humans are so oblivious to safety

It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".

We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".

The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.

Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)

Then explain the Apollo program, and the actual printed literature that came out of the program that summarized how they were successful.

Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.

I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems.

If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:

https://ehss.energy.gov/deprep/archive/documents/0308_caib_r...

It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.

There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.

Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.

It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.