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Asteroid impacts (was August 27, 2003 - Mars)
[How did this thread come to involve asteroid impacts? Never mind.]
In article , (Paul Schlyter) writes: In addition, there are much greater dangers to our lives: the risk of dying for some other reason is vastly larger than the risk of dying from an impacting asteroid. There's some information in the FAQ at http://sciastro.astronomy.net/sci.astro.5.FAQ but it is a little thin on collision frequency for different size impactors. The standard comparison has been that your personal chance of dying due to asteroid impact is about the same as your chance of dying in a plane crash. As Paul wrote, this is a vastly smaller risk than many other things, but society is still willing to spend modest amounts of money to improve aircraft safety. There have been some recent results that imply somewhat lower asteroid impact frequencies than previously thought, but I don't know how well accepted they are or what they imply for the overall risk. Anybody care to research the facts and write a new section for the FAQ? Whenever there's an accurate prediction of an actual asteroid impact several years or more into the future, I think it will be done. This is my view, too. The FAQ has some references to possible prevention methods. It's like if you build a house in the US midwest -- would you build it as a bunker so it could endure a tornado? Houses in the midwest generally have tornado shelters to protect the occupants, although it's true that few houses are built to withstand tornadoes without damage. This contrasts with hurricane areas, where many houses are built to withstand hurricanes with at most limited damage. Likewise, new housing construction in earthquake zones in the US takes seismic standards into account. As Paul says, it's a matter of trading off frequency of occurrence and potential damage against cost of countermeasures. Lead time is important too. When a hurricane is predicted, people near the expected landfall rush out to buy plywood, but they don't usually stockpile plywood beforehand. With a modest search effort, we can expect several years to decades warning before a significant asteroid impact. There is, however, no guarantee. Even if a very thorough (and expensive) search is done, there will still be non-zero risk from long-period comets. -- Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123 Cambridge, MA 02138 USA (Please email your reply if you want to be sure I see it; include a valid Reply-To address to receive an acknowledgement. Commercial email may be sent to your ISP.) ------------ And now a word from our sponsor ------------------ For a quality usenet news server, try DNEWS, easy to install, fast, efficient and reliable. For home servers or carrier class installations with millions of users it will allow you to grow! ---- See http://netwinsite.com/sponsor/sponsor_dnews.htm ---- |
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Asteroid impacts (was August 27, 2003 - Mars)
In article ,
Jonathan Silverlight wrote: For most people the risk of dying in a plane crash is zero. :-) ....no! The risk may be extremely small, but it's still larger than zero for almost everyone on this planet: even if you never ever ride an airplane in your whole life, you may still die from an airplane crashing into your house (or wherever you may happen to be). Yes, the risk is very small (almost all airplane crash victims are passengers or crew of the crashed plane; apart from the terrorist attacks on 11 Sept 2001 there have been few airplane crash victims on the ground) but it's still slightly larger than zero. Thus, to ensure that your risk of dying in an airplane crash really is zero, you must, besides never riding an airplane, also settle down somewhere above where airplanes never fly - today and in the future. And you must also never travel to places above which airplanes do fly. Few people live a life like that. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ |
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