Don’t look now but the UARS Satellite might be crashing into you!    Just when we thought Global Warming would fry our butts, the Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite crash is looming – probably today or tomorrow.

There’s a  statistic  floating around the interwebs that does not sound right at all to me.  It’s  the chance that somebody on earth will be hurt by the  falling satellite debris.  I think NASA is the source of the  claim that the “risk” to be 1 in 3200.

Note this is 1 in 3200 for ALL HUMANS.  YOUR risk – that is for a single person out of our 7 billion the chance is ridiculously  TRIVIAL.   As always it’s  remarkable anybody even calls this type of even a “danger”.

The real dangers of life, such as you driving a car or, even worse, forgetting to put on your seatbelt, or even worse, biking in a city have millions of time this level of risk.

Still that number seems very high to me given the surface area of earth.   Why wouldn’t a reasonable calculation  go something like below, which would itself be high given that most people are inside buildings, houses, and cars and therefore shielded somewhat.