1/3200 chance someone will be hit by a satellite next week

usatoday.com

18 points·edwardy20··8 comments

What percentage of the earth is occupied by a human?

51,006,560,000,000 square meters landmass on earth.

about 6 billion humans. So they take up about

6,000,000,000 square meters.

or .00118 percent of the earth. So roughly a 1 in 100000 chance of a single piece hitting a person. I'm too drunk to know if this is nonsense.

Reply to jcitme:

All of your comments are [dead] and you are probably unaware of it. There is a weird heuristic here that does that occasionally to non-trolls.

Well humans are not evenly distributed on earth and the area where the satellite will hit is within some known boundaries.

Dead Like Me?

Well, if it does hit you, it will probably be going faster than the speed of sound so you won't have time to realize what happened. Will there be a gps coordinate updated somewhere to find out of this chunk of metal is going to take down a skyscraper? How fast is it going to be moving?

Pretty sure you'd realise what's happening. After all, we notice lightning flashes.

Such a misleading title. I think this means the chances of any individual person getting hit is 1 in 21,680,754,240,000?

No, to quote from the article:

"The odds of it hitting someone anywhere on the planet are 1 in 3,200. "

Perhaps you are confusing "chances of any person getting hit" with "chances of you getting hit", which is not what the title says.

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