3 ms·
> Also, tell the family they just have “bad luck”. It's not wrong, though. The Earth's surface is slightly over 500 million km². Let's say that something lan
by chipdart 3y ago
> Also, tell the family they just have “bad luck”.
It's not wrong, though.
The Earth's surface is slightly over 500 million km².
Let's say that something landing within a 10m radius of you represents a hit. That radius is about 314 m², or
0,000314 km²
If my math doesn't fail me, if we partition the globe into discrete areas equivalent to that 10m radius, the odds of something landing on your area would be around 1 in 10^12.
- xnorswap 3y agoThat's the chance of one specific person being hit. But I think you'd want to calculate the chance of any one person being "hit", which is roughly ten billion times higher than that, and uncomfortably likely (if people were actually 10m wide).
- ykonstant 3y ago>(if people were actually 10m wide). Apparently, we're working on that.
- tetris11 3y agodoesnt the orbit shadow vastly reduce surface area to a few thin overlapping strips?
- ang_cire 3y agoExcept that neither human nor satellite distribution is even across the global surface, and we actually tend to put our satellites above the human-populated areas so that they can service those humans. Including the nigh-unpopulated polar regions would massively skew the probabilities, for instance, especially since most satellites aren't in polar orbits either. It's still an infinitesimally small likelihood of being hit by one, of course.