Re: Fascinating
You misunderstood me. I was saying the exact same thing as you. There is a small probability in your day to day life that you will suddenly die, but you get life insurance if you have a family because as remote (seeming) the chance, the consequences of not having insurance are too severe to bear.
In terms of probability, I expect it is improbable that a planet killer will strike in my lifetime, but It is not far off even money that a nasty one will.
The risk is huge. In fact, the risk is entirely unbearable. It would take a hell of an impact to destroy life, but not nearly as severe an impact to destroy civilization and likely our species. There is a finite chance of extinction and it would not be that expensive to give us a chance to at least escape extinction.
As for the probability that we have an 'event', well ... if it happens the probability is 1. We don't understand what creates the risk well enough to put a good number on it. Our long quiet period may be aberrant and end at any time. My reckoning that the probability of a very bad strike could just be an optimistic hunch.
We know there are rocks in space and we know that we have been hit by rocks from space and we can be fairly certain we will be hit again. Some of those hits can be very bad. Beyond that we don't know nearly enough to have much confidence in any estimate.
My point stands that we spend all sorts of money on other things. The marginal final 20 billion dollars of U.S. Military budget probably does less good with the military than it would on a project to get early warning of Armageddon.
Note: Don't have the military do this. They will spend most of the money figuring out how to weaponize the phenomenon.