Some comments on this:
The debris is expected to fall over a swath of Earth about 500 miles (804 kilometers) long, NASA officials said. [Video: Where Could UARS Satellite Debris Fall?]
There is a 1-in-3,200 chance of satellite debris hitting a person on the ground, odds that NASA says are extremely remote. Outside experts agree.
“Look at how much of Earth is covered with water,” Victoria Samson, the Washington Office Director of the Secure World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the peaceful use of outer space, told SPACE.com this week. “There’s a really good chance it’s going to go straight into the ocean.”
First off, 1:3,200 is not all that comforting. It’s not all that alarming, either, but it depends upon what has been considered, and what is intended. I’ll take the least alarming of assumptions, and figure that 1:3,200 is the total chance of any combination of parts from this thing hitting any combination of persons. That is, any intersection of more than zero parts with more than zero persons, which is awkward to state clearly, so I’ll accept their imprecise but more readable text. After all, newspapers are infinitely more concerned with readability than with accuracy of things they do not understand (and it’s from Space.com anyway).
The problem is a bit more acute in the case of the cosmic idiot from Dominate Me Now, or whatever that peace in space outfit is called. The fact that the earth has more water than land surface is not really the point. I looked at the animation of the orbit and saw that there is about zero chance for the thing to land outside the Arctic or Antarctic circles. I wondered for a minute whether that added to or reduced the roughly 2:1 water:land ration for an impact area. Then I realized that it doesn;t matter. The areas in consideration are so sparsely populated that they simply do not matter, and in fact land vs. water coverage is irrelevant. True, few people live on water, but a sparsely sprinkled debris field 500 miles long can catch a lot of islands.
None of this is alarming, but my take-away was this: the innumeracy (like illiteracy, but for numbers) of the American public is staggering. It is made more so by our lowest common denominator media.
