https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_YR4
If its current trajectory will make it miss the Earth in 2032, this market resolves N/A. Otherwise:
If no mission is launched, or all missions fail to encounter the asteroid at all, this resolves NO.
If any mission deflects the asteroid entirely, this resolves YES.
If it's deflected such that it will hit the Earth at a later date, this resolves NO if that date is within 5 years, YES if it's further out.
If it was going to hit a populated part of the Earth, and the mission changed its orbit to hit an unpopulated part instead, this resolves YES.
If it was going to hit a populated area, and a mission from that country changes its orbit to hit a different populated area instead, this resolves NO.
If the mission breaks it up into smaller pieces and those pieces end up causing significantly less damage than the whole would have done, this resolves YES.
In general, if there's an edge case, it'll resolve YES if I feel the vibes worldwide are "yay we did it", and resolve NO if the vibes are "something went wrong".
1,000
3.00Given that there's a significant chance if it's gonna hit earth that once it's closer we will determine it's gonna be in the middle of the ocean, a desert, or other uninhabited wilderness, and it's likely to be a Tunguska Event style airburst, in such cases it seems reasonably likely that the governments of earth won't want to rock the boat and risk a failed diversion that leads to a catastrophe
@JussiVilleHeiskanen at the moment we don't know whether it will hit earth at all let alone precisely where, but once it's closer and we do know, then if it's headed for a heavily populated area then we would need to divert it to avoid catastrophe, but if it's headed for a near empty area then we would only risk causing a catastrophe by trying to divert it
Who would launch such a mission?
If you try, and achieve anything less than complete success (clean miss of Earth), then you've just made yourself liable for whatever damage the asteroid causes. Or worse, if you're based in the USA and after your "failed" attempt the asteroid ends up smashing into Beijing then congrats, you just started WWIII.
But for this market, someone does try. Clearly, they must be stupid, and stupid people usually fail at hard things, so I bet NO.
@DanHomerick arguably it's less about stupidity than self vs group interest.
Under current legal systems, as you point out, there is a significant chance that someone who diverts the impact from a high population area to a low but non zero population area could find themselves being blamed for the few casualties as if they had personally killed them.
A self interested person/organisation wouldn't want this, but a group interested person/organisation may deem it worth the cost to themselves.
In such a case arguably the label of stupid better fits the non consequentialist legal system than the asteroid diverter, if the label must be applied at all.
@TheAllMemeingEye keep in mind that targeting an asteroid to hit a particular place isn't a real thing. Any deflection is going to involve a tiny deltaV, applied months or years before it would have collided with Earth. The realistic set of outcomes from trying are "fully reduced chance of collision", "somewhat reduced" or " "made no meaningful difference". Where it hits isn't in the calculus.
Also, the liability shift is more than just a bug in legal frameworks, it's a problem of consensus. You can't feasibly get approval from everyone on Earth before you make the attempt. Someone is always going to say NO, and quite vocally -- there will be individuals, organizations, and whole governments who take an offical stance of NO (because of fear, but also because there's power to be had by being obstructionist). Whoever launches would need to ignore/overrule their objections and do it anyways.
That will very much burn into everyone's minds that they are taking the liability for the end result. If it ends up hitting somewhere populated, there will be plenty of people with knives out.
It truly does suck, but it's human nature. Anyone who ignores all of that must be either supremely confident in their abilities (stupid) or extremely scared (also stupid, it's a small asteroid). Neither type of stupid is conducive to success.
It truly does suck, but it's human nature. Anyone who ignores all of that must be either supremely confident in their abilities (stupid) or extremely scared (also stupid, it's a small asteroid). Neither type of stupid is conducive to success.
What I'm saying is that one may instead be motivated to do it not out of ignoring the negative consequences but out of them believing the negative consequences are overwhelmingly outweighed by the positive consequences
@cherrvak Expected deaths worldwide from it hitting is probably less than a few hundred. It's pretty negligible to your life I'm sure.