[ExI] Planetary defense

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Thu May 12 22:17:13 UTC 2011


On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Kelly Anderson wrote:
>>
>> Some people seem more than willing to spend countless trillions of
>> dollars resolving or just mitigating global warming. Compare almost
>> any risk to humanity to global warming in terms of a cost risk
>> analysis, and you can make a really good case for addressing it (vs.
>> global warming). It's a powerful way to make your point, I think.
>
> I doubt it makes my point rhetorically well, remember that most people are
> pretty irrational when it comes to global warming :-)

But enough are irrational in the direction that helps your point... :-)

> Actually, I think the key issue is that climate change is a bit like a
> Christmas tree: you can decorate it with whatever ideological, political or
> economical decorations you want. If you want to dress it up in socialism,
> free markets, conservative values or eurobureaucracy, you can do it. Compare
> that to an asteroid defense program. Much fewer decorations that fit. You
> can't really make it "about" social equality or your favorite economic tool.
> This might be good news for the feasibility of actually doing something but
> there are going to be much less interest in spending (other peoples) money
> on it.

You can make it about survival, and that is a prerequisite to arguing
about all the other things... :-)

>> What do the mathematical models you use have to say about
>> climate change, and how does the response to that compare to the
>> response to asteroid detection and mitigation?
>
> My models have nothing directly to say about climate change, except that the
> statistics of drought disasters *is* worth worrying about - a very flat
> power law with a few very deadly cases. If climate change increases the
> frequency of droughts or equivalent agricultural problems then a lot of
> people will be in trouble. Asteroids actually have a very nice x^-6 power
> law - very rare big events. Just going from my data I should clearly talk
> climate change at the conference :-) (actually, the real threat in that
> analysis is wars and democides, so I should be talking about how to defang
> governments sensibly)

My suggestion was merely that the mathematics of Risk are probably on
your side, and that global warming solutions rarely come out on top in
actuarial tables of "things we can afford to do something meaningful
about".

> This shows an interesting problem we have: NEOs are not the biggest or most
> important threats we need to stop. Yet they are the best managed of all of
> them. We know their physics, it is deterministic, we have a lot of data on
> them, we have some experimental interventions (asteroid and comet landings),
> there is a community working on the problem and there is even some public
> understanding of the issue. Try finding that combination for climate change,
> wars, AGI, bioweapons or nanotech. The only thing anywhere close is
> pandemics.

You might also benefit from comparison to the history of Hurricane
prediction, another similar kind of disaster in terms of risk math.

-Kelly



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