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.

Comments

Stupid Headline

[mbone]

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.

Risk Assessment

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Not like we can stop an asteroid anyway

[RubberDogBone]

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.

Re:RISK vs CHANCE

[uncqual]

One has to weigh the cost of preventing something from happening vs. the benefit of preventing it.

Humans will obviously become extinct on Earth at some point. We are a young species and we adapt slowly. It takes us over 10 years to reach sexual maturity, we have few births per woman/year, each member of the species requires substantial resources which severely limits the number of humans that can be on the Earth at any one point in time. This all leaves comparatively few opportunities for genetic alterations as opposed to, say, cockroaches. To make matters worse (although, as civilization declines, this will no longer happen so it's a temporary impediment), we interfere with natural selection via medical procedures and social programs so resources are consumed on "survival of the weakest" rather than on "promoting the strongest".

So, it's only useful to consider the chances of a catastrophic asteroid strike before we become extinct via other mechanisms. An asteroid strike 100 million years from now is completely irrelevant to humans as there will be no humans to experience it (or to maintain the infrastructure to prevent it). More adaptable species will survive it anyway.

Not as relevant to this specific case, but to be considered in discussions about extinction of the human species in general. Extinction of the human species is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to humans (esp. since it's going to happen anyway). If the cost of delaying human extinction by N years is so high that all humans live in substantially less "comfort" for the remaining M years of human existence and N << M, it's likely incurring the cost of delaying extinction makes no sense (esp. to someone whose lifespan is much, much less than M or N).

Its analogous to, hypothetically, offering a healthy 30 year old two options. The first option is eating a distasteful, but extremely healthy, calorie restricted diet which will leave them feeling weak all the time but they will live, on the average, to be 87 years old. The second option is to eat pretty much whatever they want to enjoy and maintain a caloric count that does not interfere with their daily life or motivation or pleasure but they will live, on the average, to be only 86.75 years. A rational person would, I think, choose to live in comfort for their remaining 56.75 years rather than to live another three months but at the cost of being in discomfort and too weak to do much for their remaining 57 years.