The most common cause of death is called dying, and it kills about 55 million of us each year. That’s about one South Africa or two hundred star destroyers.
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And good news, it's your turn next because you've just become a competitor in the suicide Olympics. Bet you didn't even know that was a thing?
The rules of the suicide Olympics are as follows: First place goes to whoever gets themselves killed in the most unlikely or unusual fashion, okay? The winner gets a billion dollars. Now this isn't Zimbabwe dollars or something, this is hard, American moolah.
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Obviously if you win, you're dead, so you don't get the money personally. Your family does. So, let's just pretend you give a shit about your family for a minute.
The twist is that it has to be an accident. You can't set it up in advance. So no flying a kite in a lightning storm or
playing whose gun is it anyway with a policeman or something, it has to be an accident out of your control.
Now, if like me, you're balls to the wall scared of flying you might think hey that's easy, I'll just fly crappy airlines, and wait for something to go wrong, right?
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The odds of being in a fatal plane crash are about 1 in eleven million meaning if you flew every single day you've need to live about 30,000 years to actually get into an accident. So that's not gonna butter any parsnips is it?
Well, next best thing, become an astronaut. That's about a 1 in 100 chance of dying on launch, that sounds a lot better, but considering you'll need at least a master's degree, practically perfect health, and testicles made entirely of steel, maybe that might be a bit of a challenge. All right?
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Bungee jumping – 1 in 100,000 chance to die
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Mountain climbing? about 1 in 1700. Yeah, but in Nepal? how about 1 in 160. Actually, if you get above 6000m it's more like 1 in 10. Oh holla, now we're talking. But maybe you think that's cheating. Normal people don't climb mountains.
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How about travel instead? About 1000 people are killed each year in Mexico by scorpions,
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15,000 people are killed in India every year by snakes,
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Or move to Africa.
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That's a hippo. Intimidating it isn't. Well yes it is actually. Hyppos belong from the pachyderm family, which is in fact Latin, for murder cow and during a particularly bad year they can kill around 3000 people.
But still your best chance of dying is probably just to....live? Because we suck at it.
Last century about a hundred million people were killed by tobacco.
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Likewise, if you're fat, well, obesity killed about 300,000 people in the US last year.
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88,000 died by booze related stuff.
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Several hundred thousand to drug abuse,
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And on top of that, cancer kills about 1 in 7 of us,
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Heart disease kills about 1 in 4 humans,
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A stroke gets 1 in 23.
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All of this proving that probably everything your scared of is very unlikely to actually kill you.
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Chances are your death is going to be incredibly boring . So, chin up,
Actually, while we're at it, what about the odds of you just being born to begin with?
Well, according to Dr. Ali Binazir who did the math on this one, pretty like low?
Assuming your parents socialized like normal humans, The probability of them meeting was about 1 in 20,000
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The odds that they even have a kid, given global trends? About 1 in 2,000
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Now assuming they did meet, and your mum thought your dad wasn't a jerk, and he managed to ignore the fact that she considered the star wars prequels better than the originals, and they actually did the sexy times, the odds that you would be born, of that sperm hooking up with that egg – in particular are about 1 in 400 Quadrillion.
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And that's not even the half of it, because before the egg, before your mum and dad met, there is of course all of your ancestors who also had to get laid, and just taking that about 100,000 generations back, we're talking about 10 to the power of 45,000 that they would all meet, but now we have to calculate the odds of every single one of those 100,000 meetings between your ancestors would work out, and those sperms and eggs would match up, well that comes out at about 1 in ten to the power of 2,640,000 which is a number so big you can't even, well you know like a bag of m&ms?
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Well, it's a few trillion (1,000,000,000,000) of those. Timesed by all the particles in the universe. Multipled by Jabba the hut's waist measurement. With a cherry on top. It's big all right.
All in all, flying is pretty safe, your death is going to be boring, and your birth was rarer than we think have a wonderful day