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A lot of people do evacuate hurricane zones, even when death and destruction are not absolutely guaranteed. If we knew with certainty that a particular place wa
by School-Cotton 2y ago
A lot of people do evacuate hurricane zones, even when death and destruction are not absolutely guaranteed. If we knew with certainty that a particular place was going to be hit by an asteroid, and we had time to evacuate, I am confident most people would do so.
- dylan604 2y agoThe accuracy issue is the thing. I’d venture a guess that our prediction of the path of a hurricane 7 days out is more accurate than predicting where an impact will be.
- maushu 2y agoIt's actually the opposite. Calculating an asteroid impact is much easier because it primarily involves basic Newtonian physics. In contrast, the climate is a chaotic system, making long-term predictions far more complex.
- dylan604 2y agoI don't know how it's opposite. There's some complex guesstimating on where an asteroid will hit. We roughly know its size. We roughly know its composition. We roughly know its speed. We can give a +/- range where the impact area will be. That's not any different than how hurricane spaghetti models do.
- jjk166 2y agoThe difference is knowing the size, speed and composition of a hurtling rock tells you where it's going to go, where as knowing the size, speed, and composition of a hurricane does not tell you where the hurricane will go. Complexity isn't a problem, the issue with weather prediction is that it's chaotic - extremely small changes to starting conditions cause large changes to the end result.