this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Would You Rather
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Welcome to c/WouldYouRather, where we present you with the toughest, most ridiculous choices you never knew you had to make! Would you rather have a third arm that's only useful for picking your nose, or be able to talk to animals but only if they're wearing hats? Yeah, it's that kind of vibe. Come for the absurdity, stay because you've clearly got nothing better to do with your life.
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Random part of the ocean: any day, you can arrive in the middle of a storm, get crushed by a massive wave on nearby rocks (or ice, or floating debris) and die in an instant.
You can arrive in a patch of human garbage and be stabbed by metal or wood, or swallow petrol or oil, and return wounded to death.
You can land in the spot where orcas are fighting, or a white whale is just splashing and be killed there and then.
You can land in front of a cruiseship as it arrives at full speed and be knocked dead on the spot.
I don't know why people aren't more terrified of the ocean.
You should be terrified of the ocean.
The ocean is fucking huge. With a truly random location there's a beyond minuscule chance that you'll be transported near any rocks or animals that even register your presence within 30 seconds. This one is a no brainer.
So in
5years, you will be throwing1825times.Say, probability of one of those problematic events is
P(E), whereEis the event.Probability of
Ehappeningn(Natural) number of times would be either0orP(E), withP(E)forn = 1and0forn > 1, because you don't get more than1life to make it happen more than once.Probability of it happening at least once in the whole
5years of time, is ~~P(E) × 1825.~~(check silasmariner's reply)So, what is the value you set to
P(E)to convince yourself that probability is the correct thing to go by?It's not
P(E) x 1825that makes no sense because the probabilities are independent. It's1 - (1 - P(E))^1825-- your maths would imply that a 1/1000 chance had a 100% probability of happening after 1000 attempts, which is not how independent probabilities work.Anyway I'd probably go for it if it were, like, 1/100,000, giving a probability of the bad thing happening once over 5 years at just under 2%
I just remembered I hadn't tried to write anything in J for like a year so I had a go at seeing how far the approximation was from the real values and got:
So it looks like the ratio probably converges as you increase n (these results are for 1, 1/10, 1/100 etc) but that
x 1825is always higher and starts off wildly off. But these numbers are probably mad squiffy because floating point yadda yadda.Edit again: oh yeah. Binomial expansion. Once the negation of your probability gets very close to 1 the initial coefficient will absolutely dominate. Proof left for reader.
I checked wiki for a couple numbers, and it looks like Earth's ocean surface area is 361 million km^2, and the shoreline is 356,000 km. Even assuming every bit of the shoreline is made of sharp deadly rocks, there's an extremely low probability you'll end up near the shore at all, even with almost 1900 chances at it.
Going by masquenox's comment, you might want to consider the whole volume of the oceans and the instant depressurisation that would occur if you were to survive the pressurisation.
Yeah the volume is one thing but I assumed we were talking about the surface. If you could end up miles underwater it wouldn't be worth it
So, either I get micro-vacations and rich, or I die? Where's the downside?