What If You Kept Getting Unluckier and Couldn't Stop?

The premise is made up. The facts along the way are real. CHAPTERS 0:00 Completely average 0:20 Day one: ÷10 1:26 One in a million 3:00 The elevator 3:39 The plane 6:14 Alone in space 6:31 Vacuum decay 7:31 The last one SOURCES NOAA National Weather Service, "How Dangerous is Lightning?": odds of being struck in a given year about 1 in 1.2 million; about 90% of people struck survive Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer & Vohs (2001), "Bad Is Stronger Than Good," Review of General Psychology 5(4): negativity bias Murphy's law: named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy Jr., engineer on the 1949 MX981 rocket-sled tests at Edwards Air Force Base, where a set of sensors had been wired backwards Guinness World Records: Roy C. Sullivan, Shenandoah National Park ranger, struck by lightning 7 times between 1942 and 1977 Surviving 185 strikes at 90% each: 0.9^185 ≈ 1 in 290 million; Powerball jackpot odds are 1 in 292.2 million Ann Hodges, Sylacauga, Alabama, November 30, 1954: hit by a meteorite of about 4 kg while napping on her couch; she was bruised Lottie Williams, Tulsa, Oklahoma, January 22, 1997: brushed on the shoulder by a piece of a Delta II rocket, the only person confirmed hit by space debris; unhurt Elevators hang on several steel hoist ropes (commonly 4 to 8), each able to hold the car on its own, plus safety brakes that clamp the guide rails Guinness World Records: Betty Lou Oliver survived a 75-floor elevator fall in the Empire State Building, July 28, 1945 Airliners use three independent hydraulic systems; certification rules (FAA AC 25.1309) target catastrophic failures at below one in a billion per flight hour The Carrington Event, September 1859: a solar storm that made telegraph lines spark and set some telegraph offices on fire, with auroras seen far into the tropics NASA (2014), "Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012": a Carrington-class eruption crossed Earth's orbit about a week after Earth had passed that point NASA, asteroid 2024 YR4: in February 2025 the impact chance briefly peaked at about 3.1%, then fell to nearly zero with more observations The Chicxulub impactor that ended the age of dinosaurs was about 10 km across Vacuum decay: Andreassen, Frost & Schwartz (2018), Physical Review D 97, 056006; Baratella et al. (2024) revised the Standard Model estimate to about once per 10^790 years per cubic gigaparsec (a region about 3 billion light-years wide); Quanta Magazine, "Vacuum of Space to Decay Sooner Than Expected (but Still Not Soon)," July 2024 Light covers 20 million km in about 67 seconds, reaches us from the Sun in about 8 minutes, and from the nearest star in about 4.2 years #whatif #luck #physics