Quote:
Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman
- the actual odds of being killed or injured by the specific event which we are trying to guard against . For instance, the probability of a person being killed or hurt by a 10 km asteroid is probably substantially greater than the probability of being killed in an airline disaster, but there is only a miniscule chance of a specific individual person being killed by a 50 metre asteroid.
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This is where people's misunderstanding of statistics fails them.
There has been one person reported to have been killed by a meteor in the last 100 years. That's 1 in ~7 billion.
Since records started being collected for Australia in 1791 there have been 216 fatal shark attacks. Say 1 in 140,000 for the population in those 200+ years, or 1 in 27 million per year.
About 400 people die a year on NSW roads. That's 1 in 18,000.
A Chicxulub sized meteor would most likely wipe out everyone either by the impact or the loss of habitat. You can't say this won't happen. It has at least once. That meteor was guesstimated at around 10km in diameter and we can be reasonably sure all objects with periods under a few hundred years of that size are known, and none are dangerous.
Which ones do the current affairs programs use as scare tactics?