It’s long been known that people aren’t very good at aligning their fears and emotions, and resulting behavior, with statistics. For example, the chance of dying in a car is much greater than in an airplane, but many more fear to fly than to ride. Even people who are numerate are prone to this quirk of human nature (e.g., the great science fiction author and chemistry PhD Isaac Asimov had a severe fear of flying, and always traveled by train). On the other hand, people vastly overestimate their chances of winning the lottery, at least from a rational expected-value perspective.

I’ve occasionally talked about the dangers of asteroids in this weblog, and in fact featured it in my Fox News column last week. I’ve seen quite a bit of skepticism on the issue, some of which may be justified, but it often appears to me to be driven as much by the non-rational parts of us as the rational, even when coming from scientists.

When coming from politicians, of course, it’s even worse. A couple of weeks ago, an Australian cabinet minister ridiculed people who were concerned about asteroids, and refused to allot the paltry sum of a million dollars in order to look for them in the Southern Hemisphere, one of our current major blind spots. There are many sky surveys being done above the equator, but very few below.

It actually reminds me of the controversy of a couple of decades ago, when Luis Alvarez at Berkely first put forward his theory of dinosaur extinction being caused by an extraterrestrial impact. While it’s become fairly well accepted today, many aren’t aware, or have forgotten, that there was a tremendous amount of resistance to it when it was first propounded. And that resistance seemed to go beyond rational scientific argument–it seemed almost religious in its fervor.

Viewing this as a college student, who was interested in and familiar with space, I found nothing exceptional about the theory at all, but it was clear to me that much of the scientific community had a deep emotional investment in not believing that our planet could be so dramatically affected by an event beyond our atmosphere.

I’m not sure why exactly, but one might speculate that, to a planetary scientist used to thinking in terms of geological and biological processes forming and reforming the earth and its inhabitants, invoking forces extraterrestrial perhaps had the feel to it of the supernatural–a blow literally from the heavens, and one from a source with which they were (not being astronomers or extraplanetary scientists) unfamiliar and unknowledgable. It may have almost seemed like a creationist theory of evolution.

More practically, to accept such a concept might imply that their chosen field was much broader than their traditional education, and that much of what they had been taught was wrong. It was probably a natural resistance to a major scientific paradigm shift.

Fortunately, unlike actual creationist theories, it was testable, and evidence for it has been found, and now, after a quarter of a century, it’s now taught as the prevailing theory.

Anyway, there’s an interesting article on this subject in Space.com today, that has some interesting statistics on the subject (though I can’t vouch for them). Anyone whose interest has been piqued by my previous comments on the subject will find it at least as interesting as mine.

Basically, the thesis is that we base our fears not on analysis, but on what’s familiar. Prior to September 11, few took the terrorist threat seriously–now concern about it is very high and it can command huge numbers of societal resources. Hopefully, it won’t take an asteroid strike to get similar motivation to map and deter potential cosmic threats, but judging by human nature, it may.