Who’s the second luckiest human alive?
(After Ringo Starr, of course)
Ooh! That Air Force (?) dude who was standing beside a jet fighter (?) and got sucked into it’s engine. Not only did he live to tell the tale, but miraculously escaped with minor injuries. I can’t YouTube at work but I’ve scene the footage on one of those “that’s incredible!”-type shows. It’s so surreal, like a special effect.
US Navy I believe
Me. Oh, wait, I was killed by a sentient feline. Never mind.
Not to be snarky, but I believe it was actually by your former lover. You were fighting the sentient feline. You were busy, maybe you didn’t notice.
Whilst what this guy went through was amazing, I’m not sure I’d consider him lucky. He had serious injuries, his wife was really ill, he got cancer in later life and I can only imagine the mental torment he went through. Since he lived in one of the cities, it’s a safe bet that he lost friends and/or family members in the bombings.
So yeh, lucky to survive, but not as lucky as someone who didn’t get bombed in the first place.
In that case, your definition of lucky is someone who never experiences life, never goes out and does stuff. He’s lucky because despite twice being blown up by an atomic bomb, he’s still around to tell the tale. The odds (this it the luck part) of having 2, not just 1 mind you, never before known pieces of atomic bombing technology dropped on you and not dying like everyone else around is pretty freaking lucky in my mind.
I was originally going to vote for someone else, but that guy wins hands down I think.
All of the other people who have never survived two atomic bombs (so, basically, everyone who has ever existed except for this one guy) take issue with this statement.
Harrison Schmitt
He was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 17. Unlike the rest of the Apollo astronauts (not counting Skylab), he was not a military aviator or test pilot. Schmitt was a geologist, one of several scientist-astronauts selected by NASA despite the objections of many at the time.
They actually bumped another astronaut, Joe Engle, to make room for Schmitt when Apollo 18 was canceled.
While we can certainly say Schmitt made his own luck by being a good geologist, and doing what was necessary to be selected as an astronaut, he most definitely was in the right place at the right time.
That was kind of my point in writing it so facetiously in response to the person I was quoting. Thank you for pointing that out for anyone not reasonable enough to catch on.
Well, George W. Bush was mighty lucky to be born into a prominent family and to have 100% name recognition before ever ran for governor of Texas.
If his name had been George W. Smith, there’s no way he’d have gpotten as far as he did.
No, you misunderstand both The Why Bird’s and supergoose’s posts, and probability in general.
Vesna Vulovic.
She was a flight attendant on a Yugoslavian airliner that broke up in mid-air, probably due to a bomb. She fell 33,000 feet (over 6 miles) without a parachute and managed to live. Everyone else on the plane died.
Aww. How cute. Somehow baseless, mindless assertions seem profound to you. You must do better.
The probability of being hit by a yet unknown, never before ever known event is, well, I’d say rare. And when it usually results in the death of all things around it, surviving is quite rare I’d say. Then to have it happen again a couple of days later is, well, you got me, very common.
Wasn’t there some guy who survived the Titanic, the Lusitania, and a whole host of other travel disasters?
Er, what are you talking about, ashman?
The whole point is that when freakishly unlikely things that are bad happen to you, that doesn’t make you lucky, it makes you unlucky.
Being condescending about it doesn’t mean you weren’t wrong.
This is getting out of line for MPSIMS, so let’s reel it in. Thanks.
This article is somewhat apropos:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/times_tokyo_weblog/2009/03/the-luckiest-or.html
Of course, you’re right. It’s unlucky that it happened in the first case. But it’s not fair to say that surviving it is also unlucky. So, he shared the same misfortune as all the other people save a minor detail: he was bombed twice and survived it both times. Of course, we can’t really say how many people survived the first one to get done in the second one. So that’s a wash.
But unlike all the other people who died in either of them, he lived through both. I wouldn’t call that unlucky. Unless, of course, you have a narrow view that if one unlucky thing happens to one in life, that all subsequent events related to it or not are necessarily unlucky because of the original event. I’m more of an optimist: unlucky to get bombed either time, let alone both, lucky to have lived through them both and to have had a productive live despite the bombing, which is only, one can presume, based upon the sheer fortune of not having died in either.