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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?
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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.
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).
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?
Blanche, Dorothy, Sophia, and Rose can save the day should an asteroid ever threaten humanity again.
I had a double-take there for a sec, as those were names of four of our chickens. I imagined a snippet of several hens flying off to save humanity.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
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...
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.
How much did the soviet moon effort given back to humanity?
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.
Ah rubycodez... Your secret is out. Also, you should stop replying to yourself, it looks silly and nobody actually gives you any credibility. I suppose that's not enough to break through your mental illness but I feel better for having done the socially responsible thing. Seriously, we care. Go get help. I don't mind paying taxes to help you out. In fact, I hope you get good mental health care. I really don't mind paying my share to help pay for it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Incoming Asteroid, we done screwed up....
That. Is. Awesome.
It really is. Did you have the chickens before the "Happy Monday from the Golden Girls" guy came around? (They've gone missing, I kind of miss them. I looked forward to their posts wishing me a happy day.) If you did then it must have been almost as strange when they popped in.
Either way, that's an excellent choice of names for your critters. A group of chickens followed the path from my neighbor's house (which is actually quite a ways away but she and he both do some work for me) and have opted to live at my house. After having witnessed the chickens in action, I've generally concluded that there must have been some sort of political divide and one team of chickens opted to move out and set up a new community.
At one point I set out to send them home but it turns out that herding chickens is impossible. I don't actually know where they're coming from but the number increases from time to time and they're not like brand new chickens but fully grown things. I can only assume that they tell tales of the group that have wandered away and split from the commune and these new chickens are those sent to find them (and aren't returning) or are those who are also disenfranchised with the other community.
My conclusion is that one group must be, in fact, a tyranny and the oppressed are seeking a new life elsewhere. I also conclude that the freedom loving chickens must be mine because the migration appears to only happen one way. What right-minded chicken would willfully subject themselves to tyranny, obviously. The thing is, I never fed them or invited them and they don't actually appear to have any reason to be here except that now I have them fed. They're also fond of my garden and I don't mind them eating bugs but they've also eaten a few plants along the way. Well, I assume they ate some. They certainly pecked them to death.
So, another oddity is that I've since had guests who say, "Oh, you have chickens?" Which is a pretty dumb question, I guess. Really, I don't. I tell them that I don't have chickens and that they just kind of chose to live here and they don't belong to me. When I left home to go on my journey I was up to six chickens. I have no idea how many chickens I have now. I'm not sure what the neighbors will do when they run out of chickens but I presume they'll buy more and I'll end up with more chickens.
What they SHOULD do is find the evil tyrant that's leading their chickens and eat them. That would end their migration and ensure the freedom loving fowl that have sought refuge in my domain could return to their motherland. A constitution might also be a good idea. I don't mind the chickens, I don't normally eat many eggs either, so it's okay that they live here but I'm sure they must want to return and live among their friends instead of having to run away in the middle of the night to live in a distant land.
They also don't like the house I built them. They prefer to live under the overhang on my woodshed. I'm pretty sure they're communists. I'm okay with that but I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I end up with a yard full of chickens and the society collapses. I'm told that they're probably not good eating. They're also speedy bastards when they want to be. And nosy. I often leave my door open and more than one has wandered into the house.
I'm kind of hoping that there's no drama between the groups. I don't know if chickens go to war or anything (or anything at all about chickens really) but I do know a war would be bad. I'd have commando chickens and I guess that might be interesting.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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...
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
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
Four of them escaped the clutches of the evil tyrannical chicken at the neighbor's house and sought asylum at my house. One of them must have been an asshole because my dog chased it into the woods and it has never been seen again - he doesn't mind the rest of them. Since then three more have arrived - each separately. I am at a loss to explain how they know to come to my house, why they moved in, or why they've never returned.
I didn't feed them at first but they stayed long enough so that I felt compelled to ensure they were kept alive. I don't want to be taken in front of the UN for failing to provide for asylum seekers and committing a chickenside.
I don't know much about chickens but, as near as I can tell, every one that's at the house is a female. I've yet to have a rooster come. The neighbor's only have one rooster and he's definitely not the cock of the walk. No, he's a cowardly little braggart who talks a big talk but then runs and hides behind the hens who then treat him like the sissy he is. I can't say that I understand the social dynamics in chickendom but he is definitely not the reason that the hens have left and expatriated to the CCCR (Communist Chicken Coop Rebels).
They arrived in late spring, not too long after the snow was melted from the woods. I've questioned my neighbors who tell me that I'm quite welcome to keep them, which is how they got the house that they don't live in. There are an amazing number of chicken house plans online. I am not sure why, it appears chickens don't like them. I appreciated the style and put the labor (and money) into building them the house. At best they sit atop it and shit over the eves. It even has lights in it to give them some heat during the winter, I'm assuming they will be there in the winter as they've showed no inclination to return to their motherland.
I do have one other theory but it's a bit of a stretch. They could be troublemaker chickens (they did kill some plants and didn't show a single sign of remorse) and the neighbor just might have some unknown chicken herding skill and used that to send them to live at my house. They say this isn't so and I'm inclined to believe them but it is a possibility. They've never lied to me, that I know of, but they did get rid of some plant-murdering chickens.
Again, I don't know much of anything about chickens - just the little I've learned from Google. They do seem to have some sort of 'pecking order' (pardon the pun) and are constantly socializing. I must assume there's cliques within this hierarchy but I'd need to study more chickens to come to any conclusions. When I question the original guardians of the chickens they don't give much insight and wonder why I'm so curious about the ways of the fowl. I've made some casual observations of their remaining chickens (still a greater number than those who've exited) and I do not understand the social dynamics in play. They seem like stupider chickens than those who populate my lawn.
I didn't even realize that chickens had much of anything going on in their heads. I figured they just hung around being chickens but they do seem to have a dynamic social life and a structured hierarchy. I've not given them names because I like to give things descriptive names and these names would mostly consist of vulgarities. "Chicken that Shat on my Car" and "Bastard Bird Get out of my Way" are not, in fact, acceptable chicken names. As they are refugees and seeking to be free from tyranny it's not acceptable for me to heap my scorn on them - even if one shit on the seat of my tractor.
Anyhow, they're far more interesting than I'd have expected. I do, at times, enjoy their limited company - they're great vocalists but not great conversationalists. They also don't crow at dawn or anything - they'll do that at any time. Well, cluck and screech I guess, crowing hasn't really been actually accomplished. They were probably afraid to speak out in their old country so aren't yet quite acclimated to having the freedom of speech.
I've thought abo
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Hmm... I need to get a life. I didn't actually preview and then I saw how long that post was. Well, have a novel about David's Life With Chickens.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"[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>
Use Kickstarter or another crowd funding to make it work. 450 mil is a bit steep though.
Been there, done that. Despite two month of press releases and a reasonable well-documented deliverable (plans for HAIV mission payload vehicle), a panel of international experts willing to donate their own time, a mere $200,000 target to help with other expenses, even a Slashdot article to promote it, should I even mention cool items (the shoulder patches arrived today)...
Only 187 human beings (2 were me) from planet Earth put in a grand total of $8,834 towards their $200k goal.
May we now have a moment of silence to consider this.
[... ... ... ...]
[Hissssssss...... BANG!]
What a mess. Glowing iridescent rings of exposed mantle like the hollow eye sockets of a ghost. Each one the eye of a hurricane of steam and worse things. Now if this was your planet, you would be feeling unpleasant tingles working up and down your spine right now just to look at them. Or even to hear me describe them. If there are no tingles you haven't given it enough thought. Thousand-foot tsunamis towards the coasts (it's an ocean impact). Molten fragments are setting prairie and forest ablaze a thousand miles away. When it burns out night will fall early. The next Winter will last dozens of years. It is merciful when dark clouds roll over everything at the end. Final curtain.
Good thing we took that 'statistical cost-benefit analysis' approach to heart. Makes it easier to bear.
If survival would be ZERO, cost-benefit analysis is as pointless as dividing by ZERO.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
[CORRECTED LINK to ARTICLE, 150 comments]
Ask Slashdot: Best Payloads For Asteroid Diverter/Killer Mission?
TheRealHocusLocus writes:
The Emergency Asteroid Defence Project has launched a crowdfunded IndieGoGo campaign to help produce a set of working blueprints for a two-stage HAIV, or Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle. This HAIV paper (PDF) describes the use of a leading kinetic impactor to make a crater --- a following nuclear warhead would detonate in the crater for maximum energy transfer. The plans would be available for philanthropists to bring to prototype stage, while your friendly local nuclear weapon state supplies the warhead. This may be a best-fit solution. But just ask Morgan Freeman: these strategies could fail. What --- if any --- backup strategy could be integrated into an HAIV mission as a fail-safe in case the primary fails? Here is a review of strategies (some fanciful, few deployable) if we have to divert an asteroid with very short lead time. A gentle landing on the object may not be feasible, and we must rely on things that push hard or go boom. For example: detonating nearby to ablate surface materials and create recoil in the direction we wish to nudge. Also, with multiple warheads and precise timing, would it be possible to create a "shaped" nuclear explosion in space?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The dinosaurs made the same decision and look what happened to them.
Survived for a couple of hundred of million years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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"