Conversation

kinda sucks that space flight is still basically dangerous... we're so used to air travel being safer than driving we forget that if you turn it up to 11 it gets dangerous again
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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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Feels off to me as well. Likely because both these two statements are functionally true: - The likelihood of your plane crashing is much lower than your car crashing - The likelihood of you surviving a plane crash if it happens are slim to none
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Guesses about why we might feel this way: - perception that cars fail safe (generally) and planes fail catastrophically - car travel feels far more routine than air travel (esp. post-pandemic) - lack of control and even awareness as a plane passenger vs as a car driver.
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