"Skylune" wrote in message
lkaboutaviation.com...
"Mike Granby" wrote in message
oups.com...

1 in 25

Only if those 4000 hours are all ahead of him. If he already has 2000,
those are in the past, and can no longer kill them, so his odds go to 1
in 50.

So, if i toss a coin five times, and each time it comes up heads, on the
sixth toss my odds will much better than 50% that the toss will come up
tails. OK.

No, Mike had it exactly right (which would be more evident if you'd quoted
him in your reply; I've restored the quote for you).

Your coin fallacy in no way follows from what Mike said. He's addressing the
odds of an improbable event happening at least once in a long string of
trials; that probability is indeed (to a first-order approximation)
proportionate to the number of trials remaining (hence, if you halve the
number of trials, you halve the probability, just as Mike said). Your coin
fallacy talks instead about the odds on a *single* subsequent trial, which
of course is independent of the number of preceding trials.

--Gary