[nojvek]

I’ve done both caving and cave diving. Other than free diving (single breath), cave diving is the second most dangerous form of diving. Cave diving is really technical. As you’ve said, there’s a 1000 things that can easily go wrong.

Imagine you are in pitch black darkness, with limited visibility even with torches. The water is moving, there isn’t a GPS equivalent, it’s real hard to keep track of position other than markers on a rope.

There can be castrophobicially small tunnels that you need to crawl through. Add bulky gear to the scenario. There can be sharp edges that can tear through skin or gear. Worse, there can be stones in the water stream shooting at you.

There is so much that is an element of luck.

This is one of the reasons that interest me so much in robotics. Imagine being able to send 10’s of robots that can map the entire cave in parallel and send the accurate position of the kids. Not only that, but they can autonomously deliver important gear like food, oxygen, heat blankets e.t.c while human divers prepare for rescue. The man-machine patnership can potentially save so many lives.

I strongly believe the future of exploration/rescue is all about how smart + cheap we can make our robots. It’s so much cheaper sending robots than humans to dangerous missions.