does anybody know statistically how many people are killed from meteorites every year?

Question

please don't just post a link for wikipedia, if i wanted to go on that i would.

for the record meteorites do land on earth, thats how they manage to collect them in the poles, they get them there because they are easy to spot on the snow.

Answer 1

The insurance life tables do not include such deaths as a separate category because they are so rare. They are lumped together under "General causes arising in the natural environment" or Acts of God as some people call them.

However, it is possible to analse the risk statistically but not altogether convincingly.

The Earth is a sphere (more or less) of 4000 miles radius. Therefore it has a surface area of about 200 million square miles.

The population of Earth is close to 6000 million. This means that there is an average of 30 people per square miles of Earth surface. Now, of course, humans are not evenly spread and are more concentrated on the edges of continents with very few indeed at the Poles or in mid-ocean.

Assume for the moment that there is an even distribution of humans, then 30 people per square miles corresponds to an average distance between each human of about 1000 feet. That is pretty spread out and there is plenty of room for a meteorite to fall between the humans. If a meteorite is (say) 1 inch across, then the chance of being hit is about 1 in 900,000 when a meteorite falls to Earth. That suggests that about 6000 people per year are hit by meteorites but that can't be true. The newspapers would be full of it.

Anyway, this is too small a chance to include in risk tables. Also, most meteorites seem to burn up in the atmosphere so observed shooting stars may not represent a real measure of the threat to humans.

However, in many parts of the world, the human density is more like 3000 people per square mile and in a few probably 30,000 per square mile. In these two cases, the chance of being hit by a random meteorite would be 1 in 9,000 and 1 in 900 respectively.

So this last figure begins to look like a manageable risk but is still too small to be accounted separately in injury or life tables. If we had an estimate of the number of meteorites that penetrate the atmosphere to ground level each year in the temperate and tropical regions, then we could estimate also the number of expected collisions with humans.

As the number and size of items of space debris increases, I wonder if the insurance industry will begin to include that risk in its premium calculations?

Answer 2

There is no clear record of a person being killed by a meteorite impact in recorded history.

Tunguska may be a special case, but the records are not yet verified.

A meteorite injures a person or damages property on the average about once every four years.

The person who said no meteorites reach the surface should go away, and not post answers until obtaining some knowledge. Of course many of them do reach the surface.

Answer 3

Yes, there are calculations on this subject.....

"Even though many thousands of meteorites fall to Earth each year it is rare for one to hit a human being. The chances of a human fatality resulting from the fall of a meteorite have been calculated as one death, somewhere in the world, every 52 years. Thankfully, no human deaths from falling meteorites have been reported this century. "

It is a pretty sure bet that you can sleep safely not worrying about being hit by one.

But if you did get killed by one;

A.) You wouldn't know it ever hit you.
B.) Your name would be in all the papers and in Wikipedia for the rest of time!

Kewl, huh?



g-day!

Answer 4

Even though many thousands of meteorites fall to Earth each year it is rare for one to hit a human being. The chances of a human fatality resulting from the fall of a meteorite have been calculated as one death, somewhere in the world, every 52 years. Thankfully, no human deaths from falling meteorites have been reported this century.

Answer 5

In an average year, no one is killed by meteorites. If you include impacts from stray comets and asteroids, over millions of years the average death toll would be in the neighborhood of a couple of thousand per year. This is based on the assumption that once every million years on average a major impact kills one-fourth of the world's population.

Answer 6

I don't think we have a single case of anyone being killed by a meteorite. Ever. I'm sure it's happened, but not since we started keeping track of that kind of thing (a few hundred years at least).

Answer 7

Meteorites burn up in our atmosphere, so in order to kill someone, they would have to be high up in our atmosphere or in orbit. Since I have never heard of a plane or shuttle being whacked by a meteorite, I am going to say none.

Answer 8

no not many that ive heard of and im sure we would here of something like that but then again we never get to here much unless its a huge cotastrophe