What exactly makes cave diving so risky, even if you have experience or are with a guide?
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see, when you’re in the dark, you still have sense of where you are with your ears. A lifetime of experience will actually teach you to discern your voice as it bounces around a room, whether it echoes or not, how close you are to a war. If you’ve ever put your face an inch from a wall and spoke it does extremely different from when you’re facing an open room. You’re so used to this in your daily life that you don’t even think about it, it’s one of these minor clues that inform your knowledge of the world around you. This, combined with sight, and you’ve got a pretty good 3d grasp of the world around you, and that can inform how your limbs move you around. Even things like how your sleeves bend and press against your arms, or your leg hair as your legs swing forward, the folding of your socks, maybe your ponytail tugging slightly on your scalp. These things all contribute to your feel of gravity, of momentum, and you might not think about it because they aren’t necessary to function, but they’re data input points your brain definitely uses.
imagine none of that. Now, you’re completely numb to the world. No hearing, no sight, nothing. You have no sensory feedback as to where your hands are, you’re flying blind only with your own body’s muscles and nerves to hopefully get it right. If you aren’t used to this, you can’t ‘feel’ your way around. You might think you’ve got 3 feet in front of you when you’ve only got 6. That sharp left turn might actually be only 30 degrees. the wall is now 2 feet away from you when you swore it was right beside your hand, ready to grab. Everything lies to you and you have absolutely no way to get more information. You start to make shit up as your brain grasps for straws, so to speak, of info to cobble together whatever input it feels.
Suddenly you aren’t sure what way is up or down, you can’t feel momentum or inertia. Your only way to know, your ears, are second-guessing themselves now because you’re not getting any other input to back it up. You’re wrong all the time but that’s never been a problem because in case of conflicting info, you’ve got all these other ‘failsafes’ of contextual input to help you.
your entire understanding of the physical world is collapsing, and you have absolutely nothing to help you regain enough of it to make informed decisions. You might start backing up not realizing you’re actually going further in. And this whole time has been 30 minutes when you were sure it was only 30 seconds and you don’t know that your oxygen is getting dangerously low, because you’re using it up in your panic.
honestly, the risk isn’t even always with the cave itself. if you aren’t trained to deal with all of this, you’re fucked.
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