Asteroid Search vs Homeland Security
i found this article interesting.
do you find the disparity in funding appropriate, or do you think funding should be reallocated? are the priorities correct here?
Asteroid Search vs Homeland Security
i found this article interesting.
do you find the disparity in funding appropriate, or do you think funding should be reallocated? are the priorities correct here?
I think even without the fear of NEO impacts the defense budget is overinflated. But this kind of early detection (and, it is to be hoped with time, possible deflection) research should be under the umbrella of national defense.
I think if we cut 10 billion dollars from funding lasers, sonic cannons, and other scifi-esque weapons and reallocated that money to NASA's current detection efforts, we'd see some real results without really losing an edge over other militaries.
Originally posted by focus4chumps
yes, terrorists have eradicated terrestrial life on a planetary scale more than meteors.
No meteor has ever managed to wipe out humanity or its ancestors.
No meteor has managed to wipe out anything larger than a city block or so in the last 60 million years.
The problem with the argument that because a meteor might wipe us out and thus we should put effort into defending ourselves from it is that there are an endless number of ridiculously unlikely things that might wipe us out. If we accepted that argument we'd have to spend all of our money doing nothing but saving ourselves from things that aren't going to happen (and which we can do nothing about).
it has happened multiple times. to declare "since it hasn't happened in our own greatly marginalized scope of time, we're safe" is about as asinine as declaring america safe from islamist terrorism since there hasn't been a successful mass-killing of civilians in america for over 10 years.
well at least we have the ability to spot asteroids and stand a moderate chance of seeing the giant rock that could extinct us all...after which we can all watch as helpless as infants...praying for bruce willis to save us all.
No terrorist has ever caused this amount of damage in history:
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/761893.shtml
And as pointed out, this is just earth.
Originally posted by focus4chumps
it has happened multiple times. to declare "since it hasn't happened in our own greatly marginalized scope of time, we're safe"
I didn't say that, though. I said that we can't use the fact that meteor impacts have arbitrarily large potential costs as a complete argument. There's simply no way of getting around the fact that civilization ending meteor impacts are ridiculously uncommon and that has to factor into how we allocate our resources to deal with them.
Should we also spend money finding ways to protect ourselves from the chance that we're in a simulation and God might have a power outage that destroys the universe? The result is actually worse than a civilization ending meteor impact (no chance of anyone surviving) but I'd bet you think its so unlikely we shouldn't spend a lot of money on saving ourselves from it. Its an extreme example, of course, but its purpose is simply to illustrate that probability is a factor.
We're much better off spending money on things that are vastly more common if slightly less disasterous (terrorism, crime in general, disease, almost any other kind of natural disaster).
Originally posted by focus4chumps
well at least we have the ability to spot asteroids and stand a moderate chance of seeing the giant rock that could extinct us all...after which we can all watch as helpless as infants...praying for bruce willis to save us all.
Which goes to the other part of my argument. If we can't defend ourselves from planet destroying events (likely) why should we pour money into looking for them? Its just security theater dressed up with scientific language.
Originally posted by Sadako of Girth
And as pointed out, this is just earth.
I assume we're all living on Earth in which case meteor impacts on other planets are irrelevant to protecting people.
Originally posted by Symmetric ChaosWhich goes to the other part of my argument. If we can't defend ourselves from planet destroying events (likely) why should we pour money into looking for them? Its just security theater dressed up with scientific language.
I assume we're all living on Earth in which case meteor impacts on other planets are irrelevant to protecting people.
No spending money on detection would allow people to relocate at times of projected strikes.
Not if you have an understanding of how the small and cosmically young surface area of the moon got it's scars or if you understand how the other bodies in our solar system affect directly the trajectories of debris that is in it or drifts into it.
Originally posted by Omega Vision
Sym, I don't think anyone disagrees that terrorism is a more pressing and immediate concern than NEOs, but do you really think it's tens of thousands of times more important?
First of all I could almost understand spending a few billion of asteroid countermeasures, that would be expensive, but the article us just about spending money to improve out ability the ability to stare at them helplessly. While that's useful I'd say we're already well within diminishing returns there.
Moreover if we discard unimaginably rare civilization ending meteors we can do absolutely nothing about this most recent meteor drives the point home pretty well. A meteor came down in a populated area and . . . broke some windows. We've had a number of impacts over the last hundred years that could have been dramatic and weren't. I think people tend to think "what if it hit here?" and forget that the vast majority of places an object might hit are not really going to affect humans.
From a cost-benefit standpoint we have two types events to spend money on between terrorism and meteors: One happens frequently around the world, often causes harm to people, and can be prevented. The second almost never happens, rarely harms people when it does, and can't be prevented.
I'd say yes, terrorism is worth spending thousands of times more on than near earth objects.
Secondly, Homeland Security does more than just "stop terrorism" so that budget figure is misleading if you're thinking of it as representing the amount of money spent on terrorism. Its not easy for me to estimate what fraction of their budget goes to that but its worth noting that in 2013 they asked for $6 billion in disaster relief funding. Were a deadly asteroid to be spotted headed for the US that disaster relief is the most relevant thing we have available. Knowing very roughly when and where it will hit is not all that helpful.
I was going to add a third point, that asteroid impacts are an international issue and are probably being searched for internationally, but that doesn't actually seem to be true (if you go to wikipedia they have graphs of NEO detection systems, all the named ones are part of NASA and the unnamed ones are very small). For whatever reason the world has decided to make asteroids an American problem. So the few million dollars that NASA spends on asteroid detection are effectively the whole world's budget for the issue, which might be a reason for concern. Certainly it means that we, as a species, can easily afford to do much better detecting NEOs.
Of course, those same graphs show that the new Catalina system is extremely effective, and we're not just finding new NEOs every year but we're finding more new NEOs every year.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
First of all I could almost understand spending a few billion of asteroid countermeasures, that would be expensive, but the article us just about spending money to improve out ability the ability to stare at them helplessly. While that's useful I'd say we're already well within diminishing returns there.
i agree that mere detection is silly if nothing is devoted to research on deviating dangerous asteroids from an impact course. the logical solution is to invest more in asteroid-defense along with detection. your ultimate solution of just saying "**** it" is purely asinine.
its clearly implied many times.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Which goes to the other part of my argument. If we can't defend ourselves from planet destroying events (likely) why should we pour money into looking for them? Its just security theater dressed up with scientific language.
investment in x & y is necessary
there is little/no investment in 'x'
solution: scrap 'y'
and you keep rehashing your speculation that another species-killing meteor is probably never going to happen.