Two events each having a low probability is not the same thing as the events not happening. Despite our best efforts, folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot.
So while it can be extremely unlikely from a probability standpoint that this plane was stuck by space debris, and it can also be extremely unlikely that he saw it before it hit, it’s not a false statement just because the probability says it’s unlikely.
And of course, despite probability, folks still get struck by lightning.
"In 1998, Bill Morgan, an Australian man from Melbourne was captured on film winning a AU$250,000 scratchcard while re-enacting his previous scratchcard win for a news report. The video of the event has since been widely shared online."
> folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot
I'm more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery, sure. But it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week.
Edit: my point about independence of events still stands, but it turns out people get struck by lightning amazingly often. The chance of someone in the world getting struck by lightning this week seems to be about 99%!
> it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week
No it isn’t? Not only are the individual odds of winning the lottery lower than the individual odds of being struck by lightning, but far more people are exposed to lightning on a weekly basis than participate in any given lottery.
That’s not true either though - someone eventually always wins the lottery, someone eventually always gets struck by lightning. The latter usually happens before the former.
When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work. When there is a lightning, it doesn't always strike a human. The former is (almost) guaranteed to happen, barring something out of the ordinary, while the latter usually doesn't happen, but does happen sometimes.
> When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work.
It's possible this is a language and cultural thing, but most (possibly all?) state run lotteries in the United States don't work this way - they simply pick numbers from a pool at random and if no one has selected those exact numbers the prize pool rolls over to the next week. Powerball (afaik the largest US based lottery) works by selecting 5 numbers from a pool of 1-69, and one number from a pool of 1-26, if no one matches all six numbers then the primary prize pool carries into the next drawing. There's no guarantee anyone wins the jackpot on any given week, and often multiple weeks and sometimes months will pass with no winner, ballooning the jackpot further.
I'd more often refer to what you're saying as a "drawing" or a "sweepstakes" where tickets are sold and the winning ticket is selected from the pool of all tickets sold, but that's distinctly different to a "lottery" for me.
When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile.
Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage.
I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft.
I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.
You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too.
There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey.
Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
> So what’s the risk of space debris to aviation? An FAA report from 2023 estimated an annual 0.1% chance that falling space debris would cause a single global aviation casualty. That meant individual passenger risk was less than a trillion‑to‑one though projected to increase.
I wonder if a report done in October 2025 would give a different estimate, considering we have a lot more stuff in space now compared to 2023.
An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches.
Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.
> An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years
Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
Interesting! There are ~2 starlink satellites re-entering the atmosphere _every day_ now - and this is only set to increase. I wonder if this was caused by starlink debris?
The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.
And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?
Way less likely than the non-burned up remainder of some item from decades ago that was never specifically designed to burn up because "that's hard and it'll probably hit the ocean anyway"
It's hard to overstate just how much random junk is up there.
Two events each having a low probability is not the same thing as the events not happening. Despite our best efforts, folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot.
So while it can be extremely unlikely from a probability standpoint that this plane was stuck by space debris, and it can also be extremely unlikely that he saw it before it hit, it’s not a false statement just because the probability says it’s unlikely.
And of course, despite probability, folks still get struck by lightning.
> folks still win the lottery
Yep, and:
"In 1998, Bill Morgan, an Australian man from Melbourne was captured on film winning a AU$250,000 scratchcard while re-enacting his previous scratchcard win for a news report. The video of the event has since been widely shared online."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Morgan_lottery_win
> folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot
I'm more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery, sure. But it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week.
Edit: my point about independence of events still stands, but it turns out people get struck by lightning amazingly often. The chance of someone in the world getting struck by lightning this week seems to be about 99%!
> it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week
No it isn’t? Not only are the individual odds of winning the lottery lower than the individual odds of being struck by lightning, but far more people are exposed to lightning on a weekly basis than participate in any given lottery.
You can buy more than one lottery ticket. You can't buy more than one per-person chance of getting struck by lightning over a period.
Lets reframe it: Someone always win the lottery, lighting doesn't always strike a human.
That’s not true either though - someone eventually always wins the lottery, someone eventually always gets struck by lightning. The latter usually happens before the former.
When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work. When there is a lightning, it doesn't always strike a human. The former is (almost) guaranteed to happen, barring something out of the ordinary, while the latter usually doesn't happen, but does happen sometimes.
> When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work.
It's possible this is a language and cultural thing, but most (possibly all?) state run lotteries in the United States don't work this way - they simply pick numbers from a pool at random and if no one has selected those exact numbers the prize pool rolls over to the next week. Powerball (afaik the largest US based lottery) works by selecting 5 numbers from a pool of 1-69, and one number from a pool of 1-26, if no one matches all six numbers then the primary prize pool carries into the next drawing. There's no guarantee anyone wins the jackpot on any given week, and often multiple weeks and sometimes months will pass with no winner, ballooning the jackpot further.
I'd more often refer to what you're saying as a "drawing" or a "sweepstakes" where tickets are sold and the winning ticket is selected from the pool of all tickets sold, but that's distinctly different to a "lottery" for me.
Do lottery winners get struck by lightning?
At least once:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...
It sounds like some deity of fortune frantically balancing the books before an audit.
Apparently yes: https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-w...
[dead]
More info here
https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-wa...
When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile.
Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage.
I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.
You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too.
There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey.
Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
You could get hit by a meteorite or space debris without flying too.
Not sure if this helps though...
> So what’s the risk of space debris to aviation? An FAA report from 2023 estimated an annual 0.1% chance that falling space debris would cause a single global aviation casualty. That meant individual passenger risk was less than a trillion‑to‑one though projected to increase.
I wonder if a report done in October 2025 would give a different estimate, considering we have a lot more stuff in space now compared to 2023.
An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches.
Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.
> An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years
Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?
I sense an incoming report supporting the space hail theory.
Interesting! There are ~2 starlink satellites re-entering the atmosphere _every day_ now - and this is only set to increase. I wonder if this was caused by starlink debris?
The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.
And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?
Way less likely than the non-burned up remainder of some item from decades ago that was never specifically designed to burn up because "that's hard and it'll probably hit the ocean anyway"
It's hard to overstate just how much random junk is up there.
Boy, you just really wish you could blame this on Starlink.
cool yeah neat but you can contend with the reality that it does happen right? https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-actually-dying-starlink-sa...