Why are people being so hard on the Mythbusters and the Discovery team? The Mythbusters on-air talent were supervised by experts. If the experts didn't expect this situation, why should the hosts of the TV show? Precautions were taken, regulations were followed. It was just a highly improbable occurrence. No one got hurt. Damages will be repaired and paid for...why all the second-guessing? It's happened to the team before, it just didn't get publicized as widely.
That's true. However, people have a tendency to assume the most visible faces are also the most responsible ones. And the show kind of promotes that impression by having the hosts perform most of the on-camera stuff themselves, not to mention by recording those fictionalized intro segments where the hosts seem to be spontaneously proposing the myth to each other and concocting a procedure on the spot, even though they're really just summing up a development process that was done weeks or months earlier by their writers, producers, researchers, etc. as well as the Mythbusters themselves.
It certainly does sound like a
force majeure ("act of God") kind of situation, something that nobody could've predicted and nobody's really to blame for. After all, this was the third test fire of the cannon, and the first two presumably worked okay. I hope it does turn out that way and that there are no penalties for Kari, Grant, Tory, or Sgt. Nelson.
Barely. People *could* have been hurt or even killed. It was pure luck that no one was.
Well, there's no real arguing with that statement. It's just far more likely that, if anyone is ever maimed or killed in a Mythbusters experiment, it'll be one of the hosts, not someone napping in a house outside the bomb range.
That's a good point. I've often thought these guys are tempting fate by conducting so many potentially dangerous experiments themselves, and that it's only a matter of time before one of them suffers worse than a singed-off eyebrow or a banged knee.
But I think one
can argue with the statement that it was pure luck that nobody was hurt. It wasn't a crowded mall, but a quiet residential neighborhood -- at 4 PM on a Tuesday, when a lot of people would've still been away at work or afterschool activities or whatever. Statistically speaking, the percentage of the region's volume that was occupied by human bodies was quite low, so the probability that a randomly fired cannonball would strike any human being (or pet) was commensurately low. Keep in mind that there are only two documented instances in history of people being struck by meteorites, even though meteorites fall to Earth all the time. And both of them survived. (
An Alabama woman was struck in the hip in 1954,
a German boy struck in the hand in 2009.)
So really, given that the cannonball wasn't aimed at anyone in particular, the odds were very much in favor of no one being hurt. It would've been a statistical fluke if anyone had been. Just as it was a huge statistical fluke that the cannonball bounced the way it did in the first place. Of course it
could've potentially hurt someone, and of course it's always important to keep safety in mind and avoid mishaps like this wherever possible because of that nonzero risk. But it's not a miracle that nobody was hurt, because that was simply the most probable outcome of the event. It's like getting a pair of threes in a poker hand and saying it's pure luck you didn't get a straight flush. That's kind of getting the probabilities backward.
The ironic thing is, this is EXACTLY the kind of wacky, completely improbable news story we've seen them try to replicate in the past!
If it hadn't happened to them, I can easily see them trying to break down all the different elements, to see if a cannonball could really fly that far, or travel through so many different objects...
Yeah, they'll be trying to replicate this 25 years from now on
Mythbusters: The Next Generation.
