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.

Comments

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Hognoxious]

Biased sample. Did they ask any dinosaurs?

Asteroids aren't the greatest risk

[sabbede]

It's those damn UFOs that show up and start shooting randomly. Not only do they break larger asteroids down to smaller, harder to hit, harder to avoid chunks; it's far too easy to get so wrapped up in trying to shoot them down that you get smashed by the asteroids.

And don't even get me started on the little ones! Those f'ers aim!

Standing on a planet that's evolving

[Hognoxious]

It took 4 billion years to develop an intelligent civilization on a planet which is highly suitable to life.

And it's 200 light-years away, so we'll probably never get to meet them.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[digsbo]

However, you cannot commit suicide by asteroid strike.

You could if you control the asteroid defense system, and intentionally cause it to fail.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[rwise2112]

I for one have *never* been afraid of asterisks.

It's good to have a healthy fear of asterisks -- there's a big difference between "rm -rf *.tmp" and "rm -rf * .tmp"

But surely the space is the villain there.