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. 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,
eh? 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 bilion dollars. Now this isn't Zimbabwe dollars or something,
this is hard, American moolah. 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? Yyeeeeeeno. 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? Bungee jumping – 1 in 100,000 Mountain climbing? Mm, 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. How about travel instead? About 1000 people are killed each year in
Mexico by scorpions, 15,000 people are killed in India every year
by snakes, Or move to Africa. 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. Likewise, if you're fat, pardon me, a person
of weight, well, obesity killed about 300,000 people in the US last year. 88,000 died by booze related stuff. Several hundred thousand to drug abuse, And on top of that, cancer kills about 1 in
7 of us, Heart disease kills about half that, A stroke gets 1 in 23. All of this proving that probably everything
your scared of is very unlikely to actually kill you. Chances are your death is going to be incredibly
boring . So, chin up, eh? 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 socialised like
normal humans, The probability of them meeting was about 1 in 20,000 The odds that they even have a kid, given
global trends? About 1 in 2,000 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. 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? Well, it's a few trillion 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 a fucking mewtwo Au Revoir
I don't mind dying, but is 1000 years too much to ask?
In Eihei Dogen's Fukanzazengi (Dogen was the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in Japan), it says
Hippos are terrifying.
Dr. Jon Osterman: "Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle."
Laurie Juspeczyk: "But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!"
Dr. Jon Osterman: "Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”
He mess up his math. 1 in 4 is 2x as much as 1 in 7 not half as much.
I decided a long time ago that if I ever kill myself I'm going to do it by deep throating a rolled up Frisbee. Now I just have to figure out how to do it accidentally to win the billion bucks.
TIL I'm better than Mewtwo. Right guys? ...Guys?
'cancer kills 1/7 of us, heart disease 1/4 of us - about half of cancer'
math fail
stubborn panda checking in to bemoan the lack of gratuitous genital pictures