asteroids assessing catastrophic risks小行星灾难性的风险评估.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2010, Article ID 954750, 15 pages doi:10.1155/2010/954750 Research Article Asteroids: Assessing Catastrophic Risks Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Graciela Chichilnisky, chichilnisky1@ Received 28 January 2010; Accepted 9 May 2010 Academic Editor: Ricardas Zitikis Copyright q 2010 G. Chichilnisky and P. Eisenberger. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We evaluate two risk profiles: i global warming risks and ii collisions with asteroids that can cause the extinction of our species. The expected values computed for these two risks suggest that no action will be taken to avoid extinction. The result is somewhat counterintuitive, but it is typical of the results of using classic decision theory to evaluate catastrophic risks in the distant future, see the study by Posner 2004. We establish why expected value is insensitive to catastrophic risks see the study by Chichilnisky 1996, and use another criterion to evaluate risk based on axioms for choice under uncertainty that update the classic Von Neumann theory and require equal treatment for rare and frequent events. Optimizing according to the new criterion is shown to be equivalent to optimizing expected utility with a restriction on the worst outcome in the case of a catastrophe. The evaluation obtained from the new criterion seems more intuitively plausible, and suggests a more practical and realistic approach to catastrophic risks: optimizing expected value while minimizi