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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

1:5000 would suggest an average lifetime of 13.7 years for a grown tree (i.e. not counting the years where it's too young to sleep under), and that's before the ability to avoid trees that look more likely to fallover.

I don't know anything about trees around there, maybe they're really short-lived? For forests around here, it's a gross overestimate.

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Even if you multiple by ten this still means you'll end up with one dead hunter every few decades (depending on how often they hunt and how many hunters there are exactly). That seems like quite a high risk for a small self-sustained community.

Also, I bet it's not just the tree you're sleeping under that poses a risk, but also other trees in the vicinity that might fall on you. In a forest there are probably a bunch of trees "in range".

All of that said, I've often camped and slept in forests, as have many of my friends, and I've never heard of anyone being killed or injured by a falling tree, or ever heard or seen any "don't sleep under a tree, it might kill you"-advice, so I don't know...

Remember that the relevant set isn't the set of all trees, but the set of trees old enough to be large enough to sleep under. That means the average lifetime would be: (number of years it takes for a tree to become big enough to sleep under) + 13.7.

I would still guess that the number is wrong, I suspect that trees have a longer life on average from becoming what we would consider "big" until they fall over. But it's still an important detail.

I mean “big enough to sleep under” is around 50+ years for most hardwoods IIRC. Also, you have to consider groups of trees that can fall on you in the surrounding area. So it’s really the probability that a tree falls within any given 50m radius, towards the center. I think the stated probability is pretty accurate. Also as humans, we tend to pick trees that provide the best shelter, thus older. From experience, if one of those big older branches decide to fall, you don’t want to be underneath. As a kid, a huge oak tree lost a huge branch right in front of me. It scared the crap out of my 8yr old self, so much that I still remember it quite vividly, it would have killed my brother and I if we hadn’t just moved out of the area. The limb looked perfectly healthy btw, green and all. There was no indicating factors, according to the adults at the time.

Don't know about Papa New Guinea, but where I live we have had lots of healthy trees fall over from a bit of wind when the ground is soaked.

Somehow I suspect trees in Papa New Guinea are different than the trees where you are

or perhaps the main difference between Papua New Guinea and the GP's location is that people feel entitled to make up weird questionable stories about PNG and not about their place.

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