this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
728 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
42434 readers
1363 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don't hear about it in the news though do you....
I'm confused about how it kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. How, by drowning?
It's an old (early-internet?) joke iirc. And yes, I think that's the answer
Oh shit, I was thinking there was no way that hundreds of thousands of people did from drowning every year, but they actually do.
WHO estimates that every year over 200k people die from drowning
Yea I did my 10 seconds of research before I quoted my number! I could have said '200k' but 'hundreds of thousands' sounds much more dramatic don't you think? Which is the whole point of the Dihydrogen monoxide thing.
Wow, talk about preventable deaths...
According to its Wikipedia page, this joke was first published in 1983! I suspect most people know it from the early 2000's when it made a resurgence again.
What I think it is, is that every single person who ever consumes it, will eventually die. We are also literally dependant on it. If you stop ingesting it for too long, it can also cause you to die... That's how it went around here, at least.
Thatβs my understanding as well, it was a joke about correlation != causation.
Look at all of the related "risks" and add them up. I'm sure that drowning is a small number, but then add in all of the deaths from scalding, acid rain, poisons (that contain water), etc etc and it eventually gets to be a very big number. Probably in the millions
The WHO estimates 236k deaths per year worldwide due to drowning. There's other ways to die to Dihydrogen monoxide other than drowning, so my numbers hold up!
Acid rain has never killed anyone. It can kill plants and destroy farms, so I guess it can kill indirectly by causing famine, but that's about it.