The Tanis site, in short, did not span the first day of the impact: it probably recorded the first hour or so. This fact, if true, renders the site even more fabulous than previously thought. It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history could still exist millions of years later—a sort of high-speed, high-resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone. DePalma said, “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.” If Tanis had been closer to or farther from the impact point, this beautiful coincidence of timing could not have happened. “There’s nothing in the world that’s ever been seen like this,” Richards told me.
This is from Douglas Preston, “The Day the Dinosaurs Died,” New Yorker, April 8, 2019. The DePalma referred to above is Robert DePalma, whose work is highlighted in the article.
Alex Tabarrok has an excellent blog post that tells the importance of Preston’s article for public policy. Specifically, the quintessential public good, which, as Alex notes, he and Tyler Cowen discuss in their economics textbook, is the means to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid before it can do harm. The “most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history” mentioned above is no exaggeration. It happened 66 million years ago and destroyed almost all of life on earth.
More detail:
The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.
If you think that the government should provide truly public goods, that is, goods that are non-excludable and non-rival in consumption, then you should think that government should provide the public good of preventing an asteroid from hinting earth. Here’s the problem: The U.S. government, which has access to more resources than any other government on earth, is almost certainly underinvesting in the technology to deflect or destroy asteroids. Just as private actors don’t have much of an incentive to produce truly public goods, neither do government actors. When I think of all the things the government wastes money on, I would rather they took a few billions of those dollars annually and invest in that technology. Unfortunately, my wishes, plus $5.75, will get my wife’s favorite coffee drink at Starbucks.
Of course, I tend to be the optimist. So just as I think the probability of a really bloody world war is much lower than it ever was in the first 90 years of the last century, so I think that there’s a chance the federal government will, as Alex says in this video, muddle through and eventually start taking the problem more seriously. We’ll see.
READER COMMENTS
john hare
Mar 31 2019 at 7:40pm
Oh I so want to get technical in comments, space being one of my hobbies.
A good detection and cataloging effort would be relatively economical. Finding out what, where, and when would allow for good planning. Orbits can be tracked and projected decades out with current technology probably costing under a billion a year. Then if a danger is in a very few years, it’s time for a crash program with unlimited funding. If an impact is likely from a well mapped asteroid in a few decades, then there is time for more responsible planning. In any case, detection, tracking, and projection could be tax money well spent.
Benjamin Cole
Mar 31 2019 at 7:51pm
Why not a $50 billion X-prize to the company develops and builds a working system to detect and destroy incoming asteroids? Financed by all developed nations.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 31 2019 at 11:26pm
Maybe not even necessary. A few years ago a lot of people talked about asteroid mining.
Fixing a proper legal framework for asteroid mining might spur that technology enough, to give us asteroid protection on the side?
Benjamin Cole
Mar 31 2019 at 10:11pm
You know, this post raises a fascinating question.
David Henderson posits there is a government role to play in protecting the Earth from asteroids.
Let us say for sake of argument there is a 1/1000th chance of an asteroid hitting the Earth in the next 1000 years. Given that tens of millions of years pass without a major strike, this may be high, but let that go.
Okay, let us say there is 1/10 chance the climate alarmists are correct, and that man-made pollutants will cook the planet in the next 100 years, and that equatorial zones will become uninhabitable, temperate zones very hot, and sea levels will rise 100 meters. (BTW, sea levels have risen 100 meters in the last 10,000 years, so rising sea levels are not a exotic idea).
Should government respond to the 1/10 chance the climate alarmists are correct?
Matthias Görgens
Mar 31 2019 at 11:24pm
The proper government reaction to climate change is a money spinner for them: emission taxes including carbon taxes.
So, yes, governments can go ahead and do something about climate change. No need to wait for a global consensus.
Use the money raised to lower other taxes. (Or invest some in Asteroid defense even..)
Do keep in mind that the best estimate of climate change economic impact give something about or below 10% world GDP loss. That’s bad, but equivalent to just a few years of growth. By comparison, a bloody big asteroid would really ruin your Sunday.
RPLong
Apr 1 2019 at 6:55am
I don’t think it depends on the probability of disaster. I think it depends on the probability of being about to avoid the disaster.
If, for example, we discovered a meteor the size of Mercury en route to Earth, no matter how much lead time we had, I doubt we should waste any money trying to prevent inevitable destruction. That money would be better put to use improving lives on Earth in the meantime.
Or, to use another example, the government of Costa Rica spends a large amount of money on ecological conservation. Some of that money is well spent, but a lot of that money is spent on things that Costa Rica cannot prevent. No matter how small Costa Rica’s carbon footprint is, it will never manage to cancel out any of the deleterious effects on the environment caused by, say, Chinese manufacturing. To the extent that the government of Costa Rica spends money on problems they cannot solve, that money is wasted. That money would be better spent improving the every-day lives of Costa Ricans.
Rob Weir
Apr 1 2019 at 10:26am
I think you need to consider the unknown unknowns as well. Suppose, we went all out on climate change remediation, for the hypothetical 1/10 probability, but in doing so wrecked the economy. Say we end up, after the effort, with temperatures 1 degree C lower, but with a long-term economic decline. Is it a good trade-off?
The risk then is that something else hits us a few years later, an asteroid, a global pandemic, a killer volcano, etc. There are many long-tail risks out there. I suspect robust growth, always staying near peak economic performance, puts us in the best condition to face whatever happens.
Mark Bahner
Apr 2 2019 at 1:52pm
Hi,
I was also going to tie this post to climate change. I was going to point out that the fact that the world isn’t spending more money on protecting against asteroids probably constitutes a “revealed preference” that the discount rates used for climate change analyses should be much higher.
But regarding your scenario:
…I think there is far, far, far less than a 1/10 chance of the sea level rising 100 meters in 100 years, so it’s really a completely hypothetical problem. If one substituted a more realistic number–I don’t know off the top of my head, but perhaps 3 meters?–I think the situation would be correspondingly vastly different.
With 100 meters of change in 100 years, the world should be willing to spend vast amounts, since 100 meters would submerge most of the major cities of the world (e.g. NYC and Miami), whereas 3 meters would certainly submerge parts of the major cities, but not put them under tens of meters of water.
An interesting followup would be what to do. We could (at tremendous expense) do many things, e.g. 1) draw CO2 out of the air, 2) a global “Green New Deal” (only the CO2 reduction parts), 3) stop the parts of Antartica and Greenland that are contributing to the hypothetical sea level rise from melting, etc.
Thaomas
Apr 1 2019 at 8:27am
No, your view plus donation to a candidate who is less unlikely to oppose increased funding for asteroid tracking and deflection and your example of doing so can help. It’s hardly surprising that after 40 years of hearing that lowering taxes and spending is always good — the very definition of liberty — it might be hard to get people to believe that there is one kind of activity that it IS worth spending on.
Jon Murphy
Apr 1 2019 at 8:46am
I am going to open up my Law & Econ class today with this quote
Mark Bahner
Apr 2 2019 at 2:03pm
Well, it might be a better policy choice to first spend the money to identify whether there are going to be any asteroids that need diverting. And I’m not an expert on this–which never keeps me from commenting anywhere ;-)– but I think enough study has already been done to know to greater than 99.9 percent certainty that an asteroid the size that wiped out the dinosaurs won’t be hitting earth in the next 100 years.
So I hope you haven’t been losing sleep over this. 🙂
Ongoing NASA “Sentry” project
Mark Bahner
Apr 2 2019 at 10:38pm
Hi,
Adding some information here about why it’s almost certain that there is no significant danger of any cataclysmic impact from any near earth objects in the next approximately 100 years.
The NASA “Sentry” project that I linked to above ranks asteroids in descending order of their cumulative “Palermo” score. The Palermo score is based on a combination of the object size, the likelihood of hitting earth, and the nearness in time for the potential impact. The higher the score, the more dangerous…however, any score that is negative is considered nothing to really worry about.
The most dangerous object listed at the top is 29075 (1950 DA). The estimated diameter is 1.3 km. To give some perspective, the object that terminated the dinosaurs has been estimated at 11 to 81 km in diameter. In general, mass is proportional to diameter cubed. (Although the object that ended the dinosaurs may have been a comet, and this is object is probably an asteroid.)
If this object were to hit earth, it would be in the year 2880. (Which is of course well beyond the year 2525.) And the current estimated probability of hitting earth is 0.00014 (about 1 in 10,000).
So rest easy on civilization-ending objects striking earth any time soon.
However, this leads me back to something that we know is going to be very expensive. There is approximately a 50/50 chance that hurricane storm surge will cause more than $40 billion in damage in the U.S. in the next decade, and more than $100 billion globally. If there was a portable system that could be set up to reduce the damage from storm surge anywhere in the world on a few days’ notice, it would be a very wise public investment.
David Henderson
Apr 2 2019 at 11:59pm
Thanks, Mark. That’s extremely comforting.
Mark Bahner
Apr 3 2019 at 12:56pm
Hi David,
You’re welcome. I’m always happy to free people to worry about other things. 🙂
Some more on near earth objects (NEOs) and the world in general:
NASA thinks they have identified more than 90 percent of the NEOs greater than 1 km in diameter. So now they’re a couple years into trying to identify more than 90 percent of the NEOs greater than 0.140 km in diameter.
Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say about impacts and the damage they cause:
Isn’t it amazing that the NASA “Sentry” project website has such vast sums of interesting/useful information? Or even that Encyclopedia Britannica is available online. What a world!
I’ll comment later on some other things–besides a portable storm surge reduction system–that I think are potentially useful to the world, but probably will have a tough time getting funded. (And yet the U.S. government has already spent $400 billion on the F-35 fighter, and expects to spend close to $1.5 trillion. Now I’m depressed again!)
Comments are closed.