[tsaksa]

As Kevin pointed out, the kind of decision that was described in this thread would probably not occur in a real life. However, if it did, engineers would have some previous experience to draw on. Life and death decisions are made by some types of engineers, where personal safety and projected fatalities are traded off against cost, budgets, and schedules. It may not sound ethical, but I believe it does happen on a regular basis.

A good example is when a highway being designed. A large number of parameters need to be selected including the number of lanes, the location of entrances and exits, and the length of acceleration lanes, the width of break down lanes, the radius of curves, etc. A lot of data has been collected on these things over the years, and the civil engineers building the highway would be able to calculate fairly precisely how making changes such as increasing or decreasing the length of the acceleration lanes by 100 feet would have on the number of fatalities over a given period of time. It would be great to have the budget and schedule to build the safest roads possible. Unfortunately, in the real world engineers may be forced due to cost limitations and other factors to select less optimal implementations. I am pleased that I work in a field where this type of tradeoff is not required, but I believe that some engineers do face these types of problems.