If you live your entire life doing these "small chance each time" stunts, maybe we should not be so surprised that your eventual demise was this kind of thing.
Was an interesting character, RIP.
So riding a motorbike 100 miles is 8 micromorts.
Hang-gliding is 9 micromorts.
Base jumping is 430 micromorts.
And summiting Everest is 37,000 micromorts.
Incidentally, of those - I know of two guys who died either on Everest or at base camp there over the past 15 years. First guy fell on the descent, and the second guy developed health issues at altitude (apparently related to an Israeli team immediately prior stealing their oxygen bottles).
That's only 3.7 % — I imagined it was higher.
Does the death rate of 'summiting' include those who die before they reach the top? or those that abandon an attempt and survive?
I think it is somewhat commercialized. Actually, I’m surprised the death rate is that high. I wonder if it is pulled up by people who aren’t really ready, because it is so popular. FWIW,
https://www.climbing-kilimanjaro.com/mount-kilimanjaro-death...
> Approximately 50,000 people ascend Mount Kilimanjaro every year. According to Kilimanjaro travel guides and recorded statistics, on average 3 to 10 people die each year. It is widely believed that the actual number could be two to three times higher, although these estimates are not substantiated by reliable data.
The more deadly mountains like K2, Nanga Parbat and Annapurna, are prone to avalanches that cannot be avoided by taking a specific route. Or icefalls. A couloir called the Bottleneck is a major killer on the K2 route. You have to traverse a very exposed terrain there to get to the top, and a majority of K2 deaths have happened there.
Nothing like that on the standard Everest route. The Khumbu icefall or the Hillary step are challenging, but nowhere near as treacherous.
If you have been base jumping for 20 years, you have the same risk on your next jump as someone trying it for the first time.
The way you answer it is by flipping it upside down (what is the probability of surviving a single jump?) and multiplying that value by itself n times, where n is the number of jumps.
.99999 * .99999 * .99999 * …
Mind sharing where you got these news from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...
More recently, he might have been wearing a vital signal monitor that kept logs.
Nowadays probably the latter.
There are many activities where you really should not pass out while doing them, but they don't make for interesting headlines.
Most people who pass out in vehicles probably survive. Say we ignore the cases where you're on a side street, stuck in traffic, going at slow speeds, etc. (and just end up idling in the road with people honking/routing around you) -- so just consider the deadliest case, going at speed on the highway. While there aren't statistics for this particular scenario, we can look at the numbers for multi-car collisions in general, as that's near to the worst thing that could happen if you did just stop managing your car while at speed (gliding into the median is much less likely to be fatal): https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/.... One line in the report suggests this should be broadly comparable to what we're thinking of: "In about 40 percent of fatal single vehicle rollovers and 57 percent of multi- vehicle rollovers, investigating officers reported that no crash avoidance maneuvers preceded the crash".
Even still: the fatality rate is <10%!
Compare to >80% if you pass out while doing underwater cave diving.