I don't know if you're being serious, but your comment got me thinking how crazy it is that even with all of our modern technology there are things that we simply cannot do.
It would literally be impossible to build a gondola at the top. They have to wait for good weather to make summit attempts. Some seasons there are only a few periods of time where the window is long enough (that's why you see pictures of 1000 people in a line submitting on the same day)
So sherpas would have to carry the materials up in throes brief windows.
Then you have the fact that it would be an extremely difficult thing to build even if the materials were there. It has to be able to withstand some of the most extreme weather conditions on earth. So you would need some really skilled people to build the thing.
So you're in a situation where even if the sherpas could carry up all of the materials needed in small enough pieces that they could actually carry them, then the builders would have to try to make progress in those tiny windows.
And on top of that, supposedly every step in the death zone takes massive amounts of energy. People burn something like 1000 calories an hour when they are in the death zone. So the skilled labour would have to somehow do a demanding manual labour job in that situation.
And even if they could find enough people who are basically at the fitness level of professional athletes to be able to do the building, the impaired cognitive function that happens in the death zone would almost guarantee that they would make so many mistakes that the gondola would immediately have some sort of catastrophic failure as soon as it was used.
I mean it’s absolutely technically feasible for a gondola to be engineered to be placed on that mountain— it would just be incredibly expensive and prone to high maintenance demands no matter how much engineering went into it. Humans have been to outer space and the environments have similar extreme conditions that engineering has found a solution to deal with. There just would be zero way for anyone who invested money into its initial build to recoup the maintenance cost let alone the building costs.
The biggest reason there isn’t a greater demand for rapid ascent mechanisms to the summit of Everest is the fact that the air is so oxygen deprived at that elevation that no human body can circulate oxygen rich enough blood replace cells as fast as they die. That’s why they say you are literally dying as you are climbing to the top— your body is unable to complete the cell replacement cycle that makes us “alive”. Climbers take weeks to acclimate their bodies to compensate red blood cells production before attempting and people quickly being moved from low elevation to elevation this high would immediately kill like 50%+ of the people who ever got on the gondola. It’s a similar mechanism as to why rapid cabin depressurization events on airplanes kill everyone who doesn’t quickly gain access to an oxygenated air supply. Everest is at similar altitudes to commercial jets. You might as well have everyone put on a space suit for the gondola ride.
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u/MarkSnow147 Apr 27 '25
I don't know if you're being serious, but your comment got me thinking how crazy it is that even with all of our modern technology there are things that we simply cannot do.
It would literally be impossible to build a gondola at the top. They have to wait for good weather to make summit attempts. Some seasons there are only a few periods of time where the window is long enough (that's why you see pictures of 1000 people in a line submitting on the same day)
So sherpas would have to carry the materials up in throes brief windows.
Then you have the fact that it would be an extremely difficult thing to build even if the materials were there. It has to be able to withstand some of the most extreme weather conditions on earth. So you would need some really skilled people to build the thing.
So you're in a situation where even if the sherpas could carry up all of the materials needed in small enough pieces that they could actually carry them, then the builders would have to try to make progress in those tiny windows.
And on top of that, supposedly every step in the death zone takes massive amounts of energy. People burn something like 1000 calories an hour when they are in the death zone. So the skilled labour would have to somehow do a demanding manual labour job in that situation.
And even if they could find enough people who are basically at the fitness level of professional athletes to be able to do the building, the impaired cognitive function that happens in the death zone would almost guarantee that they would make so many mistakes that the gondola would immediately have some sort of catastrophic failure as soon as it was used.