Proofiness - Charles Seife [28]
In my opinion, Branson is downplaying the risks, which has helped him convince more than 250 astronaut wannabes to put down $30 million worth of deposits on rides into space. He’s also sold politicians and the public on his vision. In 2005, New Mexico politicians started spending tens of millions of dollars—and the governor promised to raise as much as $225 million—to build a spaceport. Two New Mexico counties even passed a sales tax to fund the project. As a smart businessman like Branson probably knows, downplaying risks can be very lucrative. In fact, there are two main ways to mismanage risk for fun and profit. Like NASA or Richard Branson, you can underestimate risks, making something look safer than it actually is. Conversely, you can take something that’s mundane and exaggerate its risks, making it loom large in the public’s imagination.
Journalists are particularly fond of the latter course. The scarier the story, the bigger the audience. Nothing sells like Armageddon. Around the turn of the millennium, asteroid scares were all the rage. In 1998, the discovery of a large asteroid gave reporters the opportunity to grab readers with headlines like “October 26, 2028 could be our last day.” In 2002, another asteroid gave rise to similar worries: “The world ends on Feb 1 2019 (possibly).” Journalists seemed undeterred when astronomers repeatedly told them that the risk of an actual collision was low. More observations, they said, would be able to pinpoint the asteroids’ orbits with greater precision and a smack-up would almost certainly be ruled out—as indeed it was. But the attention-grabbing stories were too good to pass up. In fact, every doomsday scenario, no matter how far-fetched, is guaranteed to get at least some level of attention in the media. Every time physicists start up a new high-energy atom smasher—the Tevatron in 1985, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in 2000, the Large Hadron Collider in 2008—the press chatters on about bizarre claims that the machine will destroy the earth or even the universe. The airwaves are alive with theories that the new machine will create tiny black holes that will swallow the earth, will create a variety of particle known as a “strangelet” that will destroy the planet, or will change the structure of space and time in a way that might annihilate the entire universe. (While no scientist will say that these scenarios are impossible—after all, scientific knowledge is uncertain and tentative—every mainstream scientist agrees that they are all very, very improbable.) Yet every time one of these new machines turns on, there are always headlines such as “Is the end nigh? Science experiment could swallow Earth, critics say” and “Physicists fear Big Bang machine could destroy Earth.” Nobody seems to care about the science; everyone is fascinated with the prospect of Armageddon, no matter how remote it might be.
Fear sells so well that news organizations occasionally cross ethical lines to make something appear more risky than it actually is. On November 23, 1986, 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley reported on allegations that a particular model of car—the Audi 5000—was prone to sudden and unexpected jolts of acceleration even while the driver was pressing on the brake. It was a moving report; a tearful mother told of her horror as her