AC/DC versus voltage
While easy to remember, the basic dictum that DC is bad for long distance is false. The primary issue was that at low levels of the distribution system AC could use transformers to match the voltage to requirements neatly--low, cheap to insulate, and ( almost) safe in the home, higher and more efficient for the street level, and so on.
It was NEVER true that DC was inefficient for transmission at the same voltage--what was true was that it was vastly more expensive to do voltage conversion for DC. Modern power electronics (and, no, this is not Moore's law in action) have lowered conversion costs (both from one DC voltage to another, and AC to DC and reverse), and DC is becoming more common in serious long-distance applications, with one pioneering use in the Pacific Intertie being over four decades old now. One incentive is to avoid problems of system synchronization, but an emerging one is lower (not higher) transmission losses (by the way, they are not all I-squared R losses--coronal discharge gets rapidly more significant as you scale up in serious long-distance power transmission voltages).
As to safety--at the same voltage household DC is much safer to humans than AC. As to voltages you are actually likely to encounter, the 120V AC in US home wiring can kill pretty easily but usually does not, whereas the 48 DC on which most of the US telephone system used to run was really hard to kill yourself with. When I was a callow youth working at Bell Labs as a summer co-op student about 1970, a grizzled technician taught me the lore that while it was possible to kill yourself with 48DC, it was really difficult, and vanishingly few people ever had. I'm afraid I don't know the relative safety at power transmission type voltages. I'd hazard a guess you are dead either way.