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

risk is extremely low, consequences extremely high

[Anonymous Coward]

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.