Jonathan Silverlight writes:

algomeysa2 writes:

Interesting page, but, you know, when I go to a webpage and the first thing
I see is this:

"The risk you face of dying as a result of an asteroid impact is about 1 in
20,000, the same risk you face of dying in a plane crash. - Source:
Spaceguard Survey"

The fact that that's obviously a completely bogus statistic.....considering,
oh...... I can search the web and find many people who have died in plane
crashes, but, there's not one instance in recorded history of anyone dying
in an asteroid impact...... makes that rather suspect....

On what basis do you call it a fact that it is "a completely bogus
statistic"? In reality, the statistic is not at all bogus. It's
your reasoning that's bogus. You're trying to compare a relatively
high frequency, low fatality event (plane crashes) with a relatively
low frequency, high fatality event (asteroid impacts).

Suppose an asteroid impact that causes a mass extinction (let's say
50 percent of the human population eventually dies as a result)
happens once every 10 million years. Well, the current global
population is about 6 billion. That makes for an average death
rate of 600 people per year. How many people die in plane crashes
each year? The number is comparable to within the limits of this
execise.

I would say that shows how completely bogus the statistic is.

What you would say is irrelevant; the facts are relevant, and it's a
fact that there is nothing wrong with the statistic; the problem is in
its correct interpretation.

The actual
number of people exposed to the danger of dying in a plane crash is a
tiny fraction of the number now living in various degrees of poverty on
Earth. But it is an absolute certainty that some of them will die in a
plane crash.

Which does nothing to substantiate your claim that the statistic is
bogus.

And the number of people who have lived in the past ten million years is
vastly more than the current population - Clarke's "behind every man now
alive stand thirty ghosts" comes to mind.

Illogical, given that you can't be killed if you're already dead.
The relevant number is therefore the number of people killed in an
asteroid impact, which has to be some fraction less than or equal to
unity of the number of people living at the time.

In fact 10 million years ago man didn't exist.

I can imagine one dinosaur telling another, some 65 million years ago,
that 10 million years earlier, dinosaurs didn't exist. Does that
somehow make the statistic of their death rate "bogus"?

But then no-one's interested in spending money on solving problems that
actually kill people. After all, we've spent trillions to ensure the
destruction of all life on Earth.

Actually, money has been spent disproportionately on solving problems
that actually kill people: disease, automobile safety, floods,
aircraft safety, highway safety, and so on.