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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/28/skydiver-luke-aikins-jump-without-parachute-live-tv
"He's made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world's most elite skydivers, done some of the stunts for Ironman 3. But the plunge Luke Aikins knows he'll be remembered for is the one he's making without a parachute. Or a wingsuit.
Or anything, really, other than the clothes he'll be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at 25,000 feet [7600 m] this weekend, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net."
[...] "To me, I'm proving that we can do stuff that we don't think we can do if we approach it the right way," he answers.
"I've got 18,000 jumps with a parachute, so why not wear one this time?" he muses almost to himself. "But I'm trying to show that it can be done."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2016, @08:15PM
The human species can tolerate a lot more males dying than females. So guys doing risky things at their limits or beyond can actually be good for the species. It may explain why so many guys (especially the younger ones) get the urge to push limits in risky ways. If they succeed and breed, the gene pool may get some of their attributes - which might be better than average, and thus help improve the species. If they die then they weren't good enough. If they get permanently crippled they might be less likely to breed successfully.
That's probably why there's a gender imbalance in certain classes of youtube videos ( some successes end up in "humans are awesome" videos, failures in "fail compilation videos", really bad fails in "WARNING: This video may be disturbing to some viewers." ;) ).
Some may say it's bad because those guys are stupid or foolish and their genes end up in the pool, but there are plenty of fairly successful stupid species around so that's not necessarily a big problem for the species as a whole. It may turn out that certain bacteria would still be better at being space-faring species than humans. With all our supposed brains we haven't actually been making that much progress on that front and might actually take huge leaps backwards instead (global nuclear war etc).