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Asteroid Risk Greatly Overestimated By Almost Everyone

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-my-asteroid-insurance-business-is-thriving dept.

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.

4 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. risk is extremely low, consequences extremely high by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Also by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Also by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      Well, almost. A good sized fraction of North America gets buried in ash, which is dangerous to inhale, and makes a mess of machinery, but it isn't immediately deadly if you make any effort at all to avoid inhaling it. It will definitely result in another Year Without a Summer, possibly two. But the ash in the upper atmosphere, the lightest and finest stuff, tends not to cross the equator, so the southern hemisphere won't suffer the serious crop failures that the northern hemisphere will. Given how much of North America's food (and Europe's food, these days) comes from South America, the resulting famine will only be bad, rather than catastrophic.

      The problem is how many volcanoes get set off by a large asteroid strike, including possibly Yellowstone itself. Given the probability of an ocean strike (high), you get all possible fun: massive steam cloud and tidal waves, followed by volcanic ash everywhere.

  3. Re:Do people really take this risk seriously? by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    Thank you, that is just it...

    I don't "fear" this as a cause of death for myself, the odds of this happening to me personally are almost nil.

    The real concern is the big one, which is NOT likely to happen in our lifetimes, but on the off chance that it does, it renders everything else we do pointless.

    It is a very binary outcome, if it hits, we're gone and all our "save the children, save the planet" efforts amount to nothing.