Hermes Found 66 Years Later - Long-Lost Object Is A Bright Binary

Jonathan Silverlight writes:

algomeysa2 writes:

Interesting page, but, you know, when I go to a webpage and the first thing
I see is this:

"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

On what basis do you call it a fact that it is "a completely bogus
statistic"? In reality, the statistic is not at all bogus. It's
your reasoning that's bogus. You're trying to compare a relatively
high frequency, low fatality event (plane crashes) with a relatively
low frequency, high fatality event (asteroid impacts).

Suppose an asteroid impact that causes a mass extinction (let's say
50 percent of the human population eventually dies as a result)
happens once every 10 million years. Well, the current global
population is about 6 billion. That makes for an average death
rate of 600 people per year. How many people die in plane crashes
each year? The number is comparable to within the limits of this
execise.

I would say that shows how completely bogus the statistic is.

What you would say is irrelevant; the facts are relevant, and it's a
fact that there is nothing wrong with the statistic; the problem is in
its correct interpretation.

The actual
number of people exposed to the danger of dying in a plane crash is a
tiny fraction of the number now living in various degrees of poverty on
Earth. But it is an absolute certainty that some of them will die in a
plane crash.

Which does nothing to substantiate your claim that the statistic is
bogus.

And the number of people who have lived in the past ten million years is
vastly more than the current population - Clarke's "behind every man now
alive stand thirty ghosts" comes to mind.

Illogical, given that you can't be killed if you're already dead.
The relevant number is therefore the number of people killed in an
asteroid impact, which has to be some fraction less than or equal to
unity of the number of people living at the time.

In fact 10 million years ago man didn't exist.

I can imagine one dinosaur telling another, some 65 million years ago,
that 10 million years earlier, dinosaurs didn't exist. Does that
somehow make the statistic of their death rate "bogus"?

But then no-one's interested in spending money on solving problems that
actually kill people. After all, we've spent trillions to ensure the
destruction of all life on Earth.

Actually, money has been spent disproportionately on solving problems
that actually kill people: disease, automobile safety, floods,
aircraft safety, highway safety, and so on.

Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


I would say that shows how completely bogus the statistic is. The
actual number of people exposed to the danger of dying in a plane
crash is a tiny fraction of the number now living in various degrees
of poverty on Earth. But it is an absolute certainty that some of them
will die in a plane crash.

Far more will die of old age while waiting for the security check to
board the aircraft.

Pat

In article ,
Jonathan Silverlight wrote:
In message ,
writes
algomeysa2 writes:

Interesting page, but, you know, when I go to a webpage and the first thing
I see is this:

"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

On what basis do you call it a fact that it is "a completely bogus
statistic"? In reality, the statistic is not at all bogus. It's
your reasoning that's bogus. You're trying to compare a relatively
high frequency, low fatality event (plane crashes) with a relatively
low frequency, high fatality event (asteroid impacts).

Suppose an asteroid impact that causes a mass extinction (let's say
50 percent of the human population eventually dies as a result)
happens once every 10 million years. Well, the current global
population is about 6 billion. That makes for an average death
rate of 600 people per year. How many people die in plane crashes
each year? The number is comparable to within the limits of this
execise.

I would say that shows how completely bogus the statistic is. The actual
number of people exposed to the danger of dying in a plane crash is a
tiny fraction of the number now living in various degrees of poverty on
Earth.

Not true! People risking to die in an airplane crash aren't merely
those who ride the airplane -- people on the ground may be hit by
the falling airplane as well. Thus, everyone living where airplanes
pass overhead run a small risk to die in an airplane crash, including
those who never ride an airplane. To completely avoid that risk
you'd have to always remain underground, or in some bunker.

But it is an absolute certainty that some of them will die in a
plane crash.

Not true either! It's merely extremely probable that some will die
in future plane crashes, but it is *NOT* absolutely certain!

And the number of people who have lived in the past ten million
years is vastly more than the current population - Clarke's "behind
every man now alive stand thirty ghosts" comes to mind.

Not true either! Remember that for quite some time, the Earth's
population has doubled every generation or so. Therefore the number
of people who've ever have lived on Earth are only perhaps four to
six times the number of people living today. Thus there aren't as
many as "30 ghosts" behind every man now alive -- there are only some
"4-6 ghosts".....

In fact 10 million years ago man didn't exist.

This seems to be your first, and only, true statement of this post.. :-)

But then no-one's interested in spending money on solving problems
that actually kill people.

If so, why do we have hospitals, physicians, ambulances, etc?

After all, we've spent trillions to ensure the destruction of all
life on Earth.

:-) ...no we haven't. I suppose you're referring to all the nuclear
weapons on Earth. First, it is NOT, repeat, NOT absolutely certain
that they will be detonated, as you imply here. And second, even if
we detonated them all, we would NOT destroy all life on Earth! Sure,
human civilization would probably be destroyed, and perhaps all
humans and a large number of mammal species as well. But some life
would survive. In particular the insects, who are able to tolerate
much higher doses of radioactivity than humans and mammals, would
definitely survive: they'd just hibernate through the "nuclear
winter" which would follow.

That big asteroid which we believe hit the Earth at the end of
the Createcous period, killing off the dinosaurs, was probably
a larger catastrophy to the biosphere than anything we humans are
able to produce -- including detonating all our nuclear weapons.
And life didn't end on Earth then.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter, Grev Turegatan 40, SE-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN
e-mail: pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
WWW: http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/
http://home.tiscali.se/pausch/

Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


I would say that shows how completely bogus the statistic is. The
actual number of people exposed to the danger of dying in a plane
crash is a tiny fraction of the number now living in various degrees
of poverty on Earth. But it is an absolute certainty that some of them
will die in a plane crash.

Far more will die of old age while waiting for the security check to
board the aircraft.

Pat

In message ,
writes
algomeysa2 writes:

Interesting page, but, you know, when I go to a webpage and the first thing
I see is this:

"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

On what basis do you call it a fact that it is "a completely bogus
statistic"? In reality, the statistic is not at all bogus. It's
your reasoning that's bogus. You're trying to compare a relatively
high frequency, low fatality event (plane crashes) with a relatively
low frequency, high fatality event (asteroid impacts).

Suppose an asteroid impact that causes a mass extinction (let's say
50 percent of the human population eventually dies as a result)
happens once every 10 million years. Well, the current global
population is about 6 billion. That makes for an average death
rate of 600 people per year. How many people die in plane crashes
each year? The number is comparable to within the limits of this
execise.

I would say that shows how completely bogus the statistic is. The actual
number of people exposed to the danger of dying in a plane crash is a
tiny fraction of the number now living in various degrees of poverty on
Earth. But it is an absolute certainty that some of them will die in a
plane crash.
And the number of people who have lived in the past ten million years is
vastly more than the current population - Clarke's "behind every man now
alive stand thirty ghosts" comes to mind.
In fact 10 million years ago man didn't exist.
But then no-one's interested in spending money on solving problems that
actually kill people. After all, we've spent trillions to ensure the
destruction of all life on Earth.
--
"It is written in mathematical language"
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

In article .net,
algomeysa2 wrote:
"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

Depends on how long a period the number is averaged over. The chances of
dying from an asteroid impact tend to be dominated by extremely rare
events that kill a sizable fraction of the human race, so to check on that
statistic, you need a very long averaging period indeed -- recorded history
is much too short.

"Misleading" is a better word than "bogus".
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:57:47 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article .net,
algomeysa2 wrote:
"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

Depends on how long a period the number is averaged over. The chances of
dying from an asteroid impact tend to be dominated by extremely rare
events that kill a sizable fraction of the human race, so to check on that
statistic, you need a very long averaging period indeed -- recorded history
is much too short.

"Misleading" is a better word than "bogus".

Depending on whether Tunguska was a comet or an asteroid, there is a
finite probability that one or more people died from asteroid impact.
However, the death(s) would probably be unreported, as the victim(s)
would have been nomadic reindeer herders (Sami) or fur trappers or
other people unlikely to be reported missing.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, in these
bureaucratic days it's easy to assume that such fatalities will be
reported. We're too accustomed to the way things are to be able to
appreciate how it was back when.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote:
Depending on whether Tunguska was a comet or an asteroid, there is a
finite probability that one or more people died from asteroid impact...

And that was only about a century ago, too. It's easy to forget that when
you go back as little as a few centuries, "recorded history" is the
history of only a modest fraction of the world... and if you go back a few
thousand, "recorded history" is small fragments of the history of a few
isolated locations.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, in these
bureaucratic days it's easy to assume that such fatalities will be
reported...

An even more modern example: Several years before Skylab itself came
down, the S-II stage of the Saturn V that launched it -- quite a bit
bigger than Skylab itself -- came down, in pieces, in central Africa.
We think it didn't kill anyone... but nobody is actually sure of that.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote:
Depending on whether Tunguska was a comet or an asteroid, there is a
finite probability that one or more people died from asteroid impact...

And that was only about a century ago, too. It's easy to forget that when
you go back as little as a few centuries, "recorded history" is the
history of only a modest fraction of the world... and if you go back a few
thousand, "recorded history" is small fragments of the history of a few
isolated locations.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, in these
bureaucratic days it's easy to assume that such fatalities will be
reported...

An even more modern example: Several years before Skylab itself came
down, the S-II stage of the Saturn V that launched it -- quite a bit
bigger than Skylab itself -- came down, in pieces, in central Africa.
We think it didn't kill anyone... but nobody is actually sure of that.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:57:47 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article .net,
algomeysa2 wrote:
"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

Depends on how long a period the number is averaged over. The chances of
dying from an asteroid impact tend to be dominated by extremely rare
events that kill a sizable fraction of the human race, so to check on that
statistic, you need a very long averaging period indeed -- recorded history
is much too short.

"Misleading" is a better word than "bogus".

Depending on whether Tunguska was a comet or an asteroid, there is a
finite probability that one or more people died from asteroid impact.
However, the death(s) would probably be unreported, as the victim(s)
would have been nomadic reindeer herders (Sami) or fur trappers or
other people unlikely to be reported missing.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, in these
bureaucratic days it's easy to assume that such fatalities will be
reported. We're too accustomed to the way things are to be able to
appreciate how it was back when.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer