Mega Millions win or a lightning strike: Which has better odds?
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"I don't understand why people who play the lottery aren't more afraid of lightning," joked comedian Kyle Kinane in his special Trampoline In A Ditch. "If you believe in those odds, shouldn't you be like, ‘I got 20 bucks on the pick five. Wait, is that a storm?!'" Kinane went on, capping the bit with a two-word expletive meant to suggest sudden fear.
When the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots skyrocket, like the Mega Millions pot has since October -- jumping to a whopping $1.35 billion after Tuesday's drawing yielded no winner for the top prize -- many Americans begin to ponder their odds.
After all, someone has to win the money, right?
Well, not so fast.
While the odds are obviously long, how often do players realize how seemingly impossible they truly are?
Well, to amend Kinane's joke from earlier, if you like your good fortune for winning the lottery, then your fear of equally unlikely misfortune by way of "freak" accidents, such as getting struck by lightning or being crushed by a meteorite or getting attacked by a shark, should be downright terrifying.
"Like I said in the bit, you don't get to believe in only good luck. You either believe in luck (both good AND bad), or you don't," Kinane told AccuWeather. "So if you're crossing your fingers for the Powerball, might want to ask Zeus to go easy on your neighborhood while you're at it."
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A Mega Millions lottery slip is displayed at Lucky Mart in Chicago on Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford) |
In fact, compared to a 1-in-302.6 million odds, the likelihood of winning the current Mega Millions jackpot, getting struck by lightning would seem like a near certainty!
According to the National Weather Service, a person has a 1-in-15,300 chance of getting struck by lightning in their lifetime, defined as an 80-year span. That makes your odds of getting struck by lightning nearly 20,000 times higher than hitting the winning numbers for the next jackpot.
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In this Aug. 16, 2020, file photo, lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File) |
Data from the National Lightning Safety Council shows that an estimated 230 people are injured by lightning strikes each year. In 2022, 19 fatalities in the United States were attributed to lightning strikes, down from the average number of 23 deaths per year (based on estimations from 2012-2021 figures).
By those odds, you are equally likely to be struck by lightning on 250 different occasions as you are to nailing the right lottery numbers, Newsweek reported.
Here are the odds for some other incredibly improbable events that you are still more likely to experience before winning the lottery:
1 in 730,000 in any given year, according to the USGS.
1 in 3.7 million, according to CNBC. Whale Bone Mag adds that those numbers change to 1 in 7 million for Americans living in a landlocked state
1 in 700,000, according to astronomer Alan Harris in Discover Magazine. Those odds are considerably lower for getting struck directly by a meteor, however, dropping to 1-in-1.9 million should a meteor hit Earth.
1 in 112 million, according to "The Book of Odds" by Amram Shapiro. According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, an average of four Americans died per year, between 2002 and 2015, due to vending machine mishaps.
This latest Mega Millions jackpot ranks as the fourth-largest in U.S. history and the game's second highest. The largest was a $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot on Nov. 8, 2022, that someone won in California, according to Powerball. The largest Mega Millions jackpot was a $1.537 billion winning ticket purchased in South Carolina in 2018.
The winning Mega Millions numbers in the Tuesday, Jan. 10 drawing were 7, 13, 14, 15, 18 and the Mega Ball was 9. The next drawing will be Friday night, Jan. 13.
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