I'm going to go with mental illness.
These people arn't proving themselves, they're abandoning their humanity. It's not something to be celebrated.
These people arn't proving themselves, they're abandoning their humanity. It's not something to be celebrated.
I don't claim to know anything about their motivation, but the accounts I've read are somewhat different than the romantic image you seem to have. For example, I submit this:
"The only food I'd been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of Ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs, making it excruciatingly painful to breathe. Twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet up in the troposphere, there was so little oxygen reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired."
Source: http://outsideonline.com/outside/destinations/199609/travel-...
That's bullshit talk. What does that even mean?
I think mental illness is much more appropriate, because you can "connect with" nature just as well by climbing smaller mountains. No, these people are attracted to Everest specifically because it's so extraordinarily difficult there's a 2% chance they won't come off it alive, or possibly lose body parts.
There's something wrong with you if you're willing to risk your life that easily.
Do astronauts have a mental illness?
That's a 2% chance over a four day period. I don't know if that number is accurate- it's from the article, if you've read it- but even though it looks small, it's actually huge.
For comparison, in the US 6860 people die per day, and we have a population of 312 million. That means over a 4 day period, you have about a .009% chance of dying; that's a 200,000% increase. And keep in mind that's the death rate for EVERYONE in the U.S., including 90 year-olds riddled with cancer. I don't even want to think about the percentage difference in death rate using the Mt. Everest cohort, which tend to be younger, healthy males.
I can't think of a single activity that's riskier, except for actively trying to kill yourself, which by the way, only has a 5% probability of death.
Seems like if you'd like to connect with nature in an extreme way go on a safari or to a rain forest, or even just Yosemite. You may be able to brag, "I survived Yosemite", but it seems a tad more sincere.
There are extremely limited cases where it would be worth sacrificing someone's life to accomplish something (jumping on a grenade to save a bunch of other people, perhaps where acting saves other people). I could see people willingly sacrificing themselves for sufficiently otherwise unobtainable knowledge, but it would be immoral if not voluntary.
I wouldn't take the 4% risk of death from climbing Everest at all just to be #50 in a single climbing season, though. I'd be willing to accept a 50% risk of death to be the first person on Mars.
Why? This is a cultural conclusion that can be debated and modified. People are already risking their lives just by being on Everest, so it can't just be risking life == bad.
Of course, I wouldn't know what to characterize it other than sheer sense of adventure. I can totally understand going for the highest achievement one can pull off, and it certainly might seem like lunacy to many.