How will you die? Scientists reveal the odds of being killed by everything from an asteroid strike to an elephant attack

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

From asteroid impacts to elephant attacks, there are plenty of nasty ways to die that might keep you up at night.
Now, scientists have revealed just how much you need to worry about each of these potential disasters.
The bad news is that death by asteroid strike is much more likely than you might have thought.
According to physicists from the Olin College of Engineering, the average person is significantly more likely to be killed by a space rock than to be struck by lightning.
Using the latest NASA data, physicists from the Olin College of Engineering found that there are 22,800 near-earth objects (NEOs) measuring 140 metres or larger.
Assuming that an impact will kill one in 1,000 people, your odds of being dying in a collision with a space rock are one in 156,000.
By contrast, the odds of being killed by a lightning strike are just one in 163,000.
However, if it is any comfort, scientists say you are far more likely to be killed in a car crash long before that ever happens.
Scientists have worked out exactly how likely you are to die to everything from asteroid impacts to elephant attacks. This table shows how likely these events are to happen, and how likely you are to die as a result
The bad news is that you are much more likely to be killed by an asteroid impact than by a lightning strike. Although car crashes are far more deadly on average
According to the researchers, each year there is a 0.0091 per cent chance that a 140-metre or larger asteroid will slam into the Earth.
That means there is a staggeringly high one in 156 chance of the Earth being struck by an asteroid within any given person's lifetime.
If that were to happen, the blast could be thousands of times larger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
In the worst-case scenario, a large enough asteroid could produce global events on a civilisation-ending scale.
In their pre-print paper, soon to be published in the Planetary Science Journal, the researchers write: 'The dust lofting alone has the potential, in some cases, to obscure the sun to the point of stopping photosynthesis, which would then cause a mass extinction.'
However, a 140-metre asteroid might land harmlessly in the ocean and cause no deaths, or slam into a populated city and kill up to one million people.
To reflect this, the researchers say that the risk of death by asteroid ranges from essentially zero to near certainty based on a number of factors.
To help put the odds of an asteroid death in perspective, the researchers also worked out how likely you are to die in a host of other ways.
In their study, the researchers calculated both how likely it is that these events will happen to someone in their lifetime and how likely they are to die in that scenario.
Their calculations suggest that the odds of being struck by lightning are just one in 16,300, which is only fatal in around one in 10 cases.
Likewise, according to a study conducted in Nepal, the odds of being attacked by an elephant are about one in 14,000.
Since those attacks are fatal around two-thirds of the time, your odds of being killed by an elephant are a surprisingly high one in 21,000.
This analysis also reveals that, compared to the risk of an asteroid impact, many parts of our everyday lives are absurdly dangerous.
The researchers found that the average person has a roughly one in 66 chance of suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, and a one in 714 chance of dying as a result.
Likewise, the flu is much more likely to kill you than an asteroid impact, lightning strike, or elephant attack.
Killing roughly one in 1,000 people, the flu is about as deadly as an impact from a 140-metre asteroid, but you are almost guaranteed to catch it at some point in your life.
How likely is it that someone will be killed by space junk?
Researchers calculated that the chance of a piece of rocket body hitting a plane was one in 430,000 each year.
Given that there are around 200 people per plane, this gives a fatality risk of one in 2,200.
Previous studies have estimated a higher risk due to debris breaking up and satellites falling to Earth.
The Aerospace Corporation says the risk of someone being killed by space debris while on a plane is one in 1,000.
Other studies estimate that the chances of one or more people being killed on the ground by falling space debris in the next ten years is one in 10.
Yet it is driving that turns out to be one of the biggest risks to our lives, with a third of people being involved in an injury-causing crash at some point in their lives.
Given that those crashes are deadly in around one in 100 cases, the odds of being killed in a car crash are roughly one in 273.
You are, therefore, more than 500 times more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than by a deadly asteroid.
On the other hand, some seemingly terrifying risks turn out to be hardly a threat at all.
Death by rabies, for example, is almost entirely preventable through a vaccine called post-exposure prophylaxis.
Of the 800,000 Americans who sought treatment for rabies following an animal bite, only five died - four of whom did not seek rabies post-exposure prophylaxis treatment.
Of course, these probabilities are dependent on where you live and what kind of life you lead.
If you don't live near elephants or refuse to jump out of a plane, you are very unlikely to die in an elephant attack or skydiving accident.
Likewise, the researchers point out that someone who regularly checks their carbon monoxide alarms has a much lower chance of being killed by carbon monoxide poisoning.
The point of doing these morbid calculations is that asteroid impacts are, like rabies deaths, entirely avoidable in theory.
The researchers write: 'The asteroid impact is the only natural disaster that is technologically preventable.'
In 2022, NASA's DART mission showed that humanity can knock an approaching asteroid off course by hitting it with a fast-moving satellite.
However, these missions require years of planning and huge amounts of investment.
By comparing the risk posed by asteroids to threats we face every day, we can decide if it is worth investing millions in a new space defence program or whether we should be more worried about improving road safety.
WHAT COULD WE DO TO STOP AN ASTEROID COLLIDING WITH EARTH?
Currently, NASA would not be able to deflect an asteroid if it were heading for Earth but it could mitigate the impact and take measures that would protect lives and property.
This would include evacuating the impact area and moving key infrastructure.
Finding out about the orbit trajectory, size, shape, mass, composition and rotational dynamics would help experts determine the severity of a potential impact.
However, the key to mitigating damage is to find any potential threat as early as possible.
NASA and the European Space Agency completed a test which slammed a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos.
The test is to see whether small satellites are capable of preventing asteroids from colliding with Earth.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) used what is known as a kinetic impactor technique—striking the asteroid to shift its orbit.
The impact could change the speed of a threatening asteroid by a small fraction of its total velocity, but by doing so well before the predicted impact, this small nudge will add up over time to a big shift of the asteroid's path away from Earth.
This was the first-ever mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique for planetary defence.
The results of the trial are expected to be confirmed by the Hera mission in December 2026.