Hacker News Reader

> humanity is one meteorite strike away from extinction

According to NASA [0] that's a once in a million year sort of event which, given how behaviourally modern [1] humans have only existed for about 50000 years, is nothing more than a strawman for terraforming.

[0] https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/back2.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

View on HN

You do realize that just because its called a one in a million event doesn't actually mean it has to happen every million years, and it doesn't have to wait a million years, right? A one in a million event could happen after 50,000 years, it just means on average it's expected to happen every million years.

So? How does that add any urgency to our current situation on earth?

I bought a condo on a 100-year flood plain back in the day.

Had 2 100-year floods, the first 2 springs I owned it.

A million year asteroid could hit almost literally at any moment.

Yeah, not really. With the current state of various spaceguard projects working on mapping NEOs (near-Earth objects), the estimated "heads up time" for an extinction level asteroid impact is on the order of decades. The smaller the object, the less notice we get, but the risk also decreases dramatically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com