True, the actual magnitude of the problem is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. The point of my comment was to battle an increasingly often-used fa

True, the actual magnitude of the problem is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. The point of my comment was to battle an increasingly often-used fallacy where people spout numbers that look large out-of-context and then scream about the sky falling based on those large numbers. You could say something like, "Ten MILLION planets get sucked into blackholes every YEAR! This is terrifying!" (I just made those numbers up for illustrative purposes), without looking at what those numbers are relative to this just creates unnecessary panic and motivates people to mis-allocate precious resources that could be spent on more urgent problems.