The most comparable record for scuba diving would be dives to depths greater than 300 meters (790 ft) using “recreational” equipment (no pressure suit) which has only been accomplished eight times.
Since Banksiaman brought up heart transpants, another medical achievement that deserves to be mentioned is the eradication of smallpox.
???
(In case this is serious, it is my understanding that the heat of sun is only one problem — the other is the angular momentum. So much delta-V to basically put the brakes on our starting from our planetary orbital path.)
It’s not.
The “trick” is to go at night.
Oh! Heh.
It took a team of 400,000 + people to accomplish the moon landings. Nothing compares.
There are a ton of things achieved by a very tiny number of people.
Take high altitude parachuting, for example. Only 3 people have jumped from over 100k feet (or 30km). Only one from over 40km. The last was just a guy who made a ton of money at Google and it barely dented his net worth.
But these are hardly the mammoth projects that the Moon landings were.
If step one of getting the job done isn’t to light a can with tons of highly flammable crap in it that could wipe out every bit of your existence in seconds, it’s hardly in the same league of difficulty.
If we are counting heads then, apart from straight military activity, some ancient works that used lots of people:
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Great Wall of China
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Roman road network
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Some of the great mound and pyramid landscapes - Great pyramids, US mound building cultures, Maya and so on.
I guess one difference between these and the moon landing is they were cumulative visions, often extending over centuries. Living in an age where incoming governments reverse their predecessor’s decisions every few years, I remain mightily impressed that any culture was able to pursue a singular vision over centuries and dynasties.
Also, willing to grant that these were all big but essentially upscaled repetitive tasks, and may not meet the OP’s criteria.
I think an example of a project engaged in by thousands of people over thousands of years is the Polynesian exploration of the Pacific between about 3000 B.C. and 1200 A.D.:
Time lines must come into play. How long from Kennedy’s speach until Apollo 11: 6 years? That’s just incredible.
And don’t forget from the Wright Brothers powered flight until Apollo 11 was only 60 something years.
I’m obsessed by the Apollo program. Seriously.
Anyone can find feats that have been done few times. Heck, I could probably come up with a list of feats that I’m the only person in the world to have done them. But most of them, it won’t be because they’re difficult, but just because few people cared enough to bother. No kid ever said “Mommy, I want to be the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo along the westerly route”.
There’s also the question of what counts as a single “project”. We could say that Interstate 90 is a “project”, or we could say all of the Interstates in the country, or we could count the entire connected road network in the country, or in an entire continent. But a lot of “projects” are incremental things: When only half of the road network was finished, or only 10%, or only 1%, it was already an accomplishment and a useful thing. But half of Apollo, or half of the Manhattan Project, wasn’t yet really anything in itself.