timtyler comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong

75 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 18 August 2011 11:34PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (249)

Sort By: Controversial

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: timtyler 23 August 2011 07:40:15PM 1 point [-]

Astronomy is pretty well understood, so it is pretty easy to estimate the cost of searching the sky for dangerous objects.

Sort of. The possibility of mirror matter objects makes this pretty difficult. There's even a reasonable-if-implausible paper arguing that a mirror object caused the Tunguska event, and many other allegedly anomalous impacts over the last century. There's a lot of astronomical reasons to take this idea seriously, e.g. IIRC three times too many moon craters.

Reality check: mirror matter has a gravitational signature - so we know some 99% of non-stellar matter in the solar system is not mirror matter - or we would see its grav-sig. So: we can ignore it with only a minor error.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 23 August 2011 07:44:26PM 0 points [-]

Dark matter.

Comment author: timtyler 23 August 2011 09:49:53PM *  2 points [-]

There evidently aren't many "clumps" of that in the solar system - so we don't have to worry very much about hypothetical collisions with it.