this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
And you don't need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What's their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they'd be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I'm betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don't frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there's an 80's sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don't actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
I don't worry about it, because it is a very small number and my life is likely very short by comparison, but... the very large number of potential sites for life to evolve in the visible universe still yields zero evidence of a technological "WE ARE HERE" sign that we can understand. That implies that either: A) we really are the center of the universe, first to develop technology or B) such developments of energy manipulating technology are an exceedingly small number rare for... reasons that we do not yet understand. And of course C) those of us who have seen irrefutable proof of alien technology are hiding it from the rest of us for... reasons.
Of the possibilities, I find A) much less likely than B), and C) to be impossibly absurd - people just aren't that good at keeping secrets for long periods of time.
You're analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can't do is analyze a risk we haven't imagined yet. Looking at the vastness of the Universe and the rate at which our theories about how it all works evolve, I find it far more likely that we haven't imagined more of actual reality than we have.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen. What we don't know is all of the causes or all of the existing conditions that will precede such events.
When such event does "miraculously" happen we may be able to learn from observation what likely triggered it and then it won't be "miraculous" anymore, it will have an analyzable probability - with a rather large window of uncertainty.
Until such an event kills us all, or at least tanks civilization. We won't likely learn much from that one.
How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?
As I keep saying, the human mind is not good at intuitively handling very large or very small numbers and probabilities.
What you can't do is analyze a risk without doing an actual analysis. For that you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.
Yes, and all the causes that we know don't apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us. You have to make up imaginary new causes in order to be frightened of a gamma ray burst.
When data is absent, rigorous analysis is impossible. When data is severely lacking, attempts at rigorous analysis are more intuition than anything else.
And when the data can't be collected? Contingency planning and resource allocation for the unknown is folly, right up until it is the smartest thing to do.
That we know of.
We should focus on expanding our knowledge and plan based on the best data we have, but like the first lunar astronauts spending 21 days in quarantine, a bit of planning and care for the unknown isn't a bad idea either.
There are an infinite number of things for which there is no evidence. Preparing for those things would be taking effort away from preparing for things that are actually real.
The first lunar astronauts spent 21 days in quarantine because we know that diseases are real and in the past there have been real examples of explorers bringing back new diseases from the places they visited. They didn't simultaneously get ritually cleansed by a shaman because there is no evidence of actual lycanthropy being a thing.