Epistemic status: I don’t have a citation handy for the following arguments, so any reader should consider them merely the embedded beliefs of someone who has spent a significant amount of time studying the solar system and the risks of asteroids.
No, I believe that dark Damocloids will be largely invisible (when they are far away from the sun) even to the new round of telescopes that are being deployed for surveying asteroids. They’re very dark and (typically) very far away.
Luckily, I think the consensus is that they’re only a small portion of the risk. Most of the risk comes from the near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), since due to orbital mechanics they have many opportunities (~1 per year or so) to strike the Earth, while comets fly through the inner solar system extremely rarely. Thus, as we’ve moved towards finding all of the really big NEAs, we’ve moved very significantly towards knowing about the vast majority of the possible “civilization ending” or “mass extinction” events in our near future. There will still be a (very) long tail of real risk here due to objects like the Damocloids, but most of the natural risk of asteroids will be addressed if we completely understand the NEAs.
Huh, including most dark Damocloids?
Epistemic status: I don’t have a citation handy for the following arguments, so any reader should consider them merely the embedded beliefs of someone who has spent a significant amount of time studying the solar system and the risks of asteroids.
No, I believe that dark Damocloids will be largely invisible (when they are far away from the sun) even to the new round of telescopes that are being deployed for surveying asteroids. They’re very dark and (typically) very far away.
Luckily, I think the consensus is that they’re only a small portion of the risk. Most of the risk comes from the near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), since due to orbital mechanics they have many opportunities (~1 per year or so) to strike the Earth, while comets fly through the inner solar system extremely rarely. Thus, as we’ve moved towards finding all of the really big NEAs, we’ve moved very significantly towards knowing about the vast majority of the possible “civilization ending” or “mass extinction” events in our near future. There will still be a (very) long tail of real risk here due to objects like the Damocloids, but most of the natural risk of asteroids will be addressed if we completely understand the NEAs.