CNN and other news agencies have had non-stop coverage of the disappearance (almost certainly crash) of Malaysia Flight 370. Since there has been a delay in locating the wreckage of the airplane, any number of pundits has proposed one extremely expensive solution after another to make it easier to find the small number of planes that crash annually.
This is, of course, a prime example of the crazy way that humans internalize risk. A plane crash that kills 239 people is obviously news, but for some reason the same number of people who will die every 12 days in Malaysia due to automobile accidents isn’t worth of morons like CNN’s Don Lemon wondering if they may have been sucked into black holes.
In all of 2010, for example, there were a total of 26 fatal airplane accidents which killed 817 passengers and crew worldwide. In the same year, the World Health Organization estimates that more than 1.2 million people died worldwide from road traffic accidents.
That’s the equivalent of a plane like Malaysia Flight 370 crashing every hour and forty-five minutes.