Right, there are a lot of accidents and deaths, but it’s still unlikely to happen. Both things are true. And a lot of those deaths are from unqualified people who dived into a cave anyway. It’s sort of like saying “flying a plane is dangerous, I’ve seen a lot of videos about crashes and people dying - people were not made to fly”. As long as the pilot has proper training and the equipment is in proper condition, it’s not really that dangerous.
There are a lot more deaths caused by free diving (even in percentile), for example, but those stories aren’t as interesting and don’t make for good videos, so they don’t get talked about much.
When the margin of error between life and death is small, it’s dangerous. That’s all I’ve gotta say. The margin is a lot thinner with cave diving than with flying, no matter how you put it. I like the idea of doing it, but I also respect that it can kill me. In that environment, it’s much more likely for something outside my control to kill me. Even more likely, that I accidentally kill myself somehow.
How’s the fatality rate between free diving and cave diving, rather than the raw numbers?
It’s hard to find hard data for cave diving, but you can make some estimates. I talked a bit more about this in another comment, but a high estimate I got is 0.16 deaths per each cave dive. For free diving there’s several places I found saying there’s 1 death for each 500 recreational free dives, so 0.2 deaths per dive.
Cave divers have multiplies of everything because they know redundancy is important, and they have protocols to deal with different problems. In free diving you just hold your breath and try to estimate how much time you have. If you mess up you pass out and probably drown.
To be clear, I’m not saying cave diving is without risk. I myself have no interest in it because caves are boring to me, and so it’s not worth the risk which does exist. I just don’t like the over the top fear mongering I see whenever there is a story like this.
Right, there are a lot of accidents and deaths, but it’s still unlikely to happen. Both things are true. And a lot of those deaths are from unqualified people who dived into a cave anyway. It’s sort of like saying “flying a plane is dangerous, I’ve seen a lot of videos about crashes and people dying - people were not made to fly”. As long as the pilot has proper training and the equipment is in proper condition, it’s not really that dangerous.
There are a lot more deaths caused by free diving (even in percentile), for example, but those stories aren’t as interesting and don’t make for good videos, so they don’t get talked about much.
When the margin of error between life and death is small, it’s dangerous. That’s all I’ve gotta say. The margin is a lot thinner with cave diving than with flying, no matter how you put it. I like the idea of doing it, but I also respect that it can kill me. In that environment, it’s much more likely for something outside my control to kill me. Even more likely, that I accidentally kill myself somehow.
How’s the fatality rate between free diving and cave diving, rather than the raw numbers?
It’s hard to find hard data for cave diving, but you can make some estimates. I talked a bit more about this in another comment, but a high estimate I got is 0.16 deaths per each cave dive. For free diving there’s several places I found saying there’s 1 death for each 500 recreational free dives, so 0.2 deaths per dive.
Cave divers have multiplies of everything because they know redundancy is important, and they have protocols to deal with different problems. In free diving you just hold your breath and try to estimate how much time you have. If you mess up you pass out and probably drown.
To be clear, I’m not saying cave diving is without risk. I myself have no interest in it because caves are boring to me, and so it’s not worth the risk which does exist. I just don’t like the over the top fear mongering I see whenever there is a story like this.