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CarlShulman comments on Where I've Changed My Mind on My Approach to Speculative Causes - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's mostly solved, all the dinosaur-killers have been tracked, and 90%+ of the 1 km size ones. So there's not much room for more funding left, and it seems very likely that's not the best thing to work on in terms of existential risk (the mopping-up effort is now increasingly aimed at city-smashers or tsunami-triggers).
Dark comet risk has been less addressed, because it is much harder to track such comets than asteroids.
Wikipedia:
(This has happened).
I don't think so. The asteroid problem doesn't involve only what the astronomers technically call asteroids. In involves any sufficiently large body moving at sufficiently high speed on the intercept trajectory.
To "mostly solve" this problem you need either to account for all sufficiently large bodies in the Solar system (we'll agree not to worry about whatever might arrive out of interstellar space) or build some kind of deflection/destruction system which can handle everything the Solar system can throw at our planet.
You should probably read Carl's link.
I did. I am not impressed by the statistics quoted in it. In particular, there is a neat trick in transitioning from "NASA reports that all near-earth asteroids larger than 10 kilometers in diameter ... have already been identified" to "This eliminates much of the estimated risk due to {note the glaring empty space here where words "near-earth" used to be} asteroids"
Asteroid impact is mostly a black-swan type of problem: you can identify the risk you see but you have very little idea of the remaining risk from things you do not see.
Near earth asteroids are the primary threat set here, with only a tiny fraction not in that set that have any chance of hitting Earth. That's precisely why they say it eliminates much of the estimated risk due to asteroids.
I think it used to be the primary threat set. The claim is that near earth asteroids are not a threat because we looked at them and established that large ones are not going to hit Earth in the near future. Thus near earth asteroids are not the primary threat set any more.
This seems like an odd use of language which misses the fundamental point: the observation of the near Earth asteroids reduces the estimated risk level by orders of magnitude. Whether the remaining risk is still concentrated in the near-earth case is a secondary consideration and not relevant to what was being discussed.
I don't know why you think this use of language is odd. Saying that "we thought X was dangerous, we looked at it closely and it turns out X isn't dangerous at all" has the same meaning as "we mis-estimated the danger from X and then corrected the estimate".
If your updated belief is that there is little danger from near-earth asteroids, then the original belief that near-earth asteroids were the primary threat set was incorrect.
Because it misses the point that the total risk was from asteroids isn't that high. Yes, of the remaining asteroid threat, more of it is from non near Earth asteroids, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand. Hence the phrase in the report that you objected to ""This eliminates much of the estimated risk due to asteroids" makes complete sense.
We are talking past each other.
Let me try to reformulate my point. We're talking about existential risk of an asteroid impact (where "asteroid" is defined as anything large enough moving fast enough). Large asteroids have hit Earth before, we have a fairly good idea how often such things happen. The historical record gives us the basis for a guesstimate of the risk.
That risk estimate is, of course, quite low. Still, we went out looking for things which might hit us in the near future. Note the asymmetry here: were we to find something our risk estimate would skyrocket, but were we to find nothing, it wouldn't perceptibly change.
So we looked at near-earth asteroids because, well, they are near-earth. Turned out none of them is on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeable future. This is good, of course, but it does not mean that the estimated risk went down -- what happened was that it did not go up and that's a different thing.
My original objection was to the characterization of asteroid risk as a "solved problem". It is not. Saying this is like looking up, noticing that the ceiling isn't about to collapse, and then on this basis confidently pronouncing that things falling on your head is a solved problem.
Risks and dangers here are percieved risks and dangers. In that context, such talk makes sense - obviously percieved risks depend on your current state of knowledge. Maybe god knows whether the bad thing will happen or not - but without a hotline to Him, percieved risks and dangers will remain the best we have.