For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
I mean everyone says “omg they’re crazy”, but it’s so easy to say that, and all of us have at least a few things that we’d be willing to do that an onlooker could point to and say “lol why do that when you might die”.
There’s nothing wrong with taking an informed risk, and it’s really up to you what kind of risk you’re comfortable taking. Most of these people seem to have a consistently high risk tolerance, and three of them were very experienced, so I don’t think it’s fair to call them “stupid” or “idiots” just because your risk/reward assessment doesn’t line up with theirs. If that was their idea of living the best life possible, then that’s good for them.
I’d also say that the majority of people in life aren’t as happy as they could be because they’re too scared to let go of convenience and familiarity. People turn down dream opportunities because it means moving to a different country, they stay in jobs they hate because they’re scared of what comes next, they don’t travel to places because five years ago someone died there, and they stay in unfulfilling relationships because they hate the thought of being alone or having to meet new people. So if you’re the kind of person who basically spends their life on the couch with the same old people in the same old place eating the same old food watching the same old shows and you dream about what could’ve been, I’m not sure you have the right to lob criticisms at people who chose to get up and do stuff.
I get what you’re saying about taking a calculated risk - like going for a bungee jump or paragliding or bouldering. However, the more you read about this particular craft the more you realize how much they ignored highly standard safety procedures and design. So I feel like the people criticizing are less saying “why bungee jump when you could die” and more saying “why would you bungee jump without a cord and pay 250,000 dollars for the privilege.”
The idea here is that messing up due to unforseen problems and things that couldn’t have been included in calculations is a “part of the experience” but messing up due to recklessness and disregarding required safety features isn’t in my opinion. Daredevils and adventurers would first and foremost work on safety so that they can keep on doing their extreme stuff. We can go to the space, to the very bottom of the ocean, to many other places, and we can do these because we have been careful. The times when we messed up are usually when we could call it like the infamous rocket explosion of NASA, which the engineers did try to warn NASA before launching it, only for NASA to disregard those. In extreme adventures, safety is a golden rule and death is a rare possiblity, not something to expect.
Lol, we aren’t able to do “extreme stuff” because of safety, we’re able to do it in spite of that. We would advance much faster if we didn’t value human life, full stop. It’s one of humanity’s biggest, albeit necessary inefficiencies. That value isn’t the norm either - throughout history we’ve generally been pretty comfortable with the expectation of death in exchange for advancement, and we owe a lot of our modern knowledge and technology to people who suffered for it. You’re taking a tiny sample size, i.e. the western world for the past 60ish years, and pretending that it reflects a precedent. To the extent that you need humans, safety and risk are always going to compete with one another, and human life is always going to be disposable to some actors.
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