Results for “asteroid” 53 found
Wednesday assorted links
1. The infrastructure that is China, Stephon Marbury edition.
2. Price differences across gendered but otherwise highly similar toys. On Twitter Robin Hanson wrote: “My guess: women more infer quality/status from price…An obvious other theory of higher prices for women: their products more varied, & so fixed costs are spread over fewer items.”
3. Has the time come for a Pigouvian state? (pdf)
4. The Drone Wars have shifted to the ski front. And comet strikes too.
5. Neil Irwin on The Big Short.
6. Why is the author of The Revenant obsessed with trade disputes?
Sunday assorted links
1. A new estimate of “Volkswagen deaths” for the United States.
2. Daniel Diaz-Vidal and Greg Clark on assortative mating in the history of Chile (pdf).
4. “robots can legally buy drugs online for artistic purposes”
5. The best of Thailand, the worst of Thailand.
6. Steve Pearlstein on how to bend the higher education cost curve.
Why Elon Musk Wants to Go to Mars
Tim Urban at Wait but Why has a fascinating longform series on How and Why SpaceX Will Colonize Mars which itself is part of a longer series on Elon Musk and his companies. Here’s just one bit:
The Scary Thing About the Universe
Species extinctions are kind of like human deaths—they’re happening constantly, at a mild and steady rate. But a mass extinction event is, for species, like a war or a sweeping epidemic is for humans—an unusual event that kills off a large chunk of the population in one blow. Humans have never experienced a mass extinction event, and if one happened, there’s a reasonable chance it would end the human race—either because the event itself would kill us (like a collision with a large enough asteroid), or the effects of an event would (like something that decimates the food supply or dramatically changes the temperature or atmospheric composition). The extinction graph below shows animal extinction over time (using marine extinction as an indicator). I’ve labeled the five major extinction events and the percentage of total species lost during each one (not included on this graph is what many believe is becoming a new mass extinction, happening right now, caused by the impact of humans):1
…Let’s imagine the Earth is a hard drive, and each species on Earth, including our own, is a Microsoft Excel document on the hard drive filled with trillions of rows of data. Using our shortened timescale, where 50 million years = one month, here’s what we know:
- Right now, it’s August of 2015
- The hard drive (i.e. the Earth) came into existence 7.5 years ago, in early 2008
- A year ago, in August of 2014, the hard drive was loaded up with Excel documents (i.e. the origin of animals). Since then, new Excel docs have been continually created and others have developed an error message and stopped opening (i.e gone extinct).
- Since August 2014, the hard drive has crashed five times—i.e. extinction events—in November 2014, in December 2014, in March 2015, April 2015, and July 2015. Each time the hard drive crashed, it rebooted a few hours later, but after rebooting, about 70% of the Excel docs were no longer there. Except the March 2015 crash, which erased 95% of the documents.
- Now it’s mid-August 2015, and the homo sapiens Excel doc was created about two hours ago.
Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do?
You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.
That’s why Elon Musk wants to put a million people on Mars.
On a related note the latest Planet Money podcast is How to Stop an Asteroid. It’s funny and informative and yours truly makes an appearance. Worth a listen.
Planetary Defense is a Public Good
Today is Asteroid Day, the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact in recent history, the June 30, 1908 Siberian Tunguska asteroid strike. The Tunguska asteroid was only about 40 meters in size but the impact was 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.
Large asteroid strikes are low-probability, high-death events–so high-death that by some estimates the probability of dying from an asteroid strike is on the same order as dying in an airplane crash. To mark asteroid day, events around the world, including here at the observatory at George Mason University, will discuss asteroids and how we can protect our civilization.
Tyler and I are signatories to the 100X Declaration which reads in part:
There are a million asteroids in our solar system that have the potential to strike Earth and destroy a city, yet we have discovered less than 10,000….
Therefore, we, the undersigned, call for…A rapid hundred-fold acceleration of the discovery and tracking of Near-Earth Asteroids to 100,000 per year within the next ten years.
I am also a contributor to an Indiegogo campaign to develop a planetary defense system–yes, seriously! I don’t expect the campaign to succeed because, as our principles of economics textbook explains, too many people will try to free ride. But perhaps the campaign will generate some needed attention. In the meantime, check out this video on public goods and asteroid defense from our MRU course (as always the videos are free for anyone to use in the classroom.)
By the way, can you identify the easter egg to growing up in the 1980s?
NASA is Looking for a Few Good Economists
NASA has a call for research in the economics of space exploration:
This NRA seeks empirical economic research projects, historical analog research, concepts for
encouraging further economic activity in space, and unique stimulatory activities that promote
novel private/commercial uses of space, new private/commercial space opportunities, and
emerging private/commercial capabilities in suborbital, orbital or deep space environments that
enable discoveries, development and applications from these environments.
Specific topics of interest include:
- Historical Economic Studies in the following areas:
- Economic history of NASA programs;
- Long term historical impact of the space program;
- Economic and business histories of American private sector space enterprises (including companies, societies, and projects);
- Economic histories of historical analog activities for space exploration (including detailed investigations into the financing of historical expeditions, settlements, and transportation infrastructure projects).
- Current and Near-Term Trends, Analyses and Concepts for accelerating American space development, in the following areas:
- Utilizing market mechanisms, private sector partnerships, and expanding markets to serve non-traditional commercial entities;
- Promoting broader uses of space for public and/or economic benefit, including job creation and/or workforce development, and maintaining American leadership in the global space marketplace;
- Encouraging engagement on space activities from citizen makers, crowd-funders, citizen explorers, and participation of innovators from non-traditional sectors that can have a transformative effect on future private/commercial space developments;
- Identifying and evaluating economic applications of space systems design to earth-scale economic analysis, including integrated modeling of globalized economic systems and earth systems science;
- Examining competitive stresses, potentials for public benefit, and issues affecting NASA or the nation in the commercial space arena;
- Monitoring, investigating and reporting on opportunities enabled by the rapidly growing national and international entrepreneurial space communities;
- Assessing the adequacy of economic assessment and evaluation tools and methods for space architectures;
- Conducting case studies of space development projects that can be used to inform NASA on the opportunities and impediments to economic development in space.
- Economics, Systems Analysis, and Projections, in orbital and deep space development; lunar development, asteroid development, and Mars development.
Department of Ho-Hum
Or should that read Department of Uh-Oh?:
Asteroids caused 26 nuclear-scale explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere between 2000 and 2013, a new report reveals.
Some were more powerful – in one case, dozens of times stronger – than the atom bomb blast that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 with an energy yield equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT.
Most occurred too high in the atmosphere to cause any serious damage on the ground. But the evidence was a sobering reminder of how vulnerable the Earth was to the threat from space, scientists said.
There is more here. You will find asteroid protection presented as the paradigmatic example of a public good in…um…my favorite Principles text.
New stuff
The CIA buys phone data and meta-data from AT&T. The extra in the 2.8% growth figure for U.S> gdp came from inventory build-up, but the government shutdown doesn’t seem to have mattered much. Russia’s long-term growth forecast is falling, from five percent to 4.3, to four, now to 2.5%. 54% of voting white women in Virginia opted for Cuccinelli. Asteroid strikes are more likely than we had thought.
Assorted links
1. GMO labeling and rent-seeking.
2. On-line education to become an Orthodox rabbi.
3. What do you see when you look out the NYC-D.C. Amtrak window?
4. This guy wants to minimize the number of incumbents, as a way of jumping off his indifference curve.
Thiel v. Schmidt
Peter Thiel, taking the pessimistic view, and Eric Schmidt of Google, taking the optimistic view, both made good points in their debate over technology but Thiel had the knockout punch:
PETER THIEL: …Google is a great company. It has 30,000 people, or 20,000, whatever the number is. They have pretty safe jobs. On the other hand, Google also has 30, 40, 50 billion in cash. It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively. So, it prefers getting zero percent interest from Mr. Bernanke, effectively the cash sort of gets burned away over time through inflation, because there are no ideas that Google has how to spend money.
ERIC SCHMIDT: [talks about globalization]
The moderator repeats Thiel’s point:
ADAM LASHINSKY: You have $50 billion at Google, why don’t you spend it on doing more in tech, or are you out of ideas? And I think Google does more than most companies. You’re trying to do things with self-driving cars and supposedly with asteroid mining, although maybe that’s just part of the propaganda ministry. And you’re doing more than Microsoft, or Apple, or a lot of these other companies. Amazon is the only one, in my mind, of the big tech companies that’s actually reinvesting all its money, that has enough of a vision of the future that they’re actually able to reinvest all their profits.
ERIC SCHMIDT: They make less profit than Google does.
PETER THIEL: But, if we’re living in an accelerating technological world, and you have zero percent interest rates in the background, you should be able to invest all of your money in things that will return it many times over, and the fact that you’re out of ideas, maybe it’s a political problem, the government has outlawed things. But, it still is a problem.
ADAM LASHINSKY: I’m going to go to the audience very soon, but I want you to have the opportunity to address your quality of investments, Eric.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I think I’ll just let his statement stand.
ADAM LASHINSKY: You don’t want to address the cash horde that your company does not have the creativity to spend, to invest?
ERIC SCHMIDT: What you discover in running these companies is that there are limits that are not cash. There are limits of recruiting, limits of real estate, regulatory limits as Peter points out. There are many, many such limits. And anything that we can do to reduce those limits is a good idea.
PETER THIEL: But, then the intellectually honest thing to do would be to say that Google is no longer a technology company, that it’s basically ‑‑ it’s a search engine. The search technology was developed a decade ago. It’s a bet that there will be no one else who will come up with a better search technology. So, you invest in Google, because you’re betting against technological innovation in search. And it’s like a bank that generates enormous cash flows every year, but you can’t issue a dividend, because the day you take that $30 billion and send it back to people you’re admitting that you’re no longer a technology company. That’s why Microsoft can’t return its money. That’s why all these companies are building up hordes of cash, because they don’t know what to do with it, but they don’t want to admit they’re no longer tech companies.
ADAM LASHINSKY: Briefly, and then we’re going to go to the audience.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So, the brief rebuttal is, Chrome is now the number one browser in the world.
In my mind, the revealed preference of our technological leaders is the best and most depressing argument for the great stagnation.
Assorted links
1. Is this a golden age for inventors? And what is the asteroid-mining business plan?
2. Is this a golden age of Hunger Games econometrics?
3. Should gamblers be made to stand?
4. “The fundamental question is: “Why is government’s share of the voluntary donations market so damn small?” “, more here. Furthermore “There are plenty of redistributionist goals which do not require concerted collective action or threshold levels of contribution.”
5. Shout it from the rooftops! (some results about auction pricing)
Newt for President!
Sixty-five million years ago, a Manhattan-size meteorite traveling through space at about 11 kilometers per second punched through the sky before hitting the ground near what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The energy released by the impact poured into the atmosphere, heating Earth’s surface. Then the dust lofted by this impact blocked out the sun, bringing years of wintry conditions everywhere, wiping out many terrestrial species, including the nonfeathered dinosaurs. Birds and mammals thus owe their ascendancy to the intersection of two orbits: that of Earth and that of a devastating visitor from deep space.
We humans need not wait, like dinosaurs, for the next big rock to drop.
From a good piece in IEEE Spectrum analyzing the various methods available to deflect asteroids. Tyler and I have a special interest in this since we discuss asteroid deflection as a public good–a public good that as of yet neither private firms nor governments provide–in Modern Principles.
With better and more complete telescope coverage we are learning that there are a lot more near-misses than we previously thought. As the public becomes more aware of the dangers, I hope that we will see more action on this front.
Hat tip: The Browser.
Should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?
Treat this as a balanced budget question, so it's not about fiscal policy. Alternatively, imagine yourself as a benevolent philanthropist: should you support this area of research if you can do so as a free lunch? Or should you try to hinder it?
I believe no one understands the underlying science much at all. But there is some chance that the old science fiction movies are correct and that by time-traveling you alter the course of history, thereby obliterating the universe we used to have. I'll count that as a net negative, while noting there is some chance we end up with a better universe.
On the plus side, the human race will die out anyway. Time travel seems to yield a fairly safe haven. As disaster approaches, keep going back in time a few days, or decades, and that asteroid will never hit you. This is especially appealing if you are transporting back a body (upload?) which is programmed to be more or less immortal and you can take the technology with you, so as to keep on going back as time progresses.
On one side: immortal life for many of the last humans and thus immortality for the human race. And with time they may learn how to thwart the asteriod. On the other side: some probability of swapping universes.
So should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?
What is the most likely source of doomsday in 2012?
Alek has a request:
1) While I'm far from a doomsayer, I'm wondering what is the best way to bet in favor of the world ending in 2012? Betting against is pretty obvious.
I am taking this to ask what is the most likely cause of the destruction of all civilization, circa 2012, and not how to collect on the bet, in which case he should read Pascal. (If the 2012 end of the world won't be a total surprise, any leveraged short position should do, but spend the money quickly!)
Here are some hypotheses, but my answer is: destruction of the earth by space aliens.
Here are previous MR posts on The Fermi Paradox. Rampaging space aliens would explain why we don't see more civilizations out there, plus predatory ways imply that contact is short-lived, thereby making our current lack of contact more likely in the Bayesian sense.
We could be living in some kind of "branching/splitting" theory where the highest number of branches come right before everything ends and for Bayesian reasons we expect to be right up against that final point. Still, why should we think that maximum branching/splitting is coming in 2012? After a Lakers threepeat, are there no more possible worlds to create?
The overwhelming probability from a nuclear exchange, at least circa 2012, is that it would remain limited, albeit highly destructive. A pandemic is unlikely to kill more than a billion people. A very large asteroid or a super-volcano explosion can be considered other leading contenders for world-enders.
A few nights ago Natasha and I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 version. It's more a tract on foreign policy than science fiction and Klaatu of course is a stand in for the United States. I hadn't seen it in over twenty years and I'm astonished how well the movie captures and presages today's current mix of paranoia and utter unpreparedness, vis-a-vis "aliens." It works poorly when Klaatu dons the rhetoric and tactics of the United States in galactic affairs, combined with equally clumsy implied threats, backed by no moral authority but superior hardware. It's one of the scariest, and best, movies to watch in 2010, with a superb Bernard Herrmann soundtrack and it also has good shots of WDC in 1951. I won't give away the ending but a careful listen shows it's as pessimistic about the aliens as anything. Supposedly the movie deeply influenced Ronald Reagan and brought him to the arms control table.
Russia Plans to Save Mother Earth
Russia's space chief said Wednesday his agency will consider sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth.
Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized.
When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37.
Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth's surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters.
Excellent news! Here is my earlier post, Asteroid Deflection as a Public Good.
Simon Newcomb, the most important economist from Nova Scotia
Yes, Simon Newcomb (1835-1909). Newcomb was a polymath and he made important contributions to time-keeping, astronomy (most of all; he was arguably the most famous American astronomer of the 19th century), statistics, mathematics, and economics. He was especially good at coming up with new ways of calculating tables for almanacs and he was deeply interested in lunar and planetary tables. He sought to bring the scientific method to research on parapsychology. He even wrote a science fiction novel. In preparation for my Nova Scotia trip I have been rereading his Principles of Political Economy.
In economics Newcomb is best known for producing the earliest version of the equation of exchange as a means of representing the quantity theory of money. He had a remarkably good understanding of monetary velocity and the purchasing power of money, favoring a "tabular standard."
The most interesting part of the text are the questions at the end of each chapter. Many show that Newcomb knew more than the text itself let on. Others are bizarre and would not be found in 2009. How about this one?:
16. How does the modern system of production by large organizations operate upon the shiftless class who will never stick to a regular line of work? Show why, when this class really wants to work, it is harder to get it than it would be in a primitive economy.
Despite its possible inappropriateness, it is nonetheless an interesting question about fixed capital and unemployment. If you want insightful questions, here are a few picks, taken from a single page, chosen randomly:
Define what portion of the price paid for a coat goes to compensate the friction of exchange.
Does the proportion of the population engaged in intellectual pursuits tend to increase or diminish with the increase of wealth?
Is there any method of calculation by which we can approximate to the total population which the earth can sustain? If so, state the method, and show what data are necessary to apply it.
Has cheap transportation of passengers and goods across the ocean tended to retard or to stimulate emigration?
I have seen many worse questions in contemporary principles texts. He also formulated Benford's Law:
In 1881, Newcomb discovered the statistical principle now known as Benford's law, when he observed that the earlier pages of logarithm
books, used at that time to carry out logarithmic calculations, were
far more worn than the later pages. This led him to formulate the
principle that, in any list of numbers taken from an arbitrary set of
data, more numbers will tend to have the leading digit "1" than any
other leading digit
He was mostly self-taught. He suffered problems at the age of seven and was removed from school and it seems he never returned. Later his father tortured him with farm work to help improve his manual dexterity (it didn't seem to work). He was an expert chess player and could recite large amounts of poetry from memory. He started studying astronomy before he was ten. Next week I will read his autobiography, available on-line.
Here are quotations from Newcomb; I have read that the "anti-flight" remarks are ripped from context and are misleading. There is a crater, an asteroid, and a Canadian writing award named after him.
Here is Newcomb on libertarian ethics and wanting to be left alone.
If you have any interest in the history of economic thought, or in 19th century North American intellectual history, you should read Simon Newcomb. Here are some of his on-line works. When he died, President Taft and many foreign dignitaries attended his funeral. But today Newcomb is very much an underrated thinker and an underrated historical figure.
Newcomb's father once wrote to him: "You were an uncommon child for truth, I never knew you to deviate from it in one instance."