alt Hacker News>I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?
the argument is probably that today's extreme sports risk takers were last epoch's explorers who helped humanity conquer the planet.
I'd be willing to buy that if she had died while diving in an unexplored cave system, for instance, working to bring us knowledge and insights about nature that we didn't already have.
But there was nothing left to discover on that mountain peak, except how much frostbite sucks.