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though I've never actually been happy with the mental model that says air travel is safer than driving... there's something off about that way of looking at it
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I think they use some metric like fatalities per passenger mile or something... possibly if you did fatalities per passenger hour, it would be not look so great, since you log a lot more miles when you fly
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but space flight is dangerous without even getting into sketchy statistics issues... the basic tech is kinda janky. Ceramic tiles for re-entry, cryo fluids in really extreme regime compressors... it's a very temperamental thing
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somebody should redo the airline fatality model until it comes out in a way that matches nervous flyer intuition that it's more dangerous (I'm not a nervous flyer for the record)... it might be a good way to combat climate change, scare people off flying around so much
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Replying to
one could argue that not enough people have been sent to space to establish a statistically viable mortality rate! less than 700 people ever have traveled in space vs millions every day on airliners. it’s theoretically possible that space travel at scale actually is safer
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