Well, it certainly makes the argument less persuasive because it doesn&#x27;t fit with all the other parts. I think my original version is better.<p>In seriousness - actually comets are a lot like car accidents (if you believe that comets aren&#x27;t actively trying to kill you), the only difference is the probability distribution (and you used the comet example because of the higher variance.)<p>Unlike those things, the success of an intelligent being trying to kill you cannot and should not be thought of as a probability distribution. It&#x27;s not like a coin being tossed, in that a coin doesn&#x27;t tend to get better at falling on one side or the other (nor do car accidents or comets get better at killing you, so they <i>are</i> more like coin tosses.)<p>It matters whether there&#x27;s intelligence behind the cause or not; I&#x27;m surprised at how hard this point is to make at a forum occupied mostly by programmers.