Asteroid Defense Stupidity at Forbes

1. I agree. Even if you’re dismissive of the threat of major asteroid impact (and I do think it’s unlikely that we’ll get a bad one in the next few thousand years), finding and tracking all the asteroids in the solar system that might cross the Earth’s orbit has scientific merit as well.

   That said, I’ve seen some stupid arguments trotted out for space colonization in the near-term based off of impact risk. I can understand the skepticism.

   1. My wife begrudges paying a dollar a day for flood insurance to insure a multi-hundred thousand dollar asset against total destruction. We live a couple miles from the ocean, at 12 foot MSL, and the water has historically never been closer than halfway up the lawn.

      1. And yet, if a flood were to completely destroy the house, that dollar a day will have paid for itself many times over. I’d say it’s not unreasonable to spend an extremely tiny fraction of the federal budget on asteroid discovery and tracking.

2. the dinosaurs argued the same way 🙂

3. I’m not sure if this is stupid or not. The author correctly states that people have trouble making good risk-benefit decisions when the probabilities of a given result are very low. The author seems to think he is immune to this problem, which is unlikely.

   There are serious issues along these lines. The author estimates that the odds of an impact, multiplied by the resulting damage, average out to a few hundred deaths per year. By that standard, one could say that preventing an impact isn’t worth more than $100,000 per year. (In this, I am following many estimates that preventing deaths can, currently, cost as little as $100/per.person.)

   But that probably isn’t the best standard. catastrophic events tend to have additional costs, independent of the number of people affected. The damage from a.natural disaster can’t really be calculated on a person by person basis.

   So what should we do? We need to do a cost-benefit analysis, to make sure we are making the best use of our money. But, for very unlikely events, we’re lucky if we agree about the risks and have no consensus on how to measure the value of what we want to.protect.

   1. One way to look at it is if a large portion of the money making population were to be killed, then you would need to include that annual loss as well.

      1. Exactly. The lifetime earning potential of an individual can be several million dollars. You can reach a billion dollars quickly. And how much is NASA spending on NEO detection ….?

         1. Actually, the projected future GDP of humanity should be accounted for in some asteroid impact projections. Good luck guessing that.

            I’m pretty sure a risk analysis on extinction-level events is trickier that that bullshit article that tries to pose as one… yet I won’t give the Forbes people my mail to tell them so. So, this, basically, +1.

      2. To be blunt, if a large fraction of the money making population were to be killed, we’d have worse things to worry about than financial implications. For something on that scale, dollars and euros aren’t a useful metric. Which makes evaluating the risk a bit more difficult.

   2. And you know how fast deaths scale with even a slight increase in size. A minute difference and we’d have lost that city in Russia. And this guy thinks NASA is wasting time doing this? Truth be known NASA has been dragging its feet despite requirements set in law to do otherwise.

   3. $100 is pretty low. Government agencies often assign a standard value per human life for the purpose of evaluating regulations. The EPA’s is $9.1M, the FDA’s is $7.9M. With those standards, we would be justified spending on the order of $1B a year on mitigation.

      1. I think we’re proving just how uncertain these cost/value estimates are. The $100 number (admittedly from a decade or so ago and not adjusted for inflation) is based on cost per death prevented by improved third world health care, living conditions and infrastructure. That suggests five orders of magnitude uncertainty.

         1. Not uncertainty, but rather entirely different metrics. The FDA and EPA numbers values not costs, derived from average future earning and whatever other factors they used. A value tells you what you should be willing to pay (in this case to prevent a death). Even in a third world country the value of human life must be reckoned as much greater than $100 (which doesn’t mean they have the money on hand to put into medical infrastructure).

   4. Averaged out, since the advent of nuclear weapons, far less than 3000 people per year have been killed in nuclear strikes.
      Cost-wise, the money we spend on defense against this and anti-proliferation just doesn’t make sense.

      More people die each year from falls in their homes than from nuclear war. We need to divert the trillions we spend on nuclear defense into better handrails, shoe treads and carpet tacks.

      1. However, it’s unlikely that hundreds of millions of people would die from bad shoe treads on a single bad day.

      2. While what you say is true, you do not bother to mention some extremely important facts.

         To end WW-II the US expended the entire world’s nuclear weapon arsenal. But that was a measly two nuclear fission warheads. Today, there are orders of magnitudes more warheads and they’re mostly nuclear fusion warheads which are far more powerful. If the world were to expend its entire nuclear arsenal today, the number of deaths would be orders of magnitudes greater than all of the previous deaths due to nuclear weapons.

         1. You took my comment entirely too seriously.

            1. Apparently so.

         2. After a life detector for Mars maybe we need to work on a “Modest Proposal” detector for NasaWatch.

4. A child dies of diarrhea every 90 seconds around the clock. We have better things to concentrate our worries on then killer impacts.

   1. We are a nation of some 319 million people with a GDP of about $17.5 trillion.

      I think we can afford to multi-task.

      1. We can, but we don’t.
         But my point was more about concern than cost.
         A million children die every year from the horror of unstoppable diarrhea (which can be prevented for PENNIES) and it concerns me far more than statistical risks of impacts. I most certainly agree with the author that we should monitor, but what is the likelihood of even detecting, let alone destroying an impactor a couple of meters in diameter, particularly those coming from outside the plane of the ecliptic and travelling from the distance of the Moon in an hour and a half? The NEOcam’s minimum detection is for an object with 360,000 times that volume. Even then, the tools for diverting or destroying have serious implications in the arms control and proliferation arena. Beamed weapons or hypervelocity impactor weapons are majorly dual usage and possible raise the risk of war potentially at a faster rate than they lessen the risk of impacts.
         Again, I don’t think they should be ignored but I don’t fret too much.

         1. I am certain that there are vastly many more people concerned about health issues worldwide than there are people concerned about asteroids. Those concerned about asteroid impacts are a very tiny minority by comparison.

            And I have no doubt that there is at least an order of magnitude (or maybe two) more money spent on health issues than is spent on asteroid detection.

            I’d say the odds are very good. Had NEOCam been operational in February of 2013, I think it would have spotted the Chelyabinsk meteor a few hours before it impacted the Earth. Sentinel could have given a few months’s warning. That’s almost definitely not in enough time for a deflection effort to be mounted, but is sufficient to give warning to the region. The number of injuries could have been reduced simply by alerting people to stay away from the windows. A deflection effort would require a few years notice, but that’s notice we won’t have if we don’t look for these asteroids.

            BTW, traveling from “the distance of the Moon” to the Earth in an hour and a half would give a velocity of about 71 km/s. That’s faster than the escape velocity of the solar system at Earth’s orbit (which is about 42.1 km/s), so it’s VERY unlikely anything near the Earth would be going anywhere near that fast. That would be fast even for a comet at perihelion.

            Also, objects only “couple of meters” in diameter aren’t terribly worrisome. You get a neat fireball in the sky and some tiny pebbles make their way to the surface of the Earth. Objects larger than about 15-20 meters in diameter are much more likely to have large fragments reach the surface of the Earth, and so are of much greater concern.

            1. I was using 133 minutes which my mind saw as 1 1/2 hours. about 2 1/2 hours is better.

               However, NEOcam is designed to see objects 240 meters and wider. The Russian object was 20 meters. I suppose maybe if it was looking dead on it would have seen it but very late. As you say, it might give time for a warning.

               Note that that is exactly what I suggest is both doable and desirable: “I most certainly agree with the author that we should monitor”.

               As I said I just don’t fret much about the statistical risks versus the day-to-day real attrition on the human species and the rest of the biosphere. NOT that it should be ignored, just that it is maybe a large hazard, but a very low risk.

            2. 133 minutes gives a velocity of just over 48 km/s, which is still faster than solar system escape velocity.

               Where are you getting this time from?

               We can’t accurately calculate the hazard or the risk without knowing what asteroids are in our vicinity. I’d like to eliminate the “maybe” from your statement.

            3. Planetary Society:

               Sizing Up The Threat
               …
               For example, asteroids in near-Earth space typically encounter our planet with velocities of about 20 kilometers (12 miles) per second. Comets, however, encounter Earth with much higher velocities, typically 30 to 60 kilometers (19 to 37 miles) per second. Because the damaging effects are dependent on the kinetic energy of the impact (equal to half of the mass of the impactor times the square of its velocity), a comet smaller than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) across could pack a punch with sufficient energy to initiate a global climate disaster.

               Also see here:
               https://books.google.com/bo…

            4. All right, a source.

               Asteroids: 20 km/s gives a transit time from the Moon to the Earth of 320 minutes, aka 5 hours.

               Comets: 30 to 60 km/s gives a transit time of 213 minutes (3.5 hours) to 106 minutes (1.75 hours).

               Though I still don’t know where you pulled the 133 minutes from.

               We weren’t talking about comets, and it’s far less likely that comets would hit the Earth anyway. Especially those “coming from outside the plane of the ecliptic,” those would be much more likely to miss above or below the Earth. Comets are usually much easier to spot when they are still several months out, though their higher speed would be an issue for a deflection attempt. NEOCam would be looking outward from L1 and could spot comets but that’s not really what it’s interested in finding.

            5. As a rough scaling using English units (I think in English units) of 240k miles for the moon and a comet velocity of 30 miles/second and got the 133 minutes which I then posted to the nearest half hour. The precise number was unneeded and not of value.
               “We weren’t talking about comets”, well I was. That was implied by my statement: :… particularly those coming from outside the plane of the ecliptic and travelling from the distance of the Moon in an hour and a half?”
               As I clarified about the transit time, I should have said “in 2 hours”. My brain saw 133 minutes as a 1 hour 33 minutes.

            6. I’ll give you that “impactor” was ambiguous and so could have meant a comet, though you lose points for also implying that all objects that impact the Earth do so at that speed. Try not describing a worst case scenario, as it really doesn’t help your argument any. It’s the average and more likely impact events that need to be worried about the most.

            7. Sorry if anyone thought I was implying that all impactors are hypervelocity, out-of-the-ecliptic comets, that wasn’t my intent. We really don’t know what that risk is because we don’t monitor well for things like that, hence my : “I most certainly agree with the author that we should monitor,”

   2. Arguing that money should not be spent on A because spending it on B is, perhaps, more virtuous ignores the reality that money would already be spent on B if people actually wanted to do it.

      Funding for NASA is not the reason we aren’t spending money on eliminating diarrhea in poverty-stricken children or, for that matter, why we aren’t eliminating the profit in selling excess amounts of fat, salt and sugar to overfed Westerners.

      1. I was not being clear. I was not saying that the money was better spent elsewhere. If it were India, for example, I would definitely meant to have said that.
         But we are fabulously wealthy and can do many things.
         I was simply pointing out that I don’t get fretful about some low probability risks (even if the hazard is large) as compared to here and now real killers wiping out millions and millions each year. Please re-read my original post knowing my actual view.

         “A child dies of diarrhea every 90 seconds around the clock. We have better things to concentrate our worries on then killer impacts.”

5. NASA is making a mistake by not funding or supporting this mission… Another example of poor administration and complete lack of vision and leadership – to the point of incompetence.
   From the B612 website:

   “Currently there is no comprehensive dynamic map of our inner solar system showing the positions and trajectories of these asteroids that might threaten Earth. The citizens of Earth are essentially flying around the solar system with eyes closed. Asteroids have struck Earth before, and they will again – unless we do something about it. The probability of a 100 megaton impact somewhere on Earth each and every year is the same as the probability of an individual being killed in an automobile accident each year – about .01%. These odds are small, yet few among us would drive around each day without wearing a seat belt. What precautions are we taking with our planet?

   We as a civilization have the capability to change the odds, and it is our mission to ensure that such impacts do not happen again. Less than 1% of the over one million asteroids greater than 40 meters have been identified to date. The Sentinel Mission will discover the other 99% – or 50 times more asteroids than have been found by all other telescopes combined.”

   1. They are funding it – it’s just that the money is now going to JPL for their NEOCam satellite.

      1. Not Invented Here syndrome. Anyhow, as long as it gets done. Cheapest life insurance I ever saw, the tiny IR telescope.

6. This is another of those bloggers that Forbes has decided to publish without checking the content first. I find the guy extremely suspect. His bio at Forbes claims that he is a ‘professor’ at Lewis & Clark College, yet appears to have been gone from their faculty for some years and was, at least at one point in the past few years, working for an outfit called trap.it that describes itself as doing “authentic employee advocacy and social selling for engaging people”. That’s not where I go for advice on what projects NASA should be supporting.

   1. more later

   2. I have no doubts whatsoever about his academic credentials. College websites are never up to date. Most of his stuff is just fine. Its this one article that I take issue with – that’s it.

7. Three quick comments. (1) In deriding this one flawed paragraph, you neglect the rest of the article, which is actiually a fairly accurate discussion of planetary defense. (2) Risk estimates and interpretations for asteroid impacts are all over the map. Yes, some people hype the danger. But in fact many calculations underestimate the risk. This confusion reflects the difficult problem of doing quantitative risk analyses for very rare catastrophic events. The simple calculation in this story based on average values substantially underestimates the risk of such rare events. (3) NASA’s candidate IR deep asteroid survey. NEOCAM, has just passed the first step toward funding in the NASA Discovery Program. And meanwhile the ground-based LSST is under construction, and this telescope also will have a robust capability for a deep asteroid survey

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