Thilo wrote:So please stop quoting magazines with journalists or scientists wanting to get money, and drawing the nicest pictures of death while all this what they're telling you might be crap ;)
At this point I think the journalists-- and to an even greater extent, the headline writers-- deserve much more blame than the scientists.
The coverage of this particular asteroid has come in for some very justified criticism from astronomers, who point out that this was really not an unusual asteroid impact threat at all-- asteroid threats of similar magnitude of risk are found, investigated and dismissed dozens of times a year, as part of the normal functioning of near-earth-asteroid tracking efforts that have been in place for the past few years.
They even came up with such things as the automated public Web pages and the Torino Scale to try to communicate something about comparative levels of risk to the public, after a series of badly overhyped threats in the popular media in the nineties. What's frustrating about the latest round of hype is that it seems to have followed the same pattern as if none of this had been done-- initial reports acted as if scientists were telling us the end of the world was likely (at least if you didn't read all the way down to the last paragraph).
No doubt when more observations accumulate and the thing disappears off the threat list, as it almost certainly will (I see that the early potential impact is already gone), the spin will be "the scientists lied" or "the scientists made a silly mistake," when the only people who really misrepresented anything were a bunch of sensationalist folk in the news media.
The deeper problem is that (a) it's very, very hard to convey intelligent information about probability and risk to the public, and (b) there is an active disincentive for newspapers and TV reporters to do so.
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