I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.

He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.

He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.

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unsupp0rted an hour ago | parent [-]

Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.

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cowsandmilk an hour ago | parent [-]

> Only 79… far from a complete human experience

It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.

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unsupp0rted 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

Imagine what a guy like that could do with 79 more years... or 10x of that.

It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do.

It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.

	▲	unfitted2545 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A complete human experience is to have relatively little time, no point in doing anything if you have 500 years to do it IMO. Edit: Maybe there wouldn't be nilihism, but I don't think you could get more fulfilled with the extra time. I feel like an insect that lives 24 hours and a shark that lives several hundred have an equal feeling of accomplishment.