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Comment by breakyerself | Hacker News Reader

I was a nope before, but now it's a double nope. Asphyxiating or freezing to death because of a crush of people pretending to be Edmund Hillary seems like a big waste to me.

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Look past the literal. This is a metaphor for what we're all doing to this planet. An action which appears noble when one person does it becomes problematic when a billion people do it.

You can opt out of climbing Everest (and most of us do), but almost nobody is opting out of buying electronics, burning fossil fuels, using plastics, etc. Half the people in the USA don't even vote, and a sizable majority of eligible blood donors don't donate -- and those are both free, and make life better in the community in which you live.

When we say "Earth is crowded", this is what we mean. We're living in an unscalable and unsustainable manner. We pretend that being just one individual of billions means the bad things we do, or the good things we don't do, aren't really our own fault.

Everybody wants to live a lifestyle that presently requires burning fossil fuel, buying electronics, using plastics, etc. Two possibilities:

- technological advancement lets everyone indulge in this lifestyle without those externalities, or ones that are worse

- people voluntarily dial down their consumption (of food that has flown from across the world because it’s not in season, of electronics made with rare earth metals, etc), travels, and so on.

Both seem extremely unlikely and it’s hard to keep hope.

There's a grotesque disparity in per-capita CO2 emissions, even between highly developed nations. America produces 16.5 tonnes per capita, Britain produces 6.5 tonnes, Switzerland produces 4.3 and Latvia produces 3.5. Turning the dial down on our consumption is eminently possible without meaningfully compromising our standard of living, we just need to give a damn.

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

People, en masse, seem to mostly only care what their mass media channels tell them to care about.

That’s not being done in the US for consumption side-effects.

Latvia does not have the same standard of living as the others in the list. And still, 3.5 tonnes per capita is still 25 billion tonnes globally, and at that level, this planet is still super fucked. There are literally 300 million people in India who do not yet have electricity. Flip that over; if those 300 million people develop to European living standards in say, 100 years, we are well and truly screwed. You can just forget about it when you think about China, Indonesia, Bagladesh, and Africa.

The western way of life with global capitalism just will not work, the same way that growing watermelons inside of lightbulbs is just not going to work.

But what if you've no money? You can't buy those cool electronics anymore, you are forced to spend on what is more important for a minimalistic life. Wouldn't it be better if we all had less money?

Electronics and plastics aren’t the drivers. It’s Transportation and electricity. We have the tech but not the willpower for electricity. We need to densify to get cars off the road. In many ways the single family home is the biggest driver of global warming.

> a sizable majority of eligible blood donors don't donate

You'd have to donate an awful lot of blood to make earth less crowded.

5-6 pints all at once should do it.

True. They should have a limited number of slots and choose via lottery.

That said, according to the article, these ascensions only happen two or three days a year. So it’s not like there are 200 people summitting every day. It only happens in very rare spurts when the weather is favorable, which is around 1% of the days.

That is why you gotta bring a paraglider chute. When shit starts to get bad you can just be like "See ya later suckers!" and spectacularly leap off the mountain in James Bond fashion and gently cruise back down to more sane elevations.

Gotta check if the chute works in this thin air first.

Why disparage the climbers? Getting to the top of Everest is an impressive accomplishment.

I read that some of them are basically babysat the way up and put everyone in danger just by existing there.

Sounds like life in general

Not anymore.

More of a wealth marker than anything else (who else can pay $45k-130k and take months off work to prep?)

It used to be one team was allowed a permit per year, but has since evolved to be a tourist mecca:

http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2018/12/17/how-much-does-it-...

Getting to the top of Everest without supplemental oxygen and without relying on fixed lines is an impressive accomplishment.

Getting to the top of Everest by jumaring up fixed lines while sucking down 3x the volume of oxygen Hillary and Norgay used is high risk tourism.

Staying on top of your bills in an adverse economical environment like ours is really an accomplishment, especially if you add kids to the mix, climbing a piece of rock at the cost of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for no reason whatsoever is just stupid.

>Getting to the top of Everest is an impressive accomplishment.

It's not technically difficult, it doesn't require a particularly high level of fitness, it's just pointlessly dangerous. A substantial proportion of Everest climbers have negligible mountaineering experience and no real interest in the sport, they just want the bragging rights. You pay your money to an expedition company, you follow their instructions and they get you up to the death zone; whether you make it back to base camp is in the lap of the gods. About one in twenty people don't make it back. The only people I feel sorry for are the Sherpas.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

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

I am from Nepal. Our sherpas are making good money from it, no need to feel sorry for them. And it is better to keep Everest as a wasp trap. There are plenty of other mountains which are empty in the Himalayas to climb. If people want to pay to die on Everest, I do not care. It is just one mountain. I am happy to let them have bragging rights in return for contribution in our economy.

Great response. The fact the sherpas are indeed making money (better than nothing) is good news. I believe they ought to be making even more insane amounts of money though.

I wonder if the overcrowding has now increased the danger factor appeal?

> Getting to the top of Everest is an impressive accomplishment.

It's certainly an expenditure of effort and resources, which ought to require a an impressive accomplishment to justify it, but tasks, however expensive and/or difficult, aren't accomplishments, only (at best) the cost paid for accomplishments.

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