If you die on your first parachute jump, you're unlucky.
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.
There's a concept I read about before called micromorts, where activities are given a danger rating something like the expected number of fatalities per million events.
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).
Well if you commuted by riding 100 miles per day on a motorbike for 40 years your total risk is roughly 77,000 micromorts (77 millimorts?), or double the risk of summiting Everest once!
I often think about this while riding my bicycle to work. The exercise and quiet time surely has a positive impact on my health span, but being among cars risking collision and breathing in exhaust is a negative. What’s the net result?
A lot more than 2 people die on Everest per year according to Wikipedia and I’m sure oxygen bottle theft plays a role but I haven’t read anything attributing deaths to “Israeli team stealing oxygen bottles”.
Wild, is that really accurate for base jumping? I've met a number of base jumpers (there's some overlap with the climbing community where I live) and several of them have subsequently died jumping. I guess they probably jump a lot more than I think?
The main killer in the Himalayas are avalanches, and the route to Mt. Everest summit is somewhat predictable in this regard. There was a terrible avalanche in 2015 that swept the base camp and killed almost twenty people, but most of the time, nothing like that happens.
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.
Everest is such a well-known target, they have helpers and there’s a whole system, right? I vaguely think I’ve seen photos of a line at the top…
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,
> 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.
Yes but you’re answering the wrong question. It’s not, “what is the probability of death on my next jump?”. It’s “what is the accumulated probability of death by jumping repeatedly.”
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.
Tens of thousands die falling on stairs every year. You don't have to fall out of the sky to die. Just last year a good friend of mine had to bury her sister because she fell while exiting her car. You are more likely to survive than in small aviation crashes but most people (probably Felix included) spend way more time on that than flying. As a motorcyclist I'm surely not well of either when I suddenly fall unconscious.
There are many activities where you really should not pass out while doing them, but they don't make for interesting headlines.
"Many people die from X" is different than "you will most likely die if you X".
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.
Yes. A pathologist can know if there was a catasthropic event like the natural rupture of an artery (e.g. stroke, heart attack) In vivo events evolve differently than post mortem ones, e.g. strangling a dead body shows differently than strangling a person to death.
More recently, he might have been wearing a vital signal monitor that kept logs.
Someone so famous and regularly doing spectacular things surely have a bunch of sensors attached to them that reports a bunch of metrics about their physiological state.
also with time they get more cocky? While new drivers have a higher crash rate in their first year of driving, the fatality rate is actually highest in their second year, not their first.
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.