Burning Man is too deadly and must be banned. Right?

That's what I heard online, so I did the math. I was surprised.

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A few weeks ago, I posted a write-up of my experience attending Burning Man for the first time, here in 2025. I also posted a few short videos to YouTube. On one of them, someone left the comment:

It’s a perfectly rational reaction. News was widely reported that a Russian artist was murdered there this year, and there have been other deaths over the years. A guy once ran into the giant burning sculpture. People have died from heat stroke and dehydration. People have been hit by cars out on the playa. And, being mortal humans and all, some have just died — their number came up while they happened to be there.

This raised an interesting question. Are your chances of dying greater when you’re at Burning Man, compared to being out in the regular world? My initial reaction was, well, yeah. Look at the picture I headlined this post with. There are all kinds of dangerous-ass things everywhere you look. They even have a Thunderdome where people actually battle. The desert conditions can be dangerous. People are drunk and on drugs. People are zipping all over on eBikes (illegally, if they’re speeding, and they do get nailed by real cops). People are involved in amateur-led construction projects.

However, all this is balanced by emergency services (police, fire, medical) that are much closer at hand than they are in the regular world — and they’re all paid for by the festival attendees, so no argument can be made that this costs society, or draws emergency services from wherever else they might be needed.

So I did a radical thing… I did the math.

Roughly one person has died per Burning Man event in recent years¹ — that’s only a quarter as many as die at Death Valley National Park.² But I wanted an annualized rate so I could make a legit, supportable comparison to the regular world.

In 2024, 722 per 100,000 people died in the United States.³ That’s the annualized rate we’ll compare against.

Burning Man only lasts 9 days (for most attendees) during which there is 1.0 death, but we need to annualize it. Stretch that out over 365 days, and consider that it’s against 75,000 attendees, and we find there are 54 deaths per 100,000 at Burning Man.

So going by those numbers, being at Burning Man is 13.4⨉ safer (722 vs 54) than being in the regular world.

But wait; you might say. Burning Man is all young strong healthy people, while the regular world is filled with old people who die anyway, every time they turn around. OK, fine. Let’s age-adjust these numbers.