I’m curious about why they aren’t using robotics to driver food - seems like it would be safer than having human divers go back and forth
I'd imagine the psychological relief of seeing a human being rather than a robot has a lot to do with it.
British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
91–100 of 158 posts
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a weird phobia by any means. That's very common and it's called claustrophobia.
I've always wondered this: is it appropriate to call fears of legitimately dangerous things "phobias"? I don't like being close to the edge of deadly tall cliffs; am I scared of heights or are cliffs just dangerous?
My feeling also - look up the concept "l'appel du void", finally explained my reactions to high open places.
Although I still don't like being in the high floors of buildings - those Dubai towers give me the honest to god creeps.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bravery is not fundamentally incompatible with cave diving: it’s a hard requirement. People who simply aren’t brave just don’t go cave diving. That’s not to say that skill and consideration aren’t very important, but those guys are still both brave.
Bravery is over-rated. It's a poor substitute for skill, experience and professionalism. I say this not to diminish the efforts of these divers, but to praise them fully. Rock climbers drag themselves up a rock face with their bare hands, using a rope to catch them if they fall. Cavers drag themselves up a rope, because avoiding a fall is better than arresting a fall. That's the fundamental difference in culture and…
Well, I am not a caver, but a climber, but know some, who are both.
I don't think the difference you describe, exists.
Both are activitys which can be very dangerous, but usually those who do it, are smart, because otherwise they would not be alive anymore. I started climbing, beeing not smart. But very soon I started getting smart, because I realised, otherwise I would stop beeing at all or end up paralized.
But there still remains a risk. Just like traffic is dangerous. Also, the thing is, doing the same, safe thing again and again, is boring. You want new experiences, new challenges. Wheter it be a new mountain, or a new cave. But with experience and beeing smart, you can do it quite safely, because you know your limits and the enviroment. But it is never 100% safe. Big rocks can come loose and hit or trap you, or water can come from channels you don't know about. This is life, you can't plan for all events.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't be serious. Taking 13 people, with an absolute maximum of Open Water level training (if that), back out through hundreds (or thousands?) of meters of low or zero visibility diving, including (apparently) tight restrictions, without risking the lives of all concerned? Aint gonna happen - unless the water level drops to the point where they can just float back out.
What I don't understand is that surely there must be a wide enough passage for them to have got in in the first place. It may be flooded but if one can walk into them vertically, surely they should be fairly accessible to a diver horizontally. Can't they just follow / be attached to a string or something like that?
It's not logically following to me that just because it's easy to walk through a place it must necessarily be easy to dive through it. Diving is always significantly harder (you're wearing bulkier equipment for starters). It costs more energy to swim through water than it does to walk through air, the water has currents which you have to fight against, and the waters are murky so you have to go slow and can easily get disoriented.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#95I’m curious about why they aren’t using robotics to driver food - seems like it would be safer than having human divers go back and forth
Because robots up to the task don't exist yet (and aren't even particularly close). It's a very hard problem.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I think the coach should be commended for keeping all those boys safe and alive in such conditions. He couldn't have known the cave was going to flood, the signs say don't go in in between July and September - they entered in June. Without a strong leader this probably would have been a very different outcome already and they'd be dealing with retrieving corpses. I actually find comments like yours really…
I assume it was his decision to take all those children down there, so it was not beyond his control. Did he at least check the weather forecast? If my comment was designed to provoke, then it was to provoke people to think. We need to be able to think for ourselves sometimes. I actually find your comment somewhat unhelpful and grating. It is all very well everyone being a hero and never admitting to any wrong decisi…
Your idea of learning from this is to say "What was he thinking?", which in your context is is a rhetorical question. You're not trying to understand the thought process, instead you're making a statement to imply that the leader wasn't thinking about the group's safety when taking them into the cave and is negligent.
This may or may not be true, or could be somewhere in between. But it specifically does not, and actually actively pushes against finding a solution that ensures this never happens again.
By blaming someone for an error instead of the system that allowed, encouraged and enabled them to make that error you end up not solving anything, and the same problems crop up again, and again.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bravery is not fundamentally incompatible with cave diving: it’s a hard requirement. People who simply aren’t brave just don’t go cave diving. That’s not to say that skill and consideration aren’t very important, but those guys are still both brave.
Bravery is over-rated. It's a poor substitute for skill, experience and professionalism. I say this not to diminish the efforts of these divers, but to praise them fully. Rock climbers drag themselves up a rock face with their bare hands, using a rope to catch them if they fall. Cavers drag themselves up a rope, because avoiding a fall is better than arresting a fall. That's the fundamental difference in culture and…
> Rock climbers drag themselves up a rock face with their bare hands, using a rope to catch them if they fall. Cavers drag themselves up a rope, because avoiding a fall is better than arresting a fall. That's the fundamental difference in culture and attitude between cavers and participants in "extreme sports".
I completely disagree. I am a climber, I climb sports, trad and free-solo. Trad requires the most skill in evaluating risk and coping with and rationalising fear (my definition of bravery; conversely doing dangerous things without fear or understanding is not bravery, it's stupidity).
When you place gear on a route you are constantly assessing the capability of the system which affects your trust in falling on it, because not all routes have the same natural quantity, quality or distribution of protection... Bravery comes in all kinds of forms depending on the exact combination of gear and fall potential (what you are falling into), but an obviously valid type of bravery which is easiest to explain here is dealing with _irrational_ fear when you have the experience and skill to know that the system works but has a big fall potential: e.g you have completely solid gear well distributed up the bottom half of a pitch on a sheer or overhanging face with good fall potential, but a hard run-out stretch above with no gear (lets say 1/4 of the bottom half and about 6 meters above protection to make it scary but no groundfall potential), this is safe to fall on, but you will be scared and it will take bravery and experience (experience of how the gear works and knowing how much you can trust it, experience of falling and knowing how to react and what to expect from such a fall).
A more realistic and interesting scenarios are when there is some significant amount of risk, innate fear is very useful here to guide you to the seriousness of a situation, but you need the skill and experience to separate it from the irrational and then manage the "rational" part by responding to it but not letting it control you.
> Cavers go into a hazardous environment, but they mitigate those hazards through meticulous planning and preparation. They don't see their activities as inherently dangerous, but technically demanding. If you're taking risks in a cave, you're foolish rather than brave - you're working beyond the limits of your skill and experience.
I'm not a caver but I doubt any of the cavers involved in this dive would agree that "They don't see their activities as inherently dangerous". There _are_ inherent dangers with this dive, experience and skill allows you to mitigate and manage it and respond to dangers in the best way possible, but there will always be some amount of risk you cannot eradicate, this is where bravery has it's place, it's not about being fearless, it's about being in control and understanding and accepting the potential outcomes.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bravery is not fundamentally incompatible with cave diving: it’s a hard requirement. People who simply aren’t brave just don’t go cave diving. That’s not to say that skill and consideration aren’t very important, but those guys are still both brave.
Bravery is over-rated. It's a poor substitute for skill, experience and professionalism. I say this not to diminish the efforts of these divers, but to praise them fully. Rock climbers drag themselves up a rock face with their bare hands, using a rope to catch them if they fall. Cavers drag themselves up a rope, because avoiding a fall is better than arresting a fall. That's the fundamental difference in culture and…
See, no matter how skilled and careful you are, some necessary activities are more dangerous than watching paint dry. And courage/bravery is what motivates you to tackle these activities, in spite of your knowledge of their inherent danger.
Yes, skill is required, but actually skill is associated with courage; it is the skill that enables you to assess just how dangerous the activity might be, but it is courage that motivates you to undertake it, in spite of your knowing that no amount of skill can make it every-day-level safe
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bravery is over-rated. It's a poor substitute for skill, experience and professionalism. I say this not to diminish the efforts of these divers, but to praise them fully. Rock climbers drag themselves up a rock face with their bare hands, using a rope to catch them if they fall. Cavers drag themselves up a rope, because avoiding a fall is better than arresting a fall. That's the fundamental difference in culture and…
See, no matter how skilled and careful you are, some necessary activities are more dangerous than watching paint dry. And courage/bravery is what motivates you to tackle these activities, in spite of your knowledge of their inherent danger. Yes, skill is required, but actually skill is associated with courage; it is the skill that enables you to assess just how dangerous the activity might be, but it is courage that…
This whole argument ranks as one of the silliest things I've ever seen.
Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't be serious. Taking 13 people, with an absolute maximum of Open Water level training (if that), back out through hundreds (or thousands?) of meters of low or zero visibility diving, including (apparently) tight restrictions, without risking the lives of all concerned? Aint gonna happen - unless the water level drops to the point where they can just float back out.
What I don't understand is that surely there must be a wide enough passage for them to have got in in the first place. It may be flooded but if one can walk into them vertically, surely they should be fairly accessible to a diver horizontally. Can't they just follow / be attached to a string or something like that?
It's a 2.5 km (a bit less than 2 miles) underwater swim. Right now they've been without food for 10 days and are barely able to stand. At the moment they wouldn't be able to walk the distance, much less spend many hours (it was about four hours for the experienced divers, so more for the boys) swimming underwater in unpredictable currents with no visibility due to silt, so if they get confused and let go of the string for a moment in those hours then they die.
As one of the rescuers said, "When it starts raining the flow is so hard you can barely swim against it." - and that's a pro diver, imagine how would it be for a boy who didn't even know how to swim and thus doesn't have the relevant muscles trained. It's also narrow enough so that only one person can fit through, so you can't have the divers guide them by hand, only accompany them behind them.