If black holes strike – preparing for the worst

By David Alexander
Western Herald

Risks are everywhere. But some potentially catastrophic risks can be avoided with sound planning, according to one risk expert.

Professor William Leiss spoke of limiting and managing the risks involved with topics ranging from unsound economic policy to potentially devastating cosmic events last Friday in Western Michigan University’s Chemistry Building.

Leiss was born in the United States but is now a scientist at Ottawa University’s McLaughlin Center for Population Health Risk Assessment in Canada. He is also the former president of the Royal Society of Canada, a group dedicated to the advancement of the sciences and humanities.

The keys to limiting and mitigating risks, Leiss said, are foresight, precaution, and protecting the downside.

“If you own a house and it burns down, that’s a significant loss, but it’s a lot less of a loss if you have an insurance policy,” Leiss said. “You can’t stop all house fires from happening, but you can stop if from being catastrophic.”

Six topics – the global financial crisis, coronal mass ejection, global climate change, an asteroid collision, the Large Hadron Collider, and a pandemic flu outbreak – and their risks were the core of Leiss’ 90-minute talk. He called these risks “black hole risks.”

“A black hole risk is when it happens, you can’t even figure out how bad it’s going to be, but you know it’s going to be really, really bad,” Leiss said. “It’s equivalent to staring into the abyss.”

Leiss first spoke about global financial risk. Unlike some other risks, financial risks are largely avoidable because people control them. A large function of managing risk is regulation, he said.

“We would not have passed through this [global financial crisis] had, in the U.S., the Republicans been in control of Congress. Because they believed we shouldn’t have done any bailouts,” Leiss said

The best way to assess risk is to look at the gap between the benefits of the upside and the pitfalls of the downside. So as long as risks are limited to a very small number, and those who suffer their ill-effects are compensated, then the risk has been mitigated, Leiss said.

Leiss also spoke about the potential ramifications of a small asteroid colliding with the earth and a coronal ejection – a pulse from the sun that could wipe out the world’s electrical grid in 2012.

Plans need to be in place to ensure these events, if they occur, don’t devastate the world’s population with their effects, he said.

The monetary costs of these plans, like launching a relay satellite to detect solar phenomena or discharging a nuclear device in proximity to an impending asteroid to veer it off course, are more than offset by their benefits, even if the events are not terribly likely to occur, Leiss said.

“If it did happen, do you want to see what your losses would be?” he said.

Leiss spoke of the effects of global climate change, and said limiting CO2 emissions is going to be a test for humanity, and that effects on the animal population could be irreparable.

“I think we’re going to fail this test,” he said.

Another major risk people face, according to Leiss, is a H5N1, better known as bird flu, pandemic. Many scientists have concerns about the dangers of new strains of the flu, he said. The World Health Organization’s suggestion that each country implement pandemic influenza planning is a good example of mitigating risk.

“The influenza virus is one of Mother Nature’s most cunning inventions,” Leiss said. “H5N1, so far, only spreads from birds to people, and when people are infected they don’t infect other people. The virus hasn’t learned, but it’s trying.”

While the other risks Leiss spoke of earned the label black hole risks, only one actually poses a threat of creating an actual black hole, according to Leiss – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The main problem with the LHC, a particle accelerator in Switzerland that attempts to re-create the Big Bang, is that the only people qualified to do a risk assessment of it have a conflict of interest. They are the scientists who are working with it, Leiss said.

According to Leiss, one of two catastrophic events could occur as a result of the LHC being fired up.

“In an instant, the earth will be reduced to a hyper-dense ball the size of a basketball [is one possible outcome,]” he said. “The possibility that it will open a black hole in the vicinity of the earth [is the other.]”

After the lecture, audience members questioned Leiss, among other topics, about the implications of health care models as they pertain to risk assessment followed the talk.

“I think he’s looking at risks too broadly. He gave theory but he didn’t give any sound prescription how to deal with it,” said Joy Plivelick, a WMU senior
majoring in public relations.

“I think you should take risks,” she added.

“What interested me is putting together all the various ways that we think about risk in society… in a certain sense, that’s what life is about,” said Lewis Pyenson, dean of WMU‘s Graduate College, which sponsored Leiss’s visit.

“If you look at the news, much of what the news is concerned about is risk assessment.”

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Mar 14 2010. Filed under Campus, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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