Odds of Winning Megamillions Jackpot Compared to Being Killed by an Asteroid

Win the Megamillions jackpot? I keep hearing on the news that I am more likely to die from being hit by an asteroid or comet. How can this be? I frequently read about people winning Megamillions or Powerball, but I don’t ever recall hearing about a human being perishing from space rock collision. And how can one possibly determine the odds of death by asteroid anyway? By the way, I am in my 50’s so I only have about 30 years for the comet to get me. Doesn 't that tilt the odds back in favor of the jackpot?

People who disapprove of lotteries basically make shit up about them, when they get tired of claiming they’re a tax on people who can’t do math.

I’ve personally met two people who had very large lottery wins, one of them of multiple millions. So, while rare, they’re a good deal less impossible than the wowsers would have you believe.

Every hundred million years, expect an asteroid to kill everyone on earth. That’s about 70 people per year.

Your chance of “being hit” by an asteroid is about zero, but your chance of dying because of an asteroid are much higher – most of the deaths would result from fire, climate change, etc.

The Chicxulub Impact 65 million years ago might kill 5 billion people if it happened today. Assuming such impacts occur on average once every 65 million years, then 77 people die on average from such events each year. (Yes, I realize this use of “average” may seem extremely peculiar to non-mathematicians.)

I’m not sure how big a lottery needs to be to qualify as “MegaMillions” but even if there are more than 77 winners per year, the 77 asteroid deaths is an underestimate since it ignores many smaller impacts: the 1908 Tunguska event was similar to an H-bomb in destructive power.

(ETA: Ninja’d by JWT Kottekoe while I was finding links, etc.)

The academic paper/webpage I believe most of these stories come from:

http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/Natural_Disasters/impacts.htm

When we’re talking about averages of course, we should not just look at the mean, especially when the proposed timescale for the mean is so many orders of magnitude greater than the entire duration of recorded history. We’ll then find that the median number of people killed by meteorite impact is far smaller than the median number of lottery winners, and something similar for the mode as well.

Shouldn’t they also take into account the possibility that we may develop the technology to divert a wayward asteroid in the somewhat near future?

Maybe they could combine the two things into something like the Mega Asteroid Lottery. All the ticket holders wait around for years and years and years, and the first one to be killed by an asteroid gets all the money added to his estate.

From my reading of the Tulane study, I am still somewhat confused as to how those odds are calculated. While we might not be able yet to spot many killer asteroids, the fact that we are not aware of any likely impending hits should somewhat reduce the odds of my death by asteroid in the next twelve months. Furthermore, even if an asteroid does slam into the Earth in the next year, I already may be dead from something else.

This asteroid speculation regarding odds seems dubious at best, and probably not the best way to explain to the public their puny chances of winning the lottery. However, I have heard this comparison a dozen times from various sources in the past week.

There’s the old saying about statistics, that numbers can be tortured to tell you exactly what you want to hear.

The “average person” has one breast and one testicle.
IIRC, the general consensus about the Chicxulub impact was that any animal larger than about 5 pounds - died. Today that would total 7 billion people.

Mega Millions is the name of a multi-state lottery here in the US. The big prize starts at 15 million dollars and rolls over after each drawing where there isn’t a winner. It’s currently at 586 million. The biggest jackpot it’s had was last year when it reached 656 million.

The odds of winning the big jackpot are 1 in 258,890,850.

“If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to anything.”

That’s an overly simplistic view of how many people would die “on average” from a strike like Chicxulub. You can’t assume that Chicxulub would happen today, but rather that it happened at some time between today and some point in the earth’s past when it would have been meaningful. So say we fired up the TARDIS and ran 1 million different earth timeline scenarios, all of which contained one Chicxulub event. The most likely outcome of the Chicxulub event would have been that the asteroid killed…well, no human at all, because humans are a geologically recent introduction to the planet. And it’s been only extremely recently that we’ve had anywhere near the number of humans on the planet that we do now. Only a small, small percentage of those 1 million projected Chicxulub strikes would have killed billions of people.

So the real average of people who would die in a timeline where a Chicxulub strike happened at a time when it didn’t actually happen would be…look, I’m not the Doctor, ok? Get me Karen Gallian and I’ll start thinking about making those calculations. I’ll say that it’s definitely fewer than the 77 persons/yr suggested above. I’d wager to say it’s more like 1 person per year. And 1 in 5 billion odds is a lot longer than the 1 in 258 million odds for MegaMillions, but not as long as the odds of Karen Gallian showing up at my office door…hang on, someone’s knocking…

Wrong. OP wants to compare the chance of him winning the MegaMillions in the next 30 years with the chance he is killed by an asteroid in the next 30 years. Only asteroid collisions during 2013-2043 are relevant.

HTH.

Before the changed the game, I calculated the odds at about 176,000,000 to 1.

Or we could do it the other way around, and the next person who wins the lottery, we kill with an asteroid.

The asteroid odds can be tricky because as the asteroid gets larger, the odds of it hitting two people go up – you may have to share the asteroid strike with someone else.

And slightly less than two legs, etc. The poor guy’s lopsided in all kinds of ways.

That’s as may be, but we simply cannot assume that the possibility of an extinction-level asteroid strike is equal throughout earth’s history. Simply put, we don’t have enough extinction-level asteroid strike information to assume a “true” average. Is the “real” average of such a strike once every 5 billion years, was Chixulub a black swan event and the actual average would be once every 50 billion years (assuming the planet lives that long), or has the earth been lucky and the true mean of asteroid strikes is more like once every billion years?

Also, were there extinction-level asteroid strikes we don’t know about, before the seas were created and the continents formed? How far of a time span are we looking back at for this? Are we going to assume we can’t know about such an event before a certain point in geologic time? If so, where do we draw that line? Saying “we know of one extinction-level asteroid event in the last 100 million years” is very different from “we know of one E-L A E in earth’s history.” If we say it’s the latter (and assume that the true average is the same as our observed average), then we can expect the chance of an asteroid strike in the next 30 years to be 3.3 million to one. And you could expect the average number of people to be killed in an asteroid strike over the next 30 years to be (gulp) 1,818. If it’s one in every 5 billion years, the chances are 166.67 million to one, and we would expect only 36 people on average to die. So there’s a big difference depending on our lack of knowledge of prior extinction-level asteroid strikes.

Ah yes, the old ‘false equivalency’ lottery claims. :rolleyes:

There have been zero recorded claims of someone being killed by an asteroid/meteorite in recent history.

However, there were at least a dozen and probably on the order of 20 winning Megamillions tickets in the last year and well into the triple digits in the lifetime of this lottery.

This is the typical “name something that has never happened, and claim it is more likely than something that happened to 20 people in the last year” hyperbole (read: BULLSHIT) we hear from people who are mysteriously angry about something they have no legitimate reason to be angry with, other than possibly a deep seated jealousy of the people who DID win combined with the expectation they THEY never will.