"NASA has catalogued nearly 50 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger."
Anyone see the logical fallacy in this statement?
No?
It assumes NASA (or anyone) knows what the total number of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger. Just means that you'll never know what killed you.
Cataloging is prolly more than jes finding & labeling 'em. It would include details about their orbits. Jes sayin...
It's not logic but stochastics.
"NASA has catalogued nearly 50 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger." Anyone see the logical fallacy in this statement? ...It assumes NASA (or anyone) knows what the total number of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger.Yeah, it's just an estimate. The estimate has declined by (if memory serves) a factor of ten because there has been so much work going to gauge the risk. Much of this work has been in the last eight years or so, and has employed radioastronomy, because spotting these chunks of junk (even very large ones) on the sunward side of the Earth doesn't work with optical means, except by dumb luck. The late Charles Fort collected a bunch of such observations, large (because close by) rocks eclipsing the Sun, or passing the Earth during broad daylight.