The devastating tsunami in Asia illuminates the inherent human resistance to risk assessment and disaster planning, and demonstrates why this blogger feels like Cassandra when warning against the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.
The tsunami effects can be seen here in dramatic before and after satellite images of the coastline. In many other areas, a few minutes' worth of warning would have allowed thousands to reach higher ground inland, saving their lives. (higher-resolution images here)
But no warning system was in place, for want of the will to spend a few million dollars against an uncommon, but possible event. But given how destructive the wave could be, assuming a toll of 120,000 lives, in a once-a-century event, is equivalent to 1,200 dead per year.
Every year.
You'd be willing to spend some cash to stop that kind of yearly carnage now, wouldn't you, especially if the fix were well-known and technically feasible?
But when it's spread out in big chunks more than a lifetime apart, it's easy to ignore and assume someone else later will worry about it.
And so at least 1/8th of a million people died in an instant.
Now there's talk of a warning system for America's Atlantic coast. Offshore earthquakes there are even more rare than in the Indian Ocean, but it could happen. A volcano could spurt out of nowhere under the ocean with little warning, for example. We just don't know what's going on inside the Earth.
Or, an asteroid could strike the ocean, causing a deadly wave. Odds are if one hits, it will be in the water. You'd think we'd want to be protected. Because, you know, asteroids are real, and they do strike with regularity.
Big hits are spread out over long time intervals, on average, however, so the same resistance to planning for detecting, warning, and possibly shielding against asteroids and comets is in effect as the resistance that prevented a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean.
This terrifies me.
People tend to assume that astronomers are all over this, and will spot a deadly rock years away from impact.
Guess again!
Very little of the sky is under observation. A comet, moving very very fast, and coming towards us so we wouldn't see the tail, would be essentially invisible. We'd be lucky to have 2 or 3 days' warning.
And there'd be nothing we could do.
Retarget an ICBM? Not likely.
But how likely is it?
Estimates are a "killer asteroid" strikes, say, once in a million years. And again, we know these are real, and are responsible for mass extinctions in the history of the world. But once in a million years seems like "almost never".
Well, not quite. If it would wipe out, say, 3 billion people, that's like losing 3,000 people per year.
Every year.
Worse than the tsunami!
Like a 9/11 every year!
And 9/11 gets commissions to study "what went wrong."
Imagine if it happened every year, for a million years straight, and nobody ever did anything about it!
That's the equivalent situation we find ourselves in with respect to the risk of asteroid strikes.
This is no joke. The upper atmosphere is hit with great explosive force all the time.
For example, here is some testimony from a Brigadier General to the House Science Committee in October, 2002:
Two and a half months ago, Pakistan and India were at full alert and poised for a large-scale war, which both sides appeared ready to escalate into nuclear war. The situation has defused-for now. Most of the world knew about this situation and watched and worried. But few know of an event over the Mediterranean on June 6th of this year that could have had a serious bearing on that outcome. U.S. early warning satellites detected a flash that indicated an energy release comparable to the Hiroshima burst. We see about 30 such bursts per year, but this one was one of the largest we have ever seen. The event was caused by the impact of a small asteroid, probably about 5-10 meters in diameter, on the earth's atmosphere. Had you been situated on a vessel directly underneath, the intensely bright flash would have been followed by a shock wave that would have rattled the entire ship, and possibly caused minor damage.I once wrote a letter to the editor of the local town paper, pointing out that the expectation value of that risk far outweighed, say, yearly civilian plane crash casualties, or even what people are really scared of, random mass shooting sprees.
The event of this June received little or no notice as far as we can tell. However, if it had occurred at the same latitude just a few hours earlier, the result on human affairs might have been much worse. Imagine that the bright flash accompanied by a damaging shock wave had occurred over India or Pakistan. To our knowledge, neither of those nations have the sophisticated sensors that can determine the difference between a natural NEO impact and a nuclear detonation. The resulting panic in the nuclear-armed and hair-triggered opposing forces could have been the spark that ignited a nuclear horror we have avoided for over a half century....
Most people know of the Tunguska NEO strike in Siberia in 1908. An object probably less than 100 meters in diameter struck Siberia, releasing equivalent energy of up to 10 megatons. Many experts believe there were two other smaller events later in the century-one in Central Asia in the 1940s and one in the Amazon in the 1930s. In 1996, our satellite sensors detected a burst over Greenland of approximately 100 kiloton yield. Had any of these struck over a populated area, thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands might have perished. Experts now tell us that an even worse catastrophe than a land impact of a Tunguska-size event would be an ocean impact near a heavily populated shore. The resulting tidal wave could inundate shorelines for hundreds of miles and potentially kill millions. There are hundreds of thousands of objects the size of the Tunguska NEO that come near the earth. We know the orbits of just a few.
And of course I was ridiculed in the paper for making such a claim, even though I was a scientist!
Which I pointed out was odd, since not only are the yearly equivalent numbers not as bad for those bigger fears, but you can take personal steps to protect yourself from those, by, for example, not flying, or by being armed yourself. The numbers are the numbers.
But there's nothing you can do about that 10-mile-wide asteroid!
Except indirectly: contact your Senators and Representatives! Because with a dedicated program, we can detect and track and try to do something about these threats to life as we know it.
LINEAR, for example, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program run by MIT's Lincoln Lab, is scanning the skys and finding dangerous objects for the Minor Planet Center catalogs, but this is just scratching the surface. Such research must continue.
Of course, the REAL way to be sure the human race survives is to go to Mars, which may be easier than generally thought, but that topic is beyond the scope of this essay!)
But after that long-winded introduction, we finally arrive at the real point I'm trying to make, and that is the consequences of Islamic terrorists armed with atomic bombs, which they will utilize not in a random fashion like a natural disaster, but in a way cunningly designed to be as destructive to our civilization as possible.
Their intent is already stated. All they require is the capability.
It's like "the button" has already been pushed; the gun just has to be loaded. This has been discussed at length at Belmont Club (of course!) here, here, and here.
Imagine the future as a "decision tree" of possible outcomes, depending on actions taken now. We had better do all we can to make sure we go down a branch of that tree that has "nuclear attack by Islamic terrorists" with as minute a possibility as we can make it -- and ideally, zero probability!
Because if it happens, we have two options: capitulation, or massive retaliation -- unless we choose to just be quietly all killed off. None of those results is remotely acceptable!
We get to approach zero probability of that event by making sure the capability isn't developed, which takes the cooperation of a State. Why we aren't doing more to stop such developments is beyond me; we haven't even stated a policy of deterrence, which costs us nothing!
I'll go into more on details of what could be done in a soon-to-follow article.
But probably nothing will be done until AFTER we've suffered a catastrophe, much like with the Asian tsunami warning system.
There wouldn't be a saying about "closing the barn door" if it weren't human nature.
Nor would there be a myth of Cassandra, if we were not Fated to watch avoidable tragedy play out as inevitability.
Will anyone take action?
