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

Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with the premise of the article. I don't think most people are even remotely concerned about an asteroid strike.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply.

So you're in fact agreeing with the facts of the article. That's the exact number they give in the article. 100 per year.

RTFA FTW.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Spazmania]

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.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[FlyHelicopters]

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.

Re: Do people really take this risk seriously?

[CreatureComfort]

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?

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with the facts of your comment. I don't have data about trucks specifically, but thousands of pedestrians are killed each year just in the United States. Even in the deadliest years air crashes resulted in less than 2500 deaths world-wide and since 2001 that number has been less than 1000.

Heart disease induced by obesity is a terrible example, not because it isn't common because it is, but because it doesn't strike out of no where. You don't wake up one morning obese and die of a heart attack. Getting hit by a truck and getting hit by an asteroid are at least comparable in the sense that something is hitting something else and in the general course of your life there's little you can do to avoid it if it's going to happen.

The point of the fact of only one person ever being hit, not killed as you stated, is to demonstrate how unlikely it is. And the fact that an asteroid capable of destroying human civilization only shows up about every 60 million years as you stated, though the article states 100 million years which is actually correct, shows that even more. I suppose if you wake up in the middle of the night worrying about the possibility of your descendants being killed by a giant asteroid millions of years from now then yeah you should be concerned. And finally, you say "then that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply", but they actually did say 100 people per year on average right in the article.

But the fact that you're wrong about pretty much everything is beside the point. The point is, if you're worried about your own death, the deaths of family members or friends or even that guy you had that one class with in high school, there are dozens of ways to die that are far, far, far more likely than being killed by an asteroid. It might make good movies, though that's debatable, but the reality is the chances of it happening are so small it isn't worth worrying about. And of course this is just one example of a super unlikely way to die. Other recent examples are ebola, measles, or terrorist attack (more likely in some places, but not likely in most). But except under very specific circumstances, most of us shouldn't be worried about any of these things.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Applehu Akbar]

Because first of all, we don't what the risk actually is until we deploy a system for detecting NEOs.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[magarity]

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.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Rei]

The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:

That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.

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.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Hognoxious]

Biased sample. Did they ask any dinosaurs?

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[allcoolnameswheretak]

You don't wake up one morning obese and die of a heart attack.

XD

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[itzly]

Well, it's happened a couple times before

Mankind's ancestors survived every single one of 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?

[hawguy]

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"

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[cfalcon]

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".

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[HiThere]

A large impact in a shallow ocean area might well in every human dying within a decade. Most immediately. It would also first steam clean the planet, and then set an ice age in motion.

Now I'll grant that this is unlikely in any century, less likely by far, in fact, than that we'll do the same thing to ourselves via war or some other means. (War seems the most likely, but it's not the only contender. An escape from a biological warfare lab is a possibility. I'm not counting natural evolution as "doing it to ourselves", but it's happened to other species. In fact it is currently happening to a large number of amphibian species, some of which have already gone extinct.)

But I do consider asteroid impacts worth worrying about. Not worth obsessing about, however, as they are a bit down the ladder when it comes to humanity exterminators.

I also question his method of assigning proper degree of concern. And the reliability of his assertions. E.g. he claims that only one person has ever been hit by a meteor, but there's no evidence that that's true. He should have said only one person is known to have been hit by a meteor. But how many people in remote areas of the planet could have been hit and the reason for death, or even the fact of death, not officially acknowledged? And clearly nobody could cite an instance before around 1700, as even the existence of meteors was denied. So you need to ask what is the probability of someone being hit by a meteor and the fact being officially recognized. This is a quite different question. He performs the same type of factual manipulation (less obviously) in a few other places.

That said, it's not a major concern while other concerns rate higher. But a species ending event is worthy of particular concern over and above the concern over the individual lives lost, as you also need to consider the future lost, and not just a few personal futures, but all human futures.

Re: Do people really take this risk seriously?

[Dynedain]

What a stupid argument. If I kill you tomorrow you won't care because you're dead. So why worry about if I'm out to kill you?

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.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[careysub]

Right, and this is one threat that if we do detect it far enough in advance, we can actually prevent it from happening! And having a good detection system is the key, if we detect the threat many decades in advance even the largest "planet killers" can be deflected for modest amounts of money.

Re:Do people really take this risk seriously?

[tuxgeek]

As typical of most /. articles and comments being mind-numbingly asinine, your post gets close to the mark.
It's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN.

Our solar system still has billions of objects hurling about the sun. Nothing is static. Everything is dynamic. It's only a matter of time before the earth gets hit again by a space rock the size of a mountain, more or less, .. doesn't really matter.

As many comments previous & following involve the "buried head in the sand" approach, which is just fine, there's no need to "worry" about an asteroid impact. It'll happen when anyone least expects it.

The skies are very big and our eyes on the sky are very limited.

Motorcycle Safety Perceptions

[Scottingham]

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.

Re: Motorcycle Safety Perceptions

[O('_')O_Bush]

There are 7m+ motorcycle riders on the road. There are 115,000 major motorcycle accidents per year. Assuming everyone only has one major accident, a person, on average, would have to be riding for 60 years before they have their first motorcycle accident. The average motorcyclist rides for 6 years.

Therefore, the vast majority (something close to 80-90% of riders) never have a major accident and never will have a major accident.

Sure, most motorcyclists know other motorcyclists that have had major accidents, but the idea that "there are only two types of riders, those that have had a major accident and those that will have a major accident" is just FUD and bullshit.

Exotic

[Archangel Michael]

People fear exotic deaths.

Death by lethal injection or beheading, results are the same. One is much scarier than the other, why?

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.

Re:Mostly wrong

[rwa2]

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...

Wrong Premise

[arobatino]

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).

Re:Math

[ShanghaiBill]

How exactly does one evaluate the overall risk when that very-low-probability is multiplied by global extinction?

An asteroid may kill a lot of people, but it will not cause global extinction. No asteroid strike has ever completely wiped out life on earth. The closest was the Permain Extinction, and it isn't even clear if an asteroid was the root cause. People are far better prepared to survive a strike than other species. We are dispersed all over the planet. We can build shelters, stockpile food, etc. Since any asteroid big enough to be an ELE will be easily detectable, we will have many months, and more likely, years or even decades of warning. Sure, it will kill billions, but it will not kill everyone. In terms of survivability, humans are more like cockroaches than dodo birds.

Odds of winning the lottery are low too.

[Gondola]

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.

It's about having control

[uberbrainchild8437]

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.

Re:Low risk high reward

[sexconker]

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.

I think you mean low chance high punishment.

Pot, meet kettle

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Math

[Jason Levine]

An asteroid may kill a lot of people, but it will not cause global extinction. No asteroid strike has ever completely wiped out life on earth.

Just because it has never happened in the past doesn't mean it can't happen in the future. Granted, it would take a very large asteroid and it is highly unlikely, but it is possible.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/asteroid-hits-earth.htm:

By the time you get up to a mile-wide asteroid, you are working in the 1 million megaton range. This asteroid has the energy that's 10 million times greater than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. It's able to flatten everything for 100 to 200 miles out from ground zero. In other words, if a mile-wide asteroid were to directly hit New York City, the force of the impact probably would completely flatten every single thing from Washington D.C. to Boston, and would cause extensive damage perhaps 1,000 miles out -- that's as far away as Chicago. The amount of dust and debris thrown up into the atmosphere would block out the sun and cause most living things on the planet to perish. If an asteroid that big were to land in the ocean, it would cause massive tidal waves hundreds of feet high that would completely scrub the coastlines in the vicinity.
In other words, if an asteroid strikes Earth, it will be a really, really bad day no matter how big it is. If the asteroid is a mile in diameter, it's likely to wipe out life on the planet. Let's hope that doesn't happen anytime soon!

It might not wipe out ALL life as some sea creatures might survive and some microbes would likely hang on, but a mile wide asteroid (especially a dense one) impacting at the right speed would wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

As far as detection goes, I agree that we should be looking out for them, but suppose we found one. Suppose tomorrow it was announced that scientists just spotted a one mile wide asteroid that will collide with the Earth in two months. (Let's put the impact zone at New York City just to add to the fun.) Could we do anything about it in that time? Of course, there would be panic as the entire northeast United States (and some of Canada) tried to relocate. Politicians would give long speeches (and perhaps some of the more anti-science politicians would try to block spending any money on the problem until "more data was gathered"). Even if the world rallied around the cause instantly and everyone didn't panic (HUGE ifs), do we have the technology to alter the course of a mile wide asteroid in 2 months?

The feeling of having some control

[paiute]

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.

Also

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Also

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

Re:Article is stupid

[njnnja]

This. You can't simply run these sorts of numbers on an ELE because the risk isn't the risk that *I* might die, but rather, that my entire species might die. It's a totally different thing that asteroid hunters are worried about. And the chances of all of humanity being wiped out in one is actually much higher than the probability that all of humanity gets wiped out in a giant plane crash, or series of plane crashes.

It's like complaining that people who are worried about getting hit by a truck shouldn't be concerned because there are a lot of other things that might make them late for dinner (and are a lot more likely to happen). But being late for dinner isn't why one should be concerned about getting hit by a truck.

It's not about the math!

[pr0t0]

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.

Re:It's not about the math!

[painandgreed]

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.

That is probably a good allegory for both sides of the argument. After all, while technically true, how many people do you see carrying emergency parachutes onto their commercial airline flights, and how much good do you think it will do them if something does go pear shaped?

Re:Math

[kwiecmmm]

Actually the survivability isn't completely known either. There is a good theory that I heard about the K–Pg Extinction which stated that surface temperatures reached about 700 degrees Fahrenheit about 2 to 8 hours after the impact. The theory is that the asteroid threw a ton of earth into the atmosphere, which all then began to fall back to the earth, which created the temperature change almost completely around the world. This explains the death of all insects, the death of all plankton and why all fossils stopped being found for about 10 million years after this occurred.

If this actually happened today, people could survive the impact, the temperature change (being underground previously allowed mammals to survive) , but the overall climate change that would happen for the next 5-10 years, would be very difficult to survive. All plants caught fire previously and that smoke along with the dust from the impact and the volcanic activity that would happen afterwards, would cast a cloud that would make it very difficult for anything to grow for quite a while after it. Not to mention the fact that the fires and lack of plants would severely deplete the oxygen levels around the world. Human survivability would depend on how prepared we were, but also how long the earth's surface is uninhabitable after the impact, if it is longer than 5 years, I don't see how we could survive.

Re:Math

[Daetrin]

I think you may be placing too much faith in the human race. Yes some humans would undoubtedly survive anything but the worst asteroid strike. However if 90-99% of the human race was wiped out and the environment was (even more) wrecked, then i would not be surprised if humans died off within a couple centuries after that. Which would (reasonably) still be chalked up as part of the same extinction event by any theoretical future paleontologist-equivalents.

Re:It's not a risk

[WillAffleckUW]

Not true. Climate change alters basic acidity of oceans, revives ancient diseases trapped in polar ice, and the interconnected nature of society and trade may result in conflicts where one person decides to start a nuclear war as billions are forced to migrate or die.

Look, I love that you civilians think it's not a problem, but you've never had to deal with what people pushed to the edge actually DO when they either leave their nation state or die. They will do whatever they have to, and that is very very dangerous. When people think they're trapped, they do amazing things.

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:Trolling?

[rwa2]

Er, just trolling for mod points, and I guess I know my audience for the most part... I was really just looking for a nice place to link to that funny image, and your post sounded smart (though TBH I didn't really understand what position you were arguing for or against, but I agree with the statements you made).

But just to explain my AGW analogy... should we be worried about asteroids enough to spend money on asteroid interceptors, even though any kind of payoff is likely only once every 70,000 years or so? Should we be worried about climate change enough to spend money on trying to cram more people onto Earth, or just let the natural cycles of mass extinctions and famine run its course?

The fine article is somewhat silly, because first they complain about how bad at statistics people are, but then go through the math that the odds of anyone dying due to asteroids are 1 - in 70 million per year.

assuming our world’s population remains level at 7 billion indefinitely into the future

which is
1. a bit ridiculous that the population will hold steady at 7 billion the forseeable future, not that it matters because humans have difficulty relating to any population above a couple hundred.
2. over enough millennia, even with those odds, we'll see definitely see something. Probably not in our lifetimes, but likely on a civilization scale of 10,000 years.
3. Yes, TFA mentions that most of the solar system debris has already been absorbed by Jupiter and the like, but seems to ignore some other million-year scale cycles for encountering space debris http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

Are people fear-mongering? Definitely. Is any effort we make to tackle the miniscule risk of asteroid impacts or climate change wasted? No. Are historians in the distant future going to look back on our culture and and say "silly fools, they wasted so much time and effort worrying about X that they didn't notice the real issues piling up to destroy their civilization" no matter what we do? Hell yes.

I completely disagree

[Grishnakh]

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.

Personal vs. Species Survival

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Personal vs. Species Survival

[tnk1]

In fact, as soon as civilization breaks down, ebola and highly fatal diseases like it would burn out before they killed everyone because transport systems would stop transferring infected over long distances faster than the incubation period.

Of course, then you'd have the loss of civilization which could kill everyone down to the carrying capacity of what was left, but humanity would still survive most likely.

Nevertheless, a big asteroid strike or nuclear winter, which would affect the whole planet for extended periods of time, might kill off humanity. In fact any catastrophe that globally ended the various species closest to us in the food chain would quickly end us as well because there wouldn't be enough energy production in the system to support us at the apex.