You also cannot directly compare a metro line to intercity rail. That line in Tokyo was like what, 20th they built all in the same terrain, they are really good at this by now. Meanwhile, rail tunnels are usually bespoke projects.
But there was a war, wasn't there? So why not admit that 8000-year-old myth can have got "the rocks went flying" part right.
Written accounts are still vastly superior to oral tradition of course, their accuracy is on another level. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing to glimpse from old myths.
> "So why not admit that 8000-year-old myth can have got "the rocks went flying" part right."
Because they're cherry-picked examples fished out of a sea of nonsense. You can't ignore that the body of oral tradition is almost entirely florid fiction, and claim that a few bits and pieces that vaguely resemble reality are evidence that oral tradition preserves information over long timescales. It's methodologically invalid. That kind of analysis gives the same result ("we found an ancient myth that resembles a fact"), independent of whether the proposition, "oral tradition preserves information", is true or false.
It's a classic fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking ("Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.")
> E.g. "By repeating the process enough times, the probability that you never catch me becomes smaller than, say, getting struck by lightning" doesn't seem to show it's a proof?
That's fine though, because the point isn't really to publish math papers without disclosing proofs. For example, presenting a valid digital signature is sometimes colloquially called a proof that you had the private key, even though there is 1 in gazillion chance that you didn't. For such practical tasks, very high chance tends to be good enough.
Electric scooters and such do create a new danger that didn't exist before: they let (indeed, encourage) you to take the hazardous part (the battery) inside an apartment to "refuel". An equivalent would be bringing a gas-driven moped into your place which is against the rules in many places, and why would you do it anyway.
As such, it's important to take all possible reasonable steps to mitigate the risk. Those vehicles are still great overall, if only because, between air quality problems and exacerbated extreme weather events, fossil fuels cause deaths, injuries and property damage just through their normal usage. But the danger is there, and needs to be considered.
