Climbing Mount Everest is no walk in the park, but you can buy a trip there and several hundred go each year. Since 2000 the fatality rate as been about 1.4 per 100 visitor (including those who have to turn back without reaching the summit) according to Wikipedia. Is there any other single destination/activity that has a death rate that high?
Those flying squirrel suits might be close.
This might quickly become a definitions game. In Everest’s favor, it’s (a) really dangerous, (b) popular enough that you get a reasonable statistical sample, and © famous enough that mountaineers will take a disproportionate share of their “total lifetime mountaineering risk” to reach the summit, concentrating the total danger of their hobby in that one event.
Just looking at mountains, Annapurna is much deadlier than Everest. Climbing Annapurna isn’t exactly a “hobby”, but climbing Everest probably isn’t (or shouldn’t be) either. You could probably also find e.g. a particular BASE jumping location that’s deadlier than Everest, but with a smaller sample size.
Ten deadliest hobbies, with death rates, according to this site: Top 10 Deadliest Hobbies - Toptenz.net
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- Bungee Jumping - 1 in 500,000
- Scuba/Deep Sea Diving - 1 in 200,000
- Skydiving - 1 in 160,000
- Ski Jumping - 1 in 8,333
- Heli-Skiing - 1 in 5560
- Cliff Diving/Base Jumping - 1 in 2,317
- Boxing - 1 in 2,200
- Summit/Rock Climbing - 1 in 1750 *
- Motocross/Motorcycle Racing - 1 in 1,000
- Hang Gliding - 1 in every 1,000
- The web site also notes the following:
I think “civilian astronaut” beats Everest. There have only been a small handful of them, less than 10 by my accounting, so the death of Christa McAuliffe implies a death rate of >10%.
So maybe to refine the question: Is there an activity that, compared to climbing Everest, (a) is undertaken by at least as many people every year, (b) concentrates the risk of dying in a similar period of time (a few hundred hours?), where that period is deliberately chosen by the participant, (c) reasonably counts as a hobby (not suicide, not military service, etc.), and (d) kills at least as great a fraction of those who undertake it? I suspect that the answer may be no.
There are experimental aircraft that may have been as deadly as Everest, like the Revolution Mini-500, but I can’t find any that are as deadly and as popular. Maybe some particular subset of recreational drug use, if that counts?
Not as bad, but what about that freshwater deep cave diving? I know it’s a rare hobby, but definitely seems like something I would avoid (seriously, I get a little anxious whenever I have to put on the full chemical warfare get-up for gas hut training).
34 deaths out of 450 spacefarers = 1 in 13.
It is a bit unfair to include (a), because among tall mountains, Everest is vastly more popular even though it is not the most dangerous:
Other mountains have death rates of up to 32% (compared to Everest’s 4%), but far fewer people ever attempt them.
Wouldn’t it be fairer to measure lethality in deaths/hour or maybe something like a “micromort” (chances of death per million of something)?
Under that rating, taking an Ecstasy pill is 0.5 micromorts and an Everest attempt is 12,000 to 32,000 micromorts depending on source.
Krokodil users, perhaps?
If you measured danger on a per-hour scale, deep sea diving would go way up. Mountain climbing can turn from “we’re doing fine” to “oh crap oh crap oh crap” within hours, but in diving, you’re thinking in seconds.
For every 100 who have summitted K2, 29 have died, while for Everest it’s 4/100. That’s some stiff odds.
To make this an interesting question, I think you have to consider popularity. Otherwise, it just devolves into rare activities that happened to kill almost everyone who tried them. “At least as popular as Everest” might go too far, though. Maybe a lower arbitrary cutoff, or some kind of weighted measure that considers both deadliness and popularity?
Drug use numbers are tricky. Like, even if “drinking” counts as a hobby, does “drinking and driving”? And I’m pretty sure it’s easy to find drugs that beat Everest by all my measures except (b), but “1% chance of dying at some random point over the next year, if I keep doing this” feels like a different kind of choice from “1% chance of dying today”.
And the particular variant of competitive freedivinghas an especially high fatality rate.
That depends what hours you count. I’d start from a moment where you deliberately take the action that puts you in danger (ascend into the death zone, swim into the underwater cave, etc.), and stop when you’re dead or out of danger. I wouldn’t start from a moment where you realize that you’re in unexpected danger, since that would include e.g. the time from noticing that a car is about to hit you, while out for a low-risk stroll, to getting hit by that car.
Maybe the question is “in what recreational activity do participants voluntarily expose themselves to the greatest danger, in micromorts per day, according to their best rational estimate of that risk”?
Russian Roulette - 1 in 6
11 of 23 people died going over Niagara Falls … but not all of them were hobbyist … and that doesn’t include the fella who receive a lifetime ban on entering Canada, as bad as that is, it’s not death.
these days you don’t need experience to climb Everest, you just need the cash to pay guides. For other big mountains I don’t believe someone will take you along if you are not experienced.
Right. Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air hypothesizes that the Everest death rate is so high because rich people can pretty much pay to climb even if they are not ready. Usually it goes ok, but with no experience you can quickly succumb to a disaster.
I read in one of the Freakonomics books that riding horses is much more dangerous than people generally realize. If you work it out by the hours people spend doing it, riding a horse is more dangerous than riding a car or riding a motorcycle. That said, danger in this statistic was defined as death or serious injury not death alone. I don’t have the figures but I would imagine you’re less likely to be killed in a horse accident than in a motorcycle or car accident.