Hacker News Reader

Comment by sqeaky | Hacker News Reader

Death by asteroids is a low risk but high impact type of event. We cannot afford to have even one such event.

It really does only take one and costs little for us to prepare. We want to mine asteroids and further science anyway, so we are going up there already. It's not like the cost of the whole space program is dedicated to defending from this. We just need to have a few plans ready to go when we do find it.

It would cost millions of dollars, compared to the billions already in space and trillions we spend in defense. What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation?

EDIT - Wording and spelling.

View on HN

> What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation?

Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident.

Yet, you still roll the dice, and go to work. Presumably because you get paid.

For a more global catastrophic event, consider that the odds that you will die in a catastrophic nuclear war between Russia and the United States are far, far greater then 0.00001%. Yet, we all carry on as if its business as usual. (When we could take steps to reduce how catastrophic such a war would be, or how likely such a war would be.)

>Every day that you commute to work, you have a higher then 0.00001% chance of dying in a traffic accident.

If all of humanity got in the car with me as I went to work, I'd be much more concerned about the odds.

I think you've just pointed out the fallacy here: the false equivalence of a risk affecting one person vs. the entire human race (or planet).

The if the odds of dying in an auto accident for one person are 0.00001%, then the risks of the 7.5 billion souls on this rock dying simultaneously in an auto accident are 0.00001% raised to the power of 7.5 billion. That's basically 1 * 10^-45% odds.

The comparative risk posed by the asteroid is approximately 1 * 10^40 times greater.

Which paints a rather different picture.

Each of us may face that risk, but all off us don't, together.

This is a point at which conventional models of risk start falling apart. There's a meaningful difference between small events randomly distributed, and massive large impacts occurring everywhere all at once. Also between small events with no interconnectedness, and with systemic failure.

Simple incident occurrence rate fails to capture this.

We also invest heavily in preventing such a nuclear exchange.

Of course we continue on, we hope or expect that we will still be here. Rather than just lob missiles or give up, we took a stance and many active and expensive steps costing the equivalent of trillions of modern dollars. We definitely took real action on the Threat of Nuclear war.

We also invest incredibly heavily into making such a nuclear exchange more likely. We've sunk trillions of dollars into building a collective suicide switch.

We don't need more then a hundred nuclear weapons for MAD to work. Meanwhile, Russia and the US are pointing thousands of them at each-other. (And in the US, at least, the minimum number of people required to authorize a launch is tragically small. In a time of escalated tensions, a president can bring about the end of the world, without the consent of anyone else. There is no law or military process that can prevent it.)

Even if the odds of nuclear war were 1% in my lifetime, it would be an unacceptable level of risk. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, in reality, much higher.

>Death by asteroids is a low risk but high impact type of event. We cannot afford to have even one such event.

Depending on how rare and difficult to tackle would be, we probably also cannot afford to do anything about it.

If we have as much as 1% or even 0.1% possibility of one hitting earth in the next 100 years, we would have rallied to build something even if is very costly and difficult.

In 0.00001% chances or less, there's no way any country is gonna's devote any significant resources...

>What is money in the face of a 0.00001% chance of annihilation?

Still very important?

(We have a much more concrete and possible chance of billions of deaths from nuclear arms and/or global warming, but we still don't do anything about it).

Money doesn't help the rich when they are dead.

Spending in one area does not prevent spending in another. we have many dollars and some problems require more than others. They can even work together, perhaps a tax on CO2 release can fund diplomatic and scientific missions to help mitigate or prevent the other two catastrophes.

Y'all should check out https://b612foundation.org

Reply on news.ycombinator.com