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Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy

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Re: Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy

#9
This is not an increase over baseline risk (as its Palermo scale[0] indicates, being a negative number, -0.56).

I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards, because with the very awesome new telescope[1] that's going online this year, the number of these detections is going to drastically go up. The number of objects isn't going up—they've always been there, we just didn't know—but I think the media coverage is not going to absorb that nuance very well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazar... ("A rating of 0 means the hazard is equivalent to the background hazard (defined as the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact)")

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-r... ("With its capacity to detect faint objects, [Vera] Rubin is expected to increase the number of known asteroids and comets by a factor of 10 to 100")

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