From a standpoint of difficulty (feel free to interpret that many different ways,) what feats have been accomplished that involve a human being transported somewhere, or exploring, or doing something, that rival the challenge of landing men on the Moon?
Or not even necessarily difficulty, but just notability.
I’ve read, for instance, that fewer men have scuba’d to 600 feet or deeper in the ocean without the aid of a pressurized body suit than the number of men (12) who have been on the Moon. (Not sure about the exact ocean depth but it was some stat like that)
It’s hard to make a comparison. A deep scuba dive mostly just depends on having one man with an extraordinary body, who’s thus capable of making the dive. But the moon shot required the coordinated efforts of many thousands of individuals, with a wide variety of abilities and skill sets.
Containing and cleaning up after the Chernobyl disaster. It was a massive undertaking involving hundreds of thousands of people, many at significant personal risk, on short deadlines and under immense political pressure. Granted, most of it was simple grunt work, but it still had to be done. Not only that, the cleanup still ongoing, and will be for the foreseeable future.
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The Manhattan Project, I’d say. Same level of institutional coordination and rapid application of science to industrial processes, and similar tight time frames. Basically both projects were making something happen that had been almost purely theoretical a handful of years prior.
Not sure why the transporting of men is important; the real challenge of the moon landing programs (Gemini, Apollo) was in the massive coordination to design, build and test the equipment to get them there and back, as well as develop the techniques to accomplish it.
“Challenge” can have many aspects here: cost, technical difficulty, danger, low probability of success, etc.
One feat worth mentioning is the ascent of all fourteen 8000m peaks without supplemental oxygen. Until Reinhold Messner undertook & completed this project many knowledgeable people considered it obviously impossible.
Why would it be impossible? It takes the same skills and inherent abilities for all of them. If someone’s capable of doing it for whichever one is the hardest, then they’d also be capable of the other 13.
One possibility, depending on how you look at it, would be humans descending into the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. It even followed the same pattern: the first manned descent was in 1960, by the U.S Navy. This, along with Navy habitats like SeaLab, kicked off a whole round of speculation about our ‘mastery’ of the sea, how cities would be eventually underwater with people farming seaweed and fish, yada yada.
Then people didn’t descend again to those depths until James Cameron did it in 2012 with private money. Another private descent happened this year, and now several companies are planning to send people gack. Very similar to the evolution of the space program.
When I saw “Free Solo,” about Alex Honhhold climbing El Capitan without a safety rope, I felt this was one pinnacle of human achievement. Very different endeavor than the thousands of people who made the moon landings happen, but something about it did spark the comparison in my mind.
Out of 193 summits of Everest without bottled oxygen (this is back in May 2016) there were 24 deaths over 26,000 feet. That’s a 12.4% chance of death. Compare that to those using oxygen, 6,811 total summits and 255 deaths for a 3.7% chance of death. I’d assume the risk on the other mountains over 8,000 meters is comparable, at least in scale. Doing something like that once is extraordinary, doing it 13 times without dying is phenomenal.
Those expeditions that explored the Arctic and Antarctica are up there. Huge, state-planned and funded projects with very significant chances of death and failure. All to get a handful of people to a place where humans can’t survive any period of time at all without modern technology keeping them alive. Except instead of taking three days, it took years.
I’ve just started The Terror, a recent show about the Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. At several points in the show, the parallels with astronauts are obvious. Even canned food was a brand new technical achievement, like Tang and freeze-dried ice cream were in the 60s. But the canned food on The Terror caused lead poisoning, yet another horror these guys had to contend with in their years in the frozen wilderness. Of course running into an Inuit or two strikes a blow to the “alien world” vibe.
But you’re assuming that the chances of death on each mountain are uncorrelated: That each time you climb, you roll the dice to see if you die. In actuality, though, some people are better at surviving low-oxygen conditions than others. It could be that the ones that die are just the ones who are really bad at tolerating low oxygen, and were guaranteed to die on any summit, and the ones who survived are good enough at it that they’d be guaranteed to survive every time. More likely, it’s some combination, but it’s still more likely that someone who survived it once can do so again.
Definitely true. But low oxygen is by no means the only hazard encountered when attempting to climb the world’s highest mountains.
And Messner believed in climbing mountains “by fair means” which in his book meant entirely by his own efforts, without help. This seriously increased the difficult and risk.
“More likely,” sure–but that’s FAR from a guarantee. Whenever you’re in the Death Zone, the margin for survival is much smaller. Some small bit of bad luck that ordinarily wouldn’t mean much can very easily prove fatal.
And, as they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Who in the 1950s would have thought that Edmund Hillary, of all people, would eventually be struck down by altitude sickness?
