That's a bad interpretation. I could have used the word "generation" to avoid such an interpretation of "lifetime" but I wanted to have a longer span to have conservatively large odds of witnessing the event.
We'll have to either update our understanding of the statistics of these events quite substantially or we'll have to entertain hypotheses that make us look nuts to the innumerate. On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:44 PM, George Paulson <[email protected]>wrote: > Note that the odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are about > 1 in 3,000. > > So it's not that much higher than the odds of experiencing a simultaneous > flyby in one's lifetime. > > When someone gets struck by lightning, we just chalk it up to bad luck or > whatever. The odds of being struck in one's lifetime aren't low enough to > justify speculation about why someone got struck. > > The odds of experiencing a simultaneous flyby are lower than the odds of > being struck, but not that much lower. >
