link to http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/technology/afp/article.html?s=asia/headlines/000104/technology/afp/Britain_appoints_team_to_save_world_from_asteroids.html

-- please no more (wemaybe@stilldoomed.com), January 05, 2000

Answers

"Oh no!" is right. This seems like deja vue. Back to the bunkers, boys!

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), January 05, 2000.

I have NO problem with this at all, even if a few tax dollars of mind go to a worldwide effort.

It's been clearly established there have been several mass extinctions of much of the life on earth from asteroid impacts....

There's never been a mass extinction of much of the life on earth from computer problems :-)

Are you aware your chances of dying in an asteroid impact are higher than your chance of dying in an airline accident?

Yet how much money is spent on air safety research, the NTSB, etc?

-- John H Krempasky (johnk@dmv.com), January 05, 2000.

too bad those y2k doomsayer fruitcakes can't demonstrate what mass extinction is really like for the rest of us.

-- Larry McMurtry (lmcmurtry@dove.com), January 05, 2000.

Verification of source on odds of asteroid killing me being higher than airline death, please.

-- J (Y2J@home.com), January 05, 2000.

Im not going to crawl back in the bunker, even if a big non-compliant rock come a-tumbling down

-- voynik (voynik@aol.com), January 05, 2000.

J,

Excellent question, and it was in a competitive speech I did in college on risk assessment, and I'm not certain where I have my copies of old speeches :-) I remember having a cite in it with that specific information but since it was about 7 years ago I don't remember what it is.

Basically, you've got an extremely rare event that probably kills most of the world population vs. a common event that kills a few hundred a year a best. Even if conservative assumptions are made on the recurrance interval of large asteroid impacts, the math easily gives an individual person a higher chance of dying in an asteroid impact in their lifetime than in an airline crash.

Of course, If I'd said "My sister's hairdresser's second cousin's stepson is in the Army and he said he heard from the Officer's Club Mess Cook that he overheard two Majors talking about a memo they'd accidentally seen on a General's desk about Clinton imposing martial law a week from now" I doubt anyone would have questioned me at all and I'd be flooded with "Thanks for the info...keep us posted!" messages.

-- John H Krempasky (johnk@dmv.com), January 05, 2000.

I think air travel is relatively safe _because_ of the huge amounts of efforts invested in regulation and safety.

600 million people flew in the Uk during the last 10 years, and 60 of them were killed. That a casualty figure of 0.0000001% or a 1 in 10 million chance. I am sure this figure would go up if standards were allowed to lapse.

There might be something you could do about an asteroid, but I don't what you could about a blast wave of cosmic radiation. Apparently the mass exctinctions also occured when the solar system passed through one of the spiral arms of the galaxy (this occurs every 50 or 60 million years). It is quite plausible that radiation from nearby exploding stars may have caused the extinction, but I don't know how that hypothesis has been received.

-- Matthew (mdpope@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.

Tuesday, January 4 8:37 AM SGT

Britain appoints team to save world from asteroids

LONDON, Dec 4 (AFP) -

Britain's Science Minister Lord Sainsbury on Tuesday named a three-man task force to study the risks of the Earth being destroyed by a giant asteroid.

The team is tasked with making proposals to the British National Space Centre on how the country can best contribute to international efforts to protect the planet from a strike from space.

The task force will be chaired by Harry Atkinson, 70, a past chairman of the European Space Agency's Council.

The other members were named as Crispin Tickell, 69, an environmental expert and diplomat who was Britain's permanent representative to the United Nations between 1987 and 1990, and David Williams, a 62-year-old professor of astronomy at University College, London, who formerly worked for NASA.

They are due to report by mid-2000.

Lord Sainsbury said: "The risk of an asteroid or comet causing substantial damage is extremely remote.

"This is not something that people should lie awake at night worrying about but we cannot ignore the risk, however remote, and a case can be made for monitoring the situation on an international basis.

"I hope that the setting up of this task force will help the UK play a full and prominent role in international discussions on this important issue."

Of the known asteroids and comets, which scientists have dubbed near Earth objects, none is believed to pose a significant risk to the planet in the near future, according to government data.

However, over the past millions of years the Earth has been hit by objects of sufficient size to cause serious damage, including an impact about 65 million years ago which is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

-- Mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.

Oh, boy.

It begins(did it ever end?).

Okay folks, this is the way it looks to me so far. Lotsa folks are claiming victory on day 5(and remember 2 of those days fell on a weekend). Doomers are wrong; Pollys are gettin' jiggy wid it.

And many folks think that preparations were stupid(why, I'll never figure out; it is always good to be prepared for hard times).

Dangerous thinking, folks. Next thing to happen: someone predicts another catastrophic event(asteroid, plague, "My Mother The Car" and Hello, Larry" reruns being the only thing on TeeVee; you get the idea), and folks say,

"Look at the Y2K thing! Nothing happened there; why should I do anything now? This is probably just like that situation; people trying to scare us into spending our hard earned(***again, what's wrong with extra food?***) on silly survivalist crap. Get a life!"

Only problem is, the next one may not be so kind and gentle as the Y2K rollover has been so far(remember, day 5; I don't think we've seen everything yet). As a result, even less people will be prepared(why bother?!?!!), and more die/become totally disenfranchised/fill in the bad thing here as a result.

We can't let this get to us to the point of thumbing our noses at all future problems, no matter how loony they might sound(and remember: the truth is always stranger than fiction)!

Doomers: Don't take this as a sign to let down your guard. The manure could STILL hit the blower, from Y2K glitches down the road to a major financial crisis to a war to asteroids to rabid killer bees/ferrets/high school students on crack with BIG guns. You never know; always better safe than sorry.

Pollys: Think nothing bad is ever gonna happen ever again? Remember that when YOU lose your job. Not a catastrophe for me or my buddies with preps if it were to happen to one of us; potentially devastating for you personally. Folks are out there dumping their preps(I STILL don't get it!); you can pick up some ***cheap*** insurance and piece of mind, if you wanna. Ever had homemade bread made with stone ground organic red winter wheat that you ground yourself? It tastes REAL good; no good reason why to not have some wheat around the house(or rice, beans, and other staples that you'll use anyway, and are already using), unless you have a gluten allergy.

Holding onto my preps

Peace,

Don

-- Shimoda (enlighten@me.com), January 05, 2000.

Well, the main reason I think Doomer Y2K hype was (and is) so dangerous is BECAUSE we face so many future disasters.

I really don't think having a predictive flop this bad is going to help people prepare in the future..."crying wolf" will cause preparedness problems in the future.

I think this outweighs the benefits of people using their leftover Y2K prep stuff for a future earthquake, etc.

I mean, you've got the USGS desperately trying to persuade people that dense housing developments in historical mudslide/debris flow paths from Mt. Ranier is a really horrible idea......do you think people are more or less likely to take such stuff seriously now?

-- John H Krempasky (johnk@dmv.com), January 05, 2000.

Should we perhaps tell them that "Deep Impact" was a MOVIE, not a DOCUMENTARY?

-- Jay Urban (Jayho99@aol.com), January 05, 2000.

Regarding documentation on my claim of death risks....

Here is an article dealing with the question (which wasn't the original cite I had used) that had slightly different odds...

http://home.stlnet.com/~jpion/risk.html

It gives chances of Asteroid death as 1 in 25,000 and death in an airplane accident as 1 in 20,000. Hence contradicting me in that that particular study found you were slightly more likely to die in an airplane accident.

It is a debateable issue, of course, depending on what numbers one plugs in. What can be stated with a reasonable degree of certainty is that an asteroid impact is on the same order of magnitude as a threat to the average person as a tornado or an airline accident :-)

-- John H Krempasky (johnk@dmv.com), January 05, 2000.

Ok, dug up some further stuff:

http://www.mcsa.ac.ru/others/iipah/neo/neo97/970402.htm

"David Levy pointed out that the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter helped removed some of the "giggle factor" preventing studies of the impact threat from being taken seriously by governments. However, it is still not being taken seriously enough. Levy further noted that the chance of dying by impact is about the same as dying in a plane crash. We spend a lot of money trying to minimize the risk of death in a plane crash. Why are we not willing to spend a comparable amount to minimize the risk of death from impact?"

Levy was co-discoverer of Shoemaker-Levy 9, of course.

So, a different source puts the airline/asteroid death risk as equal.

Boy, you know, I'm beginning to see the attraction of all this doomer stuff...

Having fun being a comet/asteroid doomer already!

-- John H Krempasky (johnk@dmv.com), January 05, 2000.

To ask the obvious, how does one prep for getting beaned by an asteroid the size of Texas?

-- Tell me (Y@saveearth.com), January 05, 2000.

hey look on the bright side-

its a JOB FOR LIFE! (no matter how long...or short)

now how often will you find that kind of job security these days?

-- plonk! (realaddress@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.