"Ten years ago, while traveling in Costa Rica, he was a passenger in a small plane that crashed in the jungle, killing the pilot, co-pilot and a passenger. Packard sustained multiple serious injuries to his abdomen and upper body. The rescuers that found the remaining five passengers after two nights in the jungle said they wouldn’t have survived another night."
This guy's luck is clearly maxed out. What a crazy pair of stories.
He's still alive, so it sounds like he's got a little credit left on that account. The big creditor in the sky hasn't declined his charges yet.
Remember this guy's name. If you ever meet this guy and he asks if you want to go on a trip with him, I would advise politely declining. You should however, offer to buy him a beer to have him tell his stories.
Yeah, that's addressed in the fine article as well:
> For years, he was an abalone diver on the West Coast in
> an area with great white sharks that have a history of
> attacking divers; he lost some friends to the predators.
Teela Brown from Ringworld. She was the result of a selective breeding program intended to create the luckiest human alive... but it turned out the _real_ lucky ones were all the "failures" who did _not_ get recruited for an impossibly dangerous mission.
That mirrors Orwell's thought when he survived a shot in the neck during the Spanish civil war - everyone kept telling him how lucky he was, but he couldn't help but think it would have been luckier to not have been shot at all!
As I recall (spoiler), that was speculation by one of the other characters after they crashed on Ringworld, later reversed because Teela met the love of her life due to the crash. The real take away was that Teela's luck was in no way transferable to the rest of the party; it only looked out for Teela.
Luck seems to me to be a zero sum game, so if someone is lucky, someone else must be unlucky. It's like a new character on What We Do In The Shadows as a luck vampire.
Perhaps instead luck is a field or fabric permeating or moving through spacetime with concentrated areas of entropy or improbabilities that some people can naturally sense of are drawn towards
He also says he lost some friends to great white sharks on the west coast, which strains credulity, given that there are 2-3 shark attack deaths per decade across the entire west coast.
I mean if you swim in whale's proximity and fly in sketch planes, crazy shit is bound to happen to you. The real tragedy is the stories there is no one left to tell.
Swimming near whales isn’t unsafe at all. They’re not particularly aggressive, a lone human is too small to worry about, and we operate on completely different sections of the food chain.
This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. Total accident.
Giraffes: not really dangerous. They graze on the tops of trees. I don't know much about it, which leads me to think that "giraffe danger" isn't a thing that gets talked about because it's not much of a thing.
Ostrich: They're not bright - the bird's eyeball is bigger than its brain. Last ostriches that I saw were a whole herd that came up to the fence with open mouths in anticipation of snacks, which was kinda cute. I guess a large male could get aggressive and the kick would be very nasty?
Hipppo: Very dangerous. They may be herbivorous but they're aggressive and territorial. They will flatten you if they're in a bad mood, and they're almost always in a bad mood. A hippo is 2 tons of bastard; and don't bother running, they're faster than you, on land or in water. Best to avoid them entirely.
I'm not joking, google "most dangerous large animal in Africa", read about hippos and how they kill more humans than any other African animal larger than a mosquito.
Giraffes can kick lions hard enough to kill them, or at least injure them enough to prevent lions from returning to effective hunting before starving to death.
In my very limited experience (4 or 5 day safari in Kruger), Giraffes are pretty shy, but you really want to avoid startling them or otherwise putting them in a situation where they feel a need to defend themselves or their young.
That’s a pretty ridiculous way to measure predator success. Hunting is a high risk high reward endeavor; a predator can fail to kill in most hunts and still be a very successful species.
For the record, it’s estimated that American deer hunters have a success rate between 6-13%, depending on the method and state. So lions are apparently more consistently successful hunters than humans with guns.
Remember Steve Irwin aka The Crocodile Man? The guy was picking up venomous snakes and wrestling with crocodiles. Then got killed by a "harmless" stingray that operated on a totally different section of the food chain...
Freak accidents happen. If you start drawing conclusions about the risk of various activities and animals from literally one incident, you’ll end up with all kinds of erroneous and silly opinions about what is dangerous and what is not.
Focusing in on Stingrays, the number of confirmed deaths by stingrays is maybe as high as 30 ever. Yes, Steve Irwin was one of them, but that doesn’t magically move the statistics, it just makes it more salient.
For comparison, coconuts kill 150 or so people per year. In a real, measurable way, taking a nap under a coconut tree is more dangerous than swimming with a stingray.
Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe? The man was swallowed by a whale, I don't care if whales are aggressive or not, if anything can swallow me whole I consider that a bit unsafe.
> This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there.
So you also consider hanging out near giraffes to be completely safe knowing they might accidentally step on you?
That's a very interesting definition of safety.
I think what you want to say is that animals like whales are friendly and we shouldn't harm them. Point taken.
You call diving in the ocean and swimming near whales "basically anything"? Diving itself is pretty high risk and the fatality rate isn't as low as you might think. You comparing essential daily activity to recreational diving in whale infested waters as equals is a quite mind boggling.
Given how many "An X Year Old Person Died in This Intersection This Year" signs I pass just going about my day, I don't think the fatality rate of essential daily activity is as low as you might think.
This is like saying people who are attacked by squirrels or crows are to blame for going outside. Did you know there are squirrels and crows outside? Did you read that one article about that one person getting dive bombed by a crow? Obviously you have only yourself to blame if you go outside.
How would you phrase it? "Eaten by a whale?" Is that less victim blame-y?
> Shouldn't have been in the ocean.
You can swim in the ocean just don't go near where the whales are, it might just help with not becoming a victim of whales' constant eating habit and as a result alleviate the tendency to make greatly exaggerated sarcastic remarks.
In the ocean, the whales stick within the designated Whale Zones, marked by vast rings of starfish holding hands (??). When you cross the starfish, as Packard must have, then you’re clearly in the Zone. At that point you have no one to blame but yourself when you get accidentally swallowed.
Naah, that is the old way/conception of confinement, in modern, eco-zoo-friendly, countries whales are allowed to roam freely in the ocean, it is the swimmers that must wear high visibility vests with a sign "I am not a snack!" written in whalish.
June apparently is the whale watching season in Cape Cod [0]. At least I hope from now on after this "freak accident" people pay a bit more attention and don't confuse things that can swallow them whole with harmless little pets they can cuddle and respect nature and the wild life for what they are. A whale in San Diego Seaworld injures several trainers [1]. A whale kills its trainer [2].
>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".
This guy's luck is clearly maxed out. What a crazy pair of stories.