Originally Posted By: IndyIan
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Yeah, I attended a talk about this once. Basically you take the odds of it happening and the resulting damages it would cost such as valuing the life of an individual which is done all the time when it comes to car crashes and airplane crashes, once you divide it up, the risk/reward ratio isn't high enough. You're better off spending the money on higher risk projects like maybe preventing flooding or anything else.
People and things are valued pretty high these days, $200+ trillion globally for realestate alone. But even a large city is 10's of billions. So to have something that could deflect a city destroying size meteor, which costs a couple billion a year to run probably would be a net benefit anyways. The R&D for such heavy lift capacity could help us colonize our solar system atleast.
Right, but the key thing you're missing is that you divide that cost by the odds that it will happen once in 60 million years. Even at trillions, it's not that much spread over 60 million years.
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Yeah, I attended a talk about this once. Basically you take the odds of it happening and the resulting damages it would cost such as valuing the life of an individual which is done all the time when it comes to car crashes and airplane crashes, once you divide it up, the risk/reward ratio isn't high enough. You're better off spending the money on higher risk projects like maybe preventing flooding or anything else.
People and things are valued pretty high these days, $200+ trillion globally for realestate alone. But even a large city is 10's of billions. So to have something that could deflect a city destroying size meteor, which costs a couple billion a year to run probably would be a net benefit anyways. The R&D for such heavy lift capacity could help us colonize our solar system atleast.
Right, but the key thing you're missing is that you divide that cost by the odds that it will happen once in 60 million years. Even at trillions, it's not that much spread over 60 million years.