After reviewing the literature pretty extensively over the last several months for a related project (the risks of human-directed asteroids), it seems to me that there is a strong academic consensus that we’ve found most of the big ones (though definitely not all—and many people are working hard to create ways for us to find the rest). See this graphic for a good summary of our current status circa 2018: https://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2018/06/Asteroid_danger_explained
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.
After reviewing the literature pretty extensively over the last several months for a related project (the risks of human-directed asteroids), it seems to me that there is a strong academic consensus that we’ve found most of the big ones (though definitely not all—and many people are working hard to create ways for us to find the rest). See this graphic for a good summary of our current status circa 2018: https://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2018/06/Asteroid_danger_explained
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.