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Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

How many people have ever been killed by an asteroid? And how many by earthquakes?

Even considering just astrophysics, we have more pressing problems.

It only takes one asteroid to end all life on earth. It's not a possibility, it's an inevitability. It's happened before, it will happen again, unless the hairless, bipedal fire apes that have proliferated on the planet use their newfound technology to redirect the asteroid slightly while it's far enough away.

The rock that hit our planet 65 million years ago had a diameter of around 10 km. What do you think we may do about that?

If it’s a few years out — it takes a relatively small amount of thrust to avoid collision.

The more heads up we have, the less we have to actually do to prevent it. The key factor in having enough of a heads up is actually looking for these things in the first place.

Have we made good progress in bringing down our estimates of the orbits for asteroids? In popular press they seem to have large error bars even only half a year out. What’s the confidence level that making a change two years out will have the intended impact instead of sending the asteroid closer to earth?

Those error bars shrink based on the number of observations you're able to make of the asteroid. Once we get to the point of committing to a redirect mission we would have made sufficient observations to know exactly what the asteroid's trajectory is. After that it's just math.

Have we even considered if there may be rare minerals on the asteroid that we would want to mine to pull our population out of poverty?

I'm a huge fan of mining asteroids, provided that they aren't hurtling towards our planet. The tech to redirect an asteroid is a small piece of the tech we'll need to mine asteroids. Looking forward to us getting there as a species.

You have to multiply by the severity of the issue. A low probability event that ends all life on Earth has a different risk profile than focusing on earthquakes which happen more frequently but are comparatively drastically less catastrophic. Also we could conceivably prevent an asteroid impact with sufficient warning and enough math / dry runs. Earthquakes don’t have good answers afaik.

> How many people have ever been killed by an asteroid?

An asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, which led to the rise of the mammals, which led to us, so that's a negative number.

But it should be an example to us, to not risk the same fate.

Our cities can be engineered to survive severe earthquakes, with tools we have right now.

We can't engineer ourselves out of an asteroid impact. Yet.

The only problem with the analysis is a single Asteriod striking anywhere on earth can wipe out billions of people.

A powerful earthquake even it hits a large city would wipe out only in millions at worst.

They do not scale the same way.

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