You Call This a Vacation?     

But for a growing number of wealthy individuals looking for the thrill of an unmitigated adventure — especially something their friends haven’t yet tried —those ho-hum sun-and-sand vacations no longer make the grade. Today, “danger tourism” or “extreme tourism” is driving an industry that is set to be worth a trillion dollars over the next five years. Adventurers are willing to pay big bucks to travel to remote, often dangerous, parts of the globe — cage diving with great white sharks, parachuting off skyscrapers or cliffs, journeying to the South Pole, or trekking across the African desert to see silverback gorillas. And the world’s wealthiest thrill-seekers are pushing tourism to its limits, from outer space to the ocean floor.

Of course, Torah-observant Jews may not engage in extreme sports, or any such risky behaviors, due to the mandate of “venishmartem me’od l’nafshoseichem,” and the ill-fated expedition on the Titan submersible vessel to tour the wreckage of the “unsinkable” Titanic last week is the latest example of why such conduct is not allowed. The expensive thrill turned into tragedy, as all five passengers, including the company’s own CEO, were killed. Each passenger paid $250,000 to dive down 13,000 feet to the ocean floor off the coast of Newfoundland, only to perish when the latest “unsinkable” vessel imploded from the vast water pressure due to a structural mishap.

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned the Titan, required participants to sign a lengthy release form acknowledging the possible dangers involved. That was after the New York Times reported in 2018 that dozens of submersible experts, oceanographers, and deep-sea explorers wrote a letter to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush expressing concern about the vessel’s safety. Rush, who perished along with the other four passengers on June 18, repeatedly claimed that increased regulatory requirements for tourist submarine and submersibles needlessly over-prioritized perceived passenger safety over commercial innovation, and that the perception of danger far exceeded the actual risk.

Much like OceanGate, the extreme tourism industry is largely unregulated. In light of last week’s disaster, experts are wondering whether increased scrutiny will now be placed on those companies that offer pricey, status-symbol trips —racecar driving on ice in Finland, pyramid exploration in war-torn Sudan, and flights to the International Space Station, to name just a few.