Nathalie Cabrol

So you need to get with all the gears, with your hiking, trekking equipment, high mountaineering gears.

And when you get on top of that, you have to remove all that and don a suit.

This is where most of the risk is because...

You can be well-prepared, but for one reason or another, you get sick.

And you can get sick not only because of high-altitude sickness.

It can be a number of things.

Or you can be tired, or you can catch a cold.

And then, of course, you have the mountain itself.

We had a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hitting one day when we were 50 meters away from the summit.

No, you can't.

And that's the acts of God.

You know, working with NASA, although I am the director of the SETI Institute, my grants are coming from NASA.

So I'm a NASA contractor.

And every time we go to those environments, we have to go through the rigorous process of training with NASA and checking all the boxes for safety.

So they are training and training and training us.

And I have to thank them because a lot of those people

Trainings are the things that are in your brain when these kind of things happen.

You know how to react and you are not freaking out.

But in all of the things they are training us for, you have the green risk, the yellow risk, and the red risk.

So the green risks are basically the don't be stupid, don't do the kind of thing you wouldn't be doing at home, like it's jumping, you know, on rocks that are not stable.