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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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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But fatalities per mile is the correct measure. If I decide to go to Philadelphia, I choose between flying and driving, but the distance remains fixed. Roughly the same by air or ground. There are few times when someone has a fixed time for travel but a variable distance.
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You might be choosing between flying or not going at all and doing zoom or a phone call... it's a rational comparison but not necessarily a reasonable one. And there's no "correct" measure here, it depends on the situation model
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It’s safer to fly than drive by every angle. For example: If you live a normal distance from the airport, you’re # more likely to die driving to the airport than on your flight. Flying is just astonishingly safe. (Agree on space flight tho)
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huffpost.com/entry/which-is fact checking myself: it actually depends on whether you're a safe driver, and whether you're on a safe airline. 10x diff on safest airlines to least safe. Similar scale diff for teenage boy vs middle age woman.
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Spending a few minutes search got me here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_ which shows that in the UK at least, planes beat out private cars by 4x or so.
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