The New Road

More 9/11 odds

Here is a small statistics primer. Let's say you order a pizza with half pepperoni and half pickles. The pizza arrives, you pay. Then you put on a blindfold, spin the pizza, and pick a slice. There are two sides, you have to pick from one. The odds are 1 in 2, or 1/2, or 50%. So there is a 50% chance you will get pickles.

Now let's say you go to the dealer to get your car fixed. It's going to take a couple of days so they offer you a courtesy car. You get to choose blindly from nine cars. Three are clunkers, and six are nice. Thats three 3 in 9, or 3/9, or simplified to 1/3. So there is a 1 in 3 chance of picking a clunker.

I got a lot of heat for my posting on 9/11 odds, but I assure you these are just numbers. They in no way are meant to discount or downplay the tragedy of that day, which was horrific. My intention was to provide some context for understanding the true risk that this type of terrorism poses to us each and every day.

Let's start with some numbers. There were 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center in 9/11. Of course this number would have been a lot higher were it not for the heroic acts of brave firefighting men and women. According to the government of New York the population of New York in 2000 was 8,008,278. The odds of being killed in New York city on 9/11 were 3000 in 8,008,278 or 1 in 2669. I overstated the risk in my original post by saying 1 in 2,000.

The second number I gave was the odds of being killed if you were in the complex. Once again I overstated the risk. I was under the impression that the number of people working in the WTC complex was around 25,000, turns out it's 50,000 with an additional 200,000 in tourists. Forgoing the tourists, 3,000 in 50,000 is 1 in 16. Once again, I acknowledge that the number would have been much higher were it not for the firefighters, many of whom lost their lives, and for people being smart and resourceful and getting out.

To put this in practical perspective simply ask a friend or coworker to pick a number between one and sixteen (inclusive) and then try to guess the number. If you guess the number exactly then, in our simulation, you would have died on September 11th had you been in the World Trade Center complex. If you pick any other number you would have lived.

One reader pointed out; "Terrorists want every man, woman and child in the United Stated to be killed. This is no over-estimation; this comes directly from their literature/propaganda." Let's talk numbers again. On 9/11 there were three thousand people killed and there were twenty hijackers. Roughly speaking this means that one terrorist was responsible for killing 150 people (20*150=3000). If there are 1,000,000 terrorists in the world, and there are 293,718,982 Americans, each terrorist would have to kill 293 Americans, in order to kill "every man, woman and child in the United Stated". So they would have to find a way to kill almost twice as many people per terrorist as on 9/11.

Practically speaking the extermination of very large groups of people (and 293 million is very very large) is impossible. Hitler tried this with his horrific Final Solution and killed 6.1 million people over five years.

So how would one go about killing all of us? Surely nuclear bombs would be the most effective way. But if you do the math it would take a lot of them. Let's take a super large bomb, ten megatons, it's blast radius is 15 kilometers. Squared it's 15 * 15 or 225. The United States land mass is 9,161,923 square kilometers. So to carpet bomb the country and kill us all would take 40,719 ten megaton bombs. That number is low because the yield on that bomb is very high. More practical bombs would have a lower yield, and thus it would take more. You could argue that you don't need to carpet bomb the country, but you do if you want absolutely everyone gone.

How about chemical weapons? These, like Sarin, work best in enclosed spaces (subways). So getting a large yield in a public space would be difficult and many people would survive. To be really effective, like Saddam on the Kurds, you need air and ground supremacy so that you can attack civilians directly unhindered. Air and ground supremacy would be hard to come by within the continental United States.

How about bioterror? The most virulent and deadly virus known to man is Ebola Zaire which is 90% deadly. This means that there would be 29 million of us still left if the terrorists somehow weaponized Ebola and were some how able to keep it from running so hot that it runs itself out (like it does today.)

All of these doomsday scenarios are extremely unlikely. They all posit an absolutely evil enemy with unlimited resources, access and manpower. The terrorist resources, manpower and access is very limited. And while they may be absolutely evil the mainstream Islamic world would not support them in genocide and would rally around us just as they did after 9/11.

The Al Qaida terrorists are kooks. It doesn't matter what they say in their literature/propaganda about killing every American since it simply isn't feasible. The only thing that will kill us all is an environment calamity like an asteroid strike or another ice age, and that would take everyone else out too.

Yes, we need to stop Al Qaida. Yes, we need to fight terror. Yes, we need to stop terrorists plots before they occur. Yes, the loss on 9/11 was terrible and horrific. But living in fear of terrorists, and giving up our civil liberties and freedoms in an effort to fight them is wrong.

Your odds of getting killed during the Revolutionary War, with British armies trooping across the countryside, were far higher then your odds of getting killed in a terrorist incident today. Yet somehow or forefathers saw their way to building a country of unprecedented personal freedoms in the aftermath of that war. Now, two hundred years later, a bunch of kooks hijack planes and kill three thousand innocent people, and we are supposed to give up our civil rights and rational government for and by the people. I don't think so.