It's an odds game and you play it like this.

Basically, you look at the numbers and say of every X units (miles, number of people, hours of use) Y% suffer (catastrophic failure of some kind).

Then you need to trend Y over t (time) and you get a real sense of risk.

That's why for me the most terrifying thing is a big plate of cheese fries, because they are a clear and present danger to my health, I have the numeric evidence to bear this out. I still love to have them now and then.

In fact, many of the most risky things- the stuff that WILL kill you - are totally under my control!

Hypertension
Smoking tobacco
High cholesterol
Poor diet
Overweight and obesity
Physical inactivity
Alcohol Abuse
Indoor air pollution from solid fuels

Also on the list is Hospitalization (infections)

Driving is another major risk (as compared to any number of other things that could go wrong).

You're also taking your life into your hands when you climb anything taller than your knees (falls kill so many people every year).

Somewhere way, way down the line is being in a plane landing in the Potomac or Hudson or Long Island Sound, and I also factor into that the fact that the plane has advanced safety systems, highly trained crew, and over-engineered equipment.

The fun(?) stuff is the outrageous "Tom Clancy" grade stuff...makes a great story because it's so very, very rare.

Now we all like to think of the classic 1-2 punch of "terrorist in airplane v. office building" which, I think before the September 11th attacks was completed by one Andrew Joseph Stack III, 53, of north Austin. Then we had the Twin Towers and then....well, nothing really since then. Certainly a few drunk and confused passengers being walloped by passengers and crew who THOUGHT they were on a plane that was to be taken over... but I'll put that into the "not worth worrying about" category.

Many people have this image of the "cities emptying out" and I think that they imagine starving hordes marching across lawns and attacking anything that moves (we often use "zombies" as a proxy for "poor underclass who don't look like me" in these scenarios). Yet the evidence just isn't there for this as an issue worth much consideration. The book "Paradise in Hell" really gets into the strong communities that form in natural disasters.

Finally, there's that most curious of phenomena, the sense that in any emergency you're on your own and your at greater risk from sharing, helping and being a part of the solution.

The "I'll do OK by myself" attitude can actually kill you.

Which reminds me of a joke that one of the priests at my high school told me:

Once, there was a home in a valley and a dam was about to break nearby.

Emergency workers in a truck came to the door of a man and told him to get away with them in the truck.

"No, I'll be OK, God will provide for me" he told the workers.

Sure enough the dam broke and the water began to quickly rise. Again the workers came, this time in a boat, and he refused to get in, saying, "No, I don't need your boat, God will take care of me."

The water rose higher and higher, and the man went to his roof. A rescue helicopter came, and lowered a basket and a rescue technician. "No need for that, God will look after me" said the man, and just then the swirling floodwaters pushed hard and the house collapsed under him and washed away, smashing and drowning the man in a torrent of debris.

The man arrived in heaven, and asked God why he'd been allowed to die so horribly. God replied, "I sent people with a Truck, A Boat and A Helicopter, what more did you want?"

My point is that one of the most important "it just ain't so" scenarios is the one where people don't band together.