And yet the asteroid claim is being repeated all across the media right now…and without any questioning of the validity of the assertion at all. It is presented as fact.
You were expecting intelligence and fact checking from the media? :dubious:
Yes, good point. Also, we are watching the skies more and more closely; since there are no reports at the moment of killer asteroids headed for earth, one can infer that the odds are lower than if one knew nothing at all about what large asteroids are headed for the Earth.
Nope.
There’s a morning deejay out here who keeps insisting that “they” have been screwing around with the odds against winning as the jackpot has been growing, guaranteeing that no one will win it until it hits the magic number of ONE BILLION, some time around Christmas. He also told his partner that the ticket from the last draw, that matched one number plus the Mega number, was worthless (it paid her two bucks). He evidently considers the lottery to be beneath him, and never plays, no matter how big the payout could get.
I think I’ll call him tomorrow morning and rub my win in his face.
Because I called “dibs,” that’s why I’m “so sure” I’m going to win…
And yet if you change the claim to be “injured indirectly by a meteorite”, then the assertion is probably valid, thanks to that bolide that exploded over Russia a year ago.
The statement I usually hear is that you are more likely to die on the way to buy your ticket than win.
Is this true?
How many people died on their way to buy tickets in the last year?
If the answer is ‘less than 15-20’, then it isn’t true.
How would we ever know? It would be hard to know that they had been on their way to buy tickets after they’re dead. Even if they told someone as they left the house, there’s noone collecting the information.
This thread reminds me of an old Travels With Farley comic strip. Farley was arguing with (I had to look this up) Bruce the raven about how bad the odds of winning the lottery were. Bruce said that Farley was more likely to be struck by lightning or attacked by a shark than he was to win the lottery.
Farley said something about being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark and Bruce said something like “Yeah, but how many people get that lucky?”
[Per google - shark attack between four and twelve million to one. Let’s say eight. Per wiki - lightning strike about 3,000 to one. Both occuring - 24,000,000,000 to one. Nah. That’s already worse odds for both happening to the same person, let alone adjusting for both happening at the same time.]
The real difficulty is in determining the odds of some very unlikely events. The lottery odds are mathematically simple to figure out, but the other events such as asteroids or lottery pre-purchase deaths are much less so. I understand how the asteroid story has news legs, but on the whole it seems meaningless. Indeed I do not see how many of the odds listed in the Tulane report are accurate.
Ok so it seems to me the most likely way to die while on the way to buy a lottery ticket is automobile fatality.
Per statistics on Wikipedia in 2012 there were 1.14 fatalities per 100 million miles traveled.
So to get to 15 fatalities would suggest ~1.3 billion miles traveled.
Six relatively small population states don’t participate in MegaMillions so lets round down to 300 million total people in areas that can buy a MegaMillions lottery ticket. Let’s say that a quarter of the population is too young to play the lottery.
So 225 million people. According to some articles I just found about 50% of adults play the lottery in a given year. So 112,500,000.
Which means, for lottery deaths (due to automobile accident) to match lottery winners, the average lottery player would have drive 11.5 miles per year solely for the purpose of buying lottery tickets.
Completely useless math since in the real world there are too many confounding factors (how do you count someone who buys gas and a ticket in the same stop).
And, if you’re frozen in a block of ice from the waist down, but doused with gasoline and torched from the waist up, then on the average, you’re very comfortable.
It appears that someone was killed by an asteroid yesterday.
Lucky bastard.
Link?
I can’t believe that nobody has mentioned the Hodges meteorite, the only carefully documented instance in human history of someone actually being hit by a meteorite.
So if the claim is that you are more likely to be hit by a falling heavenly body than to win the MegaMillions jackpot, then you have to contend with the fact that only one person has ever actually been hit. If the claim is being hit and killed, then that number drops to zero.
I have a zero probability of being the person hit by the Hodges meteorite. But I have a nonzero chance of being killed by some other meteor that hasn’t hit yet. Past performance is not a proof of future results.