I’ve never in my life felt the compulsion to jump from high places - the call of the void, as it were. But this photo confirms I just haven’t been at a high enough altitude. My brain just started chanting “jump! jump! jump!”
I guess if a space agency was looking for a middle ager with no aeronautical knowledge or experience, I’d have to turn them down.
If it makes you feel better, you would be long dead before you ever hit the ground. Jumping from that point, you would still be in an ever so slightly declining orbit around earth. I am not sure how long it would take you to reenter but you would have died from the lack oxygen long before then. When you do get there, you will most likely burn up in the atmosphere spreading your ashes over whatever continent or ocean happens to be below you at the time. A great way in my opinion to do cremations with maximum spread.
Getting to space is a bit prohibitively expensive for a cremation.
What we need is an incredibly high speed corpse cannon. With a gentle enough acceleration curve and a high enough muzzle velocity, it’ll get whole corpses cremated for a prohibitively expensive cost - but less expensive than launching the corpse into space. At least until someone screws up the acceleration curve and accidentally makes a people soup cannon and the government pays me a visit for posting such weird comments online.
I like the way you think! I think we could do it cheaper though. You know how we have that spinney thing at NASA for the astronauts? Well what if we stand that straight up and accelerate it even faster to launch them into orbit? They will already be dead so the G’s taken on by the body should be fine.
I was struggling to get an OS installed on my cousin’s dell at one point. This machine came with that Intel Optane…shit with a spinning rust hard drive, I was replacing it with a straight-up NVMe SSD. Windows would get well into the install process, and then bomb out with an error that was something like 0x123a039f34798cd76eb1 UNDEFINED ERROR. This of course was in the Windows installer, which isn’t a functioning desktop environment, so I had to type that manually into my laptop to google it, and got very few results.
I tried Linux Mint, and it apparently had the same problem. It said something like “BIOS Storage config error. Unable to mount file system. It may be that such and such setting is incorrect in the BIOS. See this page for further details.” The last sentence was a hyperlink to a wiki that discussed the problem, which opened in Firefox because this installer runs in a live environment, AND IT HAD A QR CODE LINK IN THE ERROR MESSAGE to the same page so you could easily copy the link to an external device. Y’all that was a white glove concierge deep tissue massage of an error message.
Considering most deaths in bed are probably somewhat drawn out and painful, ending it in a few seconds off a mountain isn’t awful - however, dying while young and for no other reason than climbing rocks isn’t the same as dying after a long life and all that.
Whatever. It’s what he wants to do, and as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone else it’s fine. I don’t get the admiration, though.
That’s between him and his family. While I agree with you and that it will cause damage to them, I meant it more in context of activities that cause harm to society in general. No different than any other legitimized extreme sport. Street racers taking out pedestrians, drunks drivers doing the same, etc. I realize the difference in legality, but nonetheless they are activities that cause external harm to society.
Children don’t decide for themselves. If you’re a father, you have responsibilities to your child. Risking your life in this way affects the child in a profound way, especially if you slip and die. That’s not ok.
I literally got to be a part of a group that got to chat with astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson on the ISS yesterday afternoon. It was a really cool, candid, behind the scenes experience as she did a little mini-tour through the space station.
The craziest part for me was when she took her phone to the observatory and we watched the sun vanish behind the horizon of the earth. It happened so quickly and so brilliantly that it took my breath away and nearly brought me to tears. It was spectacular.
It was almost two hours with lengthy breaks as we lost contact a few times. But what an amazing experience.
It’s very much a factor of right place and right time.
For their mental health, the astronauts are required to have calls with people down here. Tracy is an acquaintance of someone my wife knows, so when the call was set up, we made the invite list.
We have no personal connection, we just managed to sit in the room while others talked. Tracy did put out an offer to come visit her at Johnson when she’s back, so you better believe we’ll follow up on that.
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