Should limit stretching and dangerous pursuits be banned?

No, never, pushing the envelope is the only way to open limitless boundaries.

Definitely not. But I do question the use of unlimited public funds to rescue those who intentionally choose to challenge nature by rowing across the ocean solo, climbing Mt. Rainier on dangerous routes, base jumping in remote locations, etc.

Then smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol should be OUTLAWED, these two kill more people than Isle of Man Time Trials and climbing Mt Everest combined.

“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”
—Bruce Lee

I just wish that the people with the skills and desire to do these things could be recruited and funded to do something that hasn’t been done before. Like, yay, you can get to the top of Everest just to say you’ve been there, but what about getting that person a position on an archaeological team, looking for cave drawings or something?

I know, I know, we’d rather spend our money on spectator sports than academia.

Well that would be no fun at all…

As long as they are only endangering themselves, let them die.

My vote is with @DWW25921. Yes for allowing fun in life. And with @ragingloli. No to letting one person’s fun destroy another’s happiness, property or life. Besides, extreme sports may just be Darwinian natural selection continuing to chip away at improvements in the human gene pool.

Think of all the money wasted on those selfish pursuits. But if you earned it you deserve to enjoy it.

You should be required to purchase insurance, which will repay the expense of your rescue should you need it.

@gorillapaws you have to pay for search and rescue teams as it is.

I’m perfectly happy with extreme sports people dying. It’s their choice to participate or not.

There should be some requirement that they indemnify for the costs of picking up the pieces.

^Those that die on Everest aren’t picked up.

At the TT the bodies and machines are picked up by volunteers.

Who is going to ban such things?
People who interfere with human nature usually wind up like this guy

@uberbatman I didn’t realize that. Glad to hear it.

@KNOWITALL:

Are you certain your quality of life isn’t improved by those that once risked or gave their lives?

@gorillapaws I don’t know if that is everywhere, but that is how it works in my area(east coast) as well as out in The Rockies. I don’t see why it’d be different in other places. When I took my wilderness survival class they taught us about it and said if you do end up needing to call for a helicopter for rescue you’re looking at something 10–15k

@josie Actually, Savonarola was a skilled con man in the game of exploiting human gullibility. Sadly for him, there were other exploiters who had a much larger power base from which to profit on man’s inherent stupidity; and Savonarola’s cut of their take in in con job was intolerable to them.

No that’s just dumb. Man has always been pushing its limits, if we adopted that mindset earlier we’d be amish, or still living on trees, it’s insane.

@SecondHandStoke My answer was tongue in cheek because I felt sure if I approved of human exploration a liberal would start bashing me for not caring about the poor less fortunate. ;)

^I understand:

Why spend to reach for the stars when we could put free ATM’s on every corner of a poor neighborhood?

Do we really think they consider preventing our world from being decimated by an asteroid or comet important?

^ Investing in science and technology creates well-paying jobs.

The sooner we get those Martian Hotels, the sooner we can start hiring interplanetary taxi drivers.

^I’m not sure but just in case:

I was employing sarcasm.

Hey, don’t your people visit us first?

@SecondHandSmoke
I do not see the aristocrats doing any investments in space exploration either, let alone defence against asteroids.
Do you really think they consider that important, compared to their holy short term profit?

SecondHandStoke or GTFO.

@SecondHandStoke I think you might find Fluther’s tilde convention for denoting sarcasm useful.

@KNOWITALL Perhaps you should get past your straw man conception of liberals (and leftists more generally). Exploration need not be a partisan endeavor. It was John F. Kennedy who committed the US to reaching the moon, and it was George W. Bush who committed the US to reaching Mars. And while many Republicans seem committed to slashing NASA’s funding, it remains the case that this is an area where we can find some agreement among various political factions. Why try to increase the divide, then?

@Thammuz ” And lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

@uberbatman precisely what i had in mind when i wrote my post.

^^I heard that in the narrator’s voice when I read it.