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Re: (meteorobs) Let play a game with Impact Information
Wayne Holly wrote:
To all list members...from Wayne. I am not sure if this is an appropriate
subject for meteorobs, due to the possible volume of responses.
from Victor D. Noto:
I invite anyone interested in my post about playing a game with Impact
Information to email me at vnn2@phoenixat.com their critiques. I am not
afraid of the volume since I am sure it will be very few.
From Dr Morrison's NEO newsletter of 2/25/98 to explain what I mean:
snipped from Oliver Morton essay:
"Part of this "out of this world"ness comes from a lack
of appreciation of deep time. We tend to accept on an everyday level that
the past 200 years are pretty representative of the history of the earth;
impact have not been a problem in that time and so we assume they basically
are not a problem at all. We are, as a species, much better at dealing with
frequencies than probabilities, and we have no experience of the frequency
of impacts. If you think in deep time -- that is, if you think about
periods of time too long to be of relevance to a single human life or to a
family -- the picture looks different. Since the last ice age there have
probably been a hundred impacts that would have wiped out cities had one
been in the wrong place at the wrong time; there has probably been at least
one big enough to have wiped most traces of civilisation from around the
rim of one of the major ocean basins."
Everyone is saying here in Kissimmee that a tornado like this with this
force should not have happened in central Florida and that is very
unusually. They say this because they really are not appreciating deep
time. We need to think in terms of probability not frequencies.
Astronomy is all about deep space and deep time so I cannot understand why
this kind of understanding is inappropriate to this list. It is my goal
with this game with impact information to relate a true appreciation on
deep time.
http://www.phoenixat.com/~vnn2/TIME_ht.htm
Victor
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Victor Noto - Kissimmee, Florida USA
vnn2@phoenixat.com
http://www.phoenixat.com/~vnn2/BIGROCK.htm
Website theme quote:
"Life really is a Rock and
the Big Rock giveth and taketh away all life!!"
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