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8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months (cnbc.com)
dryriver writes:
China launched a space laboratory named Tiangong 1 into orbit in 2011. The space laboratory was supposed to become a symbol of China's ambitious bid to become a space superpower. After two years in space, Tiangong 1 started experiencing technical failure. Last year Chinese officials confirmed that the space laboratory had to be scrapped. The 8.5 ton heavy space laboratory has begun its descent towards Earth and is expected to crash back to Earth within the next few months.
Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth's atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 kilograms (220 pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth's surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs. The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1's debris is considered unlikely.
When NASA's SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 -- for littering.
Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth's atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 kilograms (220 pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth's surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs. The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1's debris is considered unlikely.
When NASA's SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 -- for littering.
The chances of the debris to hit anyone are low (the area with actual humans on it divided by total area of earth), that's why it's unlikely. If they do hit someone, the chances of harm are quite high, but again, that's unlikely to happen.
let's see, each human is about one square meter (2 x 0.5) of target area so 7.5E9 square meters of humans divided by 5.1E14 square meters of surface area = 0.0015% chance of someone getting hit which actually sounds rather high to me.
That's because you made assumptions that don't make sense. Firstly humans are not 1sqm of hitable area even if that meteor comes at us from the side, which it won't. It'll come at us at around about 45deg. So already you're off by a factor of 4.
Then you're forgetting about stackable humans. In apartment complexes humans overlap further reducing their surface area compared to the earth's surface, that's to say nothing of purposeful overlapping such as having sex.
Then you have all the humans who aren't actually hittable. I.e. no risk to me. I'm in the bottom floor of my apartment, and while I'm at work I'm actually in a bomb proof building.
You have waaay oversimplified and over estimated the chance of being hit.