narrow it down to perhaps a few hundred miles.
if it is pointed at Europe or eastern China or many other places we would move it.
Imagine it is pointed to somewhere in the North Atlantic. If you move it so it misses the earth you are happy. However if your attempt is only partially successful you could shove it into a populated area. Think of moving a laser pointer spot on the globe to the side so it no longer points at the earth. You are not allow to turn it off. I think most places on the planet where it could hit might require making things worse before the object is pushed far enough to miss us entirely,
The chances of a failure leading to a worse situation are quite slim, but with politics involved....Imagine if a congressman from Florida will attempt to stop any funding which would push that path over his state.
Depends on how what you mean by easily doable.
It's true that if you draw cards many times from a deck then it is not unlikely you will at some point draw two black aces in a raw. However, if you (and only you) carried out this experiment just once in your lifetime it would indeed be quite unlikely -- but of course, not impossible.
So then we're back to what probabilities really means to us humans. The odds of a hit of this asteroid may only be 1 in 625. Intuitively, that's a low risk but probably somewhat higher than what our "comfort zone" dictates. But does it really make sense to use probabilities? After all, it either hits or it doesn't. If it does, we have no way to recoup the loss since we will all be gone (I'm now assuming a worst case scenario). So it's not the same as gambling or making bets on the financial markets, since there you do have the possibility of recouping losses on future bets.
It's the same dilemma faced for people with serious illness where they may be given a prognosis, say 50%. What can they use it for? To them, all that matter is that they are going to be in the right 50%.
It just depends on what you interpret probability as meaning. Yes, you're right, the problem is deterministic, just unquantifed. Another way of interpreting it: what would you pay as a fair bet to receive $100 if it hits?
[FUCK BETA]
But isn't the difference you describe between frequentistic (sic) and Bayesian the difference between an event truly governed by probability versus one of confidence in a prediction, respectively?
Ultimately, I think my original post failed to convey that my frustration is in what I see as confusion between the concepts of probability of an event occurring and confidence bands in a prediction.
To be specific: you can't have better than 50% confidence in a prediction on a single coin flip because coin flips are random. Asteroid paths are not random, however, so the confidence in a prediction really could reach 100% (maybe not in a mathematical sense, but in a practical do-I-need-to-get-an-escape-plan sense). This is perhaps a better statement of what I meant by "it will hit or it will not."
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
"My advice to you, is to start drinking heavily"
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Just secure a robotic excavator (or two) to the asteroid and cut it to pieces. Provided that you "throw" the chunks with some slight velocity in regards to the main body, you should end with a harmless and widely dispersed debris cloud in a few years. Problem solved. :)
A 10% vig will cover the stockpiling of books and party materials: single malt scotch, caviar, oysters, fireworks. Newt, you bring the naughty girls. Gladiator fighting for the women. Fidel you're bringing cigars, Party runs until world ends. Anyone leaving early concedes their bet. No guns, knives, poison or explosives. Bets paid after the end of world must paid be in gold or diamonds,
I know it became unpopular to follow links, but this one would have told you that there is actually a mathematical model for it, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A coin flip is exactly as probabilistic an event as this possible impact.
Erm, nope. A coin flip is an exact statement about the probability of a random event, the chance of an asteroid impact represents our ignorance of the true state. One is frequentist probability, the other is a Bayesian posterior probability.
If you could account for and control every variable in a coin flip, such as upward force, spin rate, air temperature, humidity, air drag, landing surface, and the duration of flight, you could predict how a coin would end up because it would be the same every time.
A coin flip is perceived as random because the number of variables that go in to it is too complex and there values too hard to define in advance.
I view the "1 in 625 chance" as the odds that there is something out there that will happen to alter the course to cause collision with Earth. Of course, that's also why the article says it's so hard to predict their orbits more than a couple years in advance; there's a ton of stuff we don't know about.
Capture the sucker, and bring it into orbit. Then we can use it for a *real* space station, and waypoint for outbound ships....
mark
Professor Bernard Quatermass: The will to survive is an odd phenomenon. Roney, if we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?
Dr. Mathew Roney: Nothing, just go on squabbling like usual.
I'm stunned Hollywood hasn't already sued God for this clear violation of their "Armagedon" IP.
Whoa.... is... is it Mayan photon torpedoes that end the world next December? It all makes sense now.
The time to change this thing's movement is 2023. The time to start planning the mission is 2018. You don't need anything all that complicated, an 55 gallon drum full of shiny aluminum paint ought to be enough to fix the problem. Either that, or black paint. It would take a lander and a super-low-velocity sprayer.
They bother ME. As there is a possibility, however small, that it lands on it's edge.
I got all the way down to the bottom of the page and no sign of "Capture it and Study it"