Actuarily speaking08oct05NINETY-NINE per cent of the time, in...

Actuarily speaking
08oct05

NINETY-NINE per cent of the time, in 99.9 per cent of the world, nothing happens. While we reel at the news of shocking events, from volcanic eruptions to terrorist attacks to someone being arrested for having sex with rabbits, such goings-on represent 0.1 per cent of the total, which is close to totally uneventful.

Macro and micro, our personal lives and collective existence are remarkably unremarkable. If the media told the truth about what's really going on – which is virtually zero – its circulations and ratings would crash. Not aircraft.

As well as the countless thousands of planes that don't crash, consider with wonderment and gratitude the enormous number of asteroids than don't collide with earth. (Of course, few dinosaurs reading this column will share this sense of relief, for reasons that explain why so few of them buy The Weekend Australian.)

Or you might prefer to note how few of the endless list of serious illnesses the individual actually catches. Or the fact that in the biblical allotment of 70 years, or 25,550 days, a person doesn't die on 25,549 of them. Those are extremely good odds, given the number of cars on the road and germs in your nostrils.

Car accidents – it's amazing how few we have, not how many. Cars might as well be made of tin foil and go very fast, and most of us are careless drivers who aren't concentrating because we're listening to the radio, eating a Big Mac or making a phone call – or doing all three at once. A confession: I write these columns while I'm driving, mumbling into my Dictaphone. Yet 99.9 per cent of the time we don't collide, which makes you wonder why insurance premiums are so high.

Talking of insurance, how much do you carry on your home and contents? When a local terrorist armed with WMDs takes one from the box and starts a bushfire, quite a few houses can be burned. Yet despite the flammability of furnishings, the dangers of kids playing with matches, the thousands of people smoking in bed and all those rats chewing through your wiring, remarkably few homes catch fire. If it weren't for all the false alarms, firemen wouldn't get to drive their fire carts or play with their ladders. Little wonder that many of the aforementioned arsonists turn out to be firemen. As for the fire crews at Mascot and Tullamarine, how do they stay awake? How do we know they are? How do we know they haven't all gone home, years ago?

When those Islamist terrorists crashed the Boeings into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 3000, the rest of the US population remained unscathed. Fact is, the possibility of being killed by terrorists is damned near impossible, even without a magnet on your fridge. You're far more likely to drown in the bath, and that's highly unlikely, ranking with the death of Aeschylus – who got killed when a tortoise, dropped by an eagle, fell on his head.

A truly remarkable phenomenon is how few presidents get assassinated, even in the US where a majority of the population is totally nuts and everyone is packing heat. Despite the ready availability of gas chamber, electric chair and fatal injection, the murder rate outrates Desperate Housewives. So why hasn't George Bush attracted his Lee Harvey Oswald? After all, who's hated like a president? Take Richard Nixon. Everyone hated him – even Pat Nixon. Yet apart from Sean Penn, no-one tried to kill him. He must've felt very hurt, not to be in the league of Lincoln and JFK. So he had to assassinate himself, with Watergate and the secret tapes. And it was much the same with Bill Clinton, whom the Republicans hated with a vengeance – almost as much as they hated Hillary.

Paranormal predictions are so unrealisable that the presidential prophet failed to warn Nancy that Ron's assassin was on approach. Nonetheless, I'm going to have a go. I'm 99.9 per cent confident that you won't be abducted by aliens this arvo, that you'll still be alive come Monday and that a giant haemorrhoid from outer space won't wipe out 99.9 per cent of life on Earth, at least before 3pm, Tuesday. The bad news? Ninety-nine per cent of life on Earth is doomed by global warming, yet I'm 100 per cent sure John Howard won't sign the Kyoto Treaty next week either – or the week after that.

All of which is because nothing much really happens – which is why we read newspapers and watch TV, where it does, or at least seems to, usually and fortunately elsewhere. Wars happen elsewhere. Tornados happen in Kansas. Volcanoes happen in Indonesia.

And that's another reason that ours is the lucky country. All we have are droughts, floods, bushfires, cane toads, Alan Jones and the privatisation of Telstra.