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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (5082)	8/12/2002 8:36:20 PM
From: A.J. Mullen	Respond to of 12235

My question was somewaht rhetorical. I suspect the odds of an unpleasant encounter with a meteorite are so small that I would not be wish to spend anything on attempting to avoid or ameliorate it. The moon is probably misleading you. Notwithstanding our small contributions in the last forty years or so, there used to be more junk than today. The Sun and planets have been sucking up debris ever since they were created. THose objects that created the carters on the moon are no longer a risk to us. We had one sizable hit that in 1908 that wasn't even felt by the majority of people. The one before that I know of was 50 000 years ago, and we survived that one pretty well. No one I know was hurt. I do agree that people are very illogical concerning risk. But risk is a difficult thing to deal with even when we are logical. We are interested in avoiding disastrous consequences. Usually the probabilities of a calamity are low, but the costs are so high that we wonder if we should do something to avoid it. To assess whether it's worth changing our behaviour we need: an estimate of the calamity's probability, the cost if it occurs, and the cost of avoiding it. As if that were not enough, we also need estimates of the accuracy of our estimates! In the face of all that uncertainty, too many people give up and take the attitude that faeces happen. Ashley