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When I was researching all the ways cosmic catastrophes could wipe us out for my book, I was a little overwhelmed at the sheer number of such potential hazards. Gamma-ray bursts, roaming black holes, galactic dust clouds waiting in the dark to enshroud the Sun, and so on. But these are extremely rare and unlikely ways for us to go, and not worth worrying about.
But then there’s the impact threat.
Sure, the chances of civilization (or even a single human) being sent off to the Great Asteroid Belt in the Sky are very low, but they’re not zero, and they’re high enough that we should be looking into this threat.
And astronomers do. There are observatories (though not enough IMO) dedicated to scanning the skies for incoming rocks, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California is one place where they take this seriously. In fact, they’ve created The Asteroid Watch webpage loaded with info on such dangerous objects. They have news, multimedia, quizzes, and more all about the danger from space.
They even have a way cool widget which will keep you up-to-date on which rocks are passing when, with a handy drawing of a building or a bridge to give you an idea of the size of the interplanetary interloper.
Not only that, they started a couple of Twitter feeds: AsteroidWatch with general info, and LowFlyingRocks which is a wonderful way of feeding into your paranoid fantasies of civilization-ending astronomical threats: it tells you what rocks just passed by the Earth.
All this is fun to me, because you should know the odds of getting killed in an impact event are roughly equal to getting killed on an amusement park ride: that is, pretty low. But remember, we have laws on amusement ride safety to protect us, so we should also have plans in place for cosmic cannonballs, too. JPL’s efforts here are a great and fun step in raising public awareness about impacts, and that’s the first step toward making politicians take it seriously, too.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
I’m following both of those on Twitter. Fun for all!!
But to hijack this for a second sir. I hope you have seen this – which I read the tweet from @NLSI – Gigipan images of Apollo Missions!
Holy Frakkin Cow! (as I retweeted).
July 30th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Too bad NASA will probably not be around for much longer in the next decades!
July 30th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Well, the main problem is that although on average the statistics are very very low, a major impact will kill far more people than a major failing of a safety ride.
But a good mention is http://www.b612foundation.org/ which is pretty serious and scientific on how to actually move asteroids out of the way. The main problem is that you need lots of time (nuking it as in the Armageddon movie won’t help, you need a few years of constant thrust at least)
July 30th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Isn’t there an even smaller chance of dying in an impact event than an amusement park ride accident? The Wikic Oracle sez:
“From 1987 to 2000, there were an estimated 4.5 amusement ride-related deaths per year.”
I doubt there were even 4 impact event deaths per year during that period…
Not that it changes the point of the post! But it does add some perspective… Amusement parks are LOTS more fatal than asteroids…
July 30th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
@Brian
The rock would kill A LOT more poeple…. That kind of skews the odds in its favor.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Brian: let’s say there’s an impact every 1000 years that kills 100k people. The general risk of death by impact is 100 people per year, even though you might see 0 deaths for 999 years.
Amusement park rides are more widely distributed, however. So you see their deaths all the time. Over the same time period, they kill 4500 people on average.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Read the title. Read the article. Went back and read the title. You punny bastard, I love your blog.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
It bugs me how few people worry about this. I’m always reminded of the old lady who, while watching chunks of Shoemaker-Levy bombard Jupiter, said “That sort of thing happens in space.”
Now I’m no astrogeographer, but isn’t the Earth in space?
July 30th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
“JPL Rocks My World” needs to be a T-Shirt.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
@ Evolving Squid: Stupid averages! Thats why I flunked statistics… I need to go back to Physics for Poets…
July 30th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
When Baron Cuvier discovered that several creatures had suddenly gone extinct, they were surprised; but the fossil record is clear, many species have gone extinct. Humans could also go extinct, like any creature, and likely will , if nothing else, an ice age is slated to return, several asteroids could hit earth. In fact, if the mesozoic era hadn’t ended with a large asteroid, humans would not be here in the first place. A slight change in the Pliocene climate could have kept primates in the forest and no need for bipedalism, thus no humans. Back in the days of Piltdown man, scientists expected that they’d find a missing link creature with the body of a chimp and mind of modern man, because they assumed intelligence characterized humans. But no, in reality, bipedalism evolved first, probably because the early hominids had to roam out of the forests into the creeping savannah.
It’s all chance.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Hey, Dr Plait, if I wanted to discuss a subject on a professional level with you (detecting near earth asteroids) would initiating correspondence be best via the BA email? I have some telescope type questions, and I think I have some possible leads on getting funding as well as equipment for this.
Serendipitous blog!
July 30th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Sure, amusement park rides kill about the same number of people on an individual level. However no amusement park ride has the potential to kill large numbers of people, or even all people.
Meteor impacts are scary not because of the real (as opposed to the computed average) annual body count, but because of the massive damage potential they carry. Cosmic impacts can rise to extinction level events.
As Phil says, those other bad event types (wandering black holes, GRBs, etc.) have the same damage potential. However they are extremely rare in comparison to meteor impacts.
July 30th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Don’t forget about the Earth Impact Effects website, which is also a lot of fun:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
July 30th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
However no amusement park ride has the potential to kill large numbers of people, or even all people.
I dunno, if my visiting relatives force me to go on It’s a Small World one more time, I might bump the averages up a bit….
July 30th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
JPL rocks my world too. Then again, that’s where I work, so I would hope that it would.
And it does. Man, I’ve worked some crappy jobs at some crappy places (Disney, Lions Gate Films – seriously, not all that fun), but JPL is the best place I have ever worked, even if I am a secretary and not a big science/engineering brain.
Things such as those mentioned in your article are amongst the reasons why.
G-d, I love working here.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
“…and not worth worrying about.”
Way to sell a book!
July 30th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
This reminds me of the day when I assured Fabio that there was no way he’d hit a seagull riding on that roller coaster.
July 31st, 2009 at 5:30 am
I’ll just add the obligatory:
Phil, you wrote a book?
July 31st, 2009 at 5:49 am
14. Ian Says:
Don’t forget about the Earth Impact Effects website, which is also a lot of fun:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
_____________
Heh – that site’s fun. I’ve tried several times to de-orbit the Earth but haven’t found the right impact angle and velocity. I usually just turn the planet inside-out.
July 31st, 2009 at 9:55 am
So I seem to remember reading recently that although there are people tracking the skies for us, more people work at a typical McDonald’s than looking for dangerous objects circling above.
Priorities!
August 1st, 2009 at 6:47 am
I have duct tape, saran wrap, and I intend to duck and cover. Who says we have no plans?
August 1st, 2009 at 6:50 am
When do the buses leave?
August 1st, 2009 at 6:54 am
I hear that the asteroids are planning to move us out of the way.
August 1st, 2009 at 6:56 am
Scorched Earth Policy…….sounds familiar.
August 1st, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I assume JPL is keeping track on the actual NEO threat. Seems the comet contribution has been downgraded:
The current statistics of observed Jupiter hits seems consistent with the model.
Maybe we should consider dispersing the NEOs and so their threat, if there really is little outer replenishment.
August 1st, 2009 at 8:41 pm
The fossil record is clear, all species have perished. Most (99.9%, IIRC) by extinction, the rest by evolving in other ways.
So clearly humans will perish one day too. Why and how that should be considered especial is unclear.
First and foremost, humans (and so their various species such as sapiens and neanderthalensis to mention a few) are AFAIU defined by their persistent (stone) technology. There is no reason to think that this technology is tied to bipedalism as such. Bird technology, using sticks to get to food, is mostly independent of legs and is instead mainly relying on the beak. Chimp technology, much the same, is mostly independent on mouth and instead mainly relying on hands. As is hominid technology in general.
Second, AFAIU todays research has gone beyond singular states, and found that chimps as well as other apes shows bipedal behavior in the forest. Apparently chimps use bipedalism when traversing large branches while foraging for food. (Near tree trunks as well as on smaller branches they reverse to using quadrupedal modes of transport.) Bipedalism is a functional state that has been with apes, and in the forest, for a very long time.