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Cake day: February 2nd, 2025

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  • For the sake of argument, let’s use your numbers and say an average astronaut ends up taking a dozen flights on rockets designed to NASA’s 1-in-270 “loss of crew” standard. If that probability holds, then we would expect 4.4% of all astronauts flying in modern rockets to be in a fatal accident during their 12-mission career.

    For comparison, lifetime driving fatality risk for American drivers is right around 1%.



  • dehyzer@piefed.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldSomeone's cutting onions
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    21 days ago

    what are the chances that being an astronaut is actually safer than driving an hour long commute?

    A trip to space is actually about 100,000 times more likely to lead to a fatality than a 20 mile car trip.

    People really underestimate how dangerous space travel is.

    (The math is in another comment below if you’re curious.)



  • Are you asking to change the definition of a car trip to the ~500,000 miles it takes to get to the moon and back?

    In that case, rate of fatality is around 1 in 200 “driving to the moon and back” trips. 0.5% chance. So taking the rocketship is still significantly more dangerous.

    More realistically, 500,000 miles is roughly a lifetime of driving. So these astronauts are being exposed in a single trip to a fatality risk equivalent of 2+ lifetimes of driving.


  • dehyzer@piefed.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldSomeone's cutting onions
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    22 days ago

    Or to look at it from a different angle, 5 out of the 413 total manned space flights have ended in fatalities, or 1.21%.

    Auto travel in the US has a fatality rate around 1 death per 100 million driven miles. Assuming an average trip of 20 miles, that’s 1 death per 5 million car trips, or 0.00002%.

    So, roughly 10,000 (EDIT: actually 100,000, missed a zero!) times more dangerous than driving.




  • Can you explain the “pressure” part a bit more? It sounds like you’ve got a time-sensitive question, but rather than asking the question and getting a response (or not), you’re asking to ask a time-sensitive question and getting a response (or not). If you’re trying to avoid the pressure of a time-sensitive question, it doesn’t seem like this approach fixes that.

    Only thing I can see is that this approach prevents the situation where the recipient takes too long to respond but did actually want to go to the concert, forcing the sender to explain that it’s unfortunately too late, tickets have been purchased and they don’t have one. But it seems like clarity in the initial message is still the best way to give them a chance to respond promptly if they really do want to go.

    Who knows, maybe I have finally gotten too old to understand modern youth etiquette


  • So if they don’t respond to your “do you have time to talk” initial message, then you just don’t invite them to the concert at all and never tell them about it?

    All to avoid just asking them up-front whether they want to go or not?

    That’s wild, I genuinely don’t understand how this is better in any way.

    Imo if the question is urgent, either call them or add something to the text like “tickets are going quick and I’m going to buy them ASAP, so if I don’t hear back by <insert time>, I’ll assume you’re out”






  • Maybe part of why Lemmy skews older is because this is basically what “old” Reddit felt like.

    Before Reddit became the Walmart of internet forums that put all the little guys out of business and gained enough critical mass to have a niche community for every topic under the sun, it was just a quirky place that catered towards tech, politics, and this exact sort of “general everyday discussion” you’re talking about.

    I loved that era of Reddit, and I love that Lemmy is providing something that’s close to that experience.