Crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Alone. by Stand-Up-Paddleboard
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A person is attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone by stand-up paddleboard, sparking debate about the point and environmental impact of this feat.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://youtu.be/6SYHamnHqU8?si=vp-NLeMnsdQz1R-Z
Generally speaking there is a route called the "Milk Run" from Europe to the Caribbean that has tail winds and good currents in the right direction. Also much nicer weather.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Gyre
Looking at the current maps, I think most of the paddling will be southward, to get down to South America rather than the Caribbean.
For example, Thor Heyerdahl's Ra II, a square-sailed reed boat, went from Morocco to Barbados - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl#Boats_Ra_and_Ra... .
The people I've heard of who have rowed across the Atlantic generally do Canary Islands to the Caribbean. There's even "The World's Toughest Row" for that route - https://www.worldstoughestrow.com/ .
Rowing won't get the attention the paddleboard will?
The person is doing something physically and technically challenging. Perfect HN material.
Would love to dive into how he built the paddleboard, etc.
It's fairly large. There appears to be a hatch leading to an interior space. Presumably that's where he sleeps and stores supplies.
It's really more of a small paddle-powered boat. Given the shape and the ability to seal off the interior, it probably can survive a fair bit of rolling around in a storm.
Writing, Metallurgy, Weaving, Pyramids, … all co-evolution? Could be. Or…
Thor Heyerdahl advocated hyperdiffusionist ideas, and to his credit showed two such routes were possible. However, "His hyperdiffusionist ideas on ancient cultures had been widely rejected by the scientific community, even before the expedition." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl
I write more about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44399051 .
Regards food, the paddleboard looks about the same size as people who have previously rowed across the Atlantic solo.
Which is fine for a lot of the cross-Atlantic shipping traffic that is currently contributing to the CO2 emissions.
> Preparations for this special challenge have been ongoing for many months. However, for a project like this to come together, a lot of things have to fit together perfectly.
Take all the people, time and energy spend on preparations! It is probably several tons of CO2! Very long list of sponsors!
I refuse to believe, that super economy flight for $130 has higher CO2 emmisions than this stunt! It is like taking public transport!
Human is the engine here!
Take old galleys where hundred people rowed single boat. All that food to feed them! That is not very effient transport!
Taking the 6000km flight produces an additional ~1 ton of CO2 per passenger. A 777 emits around 10000kg per hour, or something like 70,000 kg of CO2 for one flight from Portugal to French Guiana. That doesn’t count the people breathing on the flight, and it doesn’t make any sense to compare a 7 hour flight to a few people taking several months to plan and execute an extreme paddle board trip. It’s the rate of additional CO2 emissions that matter, not the total number.
[1] https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-quirky-science...
I would say it takes a lot of fossil fuels to feed humans!!!
But I will keep this link, next time someone says I should eat bugs!
BTW the cows vs bugs thing is because raising the scale of cattle we have is also completely unnecessary, and cows emit methane, which is way worse than CO2 and why cattle does count as ag emissions and is a concern.
Armchair climate science aside, it doesn’t actually matter where emissions are coming from, what matters is whether we can reduce them. We can’t really choose to stop breathing, and even if we did it cannot solve the problem we’ve created at all - human CO2 emissions is too small of a portion of total emissions. We can, however, choose to reduce fossil fuel and red meat consumption, and those things can make a real difference.
By my back of the envelope math, burning 600000 kcal should produce couple hundred kg of CO2. You could also make that crossing in less than a third of the time under sail, with about a third of the daily calorie consumption, for maybe a tenth of the CO2 output.
Before modern era, surely was done this way in antiquity..
I guess I just don't get it. Does the "paddleboard" represent something more than sail?
This is a weird stunt that won’t prove anything. If he (magically) made it in a week people would still fly.
What’s the point? Don’t say “raising awareness”. Whose mind does the exercise have a chance of changing about what question? What behavioral change will that changed mind cause?