From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 19:22:58 MDT
On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Emlyn O'regan wrote:
> Of course not; we never have been. Total safety is illusory.
>
> So the question is "how safe are we"?
>
> How about a poll...
>
> Who on the list personally knows someone affected by terrorism. Personal
> acquaintances as maximum distance, no friends of friends please.
Reasonable question. I don't think it requires too much thinking
to get some approximations. [I point out some of this in [1]; Mez
subsequently qualified it].
But an easy ballpark estimate (for the U.S.) is that if you are
dealing with 16,000 lives per year from drunk drivers [2] and something
less than ~1000 lives per year (for the last three years) from
terrorism then drunk driving should be more than 10x the concern
of terrorism.
But I would doubt that in terms of the allocation of budget
dollars that would seem to be the case. [And Emlyn --
don't even talk to me about AU -- terrorism deaths --
considering the incident in Bali are probably something
like a hundred or so per year -- based on a several year
average -- and I'd hate to consider what the Driving Under
the Influence stats would be.]
But the point is well taken -- as was the case with SARS we have
a situation where some of the potential impacts cause a much greater
notice than others. What we should be looking for is a rational
scale and some way of presenting it. From my (extropic?) perspective
the greater the risk to humanity, the greater should be the perceived
risk from a hazard.
Robert
1. http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Aging/CausesOfDeath.html
2. http://216.190.132.53/pdf/info_and_stats.pdf
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