Planet Money - How To Stop An Asteroid (UPDATE)

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

Some smart people say we should be doing more to protect the Earth from asteroids. The technical issues are relatively easy. The economics — figuring out who's going to pay — are much harder. | Support our show here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Do you have economic questions rattling around in your head, driving you nuts, keeping you awake at night? You've tried shouting them out a window. Why are oil prices negative? But nobody answers. You've tried bringing them up during pillow talk. Have you ever heard of an inverted yield curve? Honey, I have a headache. Maybe another night.

Even Siri doesn't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. I know, I know. You're ready to give up, but there is hope. Hello there. I'm minor podcast celebrity Robert Smith. And here at NPR, we have come up with a miracle answer system. It's called Planet Money. It's a portable podcast that you can listen to anywhere. All you have to do is hit the subscribe button. Our crack team will then scour the globe for economic scoops and send what we find directly into your earbuds. It's easy peasy and it works. How many dollars would you expect to pay for all the irreverent, learning-packed economic stories you could possibly want. A flat fee of $50?

Four easy payments of $19.99? No way. We've got a better deal for you. The best way to support the show is to send a donation to your local NPR member station by heading over to donate.npr.org slash planetmoney. Again, that's donate.npr.org slash planet money. Whatever you're willing to give, thank you. And just make sure to add $9.95 for shipping and handling, because it takes money to makes money. Planet Money. Available wherever podcasts are given away. Satisfaction guaranteed.

This is Planet Money from NPR. Planet Money from NPR. Hey everyone, Robert Smith here. It is fair to say that 2020 has been a disaster of a year. So we thought, what's more fitting for the holiday season than one of our favorite stories about the economics of an Earth-destroying disaster, a giant asteroid. This show originally aired in 2015, and at the end of the episode, we're going to talk to two of our favorite economists, whom you might remember from our Planet Money summer school.

We're going to bring them in for a bit of postgame economic analysis. Here's the episode. On a Friday morning two years ago, people in a city called Chelyabinsk in Siberia saw a bright light in the sky. a bright light in the sky. And apparently, lots of people in Russia, I guess, have cameras mounted on the dashboards of their cars. So you can see tons of videos of this on YouTube. You know, it's people just driving down the highway,

listening to the radio. Then suddenly, that bright light becomes brighter and brighter and shoots across the sky. Two minutes after that, boom. Asteroid. A small asteroid had entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded about 20 miles up. The shockwave from the explosion hit the city.

The ground shook, glass shattered. More than 1,000 people were hospitalized. Nobody was killed because the asteroid was small, because it only sort of grazed the Earth's atmosphere, because it didn't explode right over the city. This made the news, people talked about it a lot, and then everyone sort of forgot about it. Except for a small group of scientists,

because they knew something. They knew that this event was going to happen again. And if next time the rock is bigger, if it comes at a slightly steeper angle, if it flies one morning over Moscow or New York City, millions of people could die. There's always a small group of scientists telling us that next time is going to be really bad. The next pandemic, the next

earthquake, the next whatever. There's always things that we could be worried about. But the interesting thing about the asteroid threat is that it's actually solvable. It's pretty cheap by global standards to make sure an asteroid doesn't kill you. The question isn't like, oh no, what do we do about this? The question is, why aren't we doing something about this? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Robert Smith. And I'm Jacob Goldstein. Today on the show, we're putting the planet into planet money and also the money. It's the economics of protecting the Earth from global catastrophe. Should we just play the Bruce Willis tape now? Well, we got to do it sometime.

Do it. I don't know if you have to go. We can all just sit here on Earth, wait for this big rock to crash into it, kill everything and everybody we know. The United States government just asked us to save the world. Anybody want to say no? Let's do it!

Let's take a step back from the science fiction world of Bruce Willis and just own this. Okay, Jacob, how many people died last year from asteroids? Zero. Last 50 years? Zero. Hundreds? Zero. Thousands?

As far as we know in recorded history, no one has ever died from an asteroid. So convince me that I should care. Well, just because it has never happened doesn't mean it's not gonna happen. I've been talking to some really smart people who are, in fact, quite worried about this. Yes, my name is Ed Liu, and I'm the CEO of the B612 Foundation. And what's the B612 Foundation? The B612 Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the Earth from being hit by asteroids. And when you tell people that, do they think it's a joke?

Less and less so. I didn't know what B612 was. In fact, you had to tell me, Jacob. It is the asteroid from the book The Little Prince. Cute. Yeah, I had to ask it, Lou, actually. He is an interesting guy. He has a PhD in physics.

He's a former astronaut. And being out in space is how he got obsessed with asteroids. You know, he was up on the International Space Station for months at a time where you stare out the window and you look at the Earth and you look over at the moon. And so you watch the pockmarked moon and you see that there are craters on top of craters. You realize that any planet circling the sun, as the Earth does, is hit by asteroids all the time. Any object in space, including the Earth. And in fact, Ed Lu says the Earth has been hit by asteroids even more than the moon. I mean, we're basically covered with craters. We just don't see them because there are oceans and trees and the craters that are there have been washed away by wind and rain. In any given year, it's probably not going to happen. Any given year, the chance of a decent

size asteroid hitting the Earth, somewhere around one in 500. But if one of those asteroids does hit near a populated area, it's going to be really bad. Something like that hitting, call it New York City, would send a shockwave down, which would blow out, you know, all of Manhattan and, you know, all the way out to Long Island and so on, basically topple everything. You mean like knock buildings down? Oh yeah. It would blow them over like matchsticks. And it's not like it would have to be a direct hit on a city. Say an asteroid explodes a hundred miles away from my office. You're probably dead. You're dead. By what? By what mechanism? What happens? Any of various things.

You know, hypersonic rocks moving through, enormous shockwave. You could just be burned to death by the flash, depending upon how close you are. You could be vaporized anywhere, you know, anywhere near it. Vaporized. You know, it would be roughly equivalent to 10 nuclear weapons hitting New York City at once. This is the kind of thing that is so hard to wrap your head around. You have this thing that is an inconceivably large disaster, but it's such an inconceivably tiny chance. It's almost impossible as human beings to know what to do with this. Yeah, and I will say, I mean, I pitched this story.

I did this story. I will be the first to say protecting ourselves from asteroids should not be at the top of our global to-do list. This problem, it's not climate change. It's not extreme poverty. But, you know, Ed Liu says it should be on the list somewhere. In fact, he's basically devoting his professional life to it. He runs this foundation whose mission is to protect the Earth from asteroids. The question is, well, why asteroids?

It's the one sort of global natural disaster that anybody knows how to prevent. Because if you have enough warning, it is technologically feasible to send a spaceship, say, to an asteroid to deflect it, deflect it even a tiny bit so it doesn't hit the Earth. But before you can do that sort of exciting part of it, you have to find where the asteroids are.

And even for that, we have a technology. It's called a telescope. And Ed Liu wants to build it. We're trying to put a space telescope into orbit around the sun to see asteroids that cross Earth's orbit and look for those that are going to hit the Earth. What's keeping you from building it right now? What's keeping us from building it right now? What's keeping us from building it right now is money. It would cost about $500 million to build that telescope and send it out into space. So far, Ed Liu has raised about $10 million. Just for comparison, $500 million for

this first step in saving the planet. The movie Armageddon, where Bruce Willis pretended to save the Earth, grossed more than $550 million worldwide. That's not Armageddon. No. Different Bruce Willis movie. All right. So why is it, though, that humanity, you know, all of us on the planet, are willing to spend that much to see a movie about saving the Earth from an asteroid, but not willing to spend that much to actually save the Earth from an asteroid. We called up an expert to ask about this. Hi, I'm Alex Tabarrok, and now I guess I've become the asteroid economist. Officially an economist at George Mason University who's kind of obsessed with this asteroid problem. People are going to

look around and they're going to say, if everybody else is chipping in a buck, then hey, we're protected. I may as well keep my buck and, you know, spend it on some bubble gum or a chocobar and I'll get the chocobar. On the other hand, if other people aren't giving, well, then my dollar isn't going to make a difference. In that case, I'd rather take the dollar and again, buy a chocobar. Things that everyone benefits from, whether they pay or whether they don't, are called public goods. And the classic way of paying for them is this. The government just makes you pay for them. You don't have a choice.

If you live in the U.S. or in almost any other country and you pay taxes, you're paying for public goods like the Army, national defense. You're paying for that whether you want to or not. And in the U.S., you are paying something for asteroid defense. The government has been paying some for asteroid defense. You are paying for that whether you want to or not. And in the U.S., you are paying something for asteroid defense. The government has been paying some for asteroid defense. And as a result, we've actually found most of the like giant dinosaur killer asteroids. And fortunately, none of those are on track to hit us. Yes, but there are the smaller ones. And when I say smaller ones, I mean the ones that can vaporize New York City.

And we don't know where they are. No, almost all of those are still undetected. And 10 years ago, Congress did pass a law telling NASA to find those small asteroids. But Congress did not give NASA the money to do it. You can imagine the head of NASA testifying at the congressional hearing sounds like this. We are where we are today because, you know, you all told us to do something and between the administration and the Congress, the funding to do that did not, the bottom line is always the funding did not come. Here's the problem with coming up with the

money for asteroid defense. It's not just a regular public good. It's like next level. It is a planetary public good. You know, every country on Earth would benefit from asteroid defense, even if they didn't pay for it. And so when you have this congressional hearing, really this opportunity for politicians to stand there and say, you know, we're going to do the right thing. We're going to save the planet. It's their Bruce Willis moment. And what do the congressmen do? They say, why are we paying for the whole thing? What steps have we taken to bring countries together that could contribute those billions of dollars as well as our own? Other countries were invited, but they weren't interested in contributing anything. I would suggest including Russia in on this. They may be able to make some major contributions to save us some money and actually make it a more effective system. There is, of course, the expected UN committee that talks

about the asteroid threat. There is some international coordination on this, but not a lot of international money. NASA has increased its budget for finding asteroids in the past few years, but the budget is still not enough to build a space telescope like the one Ed Lu has in mind. In other words, we really haven't solved the asteroid problem yet because we haven't figured out this really basic thing. How do you coordinate shared responsibility for threats that are on a planetary scale? And remember, asteroids are the easy thing on the global to-do list. The things at the top of that list are harder to solve, but in some ways they're really similar to the asteroid problem. Alex Tabarrok points out asteroid defense is a planetary public good, so is climate change. If we cut back on our emissions, that benefits

everybody in the world, but it just costs us especially. You know, China doesn't want to cut back and reduce its standard of living. The United States doesn't want to cut back. And so we're in this dilemma in which each nation wants to free ride on the carbon reducing efforts of other nations, and no one does it. And so we get a climate which is much too hot. Climate change, really hard problem to solve. But asteroid defense, I don't know. I mean, Robert, end of the show, last thing. What do you think is actually going to happen with asteroid defense? I don't know.

Just saying it's easy doesn't make it easy. I think, like, basically no one's going to do anything until there's, like, a really close call. That's kind of what the Siberia thing was. Eh, not close enough. Hey, Robert Smith here, back in the year 2020. That was our original episode from 2015, when I can safely say that a giant life-ending asteroid has not hit us yet.

After the break, Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan on how the economics of asteroids can teach us how to think about other existential threats, like shark attacks. We are back with our Economist Power Couple, Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, who have listened to the episode. And if you were teaching this episode in class, what would be the big point you would want to make with the asteroids? I mean, this is a great example of what economists call public goods and the kind of problems that can arise when you can't prevent non-contributors from benefiting. And here in this case, we have something that's completely collapsed. It has not been funded

as a result of the free rider problem. There's a concept that you deal with in your textbook that is just this fundamental part of thinking like an economist, and that is the cost-benefit principle. And here with asteroids, we're sort of broadening that to say there are societal costs and societal benefits, and we have to figure out a way to balance those two things, right? Why don't we start with an easier problem, Robert? Let me give you a different example of a public good. One Betsy and I have to deal with every night, which is a clean kitchen. If I clean and tidy the kitchen, it costs me a lot of work.

And then the next morning, both of us will wake up to a clean kitchen. And the question is, do I love Betsy enough to take account of the joy she will get the next morning, both of us will wake up to a clean kitchen. And the question is, do I love Betsy enough to take account of the joy she will get the next morning? If I don't, then maybe I won't bother cleaning the kitchen. So there's a whole set of benefits that I might not be accounting for that will lead me not to do things that help other people. How would we measure that? We could ask Betsy, how much would you value a clean kitchen tomorrow morning? Well, I really love a clean kitchen. Actually, that's why I can sit back and wait. And it turns out if I don't clean the kitchen, Betsy will go ahead and do it. So here we've just actually seen all couples arguments come right out of this kind of free riding problem.

And that's what you're called. You're called a free rider if someone else does the work that you benefit from. Yeah. Exactly. So Justin can sit back and realize that he's going to benefit from the clean kitchen if I do it. And I can't really stop him from benefiting from the clean kitchen unless I kick him out of the house. So if, if for me, there's not, you know, that that's the excludability here, right? In your household, it's very difficult. And so for me, you know, it's going to cost me an hour to clean up the kitchen,

but it's worth the benefits to me are worth an hour of my time. Then I would go ahead and do it. But it's a game of chicken. I'm going to leave Betsy to clean up. And the threat that she'll wake up and it'll be messy is hopefully going to be enough to spur her to action. She might leave me to clean up. And if you remember, was it Rebel Without a Cause, where they played chicken and actually went off the end of the cliff. When you're each playing chicken, you may not end up making the right choice. So in the episode, you actually heard members of Congress saying, well, why shouldn't other countries do this? Let's leave it for other countries. So the US says to China, hey, you guys do it. And China says to the US, we're not going

to do it. You guys do it. And each tries to grit their teeth and look like the tough guy who's definitely going to sit it out, hoping to intimidate the other into doing it. And the problem is with too many of these problems, we end up not doing it at all. So it might be useful to turn to this other concept that was mentioned in the episode, which is climate change, very similar issue to climate change. And we've seen there that what we've had to do to try to make any progress on to the agreements that they've made and to do what they said they were going to do. Again, the sum of the benefits may be greater than the sum of the costs, but each country that pulls out is leaving the other countries to do their share, and the other countries don't have a way to exclude the countries who drop out from the benefits that accrue from any of the work that they do. We're all going to benefit from a reduction of greenhouse gases,

regardless of who makes them. And that's why every country wants some other country to pay the costs and do the work. But there's another way to look at the asteroid problem, which is that it seems remote and a long time from now. I mean, it will be urgent someday, but as of right now, it just seems in those vague problems that you can put off to another day. So how do economists think about decisions that have a future impact, but are just hard to calculate the value of right

now? People have a really hard time thinking about really low probability events. Literally conceiving of what it means and how scared I should be, really. Exactly. The problem is that many of us struggle to figure out the difference between a small chance, a tiny chance, and an infinitesimal chance. In our brains, they all just mush together and look the same. And that might lead us to worry too much about very, very unlikely things. To give you my favorite example, being eaten by a shark. I knew Justin was going for the sharks. You know, worldwide, only five people are eaten by sharks each year.

He's obsessed with the sharks. But he thinks it's going to be him, right? Most of those people are in Australia, which means there's very few shark attacks left for the United States. So why is Justin obsessed with the sharks? Because that's an example of a low probability event that people want to over invest in preventing a shark attack. When I listened to this episode,

I thought we should take some of the money that we're dedicating to solving the shark problem and move it toward the asteroid problem. Because sharks are really just not a very big problem. Not very many people die worldwide from sharks. But because the number isn't zero, there's something really special about the number zero. We've seen a gruesome shark attack described in the news, on YouTube, in a movie. Jaws changed how we all think about shark attacks. And now we spend a lot of money trying to ward off shark attacks.

So we over, that's like the behavioral mistake there is we actually overestimate the probability of that low probability event. And I think with the asteroids, it seems like we have underestimated the probability. And that's probably because at zero, there's no salience for people. They've never seen one and they don't know how to think about it. So they've coded this probability as zero. Now imagine what would happen if we actually got hit by an asteroid. How much do you think people would be willing to invest to prevent future asteroid attacks? Or to move it beyond asteroids, the thing is we should invest a lot to prevent once in a century calamities. But often we think once in a century, that's not going to happen to us. And of course,

if we end up in the midst of a global pandemic, we suddenly discover that we are in the midst of one. And for a certain generation of economists, we've had two once in a century recessions within the last 10 years. And so these are things that we really probably do underinvest in. Thank you so much, professors. It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. Justin Wolfers and Betsy Stevenson teach economics at the University of Michigan. They also have a great podcast called Think Like an Economist, which you can find wherever you found this podcast. If you learned a little something from Planet Money Summer School,

even now in the dead of winter, please donate to help make this show possible. The way to do that is through one of your local NPR stations. You can go to donate.npr.org slash planetmoney and pick a station. We always love to hear from you. You can email us, planetmoney at npr.org. And we're on Facebook,

Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, all at planetmoney. This episode was originally produced six years ago by the brilliant Jess Jang, then it was resurrected this summer by the ever-creative Lauren Hodges, and finally put together for air by the ever-creative Lauren Hodges, and finally put

together for air by the insightful Darian Woods. Alex Goldmark is our supervising producer and Bryant Erstad edits the show. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.