Mortmeter

A friend announces they've booked a skydive, and the table splits. Half say it's madness. The other half say the drive to the airfield is worse. Nobody has a number.

Mortmeter hands you one. Type in any activity and it comes back with the odds it kills an average adult, plus how sure it is of the estimate. By its count a skydive is about 3.5 micromorts and driving 370 km is about 1, so the drive-is-worse crowd would need a road trip of roughly 1,300 km to make their case.

The footer calls it "Made for fun in Copenhagen," and the tagline is "Live fully. Rest in peace." That tone runs through the whole site. It's dark and a bit cheeky, and it clearly likes its statistics.

A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of dying. The unit comes from decision analyst Ronald A. Howard, and Mortmeter uses it for sudden, one-off risks. A microlife is thirty minutes of life expectancy, borrowed from statistician David Spiegelhalter, and it suits slow daily habits. Two cigarettes cost one. Twenty minutes of exercise earns two.

Your age is where it gets personal. The odds stay the same for everyone, but the expected cost is those odds multiplied by the years you have left. Take a stunt priced at 8,000 micromorts, the example on the method page. At 45 that's about 14 weeks of life on average, at 20 it's 24 weeks, and at 75 it's 4. As the page puts it, "The odds don't change with age; the stake does."

There's also an Atlas of known risks, with pages for skydiving, scuba diving, a marathon, Everest and a few medical procedures, and a personal log called My meter.

Mortmeter is free, with no accounts, no ads and no cookies, according to its privacy page. Your age, sex, country, fitness and smoking details stay in your browser's storage, and the time cost is worked out on your device. New questions are sent to Google's Gemini to be priced, and only the question goes.

The catch is that questions and answers are public. Each one gets its own page, so don't type anything you'd mind strangers reading. The privacy page carries no date and names nobody beyond a contact email, though it does promise never to sell data to insurers, which is a nice line.

The site is labelled beta. Years of life come from WHO life tables, activity prices are approximate averages and AI estimates, and it describes itself as perspective, not medical or safety advice.

Next time dinner turns into an argument about what's riskier, this is a quick way to put a number on the table.