Death comes for us all.
But the questions of “when” — and perhaps “how” — death comes are of interest to most of us looking to lead relatively fruitful lives. Every day, we have to weigh the risks of our activities; in particular, how likely they are to kill us.
To that end, I’m going to show you statistics on how likely various activities are to lead to death. The most useful tool of risk measurement I was able to find is called a “micromort.” Invented by Stanford professor Ronald A. Howard in 1979, the definition of a micromort is simple: it’s a one in a million chance of dying.
Using micromorts, we can compare how dangerous all sorts of human behavior are: from being born, to driving a car, to skydiving, to climbing Mt. Everest.
I first learned of the micromort idea from my COVID-19 work — the New York Times did an article on COVID’s micromort figures all the way back in May of 2020. And micromorts turn out to be very useful in putting perspective with regards to how dangerous more recent phenomena are compared to other risky activities we have a better inherent idea of.
For this table, I tried to compile every datapoint involving micromorts I could find. Most of this data is from Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter’s book The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger and Death. Other websites I used, like micromorts.rip, compile data from other sources. The COVID-19 data is from the CDC, from Jan. 2022. Obviously, these are all averages: some types of cars are safer than others, some earthquakes are deadly and some are mild, and so on.
Without further ado, my full list of activities, ranked from most dangerous to least dangerous:
Let’s look at the specifics of some of those numbers.
On danger perception
People in general aren’t great at knowing the relative danger of various activities.
In 2018, Australian psychologists Hannah A. D. Keage and Tobias Loetscher released a simple study on the topic: they asked 284 participants to rate 20 different activities on a 0-1000 scale, from “very low risk of death” to “very high risk of death.” The topics varied in terms of safety, from walking 27 miles (1 micromort) to climbing Mt. Everest (37,932 micromorts).
And yes, on average, people said climbing Everest was more dangerous than walking 27 miles — but only about nine times more risky. In reality, climbing Everest is about 38,000 times more risky than walking that distance. Some respondents even remarkably said the walk was more dangerous than the Everest climb.
The range of responses were consistently very wide: driving, motorcycling, rock climbing, hang gliding, undergoing anesthesia, skydiving, giving birth, going basejumping, working in a coal mine, working in commercial fishing and even climbing Everest all received responses that ranged the full gamut of “very low risk of death” to “very high risk of death.”
People with stronger “numerical ability” (as judged by a number-line test) did better on estimating risk — surely, regular readers of this column would rate highly. If someone had done an activity before, they tended to rate it as less deadly. Interestingly, older people usually tended to rate activities as less risky. Gender, optimism levels and self-reported risk tolerance levels didn’t seem to have an effect on performance.
On travel
There’s a pretty clear hierarchy of travel danger.
Commercial jet travel is least dangerous, followed by train travel. Traveling thousands of miles on each conveyance in the U.S. gives you just one additional micromort, one additional one-in-a-million chance of dying. Driving about 240 miles is another one-in-a-million chance; but because Americans tend to drive so much, the odds of dying in any given year is about 100 micromorts. Driving a semi-truck is significantly more dangerous than driving a car.
Then, walking and bicycling are more dangerous, thanks to all sorts of collision deaths. In general, they are about 9 times more likely to result in death than driving the same distance. But they’re not as likely to lead to your demise as traveling on a light (non-commercial) aircraft or on a motorcycle, where even standard trips mean multiple micromorts on your life.
On COVID
I waffled on whether or not to include the COVID-19 numbers in the above table. Unfortunately, including COVID data at all tends to turn off a significant portion of the audience now, no matter how level-headed your COVID reporting was.
But man, getting COVID is pretty dangerous — especially if you’re old and unvaccinated. The good news is that vaccination really helps: the risk of dying from COVID if you’re vaccinated and boosted on average is 48 micromorts if you’re between the ages of 18-49, 516 micromorts between the ages of 50-64, and 6,023 micromorts if you’re 65 or over. That means you’re about 4 to 10 times less likely to die if you’ve received at least three shots compared to those who haven’t received any. Meanwhile, the risk of vaccination, even of the relatively unfavored Astrazeneca vaccine, is quite small.
On drugs
How dangerous drugs are really depends on your drug of choice.
People overdose on heroin ridiculously often. Given an average heroin user’s regimen, using heroin carries an unintentional overdose or poisoning risk of 9,100 micromorts per year — or the same as skydiving about 1,300 times. Cocaine (and crack cocaine) overdoses happen about a third as often per user.
But honestly, some illegal drugs are surprisingly safe. Cannabis kills are extremely rarely, for example.
Ecstasy (or MDMA) is quite safe, too. Hilariously, the head of the UK Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs, professor David Nutt, wrote a column in 2009 comparing the dangers of ecstasy to “equasy” — the addiction to horseriding, arguing that they were comparably dangerous. Our stats show horseback riding as significantly less dangerous, but that doesn’t count the danger of simply keeping horses.
Note that these statistics don’t consider harm to others as a result of taking the drugs. Driving while high and then dying or killing someone else is generally counted as a traffic death, not a drug death, in the U.S.
Other notes
• The most dangerous day of your life is the day you’re born — until you reach age 92. The first year of your life is the most dangerous year of your life — until you reach age 55.
Average micromorts per day of life. The dotted line up top represents the number of micromorts a baby faces in their first day of living. (https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1471-0528.12663)
• Skydiving is significantly less dangerous than paragliding, which is significantly less dangerous than BASE jumping.
• Caesarean sections are slightly more dangerous than natural childbirth — though this result is controversial because sometimes birth complications, already dangerous, cause mothers to get C-sections who otherwise wouldn’t. The above numbers try to account for this factor. Whether they were 100% successful in doing so is a matter of debate.
• The odds a child is killed in a pedestrian accident per year are roughly the same as an average adult getting murdered on the job in an average year — though some jobs, like police officer and taxi driver, result in way more murders per capita than most others.
• Meanwhile, in the course of normal work, being a commercial logger or fisherman in the U.S. is 2 to 3 times more dangerous than the risk of an average citizen being killed by conflict-related violence in Libya in 2015.
• Going under (the sea, while scuba diving) is about as dangerous as going under (being rendered unconscious by a doctor’s anesthesia before an operation).
• Earthquakes are more likely to kill you than lightning, which is more likely to kill you than an asteroid falling from space, which is more likely to kill you than a shark. All of these are very unlikely.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com
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