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Asteroid Risk Greatly Overestimated By Almost Everyone
StartsWithABang writes: When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes, when we're far more likely to die from something mundane, like getting hit by a truck. One of the examples where science and this type of fear-based fallacy intersect is the science of asteroid strikes. With all we know about asteroids today, here's the actual risk to humanity, and it's much lower than anyone cares to admit.
I disagree with the premise of the article. I don't think most people are even remotely concerned about an asteroid strike.
How exactly does one evaluate the overall risk when that very-low-probability is multiplied by global extinction?
I'd also argue that's why so many people fear riding motorcycles.
If you remove the non-helmet/minimal safety gear and drunk rider accidents the rates are significantly lower than presented.
That said, when I have a kid I'll take a hiatus(mostly) until they're out of diapers.
Yeah, sure... I, you, we, most of us, probably every one of us are going to never be dead by asteroid.
If one takes an egocentric approach to actuarial tables then asteroids are nothing to worry about, however if one takes a speciesist view on those same actuarial tables then suddenly one realizes that if 2000 years in the future humanity is wiped out because no one ever gave a fuck... Then that's super depressing, even if _I'm_ long dead by then.
That's why I play the lottery. My odds are better the more I play. /sarcasm.
So, that would be like hitting on Megan Fox, in otherwords. Can't really judge that one very accurately either, because I'd do it every time.
Sure, the chances of getting hit by an asteroid were probably over blown. That people panic about non-threats or believe they can win the lottery is not normal, and not because of the person as much as the hype other people put on these things.
Advertisement, people wanting power and your stuff, those are the big problems. The pressure to keep people in the cave has not changed since the allegory was first written.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
People fear exotic deaths.
Death by lethal injection or beheading, results are the same. One is much scarier than the other, why?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What makes you say that? Did you ask me? No? Then why are you presuming to answer for me.
I give not one rat's fuck about it, and spend no thought on it.
I skimmed TFA, and it seems a lot of it talks about why I shouldn't be afraid of dying to an asteroid strike.
I'm NOT. Never have been. My risk is so close to zero as to not even matter, so it would be purely irrational to fear that. But that's not the point! Every hundred of million years or so, an extinction class impact does happen. The risk to humanity as a whole over the short run is also very small, but over the long run, it becomes large.
Yes, there are other ways we can take ourselves out, some of which are much more likely, but many of those are in our own hands. By making smarter choices we can reduce those risks, and either we'll learn to do so, or get what we deserved. But asteroid impacts are an external risk, something that just comes along and smites us down. It seems worth devoting a minuscule amount of our species' resources to studying what to do about that. And minuscule effort is all we're doing.
The risk year over year is almost zero. The consequences are the ultimate ones for our species and every other large animal life form on the planet.
The article appears to only consider the risk of an individual dying, not the entire human race. The latter is much harder to recover from (we'd basically have to evolve all over again).
_I_ am very concerned about a steroid strike. Some dumb muscle bound dumbass bumps into me with his syringe and needle and injects me and BAM! I got a little dick! Roid Rage, zits, cancer, .. I mean really! We ALL should be worried about a steroid strike!
But people win them all the time. Do we really want to gamble we'll never "win" this particular lottery?
I think the author's point is that we should be exploring for positive reasons. Sure, that's a feelgood strategy to take... but I don't put smoke alarms in my house for positive reasons.
Call your bookie.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
- General Thoraxian
Bug planet overlord
Getting hit by a truck is something I can control a little by being careful crossing roads. Ebola gets a little harder but I could stay inside and avoid people to reduce my chances of getting it. However it is harder for me to avoid getting abola than it is to avoid getting hit by a truck which is probably why some may fear it more, they can't see it coming. This makes an asteroid the worst because we can't really do anything about it (as a individual) and there is a chance we may not see it coming.
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Don't forget to add in that an Asteroid can carry harmful toxins such as radiation and micro organic material. The article is fundamentally flawed in that it left out these other avenues of damage. It has been discussed before on ./ that the most effective means of destroying a planet is using its own gravity well.
Does anyone else care to attack speculations and suggest we stick our heads in the sand? Come at me bro!
As in Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. We know that the risk of an asteroid strike, but we don't know about all the potential asteroids that could hit us.
While the overall risk is low, we don't know what could possibly hit us.
mod up for good use of hectored
The article is stupid. Where to begin?
Averaging is not a good way to estimate things here. No one is concerned about a 100 people dying on average every year. Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. This is not akin to killing by (relatively) mundane causes like terrorism or a specific disease or automobile accidents.
It took 4 billion years to develop an intelligent civilization on a planet which is highly suitable to life. Which shows what the probability of intelligent civilizations is.
This is not a minor injury for a civilization. This is death. A few humans may survive, and even then it may take thousands of years to come back to the current state depending on how much of our knowledge survives in the ensuing chaos and starvation. The 1/70,000,000 chance of getting totally wiped out is a big enough for me to care a great deal about it.
My biggest fear regarding dying from an asteroid strike is not about the asteroid hitting me or the city I am in, but from unintended, extemporaneous consequences like someone in Russia or China panicking and launching a nuke at it, missing, and hitting France or the US or some other nuclear-capable nation and starting WWIII. Or an asteroid hit in Pakistan or India being intentionally/accidentally mistaken as a nuclear strike by its neighbor, and starting WWIII. Or an asteroid hitting a defunct Russian spy satellite, which was really a nuclear launch platform, and setting off the bombs, and starting WWIII. Or any asteroid strike anywhere being used as a convenient excuse by anyone to start WWIII.
So, in summary, the most worrisome unintended consequence of an asteroid strike is WWIII. Let's see the TFA's author gin-up some odds on that one.
Excessive hyperbole is silly, yes...
Each year that passes sees roughly a 0.0000005% chance of a species-threatening asteroid coming our way, while real threatsâS - âSenvironmental, medical and political (i.e., war)âS -âScould literally wipe us off the face of the Earth in the blink of an eye.
Global warming is a sloooooooooooooooooow process and even if you burned every bit of coal and oil you wouldn't make Canada into Sahara, it's hardly an extinction level event. A modern day pandemic could presumably kill millions, but it's hardly an existential threat to the human race. Same goes for total thermonuclear war, there's be a lot of direct deaths and many more indirects deads from nuclear winter and starvation but not enough to wipe us out.
Tsar Bomba (most powerful nuke): 50 MT
Chicxulub asteroid (dino killer): 100,000,000 MT
We're not even remotely in the same league. The odds are small that it happens tomorrow but in terms of "worst case" asteroids have everything us humans can come up with beat by far.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Risk management is not simply about the probability of an event occurring; it must also take into account how damaging the event would be. For example, events that are very likely to occur but have little consequences might be safely ignored. Events that are very unlikely to occur but have catastrophic consequences merit some effort to prevent.
You are about 4x more likely to be killed by a cow, per year, than you are to be killed in a mass shooting with an assault weapon in the U.S. But look at the mouth-frothing AW ban insanity after Newtown.
I'm much more concerned about things like society's inability to cope with resource loss and our exploding population, and things we know will happen like Yellowstone going up sometime in the next who knows and the next worldwide plague (see Spanish flu v2 with Fox News doomsday panic), than I have been by asteroids.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I can take action to mitigate being hit by a truck by looking both ways, not texting, crossing at the green. I can minimize my chances of dying on the roads by buying a large safe car, driving defensively, wearing my seatbelt, etc. If I am in an airplane in trouble, there is nothing I can do. If an asteroid in on its way, there is nothing I can do.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We are much more likely to experience catastrophic death counts and other horrors from Yellowstone erupting. In fact, it is guaranteed. It is just a matter of time, and Yellowstone is already overdue.
In theory, we would get a good decade or more advanced notice. But even so....nobody is scared of that, even though we know for a fact that it will happen, it will kill most of north America, and it will plunge the entire planet into a year-long winter. Guaranteed.
But...OMG ASTEROIDS!
Yes, mountain sized ones are uncommon. But...
"between 36 and 166 meteorites larger than 10 grams fall to Earth per million square kilometers per year. Over the whole surface area of Earth, that translates to 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites"
will be killed by the cars you idiots drive.
park it, learn to walk again, you thugs.
I skimmed TFA, and it seems a lot of it talks about why I shouldn't be afraid of dying to an asteroid strike.
I'm NOT. Never have been.
The article generalizes that we are all as stupid and the general population, which has a tremendously skewed risk perception, in part due to media that also doesn't understand risk and/or intentionally ignores it. Unfortunately that ignorance drives our policy makers as well.
Man-made climate change, which is 120 percent of all GHG emissions worldwide (yes, I said more than 100 percent), is an actual risk.
If humans die from a giant asteroid, nobody will notice we're gone.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Having a plan to deal with an asteroid/comet strike is more like having an emergency parachute. It's FAR better to have one and not need it, than need one and not have it.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
People aren't so much scared of what could happen as they are about inability to do anything about it.
Being careful around traffic makes getting hit by a big truck less likely. Diet and exercise are not panaceas but are mitigating factors for lots of medical conditions even if you're genetically or epigenetically predisposed to them. Modern medicine, although imperfect, gives us far greater control over both of those types of things even after the fact.
In a plane crash, unless you're the pilot or mechanic, there's not much you can do. In an asteroid strike, unless it's a smaller one we know is coming and can evacuate people, there's not much anyone can do. With a disease with a high infection rate, high mortality rate and no known effective treatment, such as Ebola until recently was, there's not much that can be done other than avoiding high-risk areas and quarantining people in those high-risk areas.
Regardless of the odds, people fear loss of control sometimes as much or more than the actual negative impacts. Some competitive team sports athletes have a more difficult time watching their team from the sidelines after an injury than they have emotional difficulty in their recovery.
It's very trendy to say "When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards" but I'm not so sure that's true?
These kind of talks seemingly always look at risk/reward calculations as symmetric, which they very abundantly aren't.
The fact is that people are extraordinarily conservative when it comes to the rare-risk, high-cost cases, but rather daring when it comes to rare-but-high-reward cases because, well, we're alive and we'd rather stay that way. A 0.000001% chance that you and everyone dies *should* be regarded far more seriously than a similar chance you win a big pile of cash because one of those situations you survive either way.
Nota Bene: I don't play the lottery; well, I did play it ONCE, recognizing that my odds of winning were the highest possible with that one play, and only decrease from there.
-Styopa
If you are not trolling then you are confusing dwelling on something you can't change with something we can change. The sarcasm and snark can only be justified if you were correct in your analogy but since it's bananas to orangutangs your statements are just being a prick.
To bring in AGW which is not any where near what I or TFA were discussing. Yet somehow you got modded insightful.. go figure
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
People fear exotic deaths.
Death by lethal injection or beheading, results are the same. One is much scarier than the other, why?
Well, presumably it's because you happen to know when you've murdered someone, you aren't going to be beheaded for it, but the risk of lethal injection is actually real?
I don't care how greatly exaggerated the risk. If it happens, it'll probably happen to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Asteroid Risk Greatly Overestimated By Almost Everyone
Number of people who overestimated asteroid risk greatly overestimated by headline.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Considering that we monitor only 20% of the night sky currently for inbound asteroids and objects, this calculation, if you can even call it that, has to allow for a margin of error of up to 80%!
Thats not science! Its GUESSING!
we'd basically have to evolve all over again
No problem. I'm up for the challenge. Bring it on.
When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes.
Playing the lottery is a daydream that anyone can indulge in for the expenditure of a few dollars --- an impulse buy and a month's entertainment for the price of two rentals from the Red Box.
On 9 November 2005 a Boeing 777-200LR, dubbed the Worldliner, completed the world's longest non-stop passenger flight. It traveled 21,602 kilometres (11,664 nmi) eastward...from Hong Kong to London, in roughly 22 h 22 min
Non-stop flight
Ebola is simply a reminder of how quickly in the modern world a new and deadly infectious disease can spread beyond its origins. Replace West Africa with Central America and the Caribbean and see how you like the odds against containment.
The geek is not particularly good at distinguishing between singular incidents that have a massive --- long term -- social impact beyond a simple count of the number of dead and dying and those with occur randomly on a small scale across an entire country or continent and which can be absorbed without much difficulty.
And don't even get me started on the little ones! Those f'ers aim!
And it's 200 light-years away, so we'll probably never get to meet them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just think of a truck as a small, slow asteroid.
Table-ized A.I.
Dinosaurs replied that they will cross THAT particular road when they get to it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I skimmed TFA, and it seems a lot of it talks about why I shouldn't be afraid of dying to an asteroid strike.
I'm NOT. Never have been.
You obviously haven't seen any classic movies from the 90's.
People aren't so much scared of what could happen as they are about inability to do anything about it.
That's silly. If you can't do anything about it, there's no purpose to being scared.
Last year an app. 10 meter something exploded in the sky above Russia, between Chelyabinsk industrial city, the city's nuclear power plant and the infamous Ch.-Mayak military nuclear waste storage site, which had an insane explosion back in 1957, contaminating about half of Europe. Had that something actually impacted, people from Paris to Budapest, Stockholm to Naples would sincerely envy the residents of Fukushima...
As for what that bright and high thing was, scientists say a bolide (extra big meteorite), while many russians tend to think the Pentagon conducted a new super-weapon experiment, which was neutralized by their magnificient defenses.
Anyhow, how to price/cost such events? There was a huge cosmic impact in the russian Far East in 1947, there was the siberian Tunguska bolide in 1908. Some day, something will necessarily fall outside the endlessly vast russian empire and then maybe suddenly, there won't be e.g. Venice, Florence, Rome (as A. C. Clark has predicted in the SF novel Rendezvous with Rama).
First, they talk about asteroids like they're just a risk to be calculated. The problem is that a large enough asteroid wouldn't just kill a lot of people, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, and quite likely would cause the extinction of humans. So even if the odds are low, the consequences are bad enough that we should be worried about it. Also, it's not like it hasn't happened before. An asteroid hurt a bunch of people in Russia a few years ago, and a really big one killed off most of the dinosaurs in the K-T Event. The dinosaurs learned the hard way how foolhardy it is to not have a strong space program.
Second, a danger like this is good for us as a species right now, if we take it seriously. We need to get into space for a lot of reasons; we're destroying our ecosystem, using up our resources, polluting the planet, and there's no end in sight. There's huge opportunities in space: there's untold resources ready to be mined in asteroids or on the Moon nearby, and if we could come up with the technology, we could even live there just in case this planet becomes uninhabitable. However, if we wait around until it's too late, we won't be able to take advantage of space-based resources (or deflect a killer asteroid); we have to start now, developing our capabilities.
Finally, a threat like this is good for us to focus on, because it gives us a reason to be more unified. We humans are stupid and fight with each other when there's no external threat; the only time we band together is when there's an even bigger external threat which forces us to look past our differences and work together. Killer asteroids are good for that, forcing us to develop our space technology without needing to demonize some other group of people.
Honestly, the authors of this article should be ashamed of themselves. Even if they were right, they shouldn't publicly proclaim this because of the negative effects on society. What would they rather we do, give up on space technologies and work instead on building more ground-based weapons systems so we can fight each other more and pollute our ecosystem even more? Good job, assholes.
We are already too busy worrying about shark attacks, terrorist attacks, and plane crashes.
30,000+ people die every year due to car accidents in the United States alone. But no one seems to care much about that unless their loved one dies in a crash. Think about that number. We have the equivalent of TEN(!) 9/11 attacks every year in the United States. But no one seems to even notice or care.
You should have no problem walking along an I-Beam on a highrise construction project, but the price of failure is extreme to say the least.
Missing an asteroid impact is something we can't afford. It redefines the term "EPIC FAIL".
I would rather have a lot of false positives than miss even one.
then mod down, like super down, for being a conspiracy nut.
Fear is mostly an electrochemical process in a biological system. To call it silly is pretty dismissive of its role in our evolution. Now how supposedly rational, logical, thinking beings react to their fear is worthy of consideration.
I think the thing which the article completely misses is the difference between survival of the species vs. survival of the individual. There are very few things which threaten the survival of the species: nuclear war, massive volcanic eruption and asteroid impact. Other things, such as disease, significant climate change etc. may kill a lot of people but they are unlikely to affect the survival of the species directly - even ebola has survivors.
People who worry about asteroids don't do it because of the risk to themselves personally since that risk is negligible. They do it because of the risk to the species. The risks of these sorts of events are incredibly low. However if you compare a "1 in 100 million" chance of an extinction-level asteroid impact with the similarly tiny (and probably larger) risk of a massive volcanic eruption then suddenly the odds become more relevant. The article completely misses that point.
This article is so full of it. There have indeed been other reports of injuries and some of deaths by meteorites/asteroids. Including as the parent response notes, the major catastrophes that happen when they do occur. We are right to worry about an event that WILL eventually happen, even though it is very rare. An event that when it happens will make up for all the minutes, days, weeks, months and years it didn't happen.
Reported deaths dating back to BCE.
It might not also be a bad idea to look at the orbits of all the known potentially hazardous objects (that means asteroids/comets, of a certain mass, that intersect Earth's orbit). It's a sobering graph.
I put God in that category as well. Malevolent AI - a.k.a. Roko's Basilisk is another one.
I highly recommend the RadioLab Armageddon youtube video about a current theory on the 65 million years ago dinosaur extinction. Scary stuff.
Talk about totally missing the point... I don't believe anyone in his/her right mind thinks he/she might die because of an asteroid. We are worried about city-killers, but the real problem are mass-extinction size asteroids. The probability of it happening sometime soon, in human lifespan time scales, is close to none. The probability of it happening sometime soon in geological time scales is quite high. The probability of it happening sometime in the future of the human race is, if we're lucky, close to 1. That attitude of "let those alive at the moment deal with it" is the actual problem of us humans: complete and absolute inability to think long term and as a species, instead of as individuals who have to deal with things tomorrow.
As long as we don't know how to deal with asteroids capable of causing a mass extinction event, that's a problem of utmost importance. Not because it might kill us but because it will be the end for our species. In the meantime, the same technology to redirect asteroids needs to be developed in order to mine them, so it's not like it is a waste of money, it's also a sound investment.
...but stuffed shirts who hang out at Slashdot and untalented Hollywood producers seem to be the only ones worrying about asteroids. Most people have plenty of other things to worry about, including things they can't control...like politics.
i think you're greatly overestimating the overestimating by "almost everyone" of asteroid risk.
if people were that worried about asteroids, we would have built a multi-trillion dollar asteroid shield* by now.
*that doesn't work**
**it's called asteroid theater
We have nothing to fear from rocks from space. We will kill ourselves with the Swiss/French "Death Star" http://science.slashdot.org/st...
I think the risk is better compared to the probability of two people sharing the same birthday within a given group. You don't need to have 365 people for the probability of having shared birthdays reach 99 percent. The wiki article states its better (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem):
"In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox[1] concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people."
So you don't need some house wrecking boulder striking the Earth every year for us to decide as a species that we should start preparing some sort of planetary defence shield.
Comet activity seems to cluster during certain points in time. You get very little for thousands of years, and.., and then the sky is on fire for a few decades. -This was not factored into the author's analysis. If you happen to be alive while the Earth is flying through a concentrated cloud of rock, then your chances of being affected goes way up.
There are numerous historical studies which strongly suggest cyclical comet problems encountered by our little planet, and some theoretical mechanics offered which explain why the Earth flies through clouds of rock on a regular basis. A couple of those theories put us squarely in the early stages of just such a comet cluster. Observations of increased activity in our skies would seem to confirm this.
What can we do about it?
Not much.
Well.., some. Some of the problems associated with falling space rocks are not Crash-Boom related. The Black Plague is argued by some to have been related to off-world pathogens; there were many reports during that period of fireballs and similar. In any case, there are ways to mitigate that kind of misery.
Another benefit of knowing that immediate dangers exist is that of kick-in-the-pants inspiration, "Get on with your life! Make it worth while! Time here is unique and valuable!"
Which, I suppose, ought to be the case regardless, but still...
The other reason to not go back to sleep, as the author seems to be promoting as the rational response we should all have, is that falling space rocks are interesting! We paid the price of admission, after all. Why ignore the show?
What is that function?
Based 'on what we now know'. So we also have an estimate for how much we don't yet know that will change our estimates?
Arguments about relative risk must fail if we don't have absolute estimates for anything.
Every time a statistician uses 'average' or 'chances are' in a sentence, God kills a kitten.
Think of the kittens!
I am at a complete loss to understand why taking an important step in Earth's defense that could only be accomplished by its most intelligent species is only able to raise a sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days.
And now I am being told I should embrace some gambler's fallacy of 'non-imminence' (on average! we think!) and ratchet down my whimpering terror and boost complacency until I am a well-adjusted individual.
Statisticians and writers sometimes take inappropriate liberties when presenting probabilities. This is natural because finding joy in figuring things out is one of our finest traits. The reason for choosing any particular angle to present a result can be "because it would be fun to think of it that way". Or as in articles like this, to allay what is perceived as a generally unfounded or disproportionate amount of fear. Addressing these fears directly is invaluable because they can traumatize children, and have even been known to swing adults into voting Republican --- or Democrat!
For preventable global existential threats, is it 'OK' to play the stats game by the same rules as for other non-global or non-existential threats? Is it even ethical? That word bites doesn't it.
Isn't there some kind of 'division by zero' thrown exception thing that applies when we're talking about extinction events? As a species, aren't we clever enough to invent one if it does not exist?
Not all statistics are actionable.
And not all science articles are fit for children.
[TA ] Human beings haven't been around on Earth forever. [...] Chances are, we're not going to be around forever, either. It's only a question of how and when we're going to go out.
That's it, kids --- it's nature's way. Go gently into the Good Night when your time is come, as a species. "That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea." If this some sort of foundation argument, then what is being built?
We are the species who invented "forever". We are not bound by it because its definition is not yet complete. By what ever objective scientific time scale that can be derived from any present theory of The End, you must try to factor an important unknown: the effect future human insight and due diligence may bring to bear on the problem of survival. If you have trouble believing this as I do, join the club. I won't.
I've already said my piece about those poor 100 people who died from asteroids last year (on average! we think!).
All in all, a great article, well researched and compellingly written. But the why of it really sucks. How did that happen? Are there hungry insurance salesman lurking nearby worried that the sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days will eat into their commissions?
Don't sell out that ultimate future by falling prey to an extinction event that could happen tomorrow. The way things stand it may be at least ten years before a viable mission is ready to go IF we start today. Let us hope it's ten years of good luck.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Asteroids? More people are going to get hit by hemorrhoids.
I think the error bars on his calculation are much bigger than his answer.
He does not know anything, and neither do any of the others. We don't kmow how many are out there, at least not yet. And we don't know what the relative size mixture is.
It doesn't make sense to worry about stuff that you can't do anything about. On the other hand, it would be a good idea to assign at least a few people to find out what they can. 8-)