My point is about the Apocalyptic nature of the argument. I only responded to your points, but my main thesis is that the threat is overstated. Meteors aren’t a significant threat, and as humanity advances, the threat will diminish. This doesn’t mean that asteroids aren’t a valid point of research, which they are. But the point of research into their threat is ridiculous. The real point of research should be into their characteristics and how they can be mined. The world isn’t going to end just because we are now at the low end of the technological spectrum of being able to deal with meteors. Let’s bump our tech up to the middle of the spectrum and get more value per the dollar.
Just for fun, some extremly unreliable calculations. Asteroid impacts that could wipe out nearly everyone are estimated to happen every 100 million years ago, so in each year you have at least a 1 in 100 million chance of dying from an asteroid. It’s higher because you can get killed by smaller ones. The Economist placed it as 1 in 75 million without much explanation. I also found [a paper][1] discussing the value of preventing fatilities that called the odds of 1.5 billion death impact as 1 in 250000, which on its own gives the odds of dying in a year as 1 in a million.
That paper also estimated the value of preventing a one in a million chance of death as maybe a pound, and I have no better idea. Now its whole point was that this doesn’t scale linearly, becoming disproportionately larger as risks go up. But we can still use it to guess; applying it to a population of 7 billion, the Economist’s lower estimate would warrant something less than 150 million USD per year, and the higher one would warrant about 10 billion.
That’s a lot of uncertainty and hand waving, and there’s a lot it doesn’t take into account. Seeing as how Obama’s proposed budget is 100 million USD, though, I think it shows it’s not really so hyperbolic.
(Lots of edits to fix the math. I hope they worked.)
[1]: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyjow/VPF.doc
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That’s what the dinosaurs said.
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And for 130 million years they were right.
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They could talk?!?
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But … but … but … how do you develop the requisite technological advances? Yup, that’s right, you start building things! They don’t work at first, so you improve them, and before long (or before the heat death of the universe, technological goal permitting), you have something that does work. So you’ve solved #2 there.
But … but … but … how do you justify funding the requisite technological advances? Do you talk about the Apocalypse or do you maintain credibility and do it through traditional methods?
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Well, that’s a fair question. We seem to have become a shrill society of outrage and hyperbole, so it’s entirely possible the only sane way to get that funding is to play the fear game.
I mean, it seems to me we’re defunding everything that we should be funding to reach the goals of being an outstanding nation, much less achieving a defense against asteroids, peak oil, population explosion, and all the other Malthusian hammers looming over us. I always get called a socialist or worse when I suggest we should be spending money on education (traditional, domain-specific tech schools, random university R&D, etc), libraries, and so forth. In my opinion, taking our oil subsidies and putting them towards education would be welcome. I’m inclined to wait for the heat death of the universe on that one, although, to be fair, I have to remind myself that we were once a whale-oil based economy…
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And yet Republicans also tout God’s retribution as something that should guide real-world policy, so choosers be losers, cosmically-speaking? Get real.
Wow. Depressing, isn’t it?
It’s a tricky economic question because it seems likely that the first generation (or maybe the first several generations) to spend resources on asteroid impact prevention won’t live to see much return on their investment. Getting people to pay for something that will benefit the as-yet-unborn isn’t easy, which might be one reason some people overstate the near-term risk.
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That’s kinda the point though, isn’t it? Being able to track, travel to, land on and move asteroids would advance society, inasmuch as they’re full of useful materials. Ones we don’t have to lug up a gravity well, at that.
If those rocks that came down over Russia had come down over New York or Washington State, I reckon funding could have been blagged for these kinda shenanigans. Goddamn space-rocks trying to blow up America? Hell, no.
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What an excellent metaphor for climate-change science. Except the odds on that one are somewhat more than one in 100 million.
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If. If. Why do you ignore the probabilistic aspect? Just because you can imagine more devastation does not mean that it is likely or even probable. Please separate your fear of it from reason.
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Well, no, obviously not. I’m not terrified of an asteroid impact, because I’m not daft as a fucking brush. I was more riffing on the fact that outrageous bullshit is regularly perpetrated using trivially silly threats to justify it. Imagine, if you will, a world where our incredibly powerful and manipulative bullshit machine had been utilised to protect us from evil space-rocks instead of the ridiculous war on ‘terror’, thus allowing us to claw ourselves a little closer to number one on the Kardashev scale. It’s as vanishingly unlikely as me being hit by a rock the size of a bus, but a lot more pleasant to contemplate.
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Because it’s a Huge cost, and neither side is willing to fund both. Also, moon-mining technology (conceptually) is going to be less applicable to deflecting asteroids than asteroid-mining technology. The Moon has ‘some’ gravity, asteroids have negligible gravity, so you need more true zero-g tech to work on them.
Fear (even if just a wee bit of it) can be useful in getting the gears turning. One doesn’t have to be all Chicken Little about the situation; at the same time, I remember talk of Peak Oil, climate change, and overpopulation back when I was a wee little kid in the early 70s. I also remember the rise of gas-guzzling SUVs a few years after the solar panels were removed from the roof of the White House. We had convinced ourselves, on a societal level, for a while, that there wasn’t anything to really worry about when it came to reliance on fossil fuels. And now we’re reacting, decades later and possibly too late to prevent catastrophe.
The probability of a meteor causing massive devastation in the next 100 years is tiny. But the technology available in 100 years to deal with such a threat would be significant. So does it make sense to use resources** on it now?
Yes, it does… it makes perfect sense to me to begin using resources on this issue. It’s a relatively recent development that we’re even able to track the movements of many asteroids (generationally speaking), and this is a situation where it wouldn’t do to close the barn door after the horse has fled by waiting until we actually notice something Heading Right For Us before we start funding the research and appointing the exploratory subcommittee. Whether we can expect the Big Rock to land next year or 30,000 years from now or anywhere in between, the potential severity of the consequences of an asteroid hit demands that we can’t quite roll the dice as casually as we can for other statistically unlikely disasters. As old as our Moon is, one glance at it shows enough craters to assure us that these hits do happen, however rarely compared to our short individual lifespans, and the fact remains that right now we really don’t know if one is on its way to clobber us within the next few years (or months or less) or not. It’s a bit irresponsible (just a bit, honestly, but still) to simply play the numbers and blow off our response until the technology gets around to it in a century or two. We should start the wheels rolling now.
Meteors are small, often pin-head sized bits that burn up in the atmosphere. I assume you know the difference between meteors, meteorites and asteroids. Why do you conflate them?
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I haven’t conflated anything. You are assuming I haven’t studied astronomy. I have. Let me summarize:
asteroid: rock that orbits the Sun
meteor: rock that enters the Earth’s atmosphere
meteorite: rock that survived entering the Earth’s atmosphere
A meteor can be any size. Large meteors are called bolides.
Edit: And by the way, I have been exceedingly careful to use the accurate definitions in the correct places in this discussion because I expected to be criticized. I knew that my arguments wouldn’t be respected if I made trivial semantic errors (regardless of the logic). But in any case, you are wrong. Sorry, but you are wrong. This is a fact.
