Quote:
Originally Posted by Johny Joe Hold
I'm convinced this whole thing is a hoax.
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That's an interesting observation. I'm sure professor Snyde could do this a lot better than I can, but I've still decided to give doing the math on this a shot, and I have found that indeed the chance that there is no missing plane, this all being a hoax is 83.94%.
I have established this by calculating that chance that at least one of us knows someone with a direct family member on board of the missing airliner, that works out to 83.94%. I'm sure no one here knows any one like that, they would have shared their grief with us if it were so.
The calculations for those interested:
My calculations are based on the following numbers:
World population: 7 billion
Forum using members of our church: 53,365 (Front page of forum)
Number of people on the airliner: 239
Number of acquaintances: 150 (Dunbar, 1992)
As for family size for the people we know, good Christian people, younger people might have just 2 parents, older ones will have 2 parents and 8 or more children, so an average family size of 6⅔
Now it's simply a case of establishing the cumulative distribution function for the chance that of the 239 people at least one of them is among the family members of our acquaintances. This is actually a simple binomial equation, 100% - the chance that we know 0 people who lost family members.
The number of family members of our acquaintances is 53,365 * 150 * 6⅔ = 53,365,000
So the chance p that picking a random person from the worlds population is a family member of our acquaintances is 53,365,000 / 7,000,000,000 = p
The chance we know k = 0 such people amongst the n = 239 airline passengers is (n choose k) * p = 16.06%
So obviously the chance that we do know such people is 83.94%
The chance we know k such persons is:
n - %
0 - 16,06%
1 - 29,48%
2 - 26,95%
3 - 16,36%
4 - 7,41%
5 - 2,68%
6 - 0,80%
7 - 0,21%
8 - 0,05%
9 - 0,01%
10 - 0,00%
So even if one grieving person did not come forward, it is still more than likely, 54.46%, that someone else also has a friend who lost someone on the plane, if it did exist.