Asteroids Aff
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- RISK CALCULUS—INTERVENING ACTORS
DELAY BADEarly warning is critical—policymakers will wait too long and deflection will be expensive and ineffective NAC 2010 (“Report of the NASA Advisory Council Ad Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense,” Oct 6, http://www.nss.org/resources/library/planetarydefense/2010-NASAAdvisoryCouncilOnPlanetaryDefense.pdf) Our ability to project a NEO’s orbit years into the future is accompanied by considerable uncertainty. The object’s orbital plane will generally be known to good accuracy, such that the intersection of that plane with the orbit of the Earth can be predicted to within a relatively few kilometers. However, except in the case of a NEO observed on its terminal impact trajectory, a threatening NEO’s exact orbital period will generally not be known accurately enough to predict whether an impact many years in the future will actually occur. Decision-makers will thus frequently face the question of how to react to a NEO with a worrisome (but uncertain) probability of impact. For example, a particular NEO may have a 2 percent chance of impacting Earth on a particular day decades in the future. Waiting until ground-based observations improve the impact prediction to, say, 50 percent confidence will make an attempted deflection far more costly, if not physically impossible. Even the prompt launch of a robotic transponder mission to improve our knowledge of the NEO’s orbit will cost several hundred million dollars for each potential impact threat. Decisions of this sort will be very unpleasant for policy-makers. The Task Force recommendations seek to minimize these situations through development and deployment of search and tracking assets that reduce the uncertainty in a NEO’s position, and thus the uncertainty in its impact probability. Reducing the number of such “worrisome probability of impact” situations via better NEO search and track technologies (producing observations that 12 prove the more likely case that the asteroid will miss Earth) will be far less expensive than launching transponder missions or an actual deflection campaign. Parallel efforts to demonstrate cost-effective deflection technologies would help deal with those few objects with impact probabilities that remain too worrisome to ignore. The Task Force recommends that NASA choose search and deflection capabilities that minimize the total combined cost of confronting future impact threats. Now is key – no second chances after an asteroid strike AMES RESEARCH CENTER 2003 - NASA’s Ames Research Center is a world-class research facility located in the heart of Silicon Valley. The center is involved with many high-tech projects, ranging from developing small spacecraft to managing some of the world’s largest supercomputers, and conducting astrobiology research (July 8, * Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt * Dr. Carolyn S. Shoemaker * David H. Levy * Dr. John Lewis * Dr. Neil D. Tyson * Dr. Freeman Dyson * Dr. Richard P. Hallion * Dr. Thomas D. Jones * Bruce Joel Rubin * Dr. Lucy Ann McFadden * Erik C. Jones * Marc Schlather * William E. Burrows, “ NASA NEO News: Open Letter to Congress on Near Earth Objects ” http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=9866 ) We cannot rely on statistics alone to protect us from catastrophe; such a strategy is like refusing to buy fire insurance because blazes are infrequent. Our country simply cannot afford to wait for the first modern occurrence of a devastating NEO impact before taking steps to adequately address this threat. We may not have the luxury of a second chance, for time is not necessarily on our side. If we do not act now, and we subsequently learn too late of an impending collision against which we cannot defend, it will not matter who should have moved to prevent the catastrophe . . . only that they failed to do so when they had the opportunity to prevent it. RISK CALCULUS—INTERVENING ACTORSOther potential threats are already being dealt with by policymakers and the public—asteroids are ignored CHICHILNISKY AND EISENBERGER 2010 (Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger, Columbia University, “Asteroids: Assessing Catastrophic Risks,” Journal of Probability and Statistics, http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jps/2010/954750/) Our rational decision maker who values the future of the species and understands what probabilities really mean, could go through the following simple analysis. For any value of �� even close to one-half the expected value we have calculated makes asteroids more threatening than global warming that is attracting all the attention of policy makers and the public today. In one sense this is satisfying since we would like to believe that we would give great value to prevent our extinction. However, we used the number of US $ 3 0 0 trillion ( �� = 1 / 2 ) for the expected value and argued that it is what we should spend to defend against extinction. This does not seem intuitively correct for many reasons, not the least of which is that we would have no resources left to do anything else. The answer to this dilemma is to recognize that what we are really interested in is utility loss from extinction rather than expected value for the dollars we allocate. This view can help us achieve an intuitively pleasing answer that we should spend as much money today on defenses against extinction as can be usefully transferred into improved protection. In the case of asteroids based on current estimates many experts believe this might be only about 1 0 times what we are now spending which is about US $ 3 0 million dollars. This is a small number and the corrected valuation of the risk is high enough that we should need no further analysis to decide to increase our efforts now and when new opportunities become available in the future.10. ConclusionsWe believe that the above analysis is the beginning of a much more extensive assessment and research about our response to all kinds of catastrophic risks. Recent results provide ways to enhance our subjective judgments about the value of �� , which is approximated by the marginal utility of avoiding extinction near the catastrophe, see the study by Chichilnisky in [4]. Other methods could include the application of Bayesian analysis involving experts who understand the nature of the threats as well as the correct meaning of low probability events. A Bayesian approach can be helpful to determine both the true risk profile and the most plausible utility function for the use of resources to combat a given threat. Such evaluations identify not only high expected value but also high utility. If there are very expensive things we can do to prevent the risk the the allocations of a large amount of resources may be warranted and the problem becomes more complicated. Our political leaders will need to make the more difficult choices between meeting todays' needs compared with the need to defend against distant catastrophic threats. This is not a new challenge since we and other nations spend a significant part of our resources to defend against the threat of nuclear war or the nuclear winter that would follow it. What is new is that now we recognize that many serious threats like those arising from glaciation, asteroid impact, and biodiversity loss are unlikely to occur within our lifetimes, yet we do not want to wake up one day and find that we are facing the impact of what was an avoidable catastrophic risk. Furthermore the same type of deficiency in our approach also exists for very rare events like tsunamis and earthquakes also leading to a poor allocation of resources, as was likely the case for the 2005 Asian tsunami. This work provides a framework to address these threats in a way that agrees with our intuition. We would like to allocate resources in a way that can be useful in reducing the catastrophic threats we face. In conclusion we offer another perspective that might also be useful for understanding why it is now that we are confronting the dilemmas. An analogy might help. Early on nobody spent a lot of money on personal insurance to protect him/herself. As we gained more knowledge of the risks we face and as we became affluent enough we decided to spend increasing amounts of money on insurance. In a similar way our species only recently has obtained the knowledge of some of the catastrophic risks we face and developed ways to cope with them. For the moment we are seriously underinsured so any way that we can do useful things to reduce our risk we should do so. Someday in the future we may be challenged as we were doing the cold war to decide between present risks and future ones. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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