What about "Let's add risk to strangers' lives so we can look at a comet slightly longer"?. Throw in that 'one in one million' is a number pulled from the air to represent an opinion, not calculated mathematically, and that launching probes happens multiple times, not as a once-off event. Let's keep things in perspective here.
What happens if that burnup happens over a country like Russia or China?
And if you're going to make the "well, only 5000 people would die" argument, then you've lost already. Out of the global population that live and work in buildings, the World Trade Center attacks killed fewer than 5000 people. Overzealous police shooting people in the streets? Bah, it's hardly anyone, by the numbers. Wildfire sweeps through the state, killing 50 people? Drop in the ocean compared to car deaths, why is anyone concerned? "They were going to die anyway" is a pretty callous argument that can be used against anything.
I mean, if we're arguing for science here, then we should also be pointing out the flaws in the quoted paragraph - it doesn't matter how many other deaths are attributable to cancer (and doubly so because cancer isn't a single thing anyway). Mentioning that statistic in this context is purely political and poor science.
I say all this because the process of cutting edge science is necessarily political. You see it in academia, you see it in industry, and you see it in government funding.
Yes I agree. Science has no opinion whatsoever about the ethics of this, it can merely predict possible outcomes. The actual decision has to be about more than the statistics and include other factors. It may be worth the risk sometimes and not others. But public deaths is categorically unacceptable however you make the decision.
What about "Let's add risk to strangers' lives so we can look at a comet slightly longer"?. Throw in that 'one in one million' is a number pulled from the air to represent an opinion, not calculated mathematically, and that launching probes happens multiple times, not as a once-off event. Let's keep things in perspective here.
What happens if that burnup happens over a country like Russia or China?
And if you're going to make the "well, only 5000 people would die" argument, then you've lost already. Out of the global population that live and work in buildings, the World Trade Center attacks killed fewer than 5000 people. Overzealous police shooting people in the streets? Bah, it's hardly anyone, by the numbers. Wildfire sweeps through the state, killing 50 people? Drop in the ocean compared to car deaths, why is anyone concerned? "They were going to die anyway" is a pretty callous argument that can be used against anything.
I mean, if we're arguing for science here, then we should also be pointing out the flaws in the quoted paragraph - it doesn't matter how many other deaths are attributable to cancer (and doubly so because cancer isn't a single thing anyway). Mentioning that statistic in this context is purely political and poor science.
I say all this because the process of cutting edge science is necessarily political. You see it in academia, you see it in industry, and you see it in government funding.