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To: maceng2 who wrote (50920)	6/13/2004 6:23:09 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

PB, 100 metres above sea level will give protection against [random guess] 90 percent of bolide bullseyes. Which is certainly a good start. We live at 60 metres, with some high islands and the Coromandel and Waitakere mountains blocking a lot of waves. Las Vegas and Bangalore are excellent locations! We can't achieve 100% because bolides can always come right through the top of our hat! Any of them can do that [which reach ground level]. So it's a matter of making our statistical risk in balance with other aspects of our lives. Building cities at sea level, such as Los Angeles and Auckland, is madness. Most components of a city don't need to be near sea level. Ports do. Most parts of Auckland [for example] are only at sea level because there is zero value attached to the risk of tsunamis. There is an assumption that these are so infrequent and so minor that they are irrelevant. That assumption is not made by way of any statistical data. It has simply been built into the way we do things for 2000 years. Given that we live for only 70 years [plus some reduced quality of life years after that for the luckier of us], there's no point in being too panicky about impacts every 1000 years. Life is a lottery and with DNA spread out over the globe, any particular impact isn't going to do us in. Life beats natural disasters by out-breeding them. But as individuals, we like to keep our odds of demise at reasonably low levels. It's funny that we spend so much time and money fighting each other in geopolitical and ideological conflict when the main threat might arrive out of the blue, literally. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it [click around here to see some history of impacts on the Moon, which keeps a permanent record of what we'll be repeating, unlike Earth's ever-changing surface] mondatlas.de Foreign Affairs should include the NUN dealing with the threat. It's more hazardous to more people than most of the issues that the UN deals with. Mqurice