Were you ever about to do an activity that was potentially risky and thought: “Hmm, I wonder what the chances are that I die from this?” Now you can know the answer!

A micromort is a unit that represents a probability of death.

From Wikipedia:

“A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.”

<aside> 💡 Put in some other terms: 1 micromort = 1/100 of a basis point chance of death.

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Death by a Million Cuts (err I mean micromorts)

From this, we can find micromort values of different activities to compare their relative risk.

BASE jumping is 430 micromorts per jump

A day on the slopes is 0.7 micromorts

We can also add the total micromorts of separate events together to get an estimation¹ of our chance of death over a certain period (see Figure 1.1).

If i ski 5 times a year, my micromort exposure is:
0.7*5 = 3.5 micromorts per year = 3.5/365 days = 0.01 micromorts per day

Or really, it’s our excess chance of death since there is a baseline micromort exposure rate for everyone that differs by age.

From Statista, I’ve adjusted the annual death rates to find the daily micromort exposure:

Daily Micromort Exposure by Gender and Age Group