Would you roll the dice on your life? At what cost if any?

[lastchance]

[ QUOTE ]
Note that the choices "a number larger than a billion", and > 1,000,000,000 are the same, unless we are British, in which case a billion is 1,000,000,000,000, or what we call a "trillion" in the US. Hence the amount of the prize is also ambiguous.

Also note that if I had a billion dollars waiting for you, and that you would only need to drive to where I am to pick it up, then the persons who would not even roll a billion- sided die also better not come for their cash, since they would be taking a bigger risk than that just by driving.

Similarly, I wouldn't expect those people to be found riding a roller coaster and taking approximately a 100 million to 1 chance of dying, just for the fun of it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Where do we get these stats?

[Bob Moss]

I'd like to see a die with a billion sides.

B

[mackthefork]

[ QUOTE ]
Note that the choices "a number larger than a billion", and > 1,000,000,000 are the same, unless we are British, in which case a billion is 1,000,000,000,000, or what we call a "trillion" in the US. Hence the amount of the prize is also ambiguous.


[/ QUOTE ]

We accept your number as our standard these days, only academics use the old translation.

Mack

[mackthefork]

[ QUOTE ]
I'd like to see a die with a billion sides.

B

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd like to see you try to roll it, and how long it would take to stop.

Mack

[sexdrugsmoney]

Assume this was a normal die (refering to the dice) for a moment, you are 5:1 to make a billion, or you die.

But ask yourself this question:

If you had 6 lifetimes, what would the chance of you being a Billionaire in each?

The odds to that question I don't think are anywhere as favourable as 5:1.

Also you have to factor in that nobody knows exactly how long they may live.

Say you roll the die and lose, and die. It is not known whether tomorrow you may have died anyway by misadventure or whether you continued to live for another week, year, 70 years etc.

Also quality of life has to be factored in, questions need to be asked. Are you happy with your life currently? Can you see any other opportunity that may present itself on the horizon if you pass this by? (highly unlikely) etc.

There are many people in this world who would risk their life on a coin flip (1:1) and some who would even play a game that is mathematically rigged against them for this prize because their life is so bad and even if they died it would be a release.

5:1, just like Russian Roulette, seems like very good odds for the prize invovled which may give you a quality of life that millions of humans could not and never would achieve if they got to live their lives over tenfold.

The only real ramification is if you believed in a deity, would taking this bet and losing be classifed as suicide?

Thus if an afterlife holds any meaning to you, you have to factor that in to the equasion, and this one thing may be the 'deal-breaker'. (an Atheist may scoff that an ideology could prevent one who otherwise wanted to take this bet from doing so, yet beliefs are the strongest human motivators)

Good question, I'd be tempted to take it with a regular die with 5:1 odds but I'm not sure if I could do it got down to it. [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]

[lastchance]

Oh, if I was living in real poverty, money would be the most of my worries, and I'd gladly take 5:1, I'd imagine.

But luckily for me, I have enough for internet, food, basic health care, and showers. My house (IMHO) is pretty big, and I have a good education.

No way I think money buys happiness for me, and I really don't have many ambitions to be a billionaire.

Meh, might just be me.

[BruceZ]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Note that the choices "a number larger than a billion", and > 1,000,000,000 are the same, unless we are British, in which case a billion is 1,000,000,000,000, or what we call a "trillion" in the US. Hence the amount of the prize is also ambiguous.

Also note that if I had a billion dollars waiting for you, and that you would only need to drive to where I am to pick it up, then the persons who would not even roll a billion- sided die also better not come for their cash, since they would be taking a bigger risk than that just by driving.

Similarly, I wouldn't expect those people to be found riding a roller coaster and taking approximately a 100 million to 1 chance of dying, just for the fun of it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Where do we get these stats?

[/ QUOTE ]

For driving, I just took the 17,625-to-1 per year for car occupants given by one of the links in the OP, and multiplied that by 365 to get 6.4 million-to-1 per day, which is much more likely than a billion-to-1. Now that number includes accidents where several people are killed, trucks are safer, and different distances would be required to drive to me. But even taking those factors into account, you would only have to drive a fraction of the distance the average person drives in a day to have a billion-to-1 chance of being killed. To be sure, I found this article which puts the death rate at 1.5 per 100 million miles, so driving a single mile should give you much better than a billion-to-1 chance of being killed.

For the roller-coaster, I remember reading this number a long time ago in a magazine article that gave the death rates for various thrill seeking activities. I recall it said that parachute jumping had a 1 in 100,000 probability of death per jump, and that more people were killed because of the plane crashing than by jumping since that tended to kill everyone on board. Hang-gliding was listed as about 1 in 4000 deaths per flight per year.

No, because, the very next instant someone could offer me better odds [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Cheers,

MidGe

[lehighguy]

Only having 10 million would make me increase the number. There are things you can do with a billion you can't do with ten million.

There is a big blank spot between a billion and a trillion. At a trillion dollars I might be able to change the world. That would be worth something to me.

Say you rolled the dice and won the first time at whatever number of sides the dice had, if given the oppurtunity to, would you roll again?