My comment with regards to cancer was slightly tongue in cheek as you gathered but it does raise another useful illustrative point. In fact the current risk of dieing from cancer during your life time if you are a male is 1:4 - slightly better odds for a female. The life time risk is therefore high. We spend very little of our lifetime flying a single over the water and certainly not a life time. So is the average GA pilot more likely to die of cancer or from ditching - without doubt far more likely to die of cancer. If he spent his lifetime flying over water, you would arrive at a different conclusion.
I tried to make some kind of reply to this yesterday, but I don't think I put my point over very well. I'm going to try again, because I think it's actually quite important.
I remember a similar argument a while ago on a different forum, where some petrolheads were complaining that 3000 road deaths a year were nothing in comparison with 30,000 deaths per year due to pneumonia, and therefore restricting their right to drive like morons was a disproportionate infringement of their civil liberties. However, the truth of the matter is that the 'typical' patient who dies of pneumonia is probably an elderly person who has already had a stroke and who swallows their food the wrong way, or who has had a fall and broken some ribs and can't cough to clear their lungs. They tend to be very frail, and even if you hit them with strong antibiotics and get them over their pneumonia, they tend to die of something else (another stroke, a pulmonary embolism) a few weeks or months down the line. I'm not arguing for a moment that older people aren't valuable, or that they don't deserve good care. Simply that we will all get to a point where our time has come, and at which medical treatment becomes at best a losing battle.
People tend to get cancer a little younger and whilst they're still relatively fit, but it's still, by and large, a disease that strikes people when they're older:
Cancer mortality by age - UK statistics : Cancer Research UK
In contrast, when relatively young people meet violent and unexpected deaths through transport accidents, the loss is, if not far greater, then at least far less inevitable. We all know that we're going to die but we hope that it will be at a good age, after we've gotten to know our grandkids - who will remember us fondly. We don't like to imagine ourselves being scraped off the ground, with the police trying to match limbs to torsos and our dependants wrangling with insurance companies whilst trying to grieve. All deaths are
not the same.
But perhaps more to the point, non-smokers don't have a huge degree of control over how likely they are to get cancer - there are a few very specific types of cancer such as cervical cancer that it's worth screening for - for most types it's a bad idea. A healthy diet is a good idea, and so is going to see your doctor for unexplained weight loss, blood in your stool, or worrying moles.
Again, I'm not arguing that old people are worthless. But as an individual, and assuming that you enjoy life, would you rather die at 40 or 80? Unless your answer is that you wouldn't mind either way, it makes sense to concentrate on avoiding the most immediate causes of death.
Another way of looking at it would be to think about how much different diseases shorten your life on average. A disease that kills an 85 year old probably didn't shave more than a few months or years off their life; if you plow an aircraft into the ground or sea aged 40, you might cut your life expectancy by 45 -50 years.
About 1-2% of us will die in aircraft accidents. Excepting medical emergencies, private pilots who die through accidents will almost always be fit (otherwise they wouldn't be flying) and will have a lot to look forward to in life. And whilst fate can throw anybody a curve-ball, I like to think that I have a reasonably high degree of control over whether or not I die in an aircraft accident - which is not the case for cancer.