| What is the chance that your hobby will kill you? This isn't something you need to think about if you're into, say, knitting, but most base jumpers will have felt the niggling fear that each jump could be their last. Intuitively, we know that some hobbies really are way riskier than others. In 1980, a Stanford engineering professor named Ronald Howard came up with a simple way to convey this difference in risk: He coined a unit of measurement called the micromort. Each micromort equals a one-in-a-million chance of death. Scuba diving, for example, is pretty risky at 5 micromorts per trip, but nowhere near as dangerous as base jumping, which will net you 430 micromorts per jump. Traveling 230 miles by car would add up to 1 micromort, but you'd only need to go 6 miles by motorcycle to expose yourself to the same risk of death. The reason we have micromort estimates for these activities is because we have pretty good data on how people die. Other risks are much harder to quantify. For instance, calculating the likelihood of dying in a nuclear conflict sounds like an impossible task, but it could give us a whole new way to think about the risk. |
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