h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"what's more likely, that asteroid collision, or any of the most far-fetched terrestial concerns?"

The asteroid (or comet, or whatever) collision is not "likely".

It is GUARANTEED, 100% certain. The *only* uncertainty is when it will happen. It's happened over, and over, and over again to this planet and it WILL happen again, sooner or later. It's incredible that someone apparently educated can even ask that question.

Yes, we could investigate ways of stopping it happening. But that approach depends on spotting something really, really small and dark against a really, really BIG dark background, YEARS in advance.

Much better to get to a stage where yes, if an object impacts there will be billions of deaths BUT the human race will survive and rebuild.

Foot and mouth is a minor concern, and many countries function perfectly well with it rife in their livestock. It's a media and government scare story.

As for the Chinese: "who will they send into space ? Do you think it'll be doctors or soldiers ?"

If they've any sense, and they have, it'll be both. All the first US astronauts were Forces types. Highly educated ones with doctorates, but Forces types, because you want fit, motivated people who can follow orders and think creatively in a terrible crisis, and the best place to find people like that is in the upper echelons of the armed forces. It's not sinister, because realistically nobody is going to be fighting an infantry war in space, and any hostile actions in space will be carried out by robots.

Huge, flying robots with big guns and pointy bits on them and flames painted down the sides and rivets that look like teeth and... and... sorry.

SoRB

You cant actually "waste" money though Novo, anymore then you can "save" lives by spending money in a different way.

Every NASA employee will be paying taxes and very likely making charitable donations of some sort. Just as the ontractors employees will be and the money spent on space exploration wont go into space it will go round and round in the economy here. The people whose lives you might improve or "save" will one day all die despite the single intervention allowed by spending the money on them. What we will lose are some fossil fuesl amounting to a drop in the ocean when compared to the amount used/wasted daily on pizza delivery. We will if the space craft used or bits of them dont return lose some materials that pale into insignificance compared to the obsolete gadgets that are buried in landfills.

Our potential gain compared to the stake we put up is immesurably huge and our stake is small by caomparison to the real wastage of effort and resources we are guilty of in everyday life.

I w#ont go into the problems that followed Columbus' theft/discovery in the "New World" but I will remind you that he struggled to get the money to fund his expeditions.

Oh right, the "Law of Averages!"

How stupid of me to forget about that.

Struggling with the idea that it would be better to prepare for a post-collision human race than to bother trying to find something (better illuminated, the closer it gets) with technology that's already picking out nascent galaxies forming eons ago.

So, laborious search for a bit of rock - or giant ark comprising the brightest and the fittest... Now I understand.

Totally with the flying robots with pointy teeth though.

Frames and charts never seem to cut and paste here without the right *space* but here goes:

T. GEHRELS: COMET AND ASTEROID STATISTICS
Table 1. Approximate statistics for the hazards due to Earth-approaching Comets and Asteroids

DiameterCumulative#ImpactfrequencyImpact energy
(km) (megatons TNT)

101010 to the 8th10 to the 7th

110 to the 3rd10 to the 6th 10 to the 4th

If it doesn't work out (as I fear), it just shows that we are constantly being bombarded with small objects and just waiting for large ones (on a Civalization scale, not an Astronomic one).

Stupid indeed, Arnie.

Actually there is no 'law of averages', also known as the gamblers fallacy. On the other hand if you bet on every horse in the race you are bound to pick the winner.

Just take a look at the moon - pockmarked with craters, some as big as a Terrestrial continent, it offers a clear visual record of the history of meteor and comet strikes in our vicinity. This process hasn't stopped just because we've built cities and filled them with people. Sooner or later one of those rocks will have our name on it.

F

I'm not suggesting that we don't look for rocks. I'm just suggesting that that's not all we should do, because we might miss one.

It's incredible, really, that mankind hasn't taken the hint we were given over a decade ago. We calmly watch with mild disinterest as Jupiter was hit almost two dozen times by bits of comet. Just ONE of those fragments impacted with a force equivalent to something like 750 times the explosive power of all the world's nuclear weapons combined.

Jupiter is practically in our backyard, astronomically speaking. Granted, it's a bigger target than us. But we've not been watching it very closely for very long, and already we've seen a HUGE, catastrophic impact. Hello? Hellooooooooooooo? Are we getting the hint?

Maybe not...

SoRB

There's no "Law of Averages"!!!!!!!

Then I'm confused. Why do statements to the effect "we'll be due for a collision" appear in multiple posts throughout this thread?

I'm also still waiting to hear what benefit we derived from landing humans on the moon.

Its guaranteed we'll all die anyway - I'd suggest we'd be better spending our time developng medical science and social science, things with real-time benefits. Not just some rocket to save America's richest or China's ruling elite.

"There's no "Law of Averages"!!!!!!!"

Correct, as commonly understood.

"Then I'm confused. "

That much is clear. For instance:

"Why do statements to the effect "we'll be due for a collision" appear in multiple posts throughout this thread?"

I did a search for the letters "due" in this thread. There are two instances. In the second instance, it was used in the sense of "because of", in the phrase "due to". So that instance is irrelevant.

In its sole appearance it was mentioned that we're "long overdue" an impact. And yes, this is an example of the fallacy. We are no more overdue an impact than you're overdue getting a tail after a run of four heads when tossing a coin. The odds this year are the same as the odds last year, and they'll be the same next year. We don't really know with certainty what the odds actually are, but they're long ones.

We DO know there hasn't been a big impact for a long, long time, but that does NOT make one any more likely. Or any less likely, for that matter.

Only one thing is certain - the next big rock IS out there, on its way, right now. If we're sensible, by the time it gets here some of us won't care, because we'll be living on Mars or the Moon, or in self-sufficient ships. If we're not, we go the way of the dinosaurs, and serve us right.

"I'm also still waiting to hear what benefit we derived from landing humans on the moon."

There are obvious benefits, like developments in materials and engineering techniques. There are less obvious benefits, like the scientific knowledge gained - how do you quantify that? And then there is the benefit of simply knowing it *can* be done if we put our minds to it, and knowing the pitfalls and dangers. The biggest danger was and remains solar flare radiation. If we're ever to live in space, we have to find a way of predicting, detecting and mitigating the occasional massive outbursts of radiation the sun generates. The moon astronauts were lucky, but that's all - they had no defences against those solar flares at all.

Don't let anyone tell you we got non-stick pans from the space program, btw. There was Teflon before there was Sputnik, let alone Apollo.

Anyone realise it's fifty years since Sputnik this October?

SoRB

"Its guaranteed we'll all die anyway - I'd suggest we'd be better spending our time developng medical science and social science, things with real-time benefits. Not just some rocket to save America's richest or China's ruling elite."

Yes, we'll all die *individually*.

But when the rock comes - WHEN, not if - if we're all down here with our fancy-schmancy medical and social sciences and real-time benefits, we don't just all die individually - we die as a SPECIES. We're *extinct*. We are the first species in history ever to have the chance to save ourselves from that fate. Shouldn't we take it?

And if you were offered a choice between the extermination of every living human, and the extermination of every living human except 1,000 rich Americans and 1,000 Chinese soldiers, which would you pick?

SoRB

Despite the best efforst of science, the world death rate is holding steady at 100%

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39236

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS5QnrpDXg0

So, Arnie- are you going to magik the big rock away? Or will the big guy with the long white beard just not let it happen?

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO&hmax=all&sort=dist_min&sdir=ASC&tlim=future&dmax=5LD&max_rows=200&action=Display+Table&show=1

Here sorted by minimum miss distance. The top one in August 2130 is predicted to skip by safely 650,000 km from us, but their margin of error allows for a possible brush by at somewhere between 115 and 133 km. That's the closest (estimated) possibility here out of 156 within 2 million km in the next 200 years (that we know about). The next one is on October 29th next year, but that's got a WCS distance of just 1,400,000 km.

THat's pretty stupid zoomer, but I should have expected it from you. I guess I *had* a higher opinion of you.

I don't know if Arnie's assertion that the spectacle of human space flight is harming space research as a whole is true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised. And the point that probes are cheaper than people is certainly a good one.

Nonetheless, any scientific research in an area is better than none, and you never know what the benefits could be.

I'm not sure I actually care about the survival of the species, beyond the idea that one day someone will get to live part of our sci-fi fantasies. In some ways I feel like I'm living the sci-fi fantasies of ten years ago right now.

I guess the whole "survival of the species" thing comes down to a question of the purpose of life, in the same way that the survival of any individual does.

If there is a need for some "fulfilment" to life beyond mere "not being dead", then neither saving a human life nor saving the human species is an end in itself - or only in as much as it increases the chance of that "fulfilment". Like saving someone's life by sustaining them in an inert coma, there may be circumstances under which saving the human race may be effectively not worth the effort.

If you believe that human life is in itself sacred, then the survival of the human race is (probably) also sacred.

Conversely, if (individual) life is meaningless, and we should simply each make the best of it because we're here, then the existence of the human race is also (probably) meaningless, and our priority as a race should be to make the best of it because "we" (as a species) are here - and to accept that "we" may not be forever.

I'm not quite sure what my answer to this conundrum is - should we be fatalistic about our lifespan as a species, or strive to survive at all costs, or (most likely) pick a path somewhere between? How do you prioritise curing malaria, or AIDS, or alleviating poverty as against protecting the long-term stability of the environment, deflecting asteroids, or preparing to spread the species to other worlds?

[IMSoP]

Really, AA? I'm not in the least concern of your opinion of me. If you think *THat's stupid* then THat's your opinion no matter what I think. I would appreciate reciprocation instead of black and white analysis.

Now, back to the subject.

Philosophically one can argue that the increase quality of all human life may be better than a generally increased longevity of the entire race. Who is to say that that species longevity and the scientific achievements and discoveries that led to it will not increase quality as well? Advances in Sciences, Arts and Medicine take time, perhaps we may not have enough time if we don't spread our species around?

I can think of two good reasons for trying to get significant numbers of people off Earth and into space:

1) Population. We're choking the planet with sheer numbers. Any scientific remedy to that involving limiting numbers is going to need draconian powers to enforce it. The most basic human instinct is to procreate. We're good at it. 6.5bn and rising. I seem to remember from the 70s that the scientists were telling us 6bn was the optimum population level. That seems to have been revised up rather conveniently to 8-10bn.

2) Humanity, as far as we know, is the only sentient life in the universe. We have no evidence that it exists anywhere else. Imagine that. Millions, billions perhaps trillions of planets and we're the only ones to develop Sudoko. And all it takes is one asteroid or one supernova a little too close or one bloody idiot to spill coffee in a nuclear missile silo and it's all gone.

Yes, robots are more effective and far more cost-efficient but they should be a means to an end and that should be getting us collectively off this planet. A manned colonisation mission will help turn eyes outward instead of inward. Rivalries could be positive instead of negative.

People die. We're all dying from about the age of 18. Science can prolong the death. Big deal. But science can also prolong the species by insuring it against that chance in a billion that the ecosphere is snuffed out. It may be long odds but there may be a cosmic joker pointing a finger at Earth and saying "It could be you!".