Yeah, and a meteorite might slam through your roof and kill you while you’re sitting on your couch. A giant sink whole might open up under your bed while you are asleep and swallow you up whole (actually happened in FL). You have a better chance of getting killed driving too and from the dive site. I think what people are saying is that if your gear is maintained to proper standards from the inside of the tank all the way through to the point where your lips are wrapped around the mouthpiece and everything in between, and your situational awareness and skills are what they should be to dive safely then many or most of us are willing to accept that using scuba gear has a very low level of risk where a pony bottle does not add enough of a safety factor to bother with it.
Nothing in life is a 100% guarantee, nothing.
Ok... I have never had a meteorite hit me, or sinkhole open up under me, ... I have had a nearly new regulator with less than 30 dives suffer a high pressure seat failure. And I have been on a dive with my wife where a rental regulator had a complete (no air) failure.
We are dealing with real potential issues, not some BS theoretical problem.
Many of our current safety, backup “norms” were pioneered by cave divers in the 70’s where they averaged over 10 fatalities per year. *ref Peter Buzzacott’s American Cave Diving Fatalities 69-07.
Of course not all diving has the same risk profile as cave/wreck diving, but these pioneers, through necessity introduced things like the “octopus”, SPG, BC, AND concepts of redundancy.
Improvements in gear, standards and training have done a lot to improve these incidents, even though we have a lot more people participating in these type of dives.
And we don’t tend to track or report the “near misses”. So we really have no idea how many divers have been saved due to gear redundancy, team, or self rescue.
