4 ms·

I took an extra mortgage with my house as collateral and went to the casino with that money. I won a lot of money, so that made it a smart decision, right?

• hedora 3y ago
  If you can do that with high probability (9 times out of 10?), then yes. All safety critical stuff comes down to high-stakes gambling. One approach that I've seen work well is to estimate the expected number of terrible events per year (which is just the mean time to failure of the system). Things start to be reasonably at about a 0.01 probability per year. (So, we'd expect SpaceX to crash in a populated area once a century. If they launch roughly 100 rockets per year. That means that there has to be a less than a 1 in 10,000 chance that a given rocket crashes and that it kills someone in the process.) (The 0.01 is picked as an example. I have no idea how many zeros the actual FAA regulatory process aims for, or if they go by expected deaths vs. incident rates, etc.)
  • hef19898 3y ago
    If memory serves well, it something like 10^(-9) propability for a catastrophic failure for civil airliners. No idea about bon-people carrying space rockets.
    • hedora 3y ago
      If that is per flight, then it starts to look like 10^-3 per year.