« Remembering the Hemmingses | Main | Jonah Goldberg Is Completely Correct » The Asteroid Menace16 Jun 2008 06:06 pm I used to have an occasional joke at The American Prospect about how we should stop wasting time with article about wage stagnation and start devoting more energy to real problems -- like the risk of mass extinction caused by an asteroid. But Greg Easterbook actually did the work and wrote a great article about the problem. And the Atlantic web team made a great video to go along with it. Here's a preview: Full film (it's about ten minutes) available here. Check it out. Comments (47)
I, for one, welcome our new asteroidal overlords. 
What kind of credibility does this guy have left after the disaster that was his work at Page 2 on espn? Not to mention his very weak piece on Global Warming's winners & losers...
The video would be much improved by a vector graphics based simulation of the various technological proposals for the evasion and elimination of asteroids.
I second Vermando's and Arr-squared's sentiments. Gregg Easterbrook is a hack; blitzing should not be a defense's default third-down-D. He's in the pocket of the defense coordinator lobby.
Disaster on espn? Easterbrook's TMQB column is one of the site's best and most popular features. Sure, he went overboard with the Patriots spygate thing and I realize people may harbor a grudge against him from the Kill Bill/Jewish incident, but TMQB is always a great, in depth read that hits tons of stuff that other guys don't talk about and takes a lot of "conventional wisdom" to task. I can't comment on his non-TMQB work, as I haven't read much.
no to mention his support of Creationism.
regg Easterbrook is a hack; blitzing should not be a defense's default third-down-D. He's in the pocket of the defense coordinator lobby. Posted by A Different Matt | June 16, 2008 6:50 PM Are you talking about the same guy? The guy who has a weekly feature called "Stop me before I blitz again!"? The guy who skewers coaching staffs every week for blitzing way too often, in the wrong situations, and with the wrong number of guys?
Tell Gregg Easterbrook that I didn't have time to read his article, I was too busy getting autism from watching TV.
I second Vermando's and Arr-squared's sentiments. Gregg Easterbrook is a hack; blitzing should not be a defense's default third-down-D. He's in the pocket of the defense coordinator lobby.
Carl Sagan wrote at length on asteroid defense in Pale Blue Dot, and I think his views are worth including in the discussion. He felt that developing ways to prevent impacts was a mixed blessing. As he put it, if you have the ability to prevent an impact, you also have the ability to cause an impact. He felt that since the threat of a natural impact was very small, albeit real, that we should be careful about increasing the risk of deliberate impacts, which he considered to be much more likely.
In the video, he talks about this in terms of NASA - suggesting that this would be a better use of NASA funds than a crazy moonbase. It seems SDI is a better point of comparison, though. How does this threat stack up against the threat of ballistic missiles from North Korea or Iran or whatever. I'm strongly against spending NASA billions so we can see a crew-cutted Air Force colonel hitting golf balls into the Valle Maranis. And would much rather NASA spend its money on robotic probes. Threats like asteroids, though, seem more in the military arena.
would much rather NASA spend its money on robotic probes. Robotic probes? Like this? http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/06/misfit-love.html Or did you have something not quite so probing in mind?
Carl Sagan wrote at length on asteroid defense in Pale Blue Dot, and I think his views are worth including in the discussion. He felt that developing ways to prevent impacts was a mixed blessing. As he put it, if you have the ability to prevent an impact, you also have the ability to cause an impact. He felt that since the threat of a natural impact was very small, albeit real, that we should be careful about increasing the risk of deliberate impacts, which he considered to be much more likely. Of course, Sagan also thought that the asteroid threat is a strong argument for a human spaceflight program, with the long-term goal of establishing a permanent and self-sustaining human presence beyond the earth to reduce the risk of the collapse of human civilization, or even complete extinction, from a killer asteroid or some other planetary cataclysm.
All been said: One of the worst hacks of modern times, etc. MY, man, you should be ashamed...
lvf - I guess I should get my facts straight before criticizing a guy, but honestly I don't remember whether he advocated blitzing more or less; I only remember he cherry-picked his evidence and I always disliked him for it. It's been years since I read his stuff. When I read TMQ I thought "no wonder scientist's findings are met with skepticism in some circles when one's findings are as transparently agenda-driven as TMQ's." He's a hack.
I think we can say that barring human interference in asteroid paths, the risk of being hit by an asteroid of any given size is pretty constant from year to year. So if a mass-extinction causing asteroid only hits every 100 million years or so, that means there's only about a one in a million chance it'll happen in any given century. And looking at the fossil record, mass extinctions don't seem to happen too much more often than that. Of course even a smaller asteroid could cause some pretty serious destruction, but especially given Sagan's point about possibly increasing the risk of a human-caused asteroid strike if we develop the technology to alter their orbits, I don't really think this is the sort of risk that's worth putting huge amounts of money into preventing.
If the robot looks like this, I'll probe it! http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/scc_add/SCC-014.jpg And based on this shot, looks like car bombs don't do too much damage. Check out the staples, heh, heh. http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/s2_001.jpg
Ha ha ha! What Arr-squared said in first comment. I came here to write "You wrote 'Gregg Easterbrook' and 'great article' in the same sentence," only to see it had been done already. Oh well! No harm in repeating the truth. I think it was Atrios but may have been someone else who in 2003-2005 clearly demonstrated that Easterbrook has no expertise in anything at all, was wrong on the war, and the logic he uses to defend religion is pathetic. His TMQs were fun for about one season and then his shtick got old. Like with Tom Friedman, when you're under 25 Easterbrook can seem witty and intelligent. Then you read a little more and get a little older and he becomes an idiot spouting nonsense who thinks he's great. Gregg Easterbrook is one of the poster children for shitty pundits whose careers never take a hit for being consistently wrong or for saying stupid things.
I think Easterbrook is stretching with the speculation as to why the USAF funds Pan-STARRS for a sky survey. It's strictly a matter of political convenience, in the same way that a lot of Federal dollars are routed to Hawaii. Dan Inouye sits on Defense Appropriations, and when he gives money to the Armed Services, they don't ask why. They salute smartly and execute.
Mitch Schindler -
Yeah, I am going to agree with others that Easterbrook's credibility is pretty much non-existent. You might have actually gotten me to click the video if you had left his name out of it. Easterbrook is one of the least credible human beings I can think of on almost any topic you care to name. I think my favorite was when he actually tried to argue that the existence of heaven was credible because of superstring theory. It was an argument that was almost sublime in its numb-skulled, ill informed inanity. It was also the argument that convinced me, once and for all, that Easterbrook was absolutely not worth the time to take seriously. I hope I am not missing anything good in the video but I cannot, in good conscience, pretend that Easterbrook is something other than an idiot.
Not to pile on, but Gregg Easterbrook's understanding of science is well known to be so little, as to actually be harmful to readers. Check out some takedowns over at http://www.cosmicvariance.com/index.php?s=easterbrook In this case, though his monkey typewriter has produced, well not Shakespeare, but maybe 99 cent pulp. NASA has taken PHAs seriously for a long time; however its purview in this is space missions, which are not well suited to surveying the whole sky repeatedly to find these objects. Ground-based projects like Pan-STARRS (funded) and subsequently LSST (not yet funded, but under the aegis of the National Science Foundation, not NASA) should definitely be supported. Trevor
Just to reiterate, Easterbrook has no credibility. When Easterbrook writes about something that I don't know well, I can't rely on his "expertise" to explain things to me because he's been proven to blather on about complicated subjects he plainly doesn't understand.
Easterbrook slurping in his breaths is way creepier than an asteroid strike.
If an asteroid’s movements were precisely understood, placing a gravitational tractor in exactly the right place should, ever so slowly, alter the rock’s course, because low levels of gravity from the tractor would tug at the asteroid. The rock’s course would change only by a minuscule amount, but it would miss the hole-in-one pipe to Earth. Will the gravitational-tractor idea work? The B612 Foundation recommends testing the technology on an asteroid that has no chance of approaching Earth. I think I figured out how the humans are going to cause the asteroid to hit Earth.
Thanks bobbo. I don't know if you're right but I am familiar with poorman.net and that's some funny stuff he's done and I did read him infrequently 5-6 years ago when I still happened to read TMQ and Easterbrook. BTW, your name reminds me of course of David Brooks, who preceded even Easterbrook--no, was the first member--on my list of dumb pundits with no credibility. I especially liked reading the part about 100 pages into Bobos in Paradise during an extended defense of bobos, when he admitted that all the criticisms of the bobos was valid, but that because they were his friends and nice people he didn't care and it didn't matter if they were shallow and materialistic. You can tell he never went to law school. You don't make your defense by admitting the prosecution is right. Wow. Gotta love the Easterbrook bashing. Maybe he'll see the comments and rethink his nonsensical, uninformed approach to matters.
Wow. Gotta love the Easterbrook bashing. Maybe he'll see the comments and rethink his nonsensical, uninformed approach to matters. Yes, how could Easterbrook not quake in his boots at the sweeping intellectual force of critiques like "Easterbrook is a hack" and "Easterbrook has no credibility" repeated ad nauseum with minor variations in wording. Not that I like or admire the man's writing. I find his writing on religion to be especially bad. But the idea that anyone here has offered a serious criticism of the piece in question, let alone shown it is to "nonsensical" or "uninformed," is laughable.
I would prefer my little-known-but-very-dangerous threats to all life on earth be written about by someone other than a known conspiracy crank. Easerbrook, God bless him, is a professional contrarian who makes his living imagining things that actual experts don't believe while attacking scientifically accepted theories (like global warming) that virtually all experts believe. It's difficult to imagine a less credible source on, well, anything.
I enjoyed this particular quote about Easterbrook's space rock piece from a deranged physics professor who is clearly on the take from NASA: [T]his kind of ultra-hot, ultra-dense stupidity can only be achieved by colliding at least two forms of idiocy at speeds approaching that of light, so we also get a hefty dose of exaggerated concerns about disastrous possible effects, starting with quoting Martin Rees as saying that an accelerator mishap could collapse the Earth into "an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across," and building up to what may be the best dumb argument against fundamental physics research ever... Heh. http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2007/11/an_inert_hyperdense_sphere_of.php
Regardless of the merits of the messenger, this is a pretty serious topic, and I personally think it makes a great deal of sense to develop a proven rerouting system just in case we need it. And while I think Sagan has a decent point about that system being used as a weapon, I also think there are going to be enough other ways for determined and well-funded folks to bring about a doomsday that adding one more such means to the mix isn't really increasing the risk of a human-caused doomsday appreciably.
Greg Easterbrook is to science writing what M. Night Shyamalan is to auteur filmmaking.
I'd dismiss Easterbrook entirely were it not for the articles he's been writing since 1981 on what a ridiculous overpriced boondoggle the space shuttle is. He got that one dead to rights, and I say that as a fan of manned spaceflight.
Who does the VFX for the Atlantic? That's pretty nicely done.
Glad everybody had a chance to get their snark on. However, Easterbrook's point is a damned good one-- preventing asteroid strikes is a better use of money than a Moon base or a mission to Mars. Implicitly he's making the case that NASA is even more screwed up than the Air Force, and that is indeed a frightening thought. There really is no reason for both NASA and a European Space Agency and while idly web surfing during a recent boring meeting, I came up with a solution. Since there's a fair amount of overlap in membership, merge them a NATO space agency. We could compromise on location (ESA is based in Paris, NASA in DC) by putting it in Quebec. Conveniently enough, the Canadian space agency headquarters is in Saint-Hubert, about 10 miles south of Montreal and 40 miles north of New York State. French workers could still speak their curious language (and avoid ever dealing with Homeland Security) and Americans could commute by car or rail from Jesusland.
The idea that no one thought about water impacts before sounds bogus (despite stupidity knowing no limits, even among scientists). Even assuming that no one thought to do so little as multiply the land numbers by 3, projections about the frequency aren't going to go from millions of years to a few thousand unless something else is being reevaluated. Also I like how he doesn't even mention that a lot of people think the 536-537 AD crop failures were caused by a volcano eruption, not an asteroid. Once you see a bit of bad reporting from a questionably qualified source, it's not so tempting to pay any more attention. This kind of story always frustrates me. Seems like it'd be best if there were more intermediate kinds of publications between the standards of journals and regular magazines. Of course, Nature already does a pretty good job of being prestigious, and yet including good articles for a more general audience. I'll probably stick to them instead of the Atlantic, sad to say.
Glad everybody had a chance to get their snark on. However, Easterbrook's point is a damned good one-- preventing asteroid strikes is a better use of money than a Moon base or a mission to Mars. In the long run, our only real defense against asteroid strikes--and all sorts of other threats, known and unknown, to the survival of our civilization and species--is to establish a presence on more than one planet. Or, at least, beyond this one. A moon base or a mission to Mars would be the first big step towards that goal.
"A moon base or a mission to Mars would be the first big step towards that goal." No, it would be a first small step. The real problems with survival in a exoterran environment have almost nothing to do with getting there. No, the bulk of the problem is one we could research to near-completion without ever leaving the Earth's surface. In fact, manned missions elsewhere should be the smaller, last steps. Also, the necessary increase in the knowledge of ecology and the human interdependence in Earth's ecologies would be very beneficial in helping to avoid or correct events that would make the Earth uninhabitable. So these manned missions are what they've always been: PR stunts. I say this as someone who agrees with the goal of eventual permanent, self-sustaining human presence off-Earth. Easterbrook is a notorious hack. And he's wrong on a number of things in this article. He's almost certainly grossly overstating the risk. Even so, it's a risk that we could probably negate with a very small investment when contrasted to the possible loss. This is the very definition of the characteristic in which human society is unable to plan for the long-term. It's paralleled by our failure to do much of anything about the more-certain, and nearly as consequential spectre of a global environmental catastrophe caused by human-caused global warming.
Parts of this article approach a reasonable treatment of the subject and parts are Easterbrookian breathlessness. For example, there's a sentence about how if the Oort Cloud exists, it would multiply the number of (scary, dangerous) comets by some large number. That's not right. We infer that the Oort Cloud of comets is out there because the comets we see have to come from somewhere. We already have a good idea of how many comets are perturbed in to the inner solar system per year, because comets are easier to detect than small asteroids. Another example is in the odds per century of a Tunguska-type airburst. Well, yes, they are probably common (perhaps one every century or few) but over the vast majority of the earth's area, a Tunguska-size airburst will harm few or no people. That said, the general idea that a comprehensive survey of near-Earth objects is important is correct. It's also relatively inexpensive and inoffensive, as it requires telescopes, detectors, and software, but nothing offensive, no launch vehicles, no nukes. NASA is dragging its feet on this in part because the administration doesn't care or has given this portfolio to the Air Force, and in large part because NASA likes to think of itself as an exploration agency. Also, NASA exists in large part to subcontract money to aerospace contractors. However, we don't need NASA to do the finding of NEOs. If NASA doesn't care, maybe Easterbrook should be lobbying that the money go to the NSF to fund a NEO search program. As far as I know, the Air Force is funding Pan-STARRS officially to track NEOs and unofficially to track satellites. It's not a big mystery or hidden agenda. Well, the satellite part is a little hidden (I certainly don't know for sure, and if I did, I couldn't post about it). I'm sure they'd like to militarize space, but they have closer things in mind; a reenactment of the "Armageddon" movie is a long way off.
Humans in their current physical form cannot realistically colonize space--it is just way too hostile an environment. So, if we were serious about colonization that would be the real first step (changing the form of the prospective colonists). Of course what that implies is that in some sense our "species" is doomed to extinction on this planet, but maybe some sort of successor species will live on elsewhere. And from a broader perspective, that was kinda obvious anyway--species are adapted to particular environments, and so their descendants have to evolve into a different species in order to move into a different environment.
"But Greg Easterbook actually did the work and wrote a great article about the problem." Which is just a variant of the 'take and infinite amount of monkeys and you'll get the works of Shakespeare' though experiment. Easterbrook, who has no degrees in science, blew his credibility as a journalist on science when he decided to pose as a skeptic on global warming. As a non-scientist, he has to decide who's a credible expert, and he f**ked that up royally. Being right on the Space Shuttle doesn't mitigate that.
No need to worry about asteroids silly humans. You're already well on our way to a mass extinction of our own making.
British Member of Parliament Lembit Opik, Lib dem- Montgomery, is famous for two reasons: posing numerous questions in the House about the likelihood of asteroids hitting earth, and dating a 'Cheeky Girl'. For those who don't know what the latter is, congratulations.
I'm amazed he was able to pull himself away from the Bill Belichick Menace long enough to put this piece together.
DTM has it right. What do you think the whole "Transhuman" thing is about anyway? Eliminating the limitations of the human body and brain - including little things like...death. At that point, near space - or even interstellar space - living becomes a given. As I've said before, a Transhuman needs only five things: an energy source, matter, nanomass, computing power, and knowledgebases. With fully developed nanotechnology and those five things, anything necessary can be constructed quickly, used, then broken down again to be made into something else if desired. This means virtually no impact on the environment unless something really big has to be made. And there's plenty of matter out in space to do that. Unless you want to build a Dyson sphere or something, cannibalizing the Earth simply won't be necessary.
Like the risk of mass extinction caused by an asteroid.... watching too many Space Movies!!! It's a good thing we won't be experiencing this in our lifetime!
Giblets did the math on the probability of an asteroid striking the earth, and the probability is one! The asteroid will strike the earth because Giblets will smash it into the earth and make all his enemies cry! Especially the annoying enemies. Giblets is sick of Gregg Easterbunny's whining anyway. What has Gregg Easterbunny done for anyone since their last adult tooth came in, anyway? Giblets is displeased, and will rectify this displeasure with a warm chocolaty asteroid coating.
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Heads in the Sand
Haha, you said "Gregg Easterbrook" and "great" in the same sentence, and it wasn't hipster irony.
That should count for about 4 of your required Atlantic promo posts for the week.
Posted by Arr-squared | June 16, 2008 6:29 PM