Millions of people disappear every year

a reply to: Tendencies

originally posted by: Answer
Use your brain. If millions of people were vanishing without a trace every year, just about everyone would personally know somebody who disappeared and it would be HUGE news all over the media with experts trying to determine the cause.

Quite true. One cute little blonde girl goes missing anywhere in the country and the media goes nuts. If thousands of people were disappearing each day, it would become very obvious.

On the other hand, with the world population at over 7 billion people it wouldn't hurt us to lose a few more than the 56 million so who die every year.

Too many people. Not enough souls to go around.

a reply to: Skyfloating

Occam's razor.

Before you get to "time slips", "alien abduction" or some kind of "spontaneous invisibility" you have to consider that there are a thousand other reasons for someone simply vanishing.

As you would no doubt see from the statistics, out of 10 million (est) disappearances 9.5 million are solved. Most of those are people who simply wanted to run away and hide. So, the majority of those outstanding disappearances would be the same. They simply wanted to run away from something.

Another problem with a lot of the articles about these stories is that most of it them are rehashed from others, embellished, exaggerated, manipulated to be more "mysterious" than they are. Read a blog post about someone vanishing in incredibly mysterious circumstances and you can almost guarantee that if you contacted a person actually involved they would say it was mostly bs, exaggerated, made to seem more dramatic than it actually was.

In most of these cases the disappeared are found, in the half million or so that aren't (right now) many will be in a year or two, and those that remain will most plausibly be suicide, running away, murder... none of that is mundane or boring, although very sad, so I don't know why people insist on trying to make these cases even more dramatic than they already are.