Disaster Probability

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

This is a student project to train people to worry more efficiently, about things that are actually likely to happen. It may relax people’s fears.

People tend to concern themselves disproportionately with various types of disaster. They worry too much about new types of disaster such as SARS and mad cow disease, and underestimate the oldies like drunk driving and nuclear war.

In the simplest form, the user enters his age, sex, weight, height, region and any other pertinent details. The program then tells him his likelihood of dying by various catastrophes in the next year, sorted in order.

In a more elaborate form, there is a roulette wheel the user repeatedly spins that simulates the probabilities. In a more elaborate form, you could request the odds over the next N years.

You want to consider such things as nuclear war, terrorist attacks, deaths by various diseases, being struck by lightning, being killed by gunshot wounds, being killed in combat, having a large tree land on you, receiving an anthrax letter, being electrocuted, diabetic coma, heart attack, lung cancer, AIDS,… all the things people worry about and also all the things that actually kill people.

Most of the work of this project is digging up the statistics to calculate the probabilities.

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