What if the best-known Trek trope of them all turned out to be wrong?

If you've just beamed down to a soundstage alien planet, it's a well-known fact that you're as good as dead if you're wearing a red shirt. During the entire run of Star Trek: The Original Series, 24 folks decked out in crimson bit the dust -- more than any other crew member on the show. But does that mean it's more dangerous to be a redshirt? Time to do the math!

A recent trope-destroying study points out that, while redshirts suffer more deaths, there's a question of ratio that has never been analyzed. Based on blueprints sanctioned as canon by Paramount itself, there are a sum total of 430 crewmen on board the Enterprise, 239 of whom are red-shirted engineering, operations and security personnel. With 24 of those having died, that's about a 10 percent mortality rate.

Ready to have your mind blown? There are 55 gold-shirted command and helm personnel members on the Enterprise -- nine of whom died over the course of three seasons. Mortality rate? 13.4 percent!

So the next time you're imagining yourself as a member of the NCC-1701 USS Enterprise, think twice before you decide what kind of crewman you'd be, because it turns out there are worse things than wearing red after all.

(Significance Magazine via StarTrek.com)