One of the challenges of (even modern) scuba diving is that failure conditions are at odds with normal reflexes.
For example, if you run out of air your first reflex as a non-diver might be to hold your breath and swim to the surface. As pointed out in the article, that’s a terrible idea at depth and can severely injure or kill you (instead, divers are trained to breath out during an emergency swimming ascent).
There are a number of other ways to die while diving and recorded mortality data proves that out. Each dive, on average, has a broadly similar risk profile (5, in micromorts) to a single jump while skydiving (8) or running a marathon (7) [1].
There’s seemingly room for technology to help make diving a bit more safe. It will be interesting to see if that does happen in the future.
For example, if you run out of air your first reflex as a non-diver might be to hold your breath and swim to the surface. As pointed out in the article, that’s a terrible idea at depth and can severely injure or kill you (instead, divers are trained to breath out during an emergency swimming ascent).
There are a number of other ways to die while diving and recorded mortality data proves that out. Each dive, on average, has a broadly similar risk profile (5, in micromorts) to a single jump while skydiving (8) or running a marathon (7) [1].
There’s seemingly room for technology to help make diving a bit more safe. It will be interesting to see if that does happen in the future.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort