alt Hacker News>the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth
I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.
Replies
edelbitter • today at 12:33 AM
We might have even seen the Chelyabinsk one coming, with current tech.. if only it had been coming at us from a slightly less bright direction. That one was probably in the once-in-a-hundred-years category.
> I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Perhaps the last event was one million years ago and we are now (proverbially) 'due'.
> The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen in the future (or vice versa).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
It's like people who say "it sure is strange that we had a 'once-in-a-century flood' two years in a row": that's not how odds/probabilities work.
* https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/we-had-a-100-year-flood-two-years-...