If it has the potential to wipe out our entire species, but there's something we could do to prevent it (which I'm not sure about w/r/to asteroids), then it's worth looking out for the black swan event.
Doing some extremely rough math along these lines to double check myself:
* Gemini says that a dinosaur-extincting asteroid hits Earth about once every 100 million years. So in any given year that's 0.000001%.
* Economists say a human life is worth about 10 million dollars. There are about 8 billion people on Earth. So the total value of all human life is $80,000,000,000,000,000 (or 8e+16).
* So in any given year, the present value of asteroid protection is $800,000,000 (likelihood of an impact that year times value of the human life it would wipe out).
* The Guardian says the Vera Rubin telescope cost about $2,000,000,000 (2 billion).
By that measure, assuming the Rubin telescope prevents any dinosaur-extinction-level asteroid impacts, it will pay for itself in three years.
It seems incredibly bizarre to assign a monetary value to the elimination of all human life given the concept of monetary value would be wiped out along with the people.
The counterpoint is that not doing so (implying some sort of infinite monetary loss if the entire human species is wiped out) would mean you want to spend every single unit of monetary value of the entire global economy to preventing this (which is also obviously nonsense - people have to eat after all).
So you have to put the monetary value somewhere (although you're completely within your right to question this specific amount).
I think what I’m trying to express is that it feels like the answer isn’t any amount of money, it’s just undefined, like a division by zero or trying to read the value of a binary register on a machine that’s turned off. I think Pirsig called it a Mu answer.
That's the most interesting application of capitalism-as-as-resource-allocation mechanism I've ever seen, that's something I look forward to thinking about more.
My immediate reaction though is to doubt the mapping of dollar to value - e.g., the 10 million dollar valuation of the human life, but also the valuation then of all the things that year-dollar-cost could be spent on. Many of those things probably don't map very well between true value, and dollar cost (my go-to example of this is teachers fulfilling one of the most critical roles to ensure a functioning society, yet the dollar cost paid for their labor being typically far lower than most other jobs).
And indeed, accounting for externalities (unmeasured or unmeasurable) is a tough economic proposition. If it weren't hard to account for every single variable, creating a planned economy would be easier (ish).
FWIW, there's a whole sub-field just dedicated to determining the value of life for various purposes (a starting link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). You may disagree with any specific assessment, but then you have to argue how that value should be calculated differently.
So you could actually make an argument that to a country like the US, full 100% reliable asteroid protection is only worth like $50M/year (even if an impact means full extinction)?
So if upkeep for a detection/deflection system costs more than that we'd be "better off" just risking it?! Thats insane. I would have expected this number to be much higher than $50M/year.
The economists calculated the value of 1 life. The calculation might be different if it extinguishes the whole of humanity (and thousands of other species). In a way, it also presents all future human lives. Should we include those?
I don't believe that this would change the outcome much: It seems hard to argue that preservation of a nonhuman species would be worth more than a million lives (=> negligible) and assuming global loss of all human life is already unreasonably pessimistic in my view-- (e.g. the Chicxulub impactor would not have achieved this).
I also think that fully accounting for multi-generational consequences is murky/questionable and not really something we do even in much more obvious cases: Eligible people deciding against having children are not punished for depriving future society of centuries of expected workyears, and neither are mothers/fathers rewarded for the reverse.
But even if you accounted for losing 3 full generations and some change (for biodiversity loss), that still leaves you in the ~$200M/year range.
Currently we don't have reliable asteroid deflection capability at any price (but it would be technically somewhat in reach), but just imagine a future NASA budget discussion that goes "we're gonna have to mothball our asteroid deflector 3000 because it eats 5% of yearly NASA budget and thats just not worth it"-- that could be the mathematically correct choice, which confounds me.
I think where the calculations are breaking down is in the probability of asteroid strikes.
All the math assumes that the probabilities will follow historic trends and is relatively static. With single digit events, we really have no way in knowing what the actual likelihood of impact is. It could be 1 in 100 million, it could actually be 1 in 1 million and we've been rolling a bunch of nat 20s.
Before we build out the asteroid blaster 9000, the first step is detection. With that in place then we get actual good risk and probability calculations. If the detector tells us "There's no object that will strike earth in the next 1000 years" we can safely not put any budget into asteroid defense. If, on the other hand, the detector shows "Chicxulub 2.0 will hit in the next 100 years" then your probability of an impact is 1 and the actual budget worth it is going to be much closer to that $8e+16 number calculated earlier.
While I'm strongly supportive of survey astronomy in general...
We can already say that we have very high completion of cataloguing near-Earth objects that are anywhere near extinction-event / Chicxulub-sized (~10km), and have a majority of catastrophic / country-killer (~1km), and are digging deeper and deeper into regional / city-killer (~100m) bodies.
What we don't have is comets. Comets on long period orbits just aren't readily detectable with this sort of survey unless they're quite close in to the Sun, and I don't think we have great statistics on frequency vs size, size being something that requires very specific radar cross-checking to establish with any confidence. A long-period comet or hyperbolic body has a potential impact velocity much higher than inner system asteroids, and impact energy scales with impact velocity squared.
Will rubin detect comets? I'd assume not as it seems like they'll only really be visible as they approach the sun (or if they end up blocking a line of stars).
The problem is that the difference in optical/NIR brightness (apparent magnitude) between a long-period comet core that's going to hit us in 1000 years, and a long-period comet core that's going to hit us in six months, might be a factor 10^12 (magnitude 10 vs magnitude 40) or worse. Normally brightness drops off with distance squared for light sources, but comets without any tail or halo aren't emitting all that much light, they're reflecting it, and (except for a very brief period) they're about as far from us as they are from the sun. This means that brightness drops with distance to the fourth power. Cometary tails also only offgas a significant amount near the sun. Comet cores are expected to be extremely dark / low-reflectivity due to space weathering producing a carbon coating not unlike chimney-creosote.
You can fight this a bit by working in the thermal infrared, which you really need a specific sort of space telescope for. But long-period comets and hyperbolic impactors will be a probabilistic threat for the foreseeable future. I would say "Be thankful that they're so rare", but the data from observatories like Rubin on these bodies during points of their orbit where they're close enough to the sun to actually detect, is necessary to statistically characterize their existence with any confidence.
I agree that detection is a very helpful first step and almost enough on its own. But I'm unsure how far this can be pushed-- I think impact certainty for a century or more might be physically impossible, because of uncertainty in orbital parameters and chaotic behavior of the whole system.
I also believe the approximate bounds we have on impact probability are good enough for this estimate and quite unlikely to be off by a factor of 100, because we can guess at both size distribution and impact likelihood from craters (on earth and moon), and if the >10km object impact likelihood was over 1/million years we would expect to see a hundred times more craters of the corresponding size...
> I think impact certainty for a century or more might be physically impossible, because of uncertainty in orbital parameters and chaotic behavior of the whole system.
We already have 10s of years of certainty with the current observations. Most of the uncertainty comes from the interactions of unknown objects. As the mappings of objects increase, our predictions will become much better.
The other thing to consider is that large objects will have much better certainty. A 10km asteroid won't be influenced (much) by colliding with 100 1m asteroids. It will only be impacted if it hits or swings by something like a 1km asteroid.
Rubin should in a pretty short timeframe (a few years) give us an orbital mapping of all the >1km asteroids, which is pretty exciting.
one thing this analysis is missing is the smaller asteroids. for every planet altering asteroid, there are hundreds that could cause a tsunami that would wipe out a few cities
Good point, but I think those are "worth" less from a risk-analysis PoV: 1km diameter is apparently about 200 times more likely (1/500000 years) according to wiki, but would need to kill 40M people to match the extinction-level asteroid risk (so basically-- unmitigated hit on Tokyo or bust).
To be honest, I think the 1km diameter range might still be a major fraction of the actual risk, because the estimates around "human exctinction every 100Ma" are probably much too pessimistic.
There is also a difference between mass extinction asteroid like dinosaurs, and one that destroys human civilization. Smaller one wouldn't extinct humanity but would kill most of the people alive. 1km might be big enough to do that depending on the amount of dust and cooling.
