A gondola ride to the top of Everest would be awesome. Right now, 1.4% of the people who try to summit it die. That's ludicrous and totally indefensible. Anyway it's not as wild as it used to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Everest#Everest_economy
That's because those people have no business being there. Those mountains are for genuine climbers that can earn their ascent there, not idiots with too much money and no respect for a mountain, who have sherpas basically push them to the top.
I hate this ridiculously entitled attitude. If you aren't a great climber in fantastic physical shape, just don't go to Everest. I have the same kind of contempt for people who pay crazy sums of money to go on a Safari in Africa with loads of guides to shoot lions or elephants, so they can show their friends back home the pictures and the carcasses.
Actually - in that same vein. Those are the same people that show up to Burning Man spending insane sums of money and completely defeating the spirit of that event.
I am not a climber, a hunter, or someone who has ever gone to Burning Man, but if you want to take part in those cultures, you should do so with respect and humility.
> That's because those people have no business being there.
Says who? Who are you to tell people where they have business being?
> Those mountains are for genuine climbers that can earn their ascent there, not idiots with too much money and no respect for a mountain, who have sherpas basically push them to the top.
Again, says who?
> I hate this ridiculously entitled attitude.
Like the one you're showing telling others what they should and shouldn't do?
Where are you going with this? People climb Mt Everest and die. Who says they shouldn't be there? You are free to be a rotten corpse, too, if you like.
Good decision-making requires good judgement. If you think judgement is unfair, then go ahead and make dumb decisions. Though the whole point of having a conversation is to find out how to make good decisions, not to defend bad ones in the name of some misplaced 'right to be stupid.'
>Says who?
Well, I do. If that's not good enough for you, then do something about it instead of pretending like there's some great authority I should be appealing to in the exercise of good reason.
People die climbing it, that's not a justification for saying people don't belong there when what's being suggested it not climbing but riding up in an enclosed environment to tour it. Your position has no merit.
People belong wherever they want to go, dangerous or not. People choose to do dangerous things, accept it and stop trying to say where others should or shouldn't go. Danger is not a reason to say you can't do that.
Biology. Dying from a cerebral oedema is one way your body tells you "you shouldn't have come here". Rushing quickly up that kind of altitude is dangerous to your health - for example, one of the biggest contributors to altitude medicine was when India rushed an army to the Himalayas in the '60s to counter China [1]. They got a lot of pulmonary and cerebral oedemas, and the sizable affected population really helped the literature in the topic.
Also, keep in mind that the opinion offered was in response to someone basically saying that it was indefensible to not build a gondola ride to the top of everest. I notice you didn't tell that commenter "says who?".
Nonsense, people fly everyday, they're called pressurized cabins; that you think anyone is suggesting otherwise is your lack of imagination, not some limitation of biology.
One might similarly say people in wheelchairs have no business seeing the view from a tall building, or that only able-bodied seamen deserve to travel around the world.
The point of accessibility is to allow proportion of humanity to live normally, to do the same things that most of the rest can do; i.e. work, see a movie, and yes, take in a view. The reason to do that is that it improves the lives of the smaller proportion while at least not injuring the rest. (You believe only having stairs in a tall building would be a feature?)
Are you willing to make the argument that looking out from the top of Everest or tramming to the bottom of the canyon for an afternoon is something that everyone should be able to do? That it's more important than preserving those areas for the future?
A while back, I had the opportunity to visit Blarney Castle in Ireland. As it turns out, the castle is an unreconstructed ruin; if you want to kiss the stone or at least take in the view, you have to climb a long, cramped, tight, steep spiral staircase. I'm old, out of shape, arthritic, and not fond of being the cause of a fairly large scale body recovery in the middle of a major tourist attraction, so I didn't go up. So far, I haven't noticed any consequences of the lack, and from what I enjoyed about the site, I'd just as soon they didn't strap an elevator to the side of the tower.
Everest tourism has costs, both in terms of sheer litter and in the lives of people who probably shouldn't be doing it anyway. Grand Canyon development also has costs which would reduce the value of the site. Are those costs worth the benefits?
> Are you willing to make the argument that looking out from the top of Everest or tramming to the bottom of the canyon for an afternoon is something that everyone should be able to do?
Yes, absolutely. Why shouldn't humanity aspire to that?
> Grand Canyon development also has costs which would reduce the value of the site. Are those costs worth the benefits?
My point of view is that yes, the benefits do indeed outweigh the costs. There's plenty of canyon for everyone. Let one section be for families, children, the elderly and lazy. There will still be plenty of trails for hikers who want to get away from all that.
Doesn't seem very aspirational to me. The glory in Everest isn't the nice view, but the feat it takes to get there. When people talk about Everest stories, the view doesn't feature very strongly.
Because 7 billion people trekking to Everest would transform the character of the place so thoroughly that the reason people started doing en masse in the first place would be lost to history. Tragedy of the Commons 101.
The way we prevent these tragedies is via regulation. Needless to say, this demands time and expense that could always be used elsewhere, so if there's a natural barrier limiting access, then by all means, rely on that instead.
Once you open something to everybody, you've got to deal with...everybody. Generally speaking the people who are trying to profit from the initial development have zero interest in carrying the costs their ventures impose. Essentially, they're in the uncompensated extraction business and yeah a lot of people take a very dim view of that and will quite reasonably use any and all measures thay can to block what amounts to theft from the commons.
That's mountain climbing elitism. The "great climbers" made it look cool, then others with more money than skill figured out their own way to do it, and had a great time to boot. I'm sure that drives elitists nuts, kind of like how I'm sure software hackers building with Arduino makes EE majors nuts.
A better analogy would be if an software hacker paid for several starving EE students to come build an amazing Arduino project for their child's science fair, then bragged to everyone about how smart their child is.
Alternatively, imagine Larry Ellison paying for a shitload of comp-sci PhD students to comb through The Art of Programming to look for mistakes, only to submit them under his name so he could get his own cheque from Knuth?
Earnest hobbyism and trying to learn new things is awesome and should be strongly encouraged in everyone. Buying your way to the top and cheapening everyone else's experience is crass and a good way be shunned in almost any social setting.
Your examples illustrate someone lying. Merely arriving at the summit of Everest by assisted means does not make one a liar. People do many things - summiting among them - for their own amusement, not to make grandiose claims. Jon Krakauer "bought" (or had it purchased on his behalf) his way to the top of Everest and to my knowledge has not equated himself with Sir Edmund Hillary to date.
If teleportation was invented, would it cheapen the pioneer's accomplishments if we could just buy a ticket to teleport to the top, grab a peek, and teleport home?
I'm a mountain climber. I'm not Everest caliber. It doesn't sound like elitism to me to say that only experienced, skilled, healthy climbers have any business on a deadly mountain, any more than if I said only experienced, skilled, healthy individuals had any business being a test pilot.
It's not elitism that I can't climb this rock or that mountain. It's the simple limit of my abilities. That's the beauty of it, really, because I have the same opportunity as anybody else- get better.
Speaking of burning man... I missed the ticket sales because my dumbass didn't check the "register try to buy tickets" option on my burner profile. Anyone have one to spare?
>> Right now, 1.4% of the people who try to summit it die. That's ludicrous and totally indefensible.
The only problem I have with it is that bodies are rarely taken back and therefore contribute to the pollution of the mountain. Other than that....as long as everyone climbing knows that there is a 1.4% chance of dying, it's fine. I imagine there are extreme sports which have a similar if not higher death ratio,and I would never want to be forbidden from doing something I love just because I "can" die. And I imagine climbing to the top of Everest is what makes it special, not just standing on the top.
The only problem I have with it is that bodies are rarely taken back and therefore contribute to the pollution of the mountain.
A dead human body is "pollution"? I guess you can counting the clothing and equipment as pollution or trash, but I would call a dead human body quite "natural".
Well, in an environment where the human body will never decay it's pretty much pollution. Please don't take it wrongly - I don't mean to disrespect those that died there,but it's true that their bodies stay there for years. And how many dead bodies can Mount Everest keep until it looks like a scene from some depiction of hell? 100? 1000? 10000?
I'm not saying we should forbid climbing. But offering a way to make the trip without dying would be nice. Also, having a gondola that goes up there would make it easier to remove dead bodies of climbers.
Putting a set of stairs to the peak appeals to the type of person who wants to be on top of Everest, but not to the type of person who wants to climb Everest.
A set of stairs, obviously, ruins the wildness of one of the world's great wildnesses, as well as costs a lot of money for something that would likely go relatively unused.
Otherwise, as has been pointed out, you can take a helicopter to the top, but honestly, that may prove over time to be more risky than the slower way.
I don't get the argument here. Climbing Everest is dangerous, yes. Launching a rocket is dangerous. Going to the bottom of the ocean is dangerous. Putting your head inside a alligator's mouth is dangerous. Walking a tightrope across two tall buildings is dangerous. Space travel is dangerous. Sometimes, dangerous things should just be left alone by most people, not made impotent so any average person can do them. Danger is part of life.
Some dangerous things are worth doing, in spite of being dangerous. Some dangerous things are worth mitigating the danger so more people can do them. Some dangerous things aren't really all that worthwhile.
Seeing a doctor used to be dangerous. Traveling to other countries used to be dangerous. So if I follow your logic we should get rid of all planes and travel because things that are dangerous should remain dangerous because reasons? And we should make sure surgery is still dangerous because reasons?
I totally agree. Things like life jackets for sailors, ropes for climbers, and helmets for motorcyclists have made those sports impotent for the real men/women of this world who scorn safety. If you are not willing to risk it, just stay at home so the rest of us can unflinchingly face danger head on.
A gondola to a mountain climber is hardly the same thing as a helmet to a motorcyclist. More like a city bus to a motorcyclist.
Helmets much more readily compare to ice axes, crampons, weather forecasting, ropes, anchors, avalanche beacons, pulleys, radios... and helmets! Mountain climbers are not against safety.
A gondola ride to Everest would be awful. A quick ascent to that height would virtually guarantee some pretty awful side effects for most passengers. I certainly wouldn't want to be on it.
Millions of people ascend to the height of Everest's summit every day, extremely quickly. I imagine that such a purpose-built gondola would, like modern jets, have a pressurized cabin.
So why do we need the gondola at all? If people just want to hit 29,035 feet above sea level, they can take a plane anywhere in the world.
What makes the top of Everest interesting to visit is that to do it, a person has to overcome very difficult natural challenges. So a gondola to the top would destroy the very value it was supposed to provide.
What's the point of the gondola, then, if you can't step out? If you just want to sit in a metal cabin and enjoy the view, you might as well go in a plane.
I'd go for a solution inside the mountain - maybe a train (like the Jungfrau - not to the top though) or a funicular then a elevator to take you to the very top (like Les Deux Alpes - though that is a glacier dome rather than a peak).
Millions of people haven't even summited Everest (much less everyday, can you imagine? It's like Dane Cook's skit about thousands of firefighters). The numbers around 4,000 according to a quick google search. And it's a multi day trip with plenty of acclimatization stops. Not only that but 100s of those 4000 have perished.
It's not some trivial walk around the park just because it's not considered one of the hardest summits in the world.
As for whether or not the gondola would be a good thing, I guess that'd depend on a lot of feasibility studies and cost analysis (cost to the environment, to the local populations way of life, monetary costs).
You clearly didn't catch the crux of his point - millions of people fly in passenger jets every day at Everest's elevation. All you'd need to do is pressurize the gondola, and there'd be no need for acclimatization.
As the altimeter approaches 17,000 feet, a package of potato chips balloons outward until it ruptures a seam. Sunscreen and hand sanitizer erupt unbidden from bottles. In soft sleeper class, Chinese businessmen sprawl listlessly on their bunks, sucking oxygen from plastic hoses. The bathrooms smell of vomit.
There are two problems with that. One is that for previous and future traditional ascenders it would "cheapen" the experience. In essence it makes scaling it mundane, so you would have elitists oppose this. The second is that unless you institute a limited lottery system Everest would become littered like mt Fujiyama. So basically nature becomes spoiled by commercial interests.
Everest is already covered in junk and dead bodies. Most of this is hidden by snow, but it's a lot closer to a walking up a snowy trash heap than people want to admit.* A little over 4 thousand people have reached the summet which is about the same number of billionares in the world. So, it feels fairly prestegious even if it's mostly a question of how much your willing to spend to get there.
*Mostly becase people use a small set of trails on their assent, and really don't have the enery to bring their trash down with them. The majority of the mountain is untouched, but the trails get a lot of traffic.
