&gt; <i>This is a stupid reason for having an outcry.</i><p>What about &quot;Let&#x27;s add risk to strangers&#x27; lives so we can look at a comet slightly longer&quot;?. Throw in that &#x27;one in one million&#x27; is a number pulled from the air to represent an opinion, not calculated mathematically, and that launching probes happens multiple times, not as a once-off event. Let&#x27;s keep things in perspective here.<p>What happens if that burnup happens over a country like Russia or China?<p>And if you&#x27;re going to make the &quot;well, <i>only</i> 5000 people would die&quot; argument, then you&#x27;ve lost already. Out of the global population that live and work in buildings, the World Trade Center attacks killed <i>fewer than 5000</i> people. Overzealous police shooting people in the streets? Bah, it&#x27;s hardly anyone, by the numbers. Wildfire sweeps through the state, killing 50 people? Drop in the ocean compared to car deaths, why is anyone concerned? &quot;They were going to die anyway&quot; is a pretty callous argument that can be used against anything.<p>I mean, if we&#x27;re arguing for science here, then we should also be pointing out the flaws in the quoted paragraph - it doesn&#x27;t matter how many other deaths are attributable to cancer (and doubly so because cancer isn&#x27;t a single thing anyway). Mentioning that statistic in this context is purely political and poor science.<p>I say all this because the process of cutting edge science is necessarily political. You see it in academia, you see it in industry, and you see it in government funding.