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Are your numbers correct? If so that's a 98% chance you come out fine. Do astronauts have a mental illness?

• araneae 16y ago
  More evidence that we have trouble thinking about probability as applied to our daily lives. That's a 2% chance over a four day period. I don't know if that number is accurate- it's from the article, if you've read it- but even though it looks small, it's actually huge. For comparison, in the US 6860 people die per day, and we have a population of 312 million. That means over a 4 day period, you have about a .009% chance of dying; that's a 200,000% increase. And keep in mind that's the death rate for EVERYONE in the U.S., including 90 year-olds riddled with cancer. I don't even want to think about the percentage difference in death rate using the Mt. Everest cohort, which tend to be younger, healthy males. I can't think of a single activity that's riskier, except for actively trying to kill yourself, which by the way, only has a 5% probability of death.