Daily Archives: 12/17/2004

Astronaut: ‘Single-Planet Species Don’t Last’

I call bullsh*.

Shuttle astronaut John Young made the following claim:

The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You’re 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.’

You would think that a shuttle astronaut would know better. Let’s examine this claim in some detail, shall we? First of all, let’s assume that the particular causes mentioned (asteroid collision, super volcanoes etc) have nothing to do with human activity. It’s hard to imagine how they could be. Now, the chances of humanity surviving 100 years is 444/455 454/455. You can multiply these probabilities out, and you find that humanity had only an 8 percent chance of surviving 10000 years, and the chances of surviving one hundred thousand years is about one in 2.35E11. This works out to a 97% chance of surviving ten thousand years, an 11% chance of surviving one hundred thousand years, and only a one in thirty five million chance of surviving one million years.

Stuck inside for the holidays?

Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics | Publications | 2004 | Abstract of preprint 2004.3
This paper explains how one can crochet the Lorenz manifold, the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system.

My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was only five or six. I wonder how long it would take me to bat one of these out. I further wonder what could posess me to try…

Brainwagon Radio: Dead KVM Switch, Rants, Dickens and Mediocre Audio

In trying to fix his previous noise problems, your host appears to have squelched that a bit, but ends up with clippy audio. Sigh.

More stuff: