It’s difficult to explain in everyday terms (for those of you who hasn’t read the probability math). But the comparison between asteroid impacts and plane chrashes only holds if you count the deaths over millions of years. That is longer than airplanes, or even humanity will exist.
No, I know the odds are relatively low, but they still seem fairly high for the whole Earth being wiped out. I’m not too worried about it all, but I was surprised to hear that.
throughout all the ancient texts the history of this reality is
written in cycles. the mayan culture which set its task to
create so highly accurate calenders that they not only could
calculate happenings in this cycle of event [millions of years]
but in any possible cycle [xn years]. they calculated the
change of this world/dimension for 2012. what does this mean?
according to vedic texts there are 4 ages which represent this
eternal balance of positive and negative energy. right now
we are in the age called the ‘iron/cruel age’ [kali-yuga]
despite this spiritual ‘mambo-jambo’ one only has to consider
recent scientific articles on the destruction of nature / global
warming / carbon sinks / etc / etc to realise that this course
this world is currently taking is not going on for very much longer.
though we could slow this down or even prevent it the industrial
nations think about anything but altering they’re distructive course,
which exponentially uses of all the resources on this planets
throwing most of the beings living here in poverty and chaos.
also astronomical reports on a misterious 9th [or 10th] planet
in our solar system brings us back to the texts of the ancients.
scientifically has this planet always been a part of our solar system
[ie orbiting the sun] but has been so far away that we have never
encountered it during our human history [ie small part of one cycle].
astronomers say that this planet will cause pole shifts and other
funky things when it comes close to earth… spiritual speaking
this planet is an interstellar spacecraft with the name nibiru, which
will bring about the change from negative to positive energy -
the dawn of [once again] a golden age.
word.
okay…
if the odds of a comet hitting us are as good as dying in a plane crash, we’d be dead by now.
If the odds of a comet EVER, at any point in time, throughout human history, wiping us out, are about the same as dying in a plane crash… maybe?
I’m not sure if both are the same?
I mean just like, if constantly, every second, there is a 1 in 100,000 odd of dying (i’m assuming that is what plane crash odds are, but i don’t know) then… to not die… after… a year?
Would be like, astrononically unlikely… after the 100,000 seconds are over, it would start being odds are 100,000 to ONE that we WILL die within the next second.
So… I’m not sure I even see a point in making statisical odds about being hit by one… if we as a species live long enough, quite possibly it could happen… sure.
as for 2012… keep in mind the end is ALWAYS near, everyone says so, at all times… 2000, 1996, 1984 (i think we are about to become a 1984 esque world), 2001… 2012…
Planet X was supposed to come like… March 25, 2003 I think… I remember being a bit freaked out about it… then it was supposed to come before July… it was a bit late… now I don’t even care.
I’d like to think if there is an apocalypse it’ll be a sort of everyone starts evolving and ascending rapidly kind of thing, those that don’t try to, or just sit around and live the rest of their lives out.
But who knows… a lot of people think humanity can’t move on until ALL of humanity is ready, which I think would make us need to see 90% of humanity wiped out by natural disasters beforehand?
Who knows? No one does. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I probably will when 2012 draws near though.
That is an internet scam designed to sell books. It would have made a good episode of The X-Files, but as science it is pure crap.
The difference between plane crashes and asteroid impacts is called the variance, or standard deviation (standard deviation is the square root of the variance…). The variance is a vastly bigger number for asteroids than for aircrashes.
what does that have to do with anything?
if the PROBABILITY of an asteroid hitting us is the same as a probability of you dying in a plane crash… the SD has nothing at all to do with it whatsoever.
I mean… for example… IQ… the mean is 100… the SD is 10 (i believe)
so most IQ scores fall between 80 and 120
the odds of being greater than (3?) SDs away from the mean is considered a statistical unliklihood… now i’m even going to go get my chart here…
the odds of being 3.5 standard deviations above the mean (in a standard normal distribution, as in the case of IQs) are less than .0001 quite considerably less than that if i recall… most examples we use tend to be in the e^-10 or higher power.
So… but anyway that isn’t the point… standard deviation doesn’t have much to do with probability, other than the probablity that x amounts of occurances will happen in contrast to the mean.
I’m in statistics right now… if the probability of being hit by an asteroid is the same as you dying in a plane crash… we would have been hit by an asteroid by now, it’s almost statistically impossible for us to not have been.
If that probability, is say, probability per YEAR… then go figure… we could last 100,000 years without being hit, assuming the odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 100,000.
But I don’t really see how S/S^2 have much to do with what I was saying.
man I’m glad that class is almost over.
and variance is a measurement of dispersion from the mean… I don’t think you can get a variance/standard deviation by comparing two different events… you can certainly (at least I think) take two pools of data and perhaps construct a standard deviation of the difference between the two, though… (i’m not entirely sure on this… i don’t know what good it would do you)
but in order for that to have much relevance you should probably have a correlation between the two events… which we don’t.
comparing the standrad deviations of the number of kids per year who try to fly like harry potter and the number of kids per year who have chicken pox probably wouldn’t help much at all…
Well, the point is that someone once said that the probability of being killed by an asteroid is the same as being killed in an plane crash. I don’t know if this is true or exactly how many times you have to fly for it to be true. But i assume that what it meant was that asteroids kills the same amount of people as plane crashes does over time (in theory!).
If you have 1 billion years (let’s imagine that we ran the 90’s 100 million times and “rewinded” each time), and random variables for each year P1…P1000.000.000 (number of casualties in plane chrashes) A1…A1000.000.000 (Casualties in asteriod impacts). The P:s will form something very similar to a normal bell curve (don’t know the proper english terms) around say 2500 killed passengers, with some standard deviation.
The A:s will be centered around 0 of course, and there will be nothing to the left of the centre (no negative kills). And you were right, the standard deviation will not be a good measure of the deviation in the A-variables. The SD will be small, because most of the A:s will be 0 or 1, extremely few will be in the millions or billions. But I mean, in some way the deviation will be huge! I’ll have to get better at my statistics I think, before the exam. Like, what kind of measurement of deviation measures the deviation between the largest and smallest variables? 
The point is that the sums of the P:s and the A:s divided by the number of years (the average number of deaths per year) would be equal to eachother.
The meteor/comet idea seems like nonsense to me. Even if all of humanity only had a few days warning, that would be more than enough time to launch a nuclear missile at the comet and completely destroy it.
Hm, I don’t know much about comets, but is a nuclear bomb capable of destroying it? Maybe if we throw all the nuclear bombs we have, that will work and we’re finally rid of them 
all i know is we better hear from someone if they know we are getting hit by an unstoppable asteriod. Screw mass hysteria, any1 who goes into panic is a dumbass anyway. The reason i say they better do that is because if we all knew we only had a few days left to live the whole planet might come togather in harmoney (then again maybe not) i know wut i would do. Quit my job, spend all my money and party with friends and family.
it would be funny if as the comet neared, the civilisation that had evolved on it used all it’s nuclear weaponry against the threat(earth) of collision
thereby wiping it out and saving the comet life!!
ahh the irony 
Theres always something about to destroy the world, whether it be a comet, nuclear war or the revival of disco music (Shudder)
If this comet is gonna hit I say we all get naked and freak out, 70’s style, if it doesn’t hit, then we put our clothes back on and act like nothing happened…
If the esteroid doesn’t get us, then there’s always the black hole thats moving towards our solar system, and unless we get off this damn rock there’s no way in hell we’re ganna stop THAT! (they say it will destroy the solar system in about 3 million years or so)
I think we’ve survived a lot, and some esteroid ain’t ganna stop us, at least I’m not intending on giving up anyway.
mystery
Yeah i know, and my wallet has a small black hole building up as well, if I don’t get an extra job this summer. I predict it will become critical in 8 years and suck in the whole earth in a matter of hours. Wait a minute, according to my equations (2004+8=x) it will be, you guessed it, 2012!! How ironic.
Of course by then I will be on the alien modership in warp drive bound for another solar system (can’t tell you which star, it’s part of the deal with the little guys to keep it confidential).
Don’t fear thought. Just hang in there for my book on how to make your house black-hole safe! 
Easy, we could probably blow up Earth several times over using all of the world’s nukes.
A comet would be easy, and we would have plenty of nukes left over.
statistical probability?? Well im not too good with math, but…ok here im just building as i go so bear with me…
say that there is a 1 in 100,000 chance that a disaster of apocalyptic proportions will occur.
okay, then say that this chance is taken every second, and that the critical number is 13
the first second, the number hits at 14. Now, the next second, the number hits at 66,666. On the third second, what is it that prevents it from being 14 or 66,666???
Thus, it does not matter how long of time it is, inevitability theorem does not shorten the odds, the odds are still 1 in 100,000. In other words, every time you roll the 100,000 sided die (lol manifest one of those in an LD), it would still be a 1 in 100,000 chance.
I think though theres some complicated theorem that has multiple rolls as actually lessening the odds. I cannot come up with it at the moment, it just wouldnt make sense! But hey that may just be a statement of my ignorance.
What im wondering is how they calculate these chances, and how they calculate what it ‘lands on’ and how they figure out if something prevents a certain roll result from repeating (in which case if it did not repeat, wed be dead now)
As far as nukes go, i once read some totally scary shit about it, something like that the nukes are programmed to launch by themselves and that it is not possible (or very hard w/out password etc) to stop them once the sequence has started going. The thing is, there are so many nukes that long after humanity has been wiped off the face of the earth, nukes will still be flying back and forth and continuing to marr the face of the planet. Its so bad that its like an mutually agreed upon mentality to ensure no survivors (of a higher evolved than cell nature)
LOL, the perfect acronym would be MAD for Mutually Assured Destruction
well now for this to work… planes would have to kill millions of people, they haven’t yet…
but like i could see where 1000 years of plane crash deaths could be the same as 1 asteroid impact.
ahh okay i get it… say an asteroid kills a million people, but it only does it once, in a long long time
and that averages out to kill like 15 people per year, if you know, you were to spread it out over the time gap.
where as 15 people die per year in plane crashes, on average, maybe?
Something like that?
Theoretically asteroids then kill 15 people per year, but they obviously don’t…since they aren’t yearly/century-ly(?) events.
I guess something like that was meant… yeah…
now I really don’t think this is so…
for example… how many times can you roll a dice and NOT get 6?
Go ahead and try it? IF every second there were in a 1 in 100,000 chance of complete disaster, it would have happened by now… hmm… let me make a program…
Okay so I’m running the program, getting random numbers between 1 and 60, 34 is the number I want… I’m doing a trial of 60 15 times… it should be expected that I get no more than 4 each time, with an average of 1.
each number represents doing a 1 in 60 odds event 60 times
0
1
2
0
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
2
1
0
0
We see that it’s very unlikely to get all zeros…
the average is .733 actually… I don’t feel like putting it in my graphing calculator to get the other information…
here’s my code if anyone cares:
Private Sub Form_Load()
Dim intCnt As Integer
Dim intS As Integer
Dim intDice As Integer
Dim intP As Integer
For intP = 1 To 15
For intCnt = 1 To 60
Randomize (Timer)
intDice = Int((60 - 1 + 1) * Rnd + 1)
intCnt = intCnt + 1
If intDice = 34 Then
intS = intS + 1
End If
Next intCnt
MsgBox intS
intS = 0
Next intP
End Sub
The chances of having disaster are 0.00001 (you suggested). The chances of not having disaster are 0.99999. But what happens if we take this every second?
In two seconds, the chances of no disaster are 0.99999^2 (that is, squared)
How many seconds in a week? 606024*7 = 604,800
Chances of not having disaster in a week: 0.99999^604,800 = 0.0023625
A chance of 1 in 100,000 is small, but when you have that chance every second, it is very deceptive!
A more likely figure might by 1 in 100,000 every month.
How many months in a century? 12*100 = 1,200
Chances of not having disaster in a century: 0.99999^1,200 = 0.988
Sounds better
A horse gallops majestically into the thread.
Neeeeeeeeeigh! Whinnnnnnny!
The horse stops galloping for a moment, and takes a bite of some nearby grass.
WHAM!! A meteor strikes the horse!
Dozens of people from all around run to the scene of the accident.
“Look, the horse is dead!” one of them cries.
Another hands out baseball bats to each of the people in the crowd.
“Let’s beat the hell out of it!” Everyone cheers.