What are the Odds? Did you ever wonder what the odds were for certain things? I am not talking about betting on sports I am talking about what the odds of something happening were. There are odds on everything. Humans love odds and have calculated the odds of almost every type of event which could happen. Take for example the odds earth is going to be hit by a life changing asteroid. To figure out these odds one has to know what time period they want to know about. Obviously if we are talking about millions or hundreds of millions of years it would be different than if we were talking in a few hundred years. I cannot vouch for the odds being correct, but I have seen them listed as about 300,000 to 1 for any year but only 1 in 10,000 in the next 100 years or so. The chances of being hit by lightning strikes have different ways of being measured. Let me give you an example. The odds of being hit while you are in the U.S. are 1 in 700,000 but the odds of being hit in your lifetime are 1 in 3,000 so you can see a big difference here in the way the chances of being struck by lightning are measured. An interesting fact is 90 percent of people hit by lightning survive. The United States has averaged 43 people being hit by lightning a year since 1989. When you look at how many died the figures claim 27 people. So, you can see nothing seems to make sense. I say just stay out of lightning storms. There are a lot of people who are too scared to fly on a plane. They believe it is far too dangerous, but the odds on being killed in a plane crash are 1 in 5,000,000 and some experts believe these odd should be higher. It just so happens last year (2018) was a bad year for plane crashes with 500 deaths being reported worldwide. There were less accidents on commercial flights 15 to be exact and they reported 556 deaths, so it seems we can’t even get the figures to agree. Are planes really the most dangerous way to travel? The United State registered 864 deaths in 2017 by people who traveled on the train. That same year 790 people died from motorcycle accidents in the U.S. and over 7,000 pedestrians in the U.S. In 2017 there were 34,247 fatal car accidents in the U.S. There are 1.16 deaths from car accidents for every 100,000,000 miles traveled in the U.S. The state with the safest record is Massachusetts with 0.58 deaths per 100,000,000 miles traveled and the second state is New York with 0.77 deaths per 100,000,000 miles traveled. The state with the most deaths per 100,000,000 miles traveled is South Carolina with 1.80 deaths and the second is Mississippi with 1.67. There are a lot of people who die from poisoning and breathing in noxious fumes. When I say poisoning, I am not talking about assassinations, more like eating something which was poisonous. In 2017 this accounted for 64,975 deaths. The odds of this happening in any one year is 1 in 5,027 but over one’s lifetime it is 1 in 64. Maybe that is something people should worry about. Can you imagine how the odds rise if you eat while in a traveling car? Just kidding. There are a lot of in home accidents. There is the famous falling down the stairs which we see on television every night. I would think the older you are and the worse physical condition you are in would increase the odds of falling down the stairs. The general odds are you have 1 chance in 130,654 of dying falling down the stairs. In the United States there were 2,493 stair deaths in 2017. This is a good reason for older people to move out of two story homes if they can afford to and move in to homes which are all on one level. If you own or handle a loaded gun there is some risk to you accidently shooting yourself. It sounds funny, but I remember a firearms instructor who was conducting a class. He had his gun in his holster and took it out telling the class how careful you had to be handling it. He then went to put it back into the holster and somehow the gun went off and he shot himself in the foot. Someone handling a gun has a 1 in 670,204 chance of killing themselves by accident in the United States. The odds of getting shot in a mass shooting is 1 in 11,125. The odds of being assaulted with someone with a gun in your lifetime is 1 in 315. We all know that we will die, but thankfully we don’t know how or when. Here are some of the odds of diseases which can kill us. Heart Disease has lifetime odds of 1 in 6, Cancer 1 in 7, Lung Disease 1 in 26, Diabetes 1 in 51, Pneumonia 1 in 72, Kidney disease 1 in 82. We love our animals, but sometimes animals don’t love us. We know sometimes dogs attack people, but what we might not know is the odds on a dog killing us in the U.S. is 1 in 112,382. Maybe we should carry some dog snacks in our pockets just to play it safe. Here are some odds on being executed by the state. The odds are 1 in 118,993. This is surprising since many states have done away with capital punishment. Going into the water has it own set of dangers. The odds of being killed in a shark attack is 1 in 8,000,000 in the United States. The odds on drowning is 1 in 1,133. Far more people died in the United States from drowning than from accidental firearm discharge. Everybody loves Powerball but did you ever wonder what the odds were of winning? Sure, we all know they are huge but it’s nice to know what they are. The odds are 1 in 292,201,338 on average. I am talking about the jackpot of course. In Mega Millions the odds of winning are 1 in 302,575,350. One thing which always bugged me about these lotteries is the fact you have to pay tax on the winnings, unlike other foreign lotteries. Now we know the odds for a lot of different things. Some of them will undoubtedly be different from what you expected while others may not. Remember this you can easily find other statistics which contradict the ones I have shown you. For some reason these types of odds never seem to agree, but they at least give a good idea.
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