How many people, in the world, have died or been injured from the automobile and airplane?

247,985,962.

No. No one knows this. Not even close.

For example, historians can’t even agree on how many people died during the Second World War, and many of those involved automobiles and airplanes. Multilply that complexity by all the activity of people all over the world over the last 120+ years, much of which is undocumented.

The true number would be staggering, what would you do with that information?

@SQUEEY2 Nothing. Just curious if the inventions where more harm than good.

Well they have opened the world to people before their time wouldn’t venture more than fifty miles from where their were born.
I think the world is a better place for them.

Well, the plane and the automobile were just invented around the turn of the 20th century so going back to creation is a bit fruitless.

@Dutchess_III Creation of cars and planes.

Oh! Sorry!

I’ve been watching a series on Prime about plane wrecks. Pretty horrible. Planes running into mountains, planes running into each other.

According to the World Health Organization, road injuries accounted for about 2 million of 57 million deaths last year. Link Not sure how to interpret this, since everybody is going to die eventually from one cause or another.

You have to figure in how many lives were saved or prolonged because of food and medical supplies that could be delivered by vehicles traveling along highways. You also need to figure in how many lives were saved by ambulances, and airplanes dumping water on forest fires, and fire trucks being able to arrive quickly to a burning building.

You are dwelling on the wrong things.

Every day millions and millions of people fly from place to place on airplanes and don’t die. We can go months without a plane crash – sometimes years. All of these people who fly successfully aren’t counted. If you’re going to count crashes, the intellectually, you should count successful, non-problematic flights.

Same with driving.

Each day people drive billions of miles without incident. Why are you dwelling on the occasional crash?

@elbanditoroso Just wondering. I didn’t know untill I asked and you answered. Is a non issue now. Thanks.

Travel by foot, horse, horse-drawn carriage, rail, and ship tended to be at least as dangerous, it seems to me.

The implied idea that after 120 years or so, a device that conveys people at great speed (especially through the sky) should be entirely free of dangers, seems like a type of thinking that comes from disassociation with the realities of existence, technology, and death.

It reminds me of the peculiar thinking where our society leaps to legal attempts to control death based on outlawing specific circumstances, too.

I just looked this up for another forum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year

The red line, auto deaths per vehicle mile, makes it awfully hard to justify any pet theory. A little more searching turns up a statement that about half of all deaths involve a single vehicle and either a tire failure or collision with a fixed object.

No information about airplanes, since a lot of airplanes are used specifically to kill people.

It occurs to me that if you want to significantly reduce auto deaths you should ban fixed objects.

Deal with it! :D