Comment by origin_path | Hacker News Reader

Comment by origin_path | Hacker News Reader

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"The Tunguska event was a nuclear-weapon scale asteroid"

Which had very little impact on humanity because it exploded in the middle of the tundra.

"These are predicted to happen once every hundred years or so"

What is predicted exactly, by whom and how were these predictions validated against testable reality given the postulated rareness? If they're so common then why is it so hard to name the last 10? I think in reality these events are very rare and will almost always happen over the oceans, deserts, poles etc where not many people live.

"Long-tail risks exist, and burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't"

They exist and I am not pretending they don't. I am saying that this style of reasoning in which an extremely unlikely event is unfalsifiably and arbitrarily assigned near infinite downsides in order to justify spending time and resources on it, is problematic and as a society we are far too generous towards people who do this.

> If they're so common then why is it so hard to name the last 10?

"I can't name such events therefore they're not worth thinking about" is a ridiculous argument.

The most recent one happened less than 10 years ago and almost 1,500 people were injured, and we completely missed its approach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

Luckily, it again happened near a depopulated zone, but the damage was still extensive.

> I think in reality these events are very rare and will almost always happen over the oceans, deserts, poles etc where not many people live.

Most car accidents will happen to bad drivers, so if you're a good driver you don't need to wear your seatbelt, amirite?

The fact that an easily preventable event typically happens without much damage is no consolation when that's not the case.

> They exist and I am not pretending they don't. I am saying that this style of reasoning in which an extremely unlikely event is unfalsifiably and arbitrarily assigned near infinite downsides

Your mistake is thinking the likelihoods assigned are arbitrary and unfalsifiable. By your logic, COVID-19 was unlikely as most outbreaks are small and isolated, and the likelihood of a global contagion so unfalsifiably remote it's not worth thinking about. Therefore pandemic preparation is a waste of time and money. Now that 6 million people have died, that view doesn't look so rosy in hindsight.

The calculations on asteroid threats have been done based on known data, and even with our current preparations we still miss some potentially devastating ones like Chelyabinsk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...

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