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B612 Foundation Loses Partnership With NASA; Asteroids Not a Significant Risk
StartsWithABang writes: Yes, asteroids might be humanity's undoing in the worst-case scenario. It's how the dinosaurs went down, and it could happen to us, too. The B612 foundation has been working to protect us by mapping and then learning to deflect potential threats to our planet, but their proposed mission needed $450 million, a goal they've fallen well short of. As a result, NASA has severed their partnership, which is a good thing for humanity: the risk assessment figures show that worrying about killer asteroids is largely a waste.
Yep, the chances of one getting us is small. On the other hand, if one does come, we'll look like foots just before we kiss our asses goodbye.
In a human's lifetime, the odds are unbelievably low, as in, almost nonexistent.
In the next 500 years? 1,000 years? A bit more, but still low.
However, while very low, if it were to happen, it makes everything else pointless and redundant. If we're wiped out, then our saving $450 million doesn't really matter much, now does it?
They don't believe in dinosaurs so they don't believe an asteroid kill them. It's logical given their intentionally wrong starting point of an invisible man that orders them around.
Blanche, Dorothy, Sophia, and Rose can save the day should an asteroid ever threaten humanity again.
It is the same question. You will never be fit from it.
This project is the same I guess NASA has Bruce Willis on speed dial just in case.
The dinosaurs made the same decision and look what happened to them.
This just shows how fucking useless NASA is. Retards looking for an excuse to exist found another retard buddy. "Hey what lameass thing can we pull out of our ass that we'll tell everyone to be afraid of, so we can pretend like we can protect them from?? Hmmm?? "The sky is falling!!!!!!!!!!!" Don't worry we'll protect you. FUCK NASA IDIOTS fuck you.
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Going to the moon was a waste, but look at how much the effort has given back to humanity.
450 million is chump change for the knowledge that we need to eliminate a 1 in 100,000 risk for the entire planet. One single subway line for one US city costs upwards of a billion dollars.
The project was cancelled because NASA is underfunded, not because it's not worthy of funding.
B612 lost their Space Act Agreement because they were missing their deadlines and because they weren't talking to NASA about it. I had several people at NASA tell me that they were frustrated about the lack of communication from B612 about their problems. It was only a matter of time before the SAA agreement was canceled.
B612's spacecraft is suspiciously similar to a JPL spacecraft. Hmm....
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2015/09/nasa-cancels-b6.html
Hate on asteroid detection all you want, call it a waste of time and money if you must, but the partnership drop is actually due to a recent asteroid detection proposal accepted by NASA for consideration called NEOcam.
NASA policy as laid forth in the institution's founding charter, the Space Act, is to avoid competing with private institutions using public money (their baby, JPL).
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Myopia will be our species' downfall. The sad thing is, we will have known better. The universe has given us plenty warning, many truths stare us down, but short term profit and willful ignorance will blind us to the bitter end. I wonder how many intelligent (by human standards) species across the universe have been wiped out similarly?
If an asteroid does get too close, we'll fly F-35s into it until we blow it up. $450 million will buy what, three of those things?
We humans are incredibly bad at dealing with a low CHANCE of really really bad things happening. The problem is that, as shown in the discussions here, the idea of RISK is misunderstood. There is a CHANCE of something happening, yes. But that is not the same as the RISK of something happening. The RISK is the CHANCE multiplied by some metric of how bad the thing is. It is RISK that should guide policy, not the CHANCE. (I'm capitalizing these to indicate they are mathematical variables) . When it comes to nuclear plant meltdowns or asteroid collisions, people tend to look only at the CHANCE of it happening in their own lifetime. I that is low, the RISK is forgotten. The problem with this thinking is that eventually a species that guides policy this way will become extinct. If we are the "thinking species" it's high time we got on with some serious thinking. CHANCE X "DEGREE OF BADNESS" = RISK
Watching for a rock heading to destroy our planet such that we can try to prepare and strategize in advance is a huge waste.... Oh I would love to understand your basis for establishing value..
We humans are incredibly bad at dealing with a low CHANCE of really really bad things happening. The problem is that, as shown in the discussions here, the idea of RISK is misunderstood. There is a CHANCE of something happening, yes. But that is not the same as the RISK of something happening. The RISK is the CHANCE multiplied by some metric of how bad the thing is. It is RISK that should guide policy, not the CHANCE. (I'm capitalizing these to indicate they are mathematical variables) . When it comes to nuclear plant meltdowns or asteroid collisions, people tend to look only at the CHANCE of it happening in their own lifetime. I that is low, the RISK is forgotten. The problem with this thinking is that eventually a species that guides policy this way will become extinct. If we are the "thinking species" it's high time we got on with some serious thinking. CHANCE X "DEGREE OF BADNESS" = RISK
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
So one program to find giant space rocks has ended. There are others.
But in any case, we don't have the ability at the moment to DO anything about it even if we found a rock heading for us. We'd probably need several decades to get our act together, and we have a terrible track record about responding to things like aging sewers where we can pay somebody minimum wage to fix it, versus tens of years of heavy spending (way beyond 450 mill) to come up with a way to stop the asteroid. I don't think humanity is capable of working together in the way it would need to happen.
Sig for hire.
It wouldnt take much to alter an asteroid's course to miss Earth if you knew it was coming a decade or two out. A few white paint bombs would do it. Sunlight and the yarkovsky effect would do the rest.
NASA's Office of the Inspector General is fairly disappointed with NASA's progress in NEO detection (much less amelioration) https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/re...
Rusty Schweickart tells me there are an estimated one-million asteroids of 45-ish meters which is Tunguska size http://www.asteroidday.org/ast...
The B612 group has done a poor job of keeping the community (and apparently NASA) informed of their progress and challenges. Perhaps a more transparent effort would work - even showing lack of progress would be progress here. They have indeed struggled with engagement - they only have 600 followers on G+ for example https://plus.google.com/+B612f...
> Asteroids Not a Significant Risk
Somewhere in a secret lair a supervillain is reading this and ROFL. He will bang his harsh mistress Ms. Moon tonight.
The odds of any one person being killed? 1 in 70 million.
But that's an absurd way to measure it. An extinction asteroid not only kills everybody on Earth, it kills ALL FUTURE PEOPLE. That is an unbounded number, but it's easily in the hundreds of billions.
Is there some technical reason that we can't map asteroids from earth based observations? It seem like that should cost a LOT less than sending an infrared space telescope to Venus.
So with all of this taken into account, what are your odds of dying in an asteroid strike in any given year? About 1-in-70,000,000.
So all-in-all I can assume I personally die from an asteroid strike about three times in 200M years while ignoring that the entire human species is wiped out twice.
And if I wanted the US Department of Transportation to handle this, based on personal risk to individual US citizens alone, they could spend about $30M a year on asteroid prevention.
The article sucks. It just says the risk is low and makes no attempt to compare the risk or the cost to anything else.
Incoming Asteroid, we done screwed up....
I'd hate having to worry about another Great Dying style extinction event because having a group of people trained to handle the situation and able to circumvent stop-all-money-for-humans-forever is less profitable than existing.
It's hilarious. We finally are at the point where we have the technology (read computer storage and power) to not only find but track the ~100 trillion objects that make up all possible asteroids/comets in our solar system but actually do something about an actual object that would strike, and we can't afford it because of the cost and the risk. Meanwhile, we're happily spending massive amounts of technology (read computer storage and power) through the NSA over the risk of terrorism which, oddly enough, doesn't have the "species killer" aspect to it and the personal risk is on the same order (asteroids, 1 in 70,000,000; terrorism, of 1 in 20,000,000). Yet there's no constitutional crisis for tracking asteroids. There's very little risk of false positives resulting in torture or other acts of inhumanity.
Yes, yes, we obviously should wait a few thousand years to do something about the risk of asteroids. Because, you know, if I were out in a field and someone with a chaingun was sweeping across the area, I'd definitely stand around a few seconds (the cosmic equivalent of "a few thousand years") and do nothing because the odds of any single bullet killing me are so low. And it's just too much effort to act compared to, well, apparently anything.
NASA, of course someone was unprepared to defend a budget for this.
But Congressional parties should be very worried. They may not even get time to bail into their own bunker let alone the rest of us in the cheap seats.
Watch the ApolloDividend in Tweet Space...
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Perhaps if they combine the threat of Asteroids + Aliens attack, then they would get their 450 million!
the odds of dying in a plane are insignificant, so we might as well not install seatbelts or air masks??
The fact we are lamenting over a lost NASA contract by a company that could not be bothered to come up with an original name rather than lifting the name from "the Little Prince". I would only take this company less seriously if it were called "Super Grover" or some such juvenile thing!
No, the project was cancelled because the B612 Foundation failed to uphold it's end of the contract - they've routinely failed to meet deadlines and to make the reports they're contractually obligated to do.
I am amazed that people simply do not understand the difference between, as other have pointed out, risk and chance.
The cost of fixing the problem the B612 foundation are trying to fix is close to zero. A few hundred million is close enough to zero to be discarded entirely. The potential upside - saving a major city from an impact is enormous. Are there anyone at NASA who are not morons?
Excuse me sir, can you spare a minute so I can explain to you about the GIANT SPACE GOAT that is coming to eat the planet?
We need a crash program to build a space ark so our celebrities like Snooki & Kanye can escape destruction.
Mars One is valiant first effort...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When we get hit and we will get hit it is only a matter of when.
The one threat to humanity we could actually prevent we failed to do.
It is alright go take pictures of moons.
Use Kickstarter or another crowd funding to make it work. 450 mil is a bit steep though.
"[extinction 50% of species events] Every 100,000,000 years or so on average..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"we know city-killer events happen at least every few millennia..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"Tunguska-level events... may happen as frequently as once per century..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"City-killer asteroids...will be incredibly rare: only occurring once every 100,000 years or so."
NOPE. Hey I thought you said 'every few millennia'! But NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"Species-ending strikes...all human life on Earth...every 100,000,000 years or so
Shucks I thought we'd be in the top 50%.
Anyway, NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
There's a reason that not everyone likes to gamble. None of us should want to gamble with these risks.
They invoke morality in the form of responsibility to one's children.
Once you learn of an existential risk it is immoral to deny it exists.
Immoral to take one single step back from a position of being able to better deal with the risk.
Waiting is not a step forward. Because time is passing, it is a step back.
Waiting is gambling.
There might be many here who'd toss a million-to-one die for some immediate benefit vs. the off-chance of their own death.
(But truly) how many of those people would toss that million-to-one die if the payoff was theirs but the death would be their child?
How many might boast they could do so with no hesitation... but then... back out at the last moment? (It's okay)
That's one toss. How about once a day, or year?
It's happening. By reading and knowing about this risk you are playing the game right now. It's real.
These arguments that attempt to make existential risks subject to sports-book rules, frankly, make me want to puke from anger! Part of me is wondering, why aren't we throwing stones at these people, jeering at them?
We've known that the sky could be dangerous for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We've had space travel for 50.
Does NASA have anything better to do than get rockets into space again?
Better to do than delivering science payloads to comets and other bodies?
Better than ensuring the standard rocket could accommodate heavier. say, an asteroid countermeasures package?
Better than refining systems and procedures so launches could occur with as little as several weeks' notice?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The article's author starts with "we may get some very smart, very famous people arguing counter to this, but even smart people fall prey to a common human fallacy: risk estimation when the odds are low but the consequences are great" and then proceeds to explain that it's pointless to have an asteroid tracking and protection plan because even a species-ending asteroid is really just the equivalent of 100 people dying per year.
Yeah, 7 billion people dying in one day and then no one dying for the next 70 million years (because there's no one left!) is exactly the same as 100 people dying per year, right? /facepalm
Or maybe it was just his way to slip himself into the "very smart and famous people". Who the fuck writes something like "I have won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for my blog" in their bio anyway?
It's Forbes, should have guessed.
It sounds like the risk assesment was done by a bunch of Pointy Haired Bosses.
But that's not why NASA fired them...
Within the geological profession, there is no dispute that the Chixulub impact happened, or that it was a pretty bad day, and started a pretty bed few millennia.
Whether it was what actually "did" for the dinosaurs is a more challenged question. There was a serious environment-degrading long term terrestrial event happening over the same time period - the Deccan "Large Igneous Province", a.k.a. the "Deccan traps" (which also outcrop in South Africa), which also had serious, long-lasting environmental effects. With the limitations of the geological record, it isn't clear if the dinosaurs died out at the time of the Chixulub impact, or at a later (or even earlier) time. field work continues to try to relate the two events, but currently the best dating is that the Deccan had been going for half a million years before Chixulub, and continued for another half-million or so after ; exactly when in this time period the dinosaurs died out isn't at all clear. (Incidentally, this kills, stone dead, the trope that the Chixulub impact triggered the Deccan. Interesting idea, but the energetics never worked, despite the hours of puff that it has been given on TV.)
It remains possible that the Deccan was well on the way to killing off the dinosaurs when along came the Chixulub impactor and did the remaining few percent of stragglers. Or, that the more evolutionarily flexible dinosaurs were surviving OK while the giants were dieing out, but Chixulub's effects just increased the rate of change beyond what the (non-avian) dinosaurs could handle.
It is worth remembering that there have been many major impactors that have not been associated with mass extinctions, whereas the only LIP larger than the Deccan was coincident with the biggest mass extinction of them all - the Permo-Triassic extinction. That is suggestive.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Meteor impacts are as much a hazard today as yesterday.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"