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This is not an increase over baseline risk (as its Palermo scale[0] indicates, being a negative number, -0.56). I think there's going to be a crisis of media g

This is not an increase over baseline risk (as its Palermo scale[0] indicates, being a negative number, -0.56). I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards, because with the very awesome new telescope[1] that's going online this year, the number of these detections is going to drastically go up. The number of objects isn't going up—they've always been there, we just didn't know—but I think the media coverage is not going to absorb that nuance very well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazard_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazar... ("A rating of 0 means the hazard is equivalent to the background hazard (defined as the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact)") [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-rubin-observatory-telescope-cosmos-universe-space-digital-camera/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-r... ("With its capacity to detect faint objects, [Vera] Rubin is expected to increase the number of known asteroids and comets by a factor of 10 to 100")

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
[flagged]
- readyplayernull 2y ago
  Let's not observe false vacuum.
- netsharc 2y ago
  What is it with people like you's selective memory? People were dying in droves in places like India or China, scroll down about halfway to see the funeral pyres: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/covid-pandemic-india-photos https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/covid-pande... They were even just dumping bodies in their holy river because they couldn't afford proper funerals. Congrats for living (I assume) in a modern world with good health and clean air where you were just "inconvenienced" by shut restaurants and having to wear a mask, but hey, MAGA is fixing that too, let them "doge" your life into poorer air quality and less health protections! Winning!
  - roenxi 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      1 million Americans died in the first 4 months of the COVID epidemic. That was not normal, nor anywhere close to normal.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        You're undercalling it, that would actually be completely normal. About 1 million US citizens die every 4 months (technically the number of American deaths would be quite a bit higher). The anomaly was that there were about 0.7 million surprise deaths over 12 months (some minority of which would have been caused by the COVID response itself, mind) You can look it up here - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year... - the COVID death rate is going to be a pretty good year in the 2030s. It is a statistically significant blip but ultimately the vast majority of deaths were already locked in. It was always going to be about 3 million people each year.
        2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
        also many people died due to restricted access to medical services and simply stress from the panic that was spread.
        bryanlarsen 2y ago
        The hospitals were at their breaking point in 2022, many of my family were there. If we would have had the normal 1 million flu deaths + car accidents etc on top of the 1 million COVID deaths the health care system would have completely broken down and we would have had a couple more million deaths of things that would normally have been treatable but weren't because the health care system was broken.
        2y ago
roenxi 2y ago
HOWEVER this is an excellent time to review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_structures_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_structures_on_E... in particular the S2 to S8 spherule beds found in South Africa (AKA "the big one(s)" or "we are less than dust in the eyes of the gods"). The universe is a big place with some big rocks in it. There are also some !!fun!! simulations of things like the Vredefort impact on YouTube.
- jofer 2y ago
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_strewnfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_strewnfield (debris over 10% to 30% of the Earth's surface from an impact ~788,000 years ago). Smaller, for sure, but very recent and large enough for "nuclear winter" type scenarios.
deadbabe 2y ago
Why crisis? People should simply not look up.
- lioeters 2y ago
  On the other hand, if people are told constantly to look up, eventually they stop looking.
  - ALittleLight 2y ago
    Or maybe we just build a system that can reliably detect and deflect asteroids and resolve the concern.
    - mjd 2y ago
      Obviously we should build a system which can reliably detect and correct people looking up and resolve the concern.
- virtualritz 2y ago
  > Why crisis? People should simply not look up. I don't understand why this apt pun on that movie is being downvoted. Would anyone of the downvoters of parent care to explain?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Puns are for Reddit, not HN.
    - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - adastra22 2y ago
        HN's value proposition is high signal-to-noise discussion. Jokes and meme comments work against that.
cscheid 2y ago
(I worked tangentially on software for analyzing data that will come from the Vera Rubin telescope, and) yeah, while it was designed for spotting weird supernovae and such, the first half of its operation is expected to be dominated by the discovery of near earth objects.
DennisP 2y ago
So you're calling it a "crisis" that people will be better informed of the risk they've always faced? Seems to me we should use that media coverage to build political support for a real asteroid defense system.
- perihelions 2y ago
  If the media does not contextualize risks correctly, as it never does, it's absolutely a crisis—a crisis of a poorly-informed, panicked society lashing out and doing irrational things. It's not a costless error if a warped illusion of risk drives countries to, i.e., deploy nuclear-tipped space weapons for asteroid defense, which then precipitate a genuine crisis. It's not obvious that having more defenses is obviously safer than having less; some thoughtful people have argued the opposite: >"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology." https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 ("Dangers of Asteroid Deflection" (1994), Carl Sagan & Steven Ostro)
  - DennisP 2y ago
    In this case, the context is "we face the same risk all the time, from asteroids we don't see." I'm not convinced that's reassuring. The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids, which are correspondingly more rare. For asteroids in the 8MT impact range, it doesn't make much military sense to launch deep space missions to divert them years in advance, rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes. Given any competent asteroid defense system, an asteroid diversion would be detected immediately and countered, and the perpetrators would face consequences. In fact, since we already have rockets that can reach asteroids, I'd say the possibility of malicious diversion makes a defense system more important.
mmooss 2y ago
> I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards I take that as meaning a crisis of traditional media. But most of our false-positive and false-negative crises are crises of social media. Look at climate change, vaccines, ethnic hatred, pizza gate, every crazy rumor ...

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

[flagged]

readyplayernull 2y ago
Let's not observe false vacuum.
netsharc 2y ago
What is it with people like you's selective memory? People were dying in droves in places like India or China, scroll down about halfway to see the funeral pyres: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/covid-pandemic-india-photos https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/piapeterson/covid-pande... They were even just dumping bodies in their holy river because they couldn't afford proper funerals. Congrats for living (I assume) in a modern world with good health and clean air where you were just "inconvenienced" by shut restaurants and having to wear a mask, but hey, MAGA is fixing that too, let them "doge" your life into poorer air quality and less health protections! Winning!
- roenxi 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    1 million Americans died in the first 4 months of the COVID epidemic. That was not normal, nor anywhere close to normal.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      You're undercalling it, that would actually be completely normal. About 1 million US citizens die every 4 months (technically the number of American deaths would be quite a bit higher). The anomaly was that there were about 0.7 million surprise deaths over 12 months (some minority of which would have been caused by the COVID response itself, mind) You can look it up here - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year... - the COVID death rate is going to be a pretty good year in the 2030s. It is a statistically significant blip but ultimately the vast majority of deaths were already locked in. It was always going to be about 3 million people each year.
      - 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
        also many people died due to restricted access to medical services and simply stress from the panic that was spread.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        The hospitals were at their breaking point in 2022, many of my family were there. If we would have had the normal 1 million flu deaths + car accidents etc on top of the 1 million COVID deaths the health care system would have completely broken down and we would have had a couple more million deaths of things that would normally have been treatable but weren't because the health care system was broken.
        2y ago

roenxi 2y ago

HOWEVER this is an excellent time to review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_structures_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_structures_on_E... in particular the S2 to S8 spherule beds found in South Africa (AKA "the big one(s)" or "we are less than dust in the eyes of the gods"). The universe is a big place with some big rocks in it. There are also some !!fun!! simulations of things like the Vredefort impact on YouTube.

jofer 2y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_strewnfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_strewnfield (debris over 10% to 30% of the Earth's surface from an impact ~788,000 years ago). Smaller, for sure, but very recent and large enough for "nuclear winter" type scenarios.

deadbabe 2y ago

Why crisis? People should simply not look up.

lioeters 2y ago
On the other hand, if people are told constantly to look up, eventually they stop looking.
- ALittleLight 2y ago
  Or maybe we just build a system that can reliably detect and deflect asteroids and resolve the concern.
  - mjd 2y ago
    Obviously we should build a system which can reliably detect and correct people looking up and resolve the concern.
virtualritz 2y ago
> Why crisis? People should simply not look up. I don't understand why this apt pun on that movie is being downvoted. Would anyone of the downvoters of parent care to explain?
- adastra22 2y ago
  Puns are for Reddit, not HN.
  - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - adastra22 2y ago
      HN's value proposition is high signal-to-noise discussion. Jokes and meme comments work against that.

cscheid 2y ago

(I worked tangentially on software for analyzing data that will come from the Vera Rubin telescope, and) yeah, while it was designed for spotting weird supernovae and such, the first half of its operation is expected to be dominated by the discovery of near earth objects.

DennisP 2y ago

So you're calling it a "crisis" that people will be better informed of the risk they've always faced? Seems to me we should use that media coverage to build political support for a real asteroid defense system.

perihelions 2y ago
If the media does not contextualize risks correctly, as it never does, it's absolutely a crisis—a crisis of a poorly-informed, panicked society lashing out and doing irrational things. It's not a costless error if a warped illusion of risk drives countries to, i.e., deploy nuclear-tipped space weapons for asteroid defense, which then precipitate a genuine crisis. It's not obvious that having more defenses is obviously safer than having less; some thoughtful people have argued the opposite: >"In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of potentially apocalyptic technology." https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 ("Dangers of Asteroid Deflection" (1994), Carl Sagan & Steven Ostro)
- DennisP 2y ago
  In this case, the context is "we face the same risk all the time, from asteroids we don't see." I'm not convinced that's reassuring. The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids, which are correspondingly more rare. For asteroids in the 8MT impact range, it doesn't make much military sense to launch deep space missions to divert them years in advance, rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes. Given any competent asteroid defense system, an asteroid diversion would be detected immediately and countered, and the perpetrators would face consequences. In fact, since we already have rockets that can reach asteroids, I'd say the possibility of malicious diversion makes a defense system more important.

mmooss 2y ago

> I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards I take that as meaning a crisis of traditional media. But most of our false-positive and false-negative crises are crises of social media. Look at climate change, vaccines, ethnic hatred, pizza gate, every crazy rumor ...