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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.
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.
I disagree with the premise of the article. I don't think most people are even remotely concerned about an asteroid strike.
I also disagree with the facts of the article. More people die in plane accidents than are run over by trucks. They should pick a better example of a "mundane" cause of death, like heart disease induced by obesity. They also use the fact that only one person has ever been killed by an asteroid to show it is not a concern. But if a big one comes, it could kill everyone, or nearly everyone. An ELE shows up about every 60 million years. If it kills 6 billion people, then that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply.
Yeah, large, mass-extinction asteroids are only a problem every 70 million years.
By that logic, why even bother worrying about AGW, since even by the worst predictions it won't have any horrible effects for the next 100 years or so. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy life! .... there's nothing that could possibly happen that Earth wouldn't completely recover from in a couple million years.
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-cont...
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).
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.
I also disagree with the premise but in the opposite direction.
Risk is the probability of something happening times the damage if it happens.
If Damage = Death of All (functionally infinite), the Probability need only be more than infinitesimal for the Risk to be significant. Is the probability of a mankind-killer asteroid more than infinitesimal? Well, it's happened a couple times before, so while the probability appears quite small it's certainly more than infinitesimal.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
Or, just possibly, there is a long period large body that transits the oort cloud approximately every 60 million years, sending large chunks of debris into the inner solar system on just the type of semi-clockwork periodicity you seem to think the universe lacks?
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Because first of all, we don't what the risk actually is until we deploy a system for detecting NEOs.
like heart disease induced by obesity
That's probably what got the woman in the picture of 'only person to be directly hit by a meteor'.
What I don't get is the jump from: 1000 people were injured in Russia two years ago, to: because only one person was ever directly hit by a meteor therefore strikes should be of no practical concern.
A detection system for the size of meteor that can injur 1000 might yeild all kinds of interesting side discoveries and technologies beyond just being a detection system.
The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:
Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.
A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.
And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.
And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.
Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?
Just a lot of really bad arguments.
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Well, it's happened a couple times before
Mankind's ancestors survived every single one of them.
If an extinction event kills everyone but is so rare so its average deaths per year is low (100), then that's a great argument that looking at the "average deaths per year" statistic is absolute horse-shit.
You can only meaningfully quantify "deaths" as long as the greater backdrop of society is around. Something that results in humans huddled in caves for two thousand years before finally coming back to prominence, or eliminates humanity completely, is almost the worst conceivable thing that can can happen (only events that involve the extinction of entire other hypothesized alien races would be worse).
Obviously, an event that could kill all of humanity is not one we can just put up with or tolerate. Stating that even with that nightmare scenario, the odds are too low to be worth trying to mitigate, is fine- but it sure as shit is not related to "average deaths per year".