Indian officials say a meteorite struck the campus of a private engineering college on Saturday, killing one person. Unlucky bus driver was killed when a meteorite landed in the area where he was walking, damaging the window panes of nearby buses and buildings. Three other people were injured. If scientists confirm the explosion was due to a meteorite, it would be the first recorded human fatality due to a falling space rock. http://arstechnica.com/science/2016...t-recorded-human-fatality-due-to-a-meteorite/ Rock probably created billions of years ago, travels through space, avoiding obstacles, collisions and gravity, just to enter the Earth and kill one guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seriously, what are the odds?
NASA calculated the chances of somebody on Earth being hit by a washing-machine sized chunk of a falling satellite that survived re-entry as approximately 1 in 3000 (Source). On the other hand, your individual lifetime odds of being killed as a result of a meteor impact (not necessarily by being directly hit by the meteor, mind you) are about 1 in 700,000 (source). To compare: your lifetime chance of dying in an accident caused by fireworks is higher than this, but your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are lower. (Obviously, these are all averages and do not take into account individual variations, such as a propensity to play with fireworks or living in a country where terrorist attacks are more common than elsewhere.) 1 in 700,000 may seem quite high, but the odds are somewhat skewed. A large enough asteroid impact could wipe out all 7 billion of us at once, which raises the odds somewhat.
Doesn't sound like it directly struck him. Ann Hodges received a big thigh bruise via contact with hers in 1954. Ex-husband claimed that a later nervous breakdown and ensuing medical problems were a result of stress from media and public frenzy over the incident. If that could be substantiated as the cause of her problems ("OMG, look at the aerobatic swine overhead!"), then anxious supporters of Ann could argue that she suffered a roundabout, delayed death of circa 18 years from her space rock encounter.
NASA says that Indian man wasn't killed by meteorite. Apparently, the photographs posted online were more consistent with "a land based explosion" than with something from space. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/w...ite-that-killed-a-man-in-india-nasa-says.html
