In the grand...grandparent I explicitly defined asteroids as anything large enough and fast enough to make a noticeable impact on Earth precisely to avoid terminology issues like this.
Ah, I see. Yes, in that case, using that broad class of objects, we have a much poorer understanding of comets then. The same basic argument goes through (because comets are not nearly as common an object as what is normally called asteroids), but not as by much.
. If you go to the origin of this long sub-thread you’ll see CarlShulman saying “That’s mostly solved, all the dinosaur-killers have been tracked” and me replying “I don’t think so”.
Yeah. I think Carl’s wording here is important. “Mostly solved” is different from “solved”. In this sort of context problems are very rarely solved completely, but more solved in the sense of “we’ve put a lot of effort into this, the most efficient thing to do is to put our next bit of resources into many other existential risks”.
The issue is that the chance of an issue in the short-term is much lower than we would have thought 10 or 20 years ago.
Yep—that’s what I mean by having an wrong estimate and then correcting it.
With respect to the wrong estimate—there is the “background frequency”, right? Tracking a bunch of near-earth asteroids does not lower it significantly (I am not sure, we may disagree on that). So if 10-20 years ago we thought that the threat of an asteroid impact was much higher, I think I’d call it a wrong estimate.
Ah, I see. Yes, in that case, using that broad class of objects, we have a much poorer understanding of comets then. The same basic argument goes through (because comets are not nearly as common an object as what is normally called asteroids), but not as by much.
Yeah. I think Carl’s wording here is important. “Mostly solved” is different from “solved”. In this sort of context problems are very rarely solved completely, but more solved in the sense of “we’ve put a lot of effort into this, the most efficient thing to do is to put our next bit of resources into many other existential risks”.
I’m confused here. What exactly are you saying?
With respect to the wrong estimate—there is the “background frequency”, right? Tracking a bunch of near-earth asteroids does not lower it significantly (I am not sure, we may disagree on that). So if 10-20 years ago we thought that the threat of an asteroid impact was much higher, I think I’d call it a wrong estimate.