[HN Gopher] A privately funded killer asteroid spotter
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A privately funded killer asteroid spotter
Author : prostoalex
Score : 29 points
Date : 2022-06-04 02:27 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Better distract ourselves with the 'one day it will happen'
| rather than deal with what's on our doorstep now which we are
| causing and we can control, but won't.
|
| https://explosm.net/comics/the-future#comic
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Maybe all existential risks are bad?
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| Then the nature of the universe (so far as we understand it)
| is "bad".
| iancmceachern wrote:
| True.
|
| This is a weird line of thought, but I'll bite.
|
| The universe it constantly trying to kill us all. It's
| entropy. Life is fundamentally fighting against that
| entropy to keep itself well, alive.
|
| So yes, in our "living thing" world view the whole universe
| is always trying to kill us (life) and we (life) are locked
| in a constant existential battle with entropy to stay
| alive.
|
| So to oversimplify it yes, we (life) are good and the
| universe is evil in this thought experiment.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| There is no "fight" against entropy, there is just the
| evolution of a deterministic wavefunction over time.
| hoten wrote:
| Didn't expect Tito's to have donated a million bucks to this!
| itisit wrote:
| The founder of Tito's, Bert Beveridge, has a background in
| geophysics, and he's a billionaire. I'm sure he thinks it's
| money well spent, to which I'd agree.
| wave100 wrote:
| Bert Beveridge, founder of a beverage company? That's some
| solid nominative determinism right there.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Existential risk is a threat to their bottom line!
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| It's essentially a post-processing step using government data, so
| a supplement to the government funded programs.
| moomin wrote:
| I mean, it's probably worth watching "Don't Look Up" to see what
| the best case scenario is for this.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Bolide events are turning out to be far more common than had
| generally been accepted.
|
| For example, it turns out a strike only 12,800 years ago wiped
| out cultural development in North America, along with 30+ genera
| of large animals including horses, camels, and mammoths, with
| direct effects as far as South America, Africa, and Syria, and
| triggering the 1200-year Younger Dryas return to Ice Age
| conditions.
|
| The fact was hotly disputed by geologists for decades until the
| smoking-gun layer of platinum-enriched dust was demonstrated.
|
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/695703
|
| Google Earth has been instrumental in revealing numerous newly-
| identified impact craters.
|
| Wholly modern humans are known to have been on earth for hundreds
| of thousands of years (was 200k, latest evidence 300k). The great
| mystery is why it took until just a few thousand years ago for
| civilization to arise _and stick_. We know they were sailing
| deliberately out of sight of land 50,000 years ago, because they
| colonized Australia.
|
| We don't actually know how old many of the megalithic
| constructions we inherit were built; we know only that they are
| at least as old as known people who used them.
|
| There are literally 1M+ square miles of what was rich bottom land
| during most of that time now deep under the sea.
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(page generated 2022-06-04 23:00 UTC)