Any given asteroid will either be detected and deflected in time, or not. There, to my understanding at least, no mediocre level of asteroid impact risk management which makes the situation worse, in the sense of outright increasing the chance of an extinction event. More resources could be invested for further marginal improvements, with no obvious upper bound.
Poverty and disease are more complicated problems. Incautious use of antibiotics leads to disease-resistant strains, or you give a man a fish and he spends the day figuring out how to ask you for another instead of repairing his net. Sufficient resources need to be committed to solve the problem completely, or it just becomes even more of a mess. Once it’s solved, it tends to stay solved, and then there are more resources available for everything else because the population of healthy, adequately-capitalized humans has increased.
In a situation like that, my preferred strategy is to focus on the end-in-sight problem first, and compare the various bottomless pits afterward.
I would have to disagree that there is no mediocre way to make asteroid risk worse through poor impact risk management, but perhaps it depends on what we mean by this. If we’re strictly talking about the risk of some unmitigated asteroid hitting Earth, there is indeed likely nothing we can do to increase this risk. However, a poorly construed detection, characterisation and deflection process could deflect an otherwise harmless asteroid into Earth. Further, developing deflection techniques could make it easier for people with malicious intent to deflect an otherwise harmless asteroid into Earth on purpose. Given how low the natural risk of a catastrophic asteroid impact is, I would argue that the chances of a man-made asteroid impact (either on purpose or by accident) is much higher than the chances of a natural one occurring in the next 100 years.
Any given asteroid will either be detected and deflected in time, or not. There, to my understanding at least, no mediocre level of asteroid impact risk management which makes the situation worse, in the sense of outright increasing the chance of an extinction event. More resources could be invested for further marginal improvements, with no obvious upper bound.
Poverty and disease are more complicated problems. Incautious use of antibiotics leads to disease-resistant strains, or you give a man a fish and he spends the day figuring out how to ask you for another instead of repairing his net. Sufficient resources need to be committed to solve the problem completely, or it just becomes even more of a mess. Once it’s solved, it tends to stay solved, and then there are more resources available for everything else because the population of healthy, adequately-capitalized humans has increased.
In a situation like that, my preferred strategy is to focus on the end-in-sight problem first, and compare the various bottomless pits afterward.
I would have to disagree that there is no mediocre way to make asteroid risk worse through poor impact risk management, but perhaps it depends on what we mean by this. If we’re strictly talking about the risk of some unmitigated asteroid hitting Earth, there is indeed likely nothing we can do to increase this risk. However, a poorly construed detection, characterisation and deflection process could deflect an otherwise harmless asteroid into Earth. Further, developing deflection techniques could make it easier for people with malicious intent to deflect an otherwise harmless asteroid into Earth on purpose. Given how low the natural risk of a catastrophic asteroid impact is, I would argue that the chances of a man-made asteroid impact (either on purpose or by accident) is much higher than the chances of a natural one occurring in the next 100 years.