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Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

Are there any serious dangers of debris falling over settlements in scenarios like these?

Columbia broke up over the continental United States and a large number of the pieces that did not burn up in reentry were recovered and no one was hurt on the ground by being hit by debris AFAIK. Not sure of the direct comparison but it seems less likely than getting hit by lightning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

When you consider the frequency of incidents like this and factor in how sparsely populated most of the world is you'd have far better odds winning the lottery.

There's thousands of other more dangerous things you should worry about in your daily life. Like lightning or shark attacks.

Now on the other hand, you could be taken out by an entire airplane crashing, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

People on the ground were also killed as a result of the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing.

And quite a few when El Al 1862 crashed into a building near Amsterdam Shiphol airport (both engines on one side of the cargo 747 had come off, plus leading edge of the wing, and when they later slowed down for landing, that side stalled irrecoverably :-/

But that's not debris, that was a whole damn 747.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862

Just don't live under the airport approach and departure corridors. (I live under the landing corridor, I enjoy watching the airliners float by overhead.)

Watch out for blue meteorites :-)

I live near Heathrow, and I usually see 4-6 A380s flying over about lunchtime every day (heading to Asia, I guess). They're pretty spectacular, they almost look too slow/large to fly.

Debris from the Qantas A380 engine failure several years back fell on some buildings in Indonesia. Nobody was hurt though.

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