Death in the clouds: The problem of bodies on Everest (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Death in the clouds: The problem of bodies on Everest (2015)

bbc.com

51 pointsabhi361 comments

I don't like how the first graphic splits into "climbers" and "Sherpas". If anything, the Sherpas are the true climbers, as they do that all their life, and their physical abilities are probably up to olympic athlete level in most cases. The "climbers" should be labelled "western tourists" (except for the mountain guides).

Wouldn't the label "western tourists" be wildly inaccurate though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...

"Rich tourists" would be more appropriate, yes.

> The ITBP, however, says that Paljor’s body is hopelessly stuck, and that anyway, they can’t guarantee that it actually belongs to Paljor – or even to an Indian for that matter

Looking at the pictures it appears that someone has rolled Paljor over as you can see him resting on both sides with his jacket less faded on the most recently exposed side. Clearly not that stuck.

The article goes on to say that he's since been removed altogether so, yeah, not that stuck at all.

This seems like such an obvious use for robots, and given the explosion of robots in delivery and other fields now, I'm curious if anyone has tried it ? Why can't battery powered robots, with sleds, controlled from base camp, clean up the mountain - picking up the dead and perhaps some trash too ?

Have you ever actually been on a mountain? The robotics industry is decades away from having anything that can operate reliability and do heavy work in that environment. If anyone tried it now we would end up with a mountain littered with broken robots.

1) You are underestimating how difficult the terrain is. The only types of robot that'd have a chance would be some of the legged ones from Boston Dynamics, and even they probably wouldn't be up to the challenge.

2) Lithium-ion batteries perform poorly at low temperatures. And there's very little electricity available on the mountain at all, let alone near the summit where a lot of the bodies are.

We can make robots that work in space. We can surely make things which work in this environment. Either heat them, or use thermal batteries for power when needed. Also might be an interesting application for compressed air.

> We can make robots that work in space. We can surely make things which work in this environment.

Space is a way less challenging environment than mountains for robots, which are well equipped to handle, say, lack of air and gravity, but poorly equipped to handle rough and rocky terrain and lots of gravity.

It would be a great "x-prize" type thing, indeed. Beyond current capabilities, but not that far beyond them, and thus interesting. Being able to take oxygen bottles, cameras, etc. around would make climbing a lot easier, too.

As an aside, pretty baffling that people go to all the trouble to travel through such a unique, pristine environment and still won't bother to clean up their rubbish (just to be clear, actual garbage, not human remains).

I'm clueless about this whole process. Where would they put that? Carry it up and down again?

Is that feasible?

Sherpas trek up and down various parts of the climb dozens of times for each group that hires them setting up the next camps, routes, etc. There are people paid for cleanup who also do similar.

The tourists/climbers could do it but aren't as acclimated to the environment. Paying someone else to do it is probably the best way to ensure reliable cleanup and safety of the tourists/climbers.

Does it really matter if there is trash and dead bodies up there? Who's bothered or poisoned by this? Other rich people? Is there an ecosystem up there?

Here is an excerpt from "The Tragedy of the Commons" paper [1]

"""

The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

"""

The excerpt seems to convey the same opinion, but if read the paper you get to see it from many more view points.

1. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full

That doesn't answer the question, except if you are implying that populations are going to move to Everest in the future.

Can you imagine a scenario in the future where there would be a need to do an activity at the summit of Everest?

No, I can't.

What is your point?

Without significant effort, we are not so good at a judging what resources that are not essential now yet will be in the future. Even the example, I'm going to give is lacking because it is rooted in today's technological activities.

For example, how would the stuff left on Everest affect the remote sensing requirements of the future? Perhaps there is more, but we cannot have thoughts about the questions we do not know to how to ask yet. This view point should not be straw-maned as objecting to any and everything, it is simply cautionary.

In summary, in coming to conclusions we have to factor in our lack of sufficient imagination.

Waterworld?

If you have respect for others who wish to experience the environment as close to "natural" as possible, then you clean up after yourself or pay for someone else to.

'rich' people?

I tend to agree. A lot of the people who climb Everest, or at least spend a lot of time on the mountain, are Sherpas, who most definitely aren't rich, but I think he's sniping at the others, who cough up for the license to do it, turn up with thousands of pounds worth of kit, etc.

If I understand it correctly, a guided Everest tour with all inclusive (equipment, travel, licenses, supplies, basecamp for multiple weeks) is about 100k, so it's definitely not for everybody.

Sure, it's a fair bit of money but what does that have to do with being 'rich'?

I do find it ridiculous that hikers are allowed to attempt the climb, and that if they die on the climb their bodies are allowed to litter the landscape forever.

When you attempt a climb, it should be required that you pay a deposit that will pay for 1) removal of all trash left by you assuming that everything you carry becomes trash and 2) recovery and removal of your body in case you die on the climb.

Since mostly wealthy people do these climbs it shouldn't be a problem at all.

Your proposal is basically that on the event of a rich person's death, several poor people should risk their own lives to commemorate the way that he died. Is anyone surprised that isn't how it works?

Poor people are already "required" (i.e. paid enough money to do it willingly) to risk their lives helping rich people get up and down the mountain. This doesn't seem substantially different.

Hauling a heavy dead body down the mountain is a lot tougher and more dangerous than carrying some extra oxygen bottles and food. In the death zone the porters are already working at the outer limit of human performance.

This. Never actually been in the death zone - my highest has been just under 7km, but it was hard enough carrying my own stuff up and down.

That's a neat trick, quoting a word that would have made the parent comment unreasonable, as if the parent comment had actually used that word...

I don't think the grandparent poster is suggesting that the sherpas be forced to recover the body. If you read the article, it makes it clear that in practice, several poor people already are cleaning up after the rich people who have climbed the mountain.

It is already possible to buy repatriation insurance, according to the article. I don't think gp's suggestion that climbers be required to buy that insurance is unreasonable.

Should the Sherpas be forced to buy insurance as well? What about the ones going on these dangerous recovery runs?

I don't know. It's kind of beside the point of rich foreigners coming and littering up the mountain.

Probably it should be required that their employers buy insurance on their behalf. In fact, they went on strike for something like this after the avalanche in 2014.

But, yeah, fundamentally it's probably best for anyone who is going up to make or have made for them provisions to ensure they come down again, one way or the other.

Employer insurance. This cost would be passed to the customer necessarily.

If a sherpa detects a foreigner wont make it to the top, shoots him and returns with the equpiment- would the church of economics and the great magus consider that a blessed act?

The church of economics considers it holy when negative externalities are factored into prices.

Can we be civil, please?

He's proposing that they put up the money for there to be an offer that is sufficiently attractive that the market will solve the problem. No one needs to be forced. They can take the offer to remove the body if they think offer is attractive.

Ah yes, The Market. Everything is okay if it's dictated by The Market, right?

Child slavery in the coffee industry? That's cool, working exactly as The Market should be, quite efficient even. Sex trafficking? The Market. Fucking up the planetary environment to the point where it may no longer be hospitable to human life in a few hundred years? Don't worry, that's The Market.

No one needs to be forced, you just apply huge wealth differentials and get poor people to submit to slavery and life threatening circumstances like recovering rich people bodies from mountains willingly.

I don't know why people are so reflexively bitter when anyone mentions the market. No one in this conversation is claiming that the market solves all problems. Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than the alternatives, and we can admit as much without committing ourselves to any ideological platform.

Because people reflexively rationalize and justify immoral behaviors and atrocities with that's just how the market works. It's a cop out, it's a perpetuation of the status quo and a barrier to improving it.

Your argument is basically equivalent to 'trump isn't perfect, but he's a whole lot better than hitler'. While true, it's merely a distraction from the conversation at hand.

Are you trying to say offering people money to remove bodies and trash is immoral? How odd.

>Your argument is basically equivalent to 'trump isn't perfect, but he's a whole lot better than hitler'. While true, it's merely a distraction from the conversation at hand.

Is Trump climbing Everest?

He never rationalized immoral behavior, unless you consider climbing Mt Everest immoral.

A lot of people risk their lives every day in their jobs. It's not typically seen as immoral to do this.

I agree markets have failures, and they also shouldn't justify immoral behavior--I really sincerely agree with you on that--but in those cases, that happens because of externalities. In this case the externality is the dead bodies and litter, so a market solution isn't typically bad in this context.

> Because people reflexively rationalize and justify immoral behaviors and atrocities with that's just how the market works.

Maybe this happens, but it hasn't happened in this thread and it frequently doesn't happen in other threads before someone makes a big fuss about the market. And no, there's nothing immoral about compensating someone fairly to solve a dangerous problem; yes the opportunity will always be more appealing to the poor in a capitalist society, but there are no viable alternatives so I don't understand all of the complaining.

> Your argument is basically equivalent to...

No it's not; you simply misunderstood. My argument is that capitalism doesn't solve all problems, but no one has better ideas. Even the so-called socialist eutopias of northern Europe have a market-based economy. Again, I don't understand complaining about a problem with no candidate solutions.

This whole thread was kicked off by a greenbean HN commenter's capricious tastes. There is nothing more ideological than taste, because it can motivate any injustice.

I do find it ridiculous that... their bodies are allowed to litter the landscape forever.

Yes, others' opinions can result in actions you don't like. I don't see how that is pertinent here.

Uhhh, I'm not complaining about dead bodies in some out-of-the-way spot that I'll never see, and suggesting that something "should be required". That was the other person. I'm fine with the bodies remaining in place. I like all the actions we're seeing in this context.

No one suggested otherwise.

The alternatives are around for thousand of years (religions, etc.). Capitalism for 200 years and might be on its way out in a lot of run down places.

Religions are categorically different than economic systems, and capitalism is as old as the idea of private property (prehistoric), not simply 200 years old.

There are a lot of unexamined assumptions here. Why would we assume that a prehistoric society had any particular system of economic interactions? It's not as if they wrote something we can read. In those cases in which tombs or whatever were left behind that we can examine, it typically seems that relatively rare "kings" were buried with all of the gold and other shiny rocks, and sometimes with some servants or wives for the afterlife who seem to have been ritualisticly killed for that purpose. Was that "capitalism"? Maybe!

We know that there were merchants and people bartered to exchange goods and services. The first written records in many societies are often ledgers of royal wealth transactions. Every prominent historian believes that capitalism is the original economic system.

"Royal wealth transactions", the foundation of capitalism! They must have competed for serfs and slaves in a voluntary market!

So you're upset that the Assyrian peasantry didn't invent accounting?

Yeah the market solves the problem by sending poor people to risk their own lives to commemorate the way the first person died.

Just because The Market is making it happen doesn't make it any less detestable.

I guess that depends on whether you think a choice between poverty and dangerous work is worse or better than poverty without a choice. Personally, I'm not a fan of slavery or poverty, so I tend to prefer market-based solutions to problems.

The trash certainly, but I think there is something appropriate about having to step over bodies on the way.

When I climb a mountain (and I've climbed plenty), I don't want to see people, living or dead. It detracts from the experience. Everest? No thanks.

I must admit that my first thought was corpse-looting. Also a lifetime supply of free food.

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