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

December 17, 2004 | Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, Science | By: Mark VandeWettering

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.

Comments

Comment from Hans Nowak
Time 12/17/2004 at 1:43 pm

Shouldn’t that be 454/455? Using that, I get:


>>> p = 454.0/455.0
>>> p
0.99780219780219781
>>> p**2
0.99560922593889634 # 200 years
>>> p**10
0.97823807402698304 # 1000 years
>>> p**100
0.80250106974743629 # 10,000 years
>>> p**1000
0.11077868358412908 # 100,000 years
>>>

Comment from Your brother Kevin
Time 12/18/2004 at 8:16 pm

Being hit by an asteroid doesn’t seem to be as scary, but civilization can be destroyed by things
that have happened. The 1330’s black death, which killed more than a third of Europe. Estimated
25 million people, leaving the “dark ages” in it’s wake.

The 1918 flu, which killed 40 million people. That’s after the 15 million that were killed in WWI.

Recombinant DNA samples of us tell us that humans have endured near extinction in our recent history.

It appears that homo sapiens have been numbered as few as 400 during the life of the species. The
odds of being wiped out by an asteroid or super-volcano is 1 in 45,500 years the way I look at that
statistic.

The odds of us wiping out our civilization would have to be a lot lower number.