After seeing this: Sun Rotates Earth say 18% of surveyed

Forget everything I said. Maybe we ought to be figuring out a way to encourage the damn thing to hit.

So only a magnitude worse than the '05 tsunami?

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PW -- Plant Whisperer

Yeah, I guess that's sure not worth stopping.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

How much protection can you afford?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

I don't know, what's the cost per life?

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

It's about 2-3 millions dollars US for a man in his prime, around 40 years old, according to airline insurance actuarial tables (IIRC).

Or you could look at it from human incentive perspective. How much money are you willing to pay to prevent your death from such an event?

Or look at it this way. The lifetime risk of being killed by lightning is 1 in 35,000 (according to the National Weather Service). The risk is on the same order as an Apophis impact. Would you spend all your money trying to reform the earth's atmosphere to avoid the possibility of lightning generation, or would you save your money and simply move indoors when a thunderstorm approaches?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

...



If I knew ahead of time where it would strike, I would avoid being where the lightning is. The planet Earth can't be moved out of the way, however.

At "2 million per person", you'd think money would be no problem.



Why are so many people dead-set against altering Apophis' course? Is there some upside I'm missing?

ADDED: And why do they keep coming up with completely irrelevant and exaggerated comparisons? It's path is predictable, it can be altered, and the harm it might do is avaoidable. So...?

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I think that last bit is the problem. It's not entirely predictable. They think that it's only a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting in 3 decades, but if you mess around with it, then you upset the applecart and make those predictions meaningless. By attempting to avert catastrophe in 30 years, you might inadvertently cause it to strike in 3 years. We currently don't have the resources or know-how to make make the threat zero (such as crashing it into another planet) so any messing with it could increase the chance of an impact.

The farther away it is from a collision with earth in time and space, the more a small force can be multiplied into a big change. We don't know enough about it to calculate how human alterations to it might change the orbit. Sure, lots of people assume that lateral vectors would be simple to compute. But what if we change the rotation or the albedo, and cause the Yarkovsky effect to change, then all the pre-messing-with-it calculations will be wrong and the only way to know how it will really be altered is to watch it afterwards... assuming we have enough time to watch it afterwards before it might impact.

Many asteroids cross earth's path but never collide because of orbital dynamics keeps them in a stable, if chaotic, dance. Do you really want to upset that applecart? I'd be okay with slamming it into the moon. We might accomplish some important science that way. But sending it off into space is taking a known quantity and changing it into an unknown quantity, which does nothing to minimize risk. It's not that easy to project the orbital trajectories of small objects like this, and that's why they give odds --because they don't know.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Ah. Okay, Explained that way, it makes more sense than the other posts.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Imagine your family dying..Then you will fight for that rock must be neutralized.
Risking human lives 'cos of money is heniously immoral.

If we pour huge amount of money into asteroid deflection, we must squeeze it from somewhere else like healthcare which in turn risks human lives. Given how small probability an asteroid impact is, there is no point to built very comprehensive asteroid shield.

On the other hand, mapping potentially hazardous asteroids (even smaller ones) and developing the technology needed is relatively cheap, so the argument that the money put in reasonable asteroid deflection is waste is not correct.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Why assume it'll come from there? Why not squeeze it from something useless that currently sponges billions of dollars? How many Waterworlds can we afford? Or what harm in losing a few porkbarrel projects to save lives?

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

You think Hollywood is going to pay for the mission?

And how is this not pork? Spending billions (potentially) to prevent a disaster which has a 1 in 45000 chance of happening?

Once again, we are not talking about an event that is definitely going to occur.

I have one solution to a money problem, however, I will not post it because politics is forbidden here...

That might be possible... if we want to overturn our society and remove personal freedoms and let government decide how individuals and companies spend their money. I think it was tried in Russia once. Even if such a government didn't kill more people in purges than would be killed in an impact, there will be people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice against the government than in fighting against an asteroid. "Give me liberty or give me death" may kill more people than that flying rock ever could.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Do you drive to work?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

I mean another kinds of risk...unnecesary...

Clearly, you think those odds are both completely accurate and completely immutable. But more unlikely things than that have indeed happened, and I'd rather not rely on luck.

I was just responding to a logical fallacy in the above post, which assumes that money not spent on (X) will automatically go toward socially positive ends, same thing that's used to whine about space travel, supercolliders, a whole host of things. Nonsense. In the real world, cancelling one big-ticket project usually means TPTB will just shift it into another pet project.

Oh, and "pork" is not usually defined as something that has tangible benefits. Making sure that a rock is in no position to harm anyone sure sounds like a benefit to me.

As Ara Pacis pointed out, it presently isn't possible to do so because of the increased risk of chaotic effects. But if you're going to argue against something, at least use some reasonable basis for objecting. "It might not happen" doesn't sound like one, IMHO.

ADDED: No, of course I don't expect "Hollywood" to do it, I was using that as an example of megabucks currently wasted on pointless cr(ud).

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ahh, is it the risk of doing nothing versus the risk of doing something?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau