If Mount Everest was 100,000 feet instead of 29,028 feet above sea level would anyone reach the summit?

Yes, VO2 max is poorly understood

Great minds think alike and all that

Oxygen flow rates matter tremendously here. I haven't had any biology or physiology classes for 12 years, but my personal experience was that climbing on 2L/min made it feel like you were 3000-4000 feet lower than you actually were at the time. I kicked it up to 3L/min on summit day for small bursts - when I passed a lot of people at the balcony and then had to go off the fixed lines briefly to get around people at the south summit.

I wound up getting back down to C4 around 12pm last year. I hung out at 1L/min and slept most of the night without oxygen. Getting ready the next morning without oxgyen at 26,300' felt almost as hard as summitting. I was also pretty drained at that point.

I've talked to a lot of guides the last couple years - most of these older climbers are on 5L/min once they leave camp 3 and pretty much stay at that flow rate the entire time they're moving. The guides think that 5L/min basically buys you 8k-9k feet of altitude difference. A simple comparison would be that the summit of Everest at 5L/min feels like the summit of Denali without oxygen.

https://8kpeak.com/pages/climbing-with-supplemental-oxygen-by-the-numbers

There is a ton of oxygen theft up high. One of the largest, safest, and most professional Western guided teams had 70 bottles of oxygen stolen this year. It threw a tremendous kink in logistics and cost them $140k.

@ohio_miler, it sounds like you have been on Everest? Did you make it to the summit? What were the lines like?

Bad Wigins wrote:

If people can get from 8000 to 9000 and back down to 8000 again without dying, then they could probably get to 10000 and back down to 8000 without dying about as easily, if they had a sheer cliff to jump off of with a parachute. And speaking of Bekele, 10,000 meters is his event.

Lol-ed at my cube.

Banana Bread wrote:

With all the discussions about hobby hikers climbing Everest, I was literally thinking, what if Everest was way higher. Would any of these people reach the summit, or how high would they reach? What is the highest anyone would reach? How high could Bekele go or do you think you would go? There would probably be many more deaths from people trying to go as high as possible. I wonder what the highest anyone could go without oxygen. I guess if you had a space person's suit you would do it because if we walked on the moon than humans could also walk on a really high Everest, although this would be cheating, so let's ignore this scenario. Discus.

I'm guessing above 30,000ft would make it 100% impossible without an oxygen tank. With an oxygen tank I don't know but at some point you'd have to start employing outerspace technology to keep going higher and at that point, are you really still just mountain climbing? I think at that point it becomes something completely different.

I commented on the other thread whether Everest or Sub 3 marathon was harder.

I summitted in 2018. The lines were not nearly as bad as they were this year. I summitted in 10 hours and it probably would have been 7 without traffic. I was 14 hours round trip back to camp 4. Some people this year were 21-23 hours.

The viral photo of everyone on the cornice traverse/Hilary step remnants looks like there are 70-80 people in a very tight area. I have a photo from the exact same spot last year and there are 8-10 people. The weather window was much tighter this year with more people on the mountain.

ohio_miler wrote:

I commented on the other thread whether Everest or Sub 3 marathon was harder.

I summitted in 2018. The lines were not nearly as bad as they were this year. I summitted in 10 hours and it probably would have been 7 without traffic. I was 14 hours round trip back to camp 4. Some people this year were 21-23 hours.

The viral photo of everyone on the cornice traverse/Hilary step remnants looks like there are 70-80 people in a very tight area. I have a photo from the exact same spot last year and there are 8-10 people. The weather window was much tighter this year with more people on the mountain.

Were you solo or with a group? How many dead people did you see? What other peaks have you climbed?

100,000 ft are 30.48k.

No plane can go that high just some rockets like things like the X-15.

The record for sail planes is over 52.000 ft with pressurized suits.

Even 35,000ft would be really tough if not impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlan_Project

I think it's a great thought experiment. It's just an unlikely coincidence that Everest is almost exactly at the limit of what (a few) humans could do without supplemental oxygen. I doubt anyone could make it to 30,000' and back down safely without oxygen. That would be another 3 hours of climbing and an hour of descending just to get out of the death zone.

With oxygen, maybe a bit higher, but you still have to carry it all and it is hard - if not impossible - to sleep while using it.

When reading about the death, bodies, and trash on Everest, I've wished that it were 5,000' higher so that it would be inconceivable for a human to get up there. It would be amazing to have a truly inaccessible place like that on earth. As it stands, the County open space by my house does a better job of keeping dog crap and Clif bar wrappers in the trash than Everest does. That place is like an altar to waste and desecration of nature.

ohio_miler wrote:

The air contains 20.9% oxygen at all altitudes, the air pressure decreases as altitude increases effectively reducing the amount of oxygen your body can utilize. At 27,000' there is effectively 35% of available oxygen as there is at sea level, at the summit its 33%.

The people I know that have summitted without oxygen generally think 31,000-32,000 would be the absolute limit and it would involve frostbite no matter what clothes were worn.

This sounds about right to me. The problem is simply time, and the fact that no acclimatization continues to occur at this level. I'm not sure what the record is for longest amount of continuous time spent above 8,000 meters without oxygen, but I can't imagine it is very long. If you figure that even just 2,000 ft of gain is a huge day when already at 29k and without O2, it starts to become impossible to get higher than 31-32k without requiring multiple days of continuous time in the death zone. I really think that if there was a 35k foot mountain, it would never have been climbed without O2. Even with O2 might be unlikely, ignoring the prospect of someone cranking 5L of O2 and figuring out the logistics.

ddsfsdfsf wrote:

I find it really hard to believe that some of the old, untrained people climbing Everest today are anywhere near the limit of human capacity.

Oh, tell me more about how there are so many old, untrained people summiting Everest. How would you even know such a thing?

This thread is an example of why science is important. Questions like this and the anti-vaxxers movement are spawned from a lack of basic science. Next someone will ask if you can live after driving a tank over your skull.

Proust wrote:

Everest itself yields the limit: the death zone. It's in and out before you start dying on a cellular level. You don't have much time.

Your blood is hardly oxygenated. Hemoglobin thickens your blood, making it harder for the heart to pump blood around the body until your circulation comes to a crawl. You're pushing blood around that has hardly any oxygen in it. The brain will shut off.

So you wear a pressurized suit. It would be much harder and might not feel like mountain climbing as we know it, but someone would figure out some way of getting to the top. It would also be absurdly expensive so you would have a line of 100 middle aged dudes trying it.

With the proper technology you can get anyone's carcass that high.

I feel like altitude training might help.

You have an interesting question. I understand your point - you're basing difficulty purely on fitness and oxygen levels. A very specific bubble. A few thoughts...

1) You're assuming that Bekele would be the man to beat because he is (according to you) the best runner ever. How well does 10K running ability translate to mountaineering? It would certainly be helpful to have an aerobic capacity capable of running 26 minutes for 10K. But he's specialized to perform his best for time periods of under 30 minutes. What would happen when you add heavy boots, a heavy backpack, managing a rope, much slower cadence, and using different muscles and/or the same muscles in different ways.

2) Assuming Bekele's the best man for the job, would he be guided or independent? Because if he's guided, then who on earth is this amazing guide who can shoulder Bekele's excess pack weight, break trail for him, route find, and assess hazards up to the limit of elite human altitude capability all while keeping an eye on Bekele's well being. The guide would be the real man for the job. Or woman. If he's independent and solo, he'll have to break trail, route find and manage his exposure to crevasses, seracs, and avalanches.

3) Would Bekele have the risk tolerance and judgement to enter an inhospitable environment where avalanches can come down from thousands of feet above and bury you until your body melts out of the receding glacier decades later? Or where a minor injury or illness can spell disaster? Or where a slip can turn into an uncontrolled fall for thousands of feet? Or where enormous blocks of ice can topple down on top of you with out warning? With out a guide, he would have to assess all these things himself. And once he passed the previous high point, he'd be on his own. No fixed ropes, no ladders to cross crevasses, route map, no chance of rescue if anything went wrong.

I know this is a hypothetical conversation. If you assume that being the best runner in the world translates to being the best athlete for any form of bipedal movement then I assume Bekele would go higher than anyone else. But you'd have to remove all external risk factors and judgement calls associated with climbing mountains, (he couldn't be guided, or else the guide would be far better than Bekele) especially since he'd be climbing at the cutting edge. Additionally, sure, Bekele could learn how to manage the risks and make good judgments, but if he were to take the time to do that I don't think he would be the same Bekele that we're talking about. Very few people, if any, can be the best at more than one thing. Mountaineers are going to be the best at mountaineering and runners are going to be the best at running. I don't think I'd call Kilian Jornet the best mountaineer or the best runner, but he is very, very good at both. And that is why he is so amazing - his versatility at a high level.

Chuck Norris could do it. Carrying a sherpa.

I guess if they built a big hotel at 8000m and used it for people to acclimatize to. If they made the walls and windows really thick so oxygen couldn't escape and weather couldn't harm them, so when climbers go in they can get their oxygen levels back to normal and refuel. They could sit beside a nice fire inside the hotel. Then build another similar hotel at 9000m. The people building this hotel can go back to the 8000m hotel after their days work building until it is complete. We could keep doing this every 1000m I guess. So if someone did 1000m a day and then recovered in the next hotel they might go really high. It would be easier than staying in a tent which is what we have to do at the moment.

You really don't understand any of this. You are going to pressure a hotel at 8000m? How are you going to get the building equipment up there? Where are you going to put it that it won't be wiped out by weather? How will you power it? How will people work to build a hotel at that altitude?