Reply to post: space bookies

Japan's mission to mine Mars' moon is cleared – now they've filled out the right paperwork on alien world contamination

jmch Silver badge

space bookies

"as long as the probability of taking a single, unsterilized particle, measuring no less than 10 nanometers in diameter, contains a single microbe is less than 0.000001 per cent"

Who's setting those odds, though? Since we can say very little about the possibility of Martian microbes from whatever landers / rovers there, how are these odds estimated if not by basically making them up out of a bunch of assumptions?

Reminds me of Feynman's assertion in the shuttle investigation that every layer of management at NASA had an order-of-magnitude lower estimate of failure possibility than the layer below. When the data is so sparse, probability calculations are hardly better than guesswork.

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