You're as likely to get hit by an asteroid.

With the holiday season travel predicted to be at record highs, many of you may be planning on traveling by air. If you are not afraid of flying yourself, you may end up sitting next to a pale, hand-wringing, heart-palpitating traveler who is. According to one study, approximately one in every three Americans is either fearful or anxious about flying. You might want to reassure your frightened neighbor that, statistically, dying in a plane crash is less likely than some other methods of kicking the bucket. Of course, we have all heard the statistics about driving being much more dangerous than flying. But if we flew as often as we drive, I wonder if those statistics would invert.

However, I did find one statistic very interesting comparing airplane mortalities to another unlikely demise. Did you know that you are as statistically likely to die in a fiery plane crash as you are to be hit by an asteroid? That's right, if we are looking at pure numbers, your tombstone could just as likely read 'Killed by a giant chunk of space rock' as it could 'Perished in a flaming tangle of 747 after snakes hijacked his plane'. How could this be? Only a few dozen people at most have ever died from meteors while 100 people on average die in plane crashes every year. Well, if we assume that the rate of plane crash victims will continue at this pace for the next 10 million years, that gives a total of 1 billion dead. An asteroid-turned-meteor big enough to cause the catastrophic deaths of 1 billion people is predicted to happen about once every 10 million years. So, the number of dead at the end of the 10 million years is the same, thus the likelihood is equivalent.

So, when you find yourself sitting next to a cold sweating, white-knuckled passenger this holiday season, you can comfort them by saying 'At least you'll be with your family when the asteroid hits and obliterates this half of the globe'.