2004 MN4

[piranha]

so the latest potentially hazardous asteroid that might hit earth in about 25 years or so has moved from a 1 in 300 chance to a 1 in 37 chance now (i really like the other side of that, meaning it has a 97.3% chance of missing :). at a 2 on the torino scale it was already the highest hazard yet. the paramour and i have been following it since the original press release, and it's been upgraded to a 4 on that scale now.

what i am (idly, since it's late and i should be asleep, if only...) wondering is, at what point do governments start to worry about this? are there policy documents covering this sort of thing? just when will we be instructed that we're gonna be singing kumbayah with everyone on earth, including the various axes of evil?

[edit 2004-12-27: downgraded to a 1 in 28,000 chance now. guess i won't find out anytime soon what governments would do.]

Comments

[huaman.livejournal.com]

See, I vote for just having everyone over for a beer right now, but skipping the kumbaya. HOnestly, I suspect governments would rather *not* seem to be taking any sort of action, or what have you, on the grounds that that would be likely to cause panic and chaos.

let's not panic the children

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, that's true too. i wonder how it would play against the media's tendency to sensationalize such things, though. maybe some governments (the less autocratic ones) would feel they have to be seen to do something, or the panic would be even greater.

i do wonder whether anything could threaten the earth that would get usually hostile governments to work together. my cynical side thinks that instead we'd see more erosion of civil rights while a few powerful people make plans to hide away in a safe place.

i'm certainly a long way from panic at this point. i am not sure when i'd start to, if ever. 25 years into the future is not a time for which i ever plan on a personal level because so much can happen to change my course, and i like to go with the flow. aside from the proverbial bus that could hit me tomorrow.

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

I think that it deserves a solid few years of research to determine if the models and data are solid. The asteroid-watching community has an abysmal history of crying wolf to "raise awareness" of their careers.

Assuming they're right, and there is a one in 37 chance that the asteroid will hit earth with a 75% chance that it will hit water and a whatever chance that it is in such a place that the tsunami will kill a couple dozen thousand people: meh. If we put our minds to it, we could save the lives of two thousand people who die from disease or malnutrition every year for pennies, and then we'd be ahead of the game when these global catastrophes take place.

The subject of taking action against death comets always makes me grouchy. Assuming evolution, homo sapiens have been around for 100,000 years and there is no author of the universe who would throw us a survival test within thirty years of the moment that we could detect and foil it. I understand that the universe seems like a dangerous place now that we've taken our blindfold off, but surely it is not more dangerous than it has been for the entire time that we were wearing the blindfold.

I do think that the greater impact (har har) on our lives is that many people will believe that this is Wormwood and the Rapture Index will go through the roof.

Re: 2003 MN4

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

well, there was the extinction of the dinosaurs, which isn't a small thing (presuming it was caused by an impact). and you're likely aware that a lot of people don't think there is an author to the universe who designs such things as tests. :)

i think i'm with tigertoy -- media sensationalism seems to me what blows the danger out of proportion, not irresponsible scientists. certainly the NASA site isn't yelling "death comet" at the top of its lungs.

aside from that, yup, you're absolutely right that we could do lots of things now to save people. it'd be nice, but i'll bitch about that in another post.

but i find it interesting to think about whether governments might be able to pull together in the event of a death comet (and my concern isn't even primarily about people; i rather like the planet as a whole -- with or without billions of people. yeah, i realize that isn't gonna be a common attitude :).

Re: 2003 MN4

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

2004 MN4, btw.

If you want to go back to the dinosaurs, that doesn't change my argument. The last time a TEOTWAWKI event happened was 100 million years ago. I think we can use that data to develop a Poisson-based estimate on the probability that it will happen in the next 100 years and use that as the baseline of our telescopic investigations.

I suppose I can't accurately judge between the voracious media and the budget-starved scientists on who is doing the proportion-blowing. I have a vivid memory of an event (1998 OX4? 1999 AN10? Seems not to be...) where a "scientist" somewhere Down Under called AP before his peers and the next day confessed that he did not regret his actions because only by sparking the public's imagination could we get the funding to adequately chart the skies. I did re-listen to the NPR Science Friday interview with IAU and JPL spokesmen in the wake of the 1997 XF11 turnaround, which was not about how the public could have wound up so horribly misinformed but about how great it would be if people took asteroid collisions as seriously as they did global warming. I will stamp my foot and say that scientists are as aware as I am that they are the ones that look foolish when they are quoted in an article about an event that is found to be infinitesimally likely two days later, and that they have had plenty of time since 1997 to work out a system of staying quiet until they have enough data to make a real ruling. That's not unprecedented in the US: the NTSB has an incredible record of not disclosing the cause of an airplane crash until long after the public has moved on to other things without leaks.

I have never seen global cooperation other than in the shadow of tragedy. For instance, today I'm hearing about how the nations in the Indian Ocean might just come out with a system for warning each other about the earthquakes that form tsunamis. Gosh, you think that might help? I'll leave the solution to the death comet to myself because it is not flattering to either of our nations.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

What I've seen doesn't fit your description of asteroid watchers crying wolf at all. I see a few obscure scientists suddenly put into the spotlight by a sensation-seeking media, who distort what the scientists say to make it a scarier story that they pump up for a little while, and then they decide that the public must be bored with it and stop shining the media spotlight on it for another couple of years. I've never seen a real scientist significantly inflating the chance of an impact, and it's the media and not the scientists who are responsible for the excessive attention on the "but if it did hit us what would happen" part.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Aren't 3 and 4 the wrong way round on that scale?

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

How so? Regional devastation (4) is greater than local devastation (3).

Apparently I can't see straight

[lizw.livejournal.com]

*double-take* You're right. I could have sworn the first time I looked at that, they had local down as (4) and regional as (3). Apologies.

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

And with today's observations, 2004MN4 drops to a zero on the Torino scale, having now a 1 in 5,5556 chance of hitting the earth.

Or perhaps the odds of impact have really risen to near-certainty, and the authorities have decided to hush it all up to avoid general panic?

Ah, this is the stuff of which good conspiracy theories are made. ;-)

[eagle]

I'm now idly wondering just what that 1 in 37 chance actually meant. Was this anticipated in the 1 in 37 chance, and it turned out that the asteroid was in the other 36 out of 37 chance area? Or was the estimate simply wrong?

I don't know why I wonder about things like this, but I do.

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the available set of observations produce a probability cloud of possible orbits. As the number of observations increases, the cloud shrinks until we have a near-certain course (barring trajectory-changing events such as outgassing, differential solar pressure, collisions with other bodies, and so forth).

So at 1 in 37, the probability cloud was large and earth impact lay well within it. No the cloud has shrunk, leaving earth either outside of completely, or on just the rarified fringes.

When governments start worrying...

[eagle]

...is when it starts affecting an election, he says cynically. That means, in the US, no chance of real action until we're within six years of the event, and my bet would be on about a year out as the most probable time for the beginning of real action as opposed to extended discussion, if we're lucky.

More likely, the laws would get passed a couple of weeks after the thing hit, and would be primarily concerned with removing civil rights. 'Cause, you know, no matter what ends up happening, the government will be sure to be able to deal with it better if pesky civil rights aren't getting in the way. (A major natural disaster has the potential to be a stopped clock moment for such thinking.)