Bargain basement prices for detecting and destroying asteroids

Pickle Nation, DO NOT read this article unless you want to be badly bored. Or unless you are a PhD-level economist or statistician. DO, however, take note of what I found to be a shocking point therein.

This is a paper by William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, in the midst of a peer-reviewed conversation with Harvard economist Martin Weitzman about the use of cost-benefit analysis for figuring what to do about climate change. The substance of the debate comes over how to value really horrible things that have a very low probability of happening. It's a fascinating and important question, about which I hope to say more soon, though I am in no position to be promising Pickle Nation anything at all.

Anyway, the point of this post - not of the paper - is that Nordhaus illustrates one of his points by talking about the generally accepted idea that there is a 1 in 100,000,000 chance each year that a huge asteroid will hit the earth and kill us all. Now, I have been vaguely aware of this, and have ignored it because I have figured that them's the breaks. Why worry about it? Live every week like it's shark week.

But lo and behold, Norhaus has shocked the hell out of me. He says it would cost $1 billion per year (for how long he doesn't say) to reduce the chance of that kind of event by 90%. What?! And all we're spending is $4 million per year to track potentially threatening asteriods? For that matter, isn't spending $4 million a classic "you buy cheap you buy twice" situation? Isn't that just $4 million to ensure that in the moments before we are incinerated or freeze to death or have our heads explode from the loudest sound imaginable or whatever awful way a huge asteroid kills you we get to experience the thrill of looting?

In any case, I thought we were talking about science fiction here, but by all means, let's spend $1 billion to shoot those suckers down. I mean, is it shovel-ready?