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by swid 1097 days ago
I’ve know mountain climbers, hang glider/paraglider pilots, scuba divers, sky divers, and more and we pretty much say that exact thing. I’ve been casual acquaintances with people who have died doing extreme sports.

Usually, the people in these sports say if the worst were to happen to them, they accept that risk and wouldn’t want their fate to stop other people from following their passions. That the feeling of being alive chasing these dreams fulfills a part of them, and they would be lost without that fulfillment.

We all do take risks for our own happiness, different people just want different things from life and will drawn that line in different places.

My guess is the five people on the sub would not want this incident to stop people from attempting to visit the Titanic.

3 comments

...Yes, you're going to take risks. Got it. This risk in particular ends up with you as chunky salsa 4 kilometers under the water, because you couldn't be bothered to sink a copy of the bloody thing with no one in it first.

If it's worth making, make 2 or 3 of with at least one slated for being destroyed at one point.

Space Shuttle Enterprise never saw Space or the launch pad. It was still made and flown.

There's a spectrum of risk comfort in mountaineering though.

At the end of the day if there's a rockslide, there's nothing you can do, so you have to be willing to accept some level of risk.

But at the same time, the majority of mountaineering deaths are due to people taking unnecessary risks (for the sport). Being poorly prepared in terms of gear, or making poor decisions, or not being educated enough in climbing, safety assessment, and rescue techniques.

There's absolutely a lot you can do to mitigate the risk, and I think even the experienced mountaineers who choose to take more risk (say, traveling lighter and placing less protection in order to cover more ground in a day) don't advocate for that as the standard way to practice the sport.

I'll be honest, I've had a few close calls myself, but I've taken those as lessons in how to do things more safely going forward, because I value doing things safely more than "bagging more peaks".

I guess if your dream is something like "climb every mountain" accepting more risk is necessary.

But I don't see why the people on this Titanic expedition couldn't have achieved their goals while spending a bit more time on R&D + QA.

Also, people should be making these risk decisions for themselves, not others. The CEO may have had it coming to him, but I feel bad for the other crew on board if they weren't able to decline the expedition, or weren't provided adequate information about the testing that had been done.

But they endanger others who have to go looking or attempt to rescue them.