3 ms·

And yet everyday you (and everyone else) get in a car with much higher risk of death. Why the double standard for experimental space fight?

• rfrey 8y ago
  Do you really think car travel has a 1/100 chance of death, or is this a whoosh moment for me?
  • SimonPStevens 8y ago
    They've got their statistics confused. Lifetime odds (in US) of death due to vehicle accident is 1/102. (https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortality-risk https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...) But that's average lifetime odds, not mortality rate per journey. It's a statistic with a very different meaning. But I see how people get confused by all the different ways risk can be expressed.
  • perl4ever 8y ago
    I do not think a trip in a car is that dangerous, but I recently ran across an article that suggested going to the hospital has approximately a 1/140 chance of death due to medical error, for what that's worth. That's per visit, not per lifetime. "based on a total of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths stemmed from a medical error, which the researchers say now translates to 9.5 percent of all deaths each year in the U.S" https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-...