Hey readers,
How’s it going? In case you missed it earlier this week, I wrote about whether you can safely build something that may kill you.
Beyond AI, I’m still thinking about one of the most neglected yet important issues that FP is really devoted to covering: poverty. What are some of your biggest questions around ending poverty? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Email us at futureperfect@voxmedia.com!
Enjoy the long weekend!
—Kelsey Piper, senior writer |
|
|
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images |
Around 66 million years ago, scientists postulate that a 10-kilometer-wide asteroid hit the Earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. It sent out debris for 48,000 cubic miles (or a little less than the area of the Red Sea) and released dust and soot that blocked Earth’s sunlight for years, causing temperatures to plummet. After inhabiting the Earth for 165 million years, the age of the dinosaurs ended in less than a year.
The good news is it’s unlikely that humans — who have occupied the Earth for a much, much shorter time than the dinosaurs — will face the same fate. At least for the next 1,000 years, a recent study in The Astronomical Journal found.
This study, which was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Colorado and NASA, found that the odds of any of the nearly 1,000 known asteroids larger than a kilometer — big enough to cause planetary havoc — colliding with Earth are low. The asteroid that poses the greatest risk only carries a 0.00151 percent chance of passing within the moon’s orbit in the next millennium. These are good odds, especially given that NASA believes it has discovered just about every possible asteroid that could fit in that category.
“In order for a collision to happen, you need two things,” said Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz, one of the report authors and an aerospace engineering sciences PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. “You need the paths of the asteroid and the earth to intersect, and then they need both to be at the right place at the same time.” Fuentes-Muñoz compares the occurrence to a car accident; two streets intersecting doesn’t mean a car crash is inevitable, rather it creates an environment where it can become possible.
I spoke with Fuentes-Muñoz about the history of asteroid research, this study on asteroids, and what needs to happen next to protect Earth from disastrous collisions. —Rachel DuRose, Future Perfect fellow Why did you focus on large asteroids for this study?
Size is of course one of the biggest concerns. The way that the planetary defense effort started, it was with a US congressional request to NASA to actually find all of the kilometer-size asteroids. These are the ones that, if they were to collide with the Earth, would cause global damage. But there are other asteroids that are smaller that still could cause significant regional damage. For now, because we wanted to demonstrate these methods, we focused on the largest ones. They are the most dangerous ones.
Right now, it's very hard to estimate the size of asteroids because they're just some shiny dot in the sky. You could get the same light from a huge rock that doesn't reflect a lot of sunlight or a small rock that is very metallic and reflects a lot of light. So there is some uncertainty also on the sizes, and so that's another area in which we need more efforts to actually characterize the hazards of asteroids. |
"We have examples, recent and throughout history, of how smaller asteroids can still cause a lot of damage." |
What do you think can be done to build on your research?
The next step is going to be expanding this to asteroids of different sizes, the smaller ones. The challenge there is going to be that we may not have as many observations of them, so the predictions may not be as good, but that's where we're going.
I also wanted to point you to the other planetary defense efforts, which mostly are completing the population of small asteroids [discovering them all]. There are sky surveys that are aiming to do this in the next decade.
There are also space missions, like the first deflection demonstration that happened last year with NASA mission DART. There's technology that we need to develop as a civilization to be able to deflect some asteroids in case it happens, and those are the fields that are also being currently worked on. Do you think that your research — which shows that the chances of a large asteroid hitting Earth are low — will change the amount of effort being put into counteracting a strike? Should it?
I think we absolutely need these efforts. We have examples, recent and throughout history, of how smaller asteroids can still cause a lot of damage. For example, in the Chelyabinsk meteor, which happened in Russia, we were very lucky that no one died. Or other ones, like the Tunguska event 100 years ago, which, if it was in a city, would have killed thousands. So these smaller asteroids can still cause a lot of damage, and the sooner we start developing this technology, the better.
From the point of view of being able to deflect them at all, the sooner that you find them, the better. Because if you don't have enough time, there's nothing you can do. Even if we cannot do anything to deflect it, we still need to be able to predict those paths and warn the people. It could get into a situation that is similar to a tsunami warning or a natural disaster warning. Right now, we have been able to send warnings for a few asteroids that we were able to detect that they were going to collide with the Earth.
|
|
|
The psychedelic renaissance is at risk of missing the bigger picture |
As important as anything that can turn the tide on mental health is how the frenzy over transforming psychedelics into new treatments for illness obscures — and may even interfere with — their further potential to expand our understanding of what healthy minds could be. To make the most of what psychedelics can offer to the more expansive project of human flourishing, medicalizing isn’t enough, argues Future Perfect fellow Oshan Jarow in his latest piece.
"Even as I’ve watched the so-called psychedelic hype bubble inflate over the past few years, I expected it would be tricky to ground the case for the more-than-therapeutic value of psychedelics,” Jarow said. But I found that beneath the more visible literature on mental illness, even Western scientists have been bringing a more diverse lens to making sense of psychedelic benefits for years (decades, even). We’re far from the more refined understanding you’ll find in Indigenous cultures of these substances, but I was happy to find that we have more material than I’d thought to continue weaving our own."
More on this topic from Vox:
|
|
|
A message just arrived from outer space. Can you decode it? |
Michael S. Williamson/Washington Post via Getty Images |
After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, humanity finally picked up a message from outer space earlier this week. Three of Earth’s top radio astronomy observatories detected the signal coming from somewhere near Mars — not from aliens, but from humans setting up an experiment. Senior reporter Sigal Samuel dives into who’s behind the project and the questions surrounding the risks of extraplanetary contact.
“Ever since I saw the movie Contact as a kid, I've been obsessed with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” Samuel said. “So when I heard that SETI was transmitting a coded message from space toward Earth, and that all us earthlings would be asked to help decode it, I was delirious. Intellectually, I think it's smart to have a trial run like this and to get people debating about the potential existential risks associated with talking to aliens. But emotionally, I'm just so goddamn excited to try to crack the code!”
More on this topic from Vox: |
|
|
Sina Schuldt/picture alliance via Getty Images |
If you follow international business news, you’ve probably heard a lot about “supply chain resilience” and methods meant to prevent harmful shortages like those of semiconductors, baby formula, and more that stung during the depths of Covid. But many countries are trying to shore up their supply chains simply by blocking other countries’ goods. This piece from economist Michael Gasiorek unpacks some of the doublespeak on this topic quite well and reframed how I think about these issues. —Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent
It’s safe to say that effective altruism has had a … challenging year. In his Substack newsletter, the writer Sam Atis provides a guide to some of the deeper challenges he sees within the EA movement, ranging from a tendency toward underbaked groupthink to an underappreciation for the importance of systemic change in tackling major social problems. Consider this constructive feedback. Among the lessons: If your philanthropic movement finds itself with the funds to buy an actual castle, maybe don’t buy that castle. —Bryan Walsh, editorial director
Factory farms are a leading air and water polluter in the US Midwest and West, and they’ve increasingly become a point of contention between environmentalists and state agencies and policymakers. A few weeks ago, two Iowa state senators pressured University of Iowa officials to take down a faculty member's blog critical of Iowa water policy. Meanwhile, intense fights over water quality from factory farms are playing out in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Idaho, Colorado, and elsewhere. It’s a neglected consequence of our animal-intensive food system, and one that is likely to get more attention if it continues to worsen. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer
A Category 5 typhoon hit Guam — a US territory in the Pacific — this week. As a Puerto Rican, I’m keenly aware of how humanitarian aid (and long-term structural support) can be delayed for the territories for a variety of bureaucratic, colonial reasons. I’ll be keeping an eye on how this story develops as weeks go by. —Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor
Questions? Comments? Tell us what you think! We recently changed the format of this newsletter and would love to know your thoughts. Email us at futureperfect@vox.com. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter.
|
|
|
Access the web version of this newsletter here.
This email was sent to aymentanaze.news@blogger.com. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution.
View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved. |
|
|
|