You have been hired by NASA as the planetary protection officer, your job is to protect the earth from massive asteroid strikes, and your first job is to figure out how much of a budget is sensible. You know that asteroid strikes follow a Poisson distribution with rate ? scaling roughly with the size(mass) of the asteroid so a 3 meter asteroid, causing a big flash in the sky strikes about every year. A 30 meter asteroid (10* the diameter or r^3 1000 times the mass) will strike once every 100 years, and this could be a city killing asteroid, however it is usually going to strike over an uninhabited area. The fraction of earths area that is inhabited is about 10%. Suppose the average population of a city is 250,000 people and the average GDP per year is 7 billion (1979) dollars. A) So based on these numbers figure that if you can successfully stop a 30 meter asteroid from striking a city, what is the average yearly dollar figure your office should be in charge of (assume saving 100% of GDP the year of any strike). B) What is the yearly savings in lives.(assuming you succeed) C) If you keep the job for 50 years, and you don’t succeed in being able to block strikes what is the probability of 1 or more strikes during your time. How about 2 or more strikes? D) What is the probability of no strikes in those 50 years
You have been hired by NASA as the planetary protection officer, your job is to protect the earth from massive asteroid strikes, and your first job is to figure out how much of a budget is sensible. You know that asteroid strikes follow a Poisson distribution with rate ? scaling roughly with the size(mass) of the asteroid so a 3 meter asteroid, causing a big flash in the sky strikes about every year. A 30 meter asteroid (10* the diameter or r^3 1000 times the mass) will strike once every 100 years, and this could be a city killing asteroid, however it is usually going to strike over an uninhabited area. The fraction of earths area that is inhabited is about 10%. Suppose the average population of a city is 250,000 people and the average GDP per year is 7 billion (1979) dollars.
A) So based on these numbers figure that if you can successfully stop a 30 meter asteroid from
striking a city, what is the average yearly dollar figure your office should be in charge of (assume
saving 100% of GDP the year of any strike).
B) What is the yearly savings in lives.(assuming you succeed)
C) If you keep the job for 50 years, and you don’t succeed in being able to block strikes what is the
D) What is the probability of no strikes in those 50 years
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