 What's Pluto got to do with risk? For the team responsible for navigating the New Horizons spacecraft nearly 3 billion miles to a former planet on the outskirts of our solar system, risk has been part of the mission from day one. But Pluto, as it turns out, is also a five-letter shortcut to becoming a risk expert. And here's how. P is for probability. Risk is all about the probability of something happening that you'd rather didn't. It involves phrases like, that's a 50% chance of rain today, or you have a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying from being bitten or struck by a dog. Or there's a 1 in 10,000 chance of the New Horizons spacecraft hitting a small rock and disintegrating in a shower of space dust. Risk doesn't tell you whether something will happen or not, but it does tell you what the chances are of it happening. Next L. L is for latency. Sometimes the consequences of a risk are immediate. If you get struck by lightning, you tend to know straight away. Other times, though, there's a delay between the cause and the effect. Eat a dodgy burger, for instance, and it may be a couple of hours before your best friends with the lavatory. In some cases it can take years for the effects of being exposed to something harmful to appear. Smokings like that. Some people smoke for decades before their lungs finally give up on them. We may still find that something that happened years ago to the New Horizons spacecraft may actually cause problems later on in its mission. This delay between being exposed to something or something happening and it having an effect is called latency. And it's really important for understanding risks that aren't immediately apparent. Next we have U. U is for uncertainty. Sometimes we can predict the probability of something bad happening. Sometimes we can make an educated guess. And sometimes it's anyone's guess what's going to happen next. Uncertainty kicks in when we don't know enough to predict the chances of something bad happening, often though it means putting a boundary around the likelihood of something bad occurring. For instance, I don't know what the risk is of you being attacked by a flock of stir-crazy seagulls while watching this video. That is uncertainty. But I'm pretty sure that the risk is small. That's me putting a boundary around that uncertainty. The New Horizon mission is filled with uncertainty because we've never done this before. But this doesn't mean that anything can happen. It just means that we can't predict everything that might happen. After U comes T and T is for trade-offs. Wouldn't it be great if we could get rid of all risk? Sadly, this will never happen. Apart from this making life rather boring, risk is a byproduct of being alive. You can't have one without the other. This means that at the end of the day risk is all about trade-offs. Risk decisions are often about how much pain we're willing to suck up for the gain we want to achieve. And in most cases we're willing to accept a bit of risk if it gets as to where we want to be, like Pluto for instance. And finally, O. O is for opportunity. Risk has a bit of a bad rap, but it's really your best friend. How? Because understanding risk helps you make smart decisions and it helps you take advantage of opportunities you might otherwise miss. And this brings us back to Pluto. When NASA sent the New Horizons spacecraft on its journey on January 19th 2006, it was a risk. There was a probability of mission failure, a probability that was calculated and minimized as far as it could be. There was latency where early mission events could have jeopardized the Pluto fly-by. There was uncertainty. New Horizons was boldly going where no spacecraft has been before. There were trade-offs, risks that had to be weighed against each other and against benefits to achieve the mission goals. And there was opportunity. The chance to navigate through these risks to learn things that no previous person in the history of humanity has known. So yes, this video is about risk and Pluto, the planet or dwarf planet or planetoid or whatever you want to call it, but it's also about a great way of remembering some of the more important aspects of risk. So remember, while you're watching images of Pluto streaming back to Earth, they're only possible because of another Pluto. Probability, latency, uncertainty, trade-offs and opportunity.