ASTEROIDS AND SECRECY: IF END IS NIGH, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Suppose a giant asteroid is heading toward Earth right now. Impact is certain. The consequences are expected to be globally devastating, with the human race among the casualties. The chances of doing anything about it are zero, the government decides.

Or would you prefer the Feds keep the information secret and spare you and your neighbors a bunch of pointless worrying?

In essence, the question concerns whether you'd prefer to die in ignorant bliss, or if you'd like some options. The alternatives might include dying in a panic, calmly making peace with your Maker, finally taking the kids to Disneyland or -- who knows? -- making a last-ditch effort to fight odds your elected leaders say are wholly against you.

For several reasons that will become apparent as you read on, the question is largely moot.

But that didn't stop it from coming up at a major science gathering earlier this month and generating a global round of conspiracy headlines. According to some articles, the U.S. Government has been advised to withhold information of a catastrophic impact, were one ever found to be imminent. The Times of London put this headline above its story: "Don't Tell Public of Doomsday Asteroid."

The media accounts centered around the words of one graduate student (the press variously and erroneously called him a scientist, a researcher and a government adviser). Geoffrey Sommer spoke as part of a seven-person panel Feb. 13 at an impact hazard symposium during a meeting of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held in Denver.

Here are the widely quoted words, from an AAAS press release, attributed to Sommer (much to his surprise, he said later):

"When a problem arises with high uncertainty, there is an opportunity to spin the problem to avoid global panic. If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all. If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss."

Those words were taken "severely out of context" and "inaccurately described my position," according to Sommer, who says he was not advocating a position but rather discussing choices involving information disclosure that policymakers would face. Yet the press release was sent out with, effectively, an AAAS stamp of approval, and for several days, all Sommer could do was watch as the comments generated ire among readers and some frustration on the part of scientists.

However misconstrued, the quote seemed to stem logically enough from a case study that was part of Sommer's doctoral dissertation at the RAND Graduate School, operated by the RAND Corporation (the media inaccurately placed him as an employee of the RAND Corporation working for the government). The dissertation's topic: Low-probability, high-consequence threats and how policymakers might evaluate them.

Whatever the circumstances, Sommer received some vitriolic responses to his words, which many saw as downright wrongheaded and arrogant at worst, pessimistic at best. Here are reactions from three separate people, based on e-mails supplied by Sommer himself:

"It's rather arrogant of you to presume that not a single human would survive after a large impact. Perhaps no one would. If people don't try, the odds are certainly worse."

"One doesn't have to be a RAND 'expert' to realize that the world would rather go down fighting, than to be lulled into a false sense of security."

"You are not God, Mr. Sommer ... I suppose if you were diagnosed with a rapidly progressing terminal illness, you would prefer to be told, 'All your tests came back OK, Mr. Sommer. There's nothing wrong with you at all.'"

The last note came from James Cass, who also told Sommer, "Your arrogance is pathetic." Upon reflection, Cass told SPACE.com: "I realize that some of my words were a bit acidic, but after I read Mr. Sommer's comments I was livid."

Late last week, Sommer explained his true stance to SPACE.com. More on that shortly. First, the reaction of scientists -- most of whom were somewhat confused about what Sommer was actually trying to say -- shows how passionately they detest secrecy.

Across the board, experts in asteroid search efforts and death-by-space-rock risk assessment, collectively known as the Near Earth Object (NEO) community, contest whether secrecy could ever be warranted, let alone possible.

"It is inconceivable to me that anyone involved in NEO surveys and orbital predictions would want to keep the results a secret," David Morrison, who spoke at the same AAAS symposium, said in an e-mail interview. "It is also inconceivable that astronomers could keep such a secret even if they wanted to. A real impact prediction, even at low probability, would be known all over the world in a matter of hours."

That is true. In fact, dozens of amateur astronomers -- employed by no government or institution in their backyard endeavors -- help with the follow-up observations needed to pin down a newly discovered rock's actual trajectory. They work from data stored at two publicly available Web sites, one in the United States and one in Italy.

Journalists have frequently accessed these databases to fuel doomsday stories about asteroids that had long odds of ever coming in. In each case, the odds have dropped from highly improbable to zero in a matter of days or weeks.

The scare stories leave raw scars on the NEO community and its sense of credibility, perhaps making the researchers particularly sensitive to this latest round of doomsday headlines laced with suggestions of official cover-up.

Morrison, senior scientist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center, called the whole affair a tempest in a teapot. He said there are no asteroids big enough to cause mass extinction currently in Earth-crossing orbits. Even a threatening comet, which by nature would start farther out in the solar system and might wander inward for the first time after centuries of deep space oblivion, would be spotted by amateur telescopes months before it hit, he said.

Over time, orbits change, however. Asteroids that aren't threatening now might become so in a few centuries or millennia. All leading experts, Morrison included, agree that Earth will eventually get pummeled again by a 1-kilometer-wide (0.62-mile) object or bigger. Civilization might teeter. Odds are very slim, however, that it will happen in any given year or century.

(Scientists estimate there are 1,100 1-kilometer and larger NEOs; about 640 of them have been found. Hundreds of thousands of smaller objects roam the same region of space as Earth, so the impact odds for smaller, regionally destructive asteroids are greater in any given time frame. But the bulk of asteroid search funding and political discussion to date has focused on rocks above the 1-kilometer threshold.)

Sommer said that prior to his symposium talk, he had only two minutes to review the press release containing his comments, and it had already been distributed to reporters. At the meeting and in remarks since, he has worked to put it all into context.

"I don't advocate 'silence and secrecy' as absolutely as the AAAS press release indicated," Sommer wrote Feb. 15, two days after the symposium, in an electronic newsletter called CCNet, which monitors the science and politics of the NEO search and threat.

In the CCNet writings, however, Sommer did not appear to back down entirely from the idea that hiding information might be an option under certain circumstances in order to avoid social panic and the tremendous costs that might be associated with it (think looting, profiteering, and economic collapse, he says).

One point Sommer stressed is that the governments of this Earth need to get together and come up with a mitigation strategy -- what to do if an asteroid is found bearing down our pale blue dot.

Absent a plan to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid, or to survive the hit, Sommer said policy makers might question the value of telling the public it is doomed.

CCNet is run by Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist who contemplates "neocatastrophism" in various forms. Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in England, responded: "Even with little time left for mitigation, many activities could be taken by the world community to attempt human survival of such a global disaster."

Peiser agrees with Morrison and others that in the case of a huge impacting object -- a planet destroyer -- there would be a lot of time to prepare and no possibility for secrecy. Sommer made it clear late last week that he agrees with these points, too.

Peiser also said science has not even reached a point where it can state with certainty whether an impact would doom humanity. Further, if a gargantuan incoming object is detected, it would be weeks, months or years before a firm determination was made that it was going to hit Earth, or not.

"I absolutely do not advocate government keeping secret news of any impending disaster that would wipe out the world's population," Sommer said.

"I take no stand on what the policymakers should do," he said. "I most certainly never advocated that information be withheld from the public. In the purely hypothetical scenario at issue, my point is simply that policymakers should weigh the plusses and minuses of telling people they were about to die and that there was nothing that could be done to save them. It is a value judgment for the policymaker to make."

Sommer said the whole example is peripheral to his main point, which is that warning the public of an impending disaster "is a social function, not just a technical function, and that the costs of warning (including false positives) must be considered in the calculus of resource allocation and program design."

Meanwhile, researchers are concerned over how media coverage surrounding the affair might tarnish the public view of NEO science.

Clark Chapman, of the Southwest Research Institute and another of the symposium speakers, worries about the collective damage to scientific credibility from coverage of the Sommer controversy combined with hype surrounding previous asteroid scares. Chapman said individual flames of controversy tend to be small, but they get fanned "by those who prefer to see conflict rather than convergence and consensus."

Like other NEO researchers, Chapman is concerned that the public will come to distrust serious asteroid science and the need to search for, catalogue and understand space rocks, as well as to begin looking into mitigation strategies.

Importantly, as Sommer points out, there is no strategy, in the United States or elsewhere, for what to do in the face of a natural threat from space. And that, several other experts contend, is a legitimate concern.

At issue is how and whether to deflect or destroy an incoming rock, something no one knows how to do. Similarly important is the need to develop plans for moving coastal residents to higher ground. Because our planet is two-thirds water, any impact is likely to be an ocean splashdown, whose greatest immediate effect might be tsunami waves that could destroy coastal regions on two continents within hours.

At the heart of Sommer's case is how people would respond to the knowledge of looming cataclysm.

Lee Clarke, who advocates asteroid-mitigation planning, spoke at the AAAS asteroid symposium, too. The Rutgers University sociologist studies big-time catastrophes and the supposed public panic that comes with them. He says the whole concept that everyone freaks out is largely a myth.

"We have five decades of research on all kinds of disasters -- earthquakes, tornadoes, airplane crashes, etc. -- and people rarely lose control," Clarke said. "Policy-makers have yet to accept this. People are quite capable of following plans, even in the face of extreme calamities, but such plans must be there."

A scheme for survival would require good international communication and ought to be discussed in the United Nations, so that poorer countries are not left out of any world blueprint for notification and mobilization, Clarke said. "Earth's history is filled with unanticipated catastrophes and their disastrous consequences. With appropriate planning, the human toll could be lessened."

Clarke figures the worst thing governments could do is lose public trust by withholding information. But he points out that secrecy might appeal to some public officials.

"Keeping secret something potentially very dangerous is an idea that would resonate very well with the current administration in Washington," Clarke said. "It would probably resonate with most high-level decision makers."

In that light, "Geoffrey Sommer did the debate a great service by proposing a scenario that needs to be talked about," Clarke said, adding that the discussion was and should continue to be an intellectual one, regardless of whether scientists disagree on various points.

Personally, I would want to know.

On that last day I would eat a good meal, then I would drive to a high place taking my favorite music, a bottle of Napoleon Brandy and a fine cigar to dip in it.

There I would listen to my tunes and watch the end of mankind unfold.

I would be determined to die better than the Dinosaurs

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It never fails how some people will find ANY WAY to get their shots in at the Bush Administration.

I would want to know, but I would not like everyone else to know... I do not think I could handle the way some may take it.

At the heart of Sommer's case is how people would respond to the knowledge of looming cataclysm.

This has been explored in many fine science fiction books, including the classic, Lucifer's Hammer.

As a said last week when this was first posted:

I'd like to know. I have a list of things I really want to do.

Visit with the Clintons, the governor of California, the Democratic leaders of the California senate and assembly and one of my neighbors.

This has been explored in many fine science fiction books, including the classic, Lucifer's Hammer.

I've got to get another copy of that one - I wore mine out. I haven't read that story in years.

I'd prefer my kids not have to go through the mania, raping, looting, and assorted madness that would occur if every slimeball knew that the world was ending. Nope, would rather have them live normal till the end.

If the public were told beforehand, crime of all kinds would likely explode. For the more morally casual amongst us, there would be no reason NOT to steal everything they could get their hands on and commit every vile sexual assault conceivable. What would stop them (besides a round of double-ought buck to the chest and face)?

It's been reprinted with a new preface. I wore my old one out, also.

I have read literally hundreds of science fiction books, but very few of them more than once. That book is an exception because it does such a great job of dealing with this very issue.

I would want to know only to make sure my husband and son were with me when it happened. I would want to be able to tell them I loved them one last time.

>>I'd want to know. Watch my credit card balances go through the roof. <<

That's only if ONLY YOU know. If not, it would be closer to the panic "When worlds collide."

Maybe we can somehow longitudinally monitor scientists' credit card balances?

That book is an exception because it does such a great job of dealing with this very issue.

I've always liked "Earth Abides" for dealing with out of the ashes issues.

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