When you get to be older, there isn’t a lot left to be frightened of
Asteroids and meteorites. Major asteroid collisions with Earth—involving objects larger than 1.5 kilometers, the minimum size required for “global consequences”—happen very rarely, roughly once every 100,000 years. (…) The odds of actually being hit by a meteorite are infinitesimal: only four people in recent history have been struck by one. The most famous (and documented) is Ann Hodges, who in 1954 was struck by a 7-inch meteorite in Sylacauga, AL. The object crashed through her roof and bounced off a wood-console radio before striking her in the side. In another case, in 1927, a meteorite struck a Japanese girl in the head—whether directly or indirectly is unclear. More recently, a Ugandan boy was indirectly struck in the head by a marble-sized meteorite (it ricocheted off a palm tree first), and just this year a pea-sized meteorite struck German teen Gerrit Blank in the hand—the only direct hit ever recorded, not to mention survived. However, according to Discover Magazine’s ” Bad Astronomy” blog, Blank’s story is either a hoax or drastically embellished.
Hail. The odds a person will be injured by hail in a year are 1 in 5,114,000. According to the National Weather Service, 718 people were injured by hail between 1995 and 2007. And the number killed? Just five. The odds a person will be killed by hail in a year, then, are 1 in 734,400,000.
Blue Ice. There are several known cases of houses being struck by frozen airplane-lavatory waste, euphemistically known as “blue ice.” The ice can form when a plane’s lavatory develops an external leak; frozen at high altitude, the waste warms and dislodges as a plane descends. Luckily, there are no known instances of people being struck by blue ice.
Aerospace Junk (Satellites, Space Stations, Weather Balloons). In the 52 years since the launch of Sputnik 1, there have been no recorded instances of death caused by falling satellite, shuttle, or space station parts. (…)Suicide jumpers. At least one case exists in which a person has been struck and killed by another (falling) person: just this year, a Ukrainian man was crushed and killed in Barcelona by a 45-year-old woman who had thrown herself out of her 8th-story window in an act of apparent suicide.
Pennies. Empire State Building + dropped penny = fatality, or so the myth goes. In reality, there are no recorded instances of a falling penny (or any coin, for that matter) injuring/killing a pedestrian. The popular science show Mythbusters disproved this urban legend based on a penny’s light weight and low terminal velocity (64 mph), going so far as to fire a penny at a co-host’s hand at the correct velocity. It merely left a welt.
Coconuts. They do not, as occasionally claimed, “kill around 150 people worldwide each year.”
