for a deliciously crafted explanation of the what’s worse, deadliest jobs edition rules, see part 1

Commercial Diver v Smokejumper.

Smokejumpers are firefighters who must be in the air within 10 minutes of getting the call on a remote wildfire. Dropped in from a small plane as low as 1200 feet in altitude, a smokejumper begins by chopping and back-burning areas to head off the fire before it gets big and uncontainable. If the thought of being parachuted into a raging inferno and having to fight your way back until you can be airlifted out, many sleepless nights later, appeals to you, then you should try smokejumping. The work is intense; your core requirements for smokejumping are strength, fearlessness, and endurance—an ability to start from zero and work around the clock.

Other characteristics it’s nice to have, as a smokejumper:

- the ability to get by on little-to-no food and water for several days; air support will get spread thin and have trouble getting you supplies

- an inclination to hike many miles out of the location after the fire is controlled—even if you slipped a disk in your back or sprained a joint when you parachuted in, or whatever else, your mates have too much gear to carry you, and you’re not getting a ride out

- An intrinsic trust your own knot-tying abilities. Smokejumpers leave the plane with 50 or more feet of rope as part of their gear: if you land in a tree, you’ll need to not just cut yourself free, but rope yourself down from said tree

- Be really, really good at parachuting. Jumps from the plane are made at a very low altitude, so there’s little margin for error. But it’s not just about what you’re jumping from; what you’re jumping into is rather a consideration, as well. Heavily wooded, remote wilderness makes for less than an ideal parachuting target—add to that the factor that, oh yeah! the whole place is on fire, and you’ve got yourself a level of risk that may exceed the riskiest thing you’ve ever done

- And smokejumpers do it a lot: During the drastically bad summer fire season of 1994, the 391 smokejumpers available nationwide made 4,806 fire jumps on 989 wildfires—a record for yearly activity

- Most smokejumpers are attracted by the danger, and the camaraderie that comes with it. They are known to form very tight friendships, work relentlessly, and party like…like people who live on the edge—you know, Top Gun, Maverick and Goose kind of stuff. Smokejumpers bond hard, and party like people who jump out of airplanes into forest fires for a living might be expected to party. Which is to say: hard.

Commercial diver. The awesome thing about commercial diving isn’t the fact that it’s inherently dangerous, but the sheer number of ways it gives you to encounter a more specific danger. You’re not just diving into the danger. Once you’re in, you also may be infected by the danger, or get ground up in the danger; or you could become trapped under the danger, or be eaten by the danger.

Like, take nearly any one of your fears—not the lame-o agoraphobia you temporarily developed after your college girlfriend moved out in the middle of the night, but a legitimately, fascinatingly scary thing—put it in an underwater context, and there’s a decent chance someone does that for a job.

First you have your immediate-surroundings kind of fears, like

- Hate being in the water? Great! You’ve come to the right place.

- Have a fear of enclosed spaces? Good news: you get to wear a vulcanized rubber drysuit with small, thick viewing lenses an inch from your face; and maybe with a layer of PVC over the whole suit to protect you from

- being stabbed or punctured, which people have been known to fear.

- Hate sharks? Be a shark wrangler, who gets to swim in murky green water with some juvenile great white sharks—perhaps the most perfect predators this side of the velociraptor. A young great white will sometimes get caught in a commercial fishing net, and when an aquarium like Monterey Bay saves him, a diver will regularly go in to monitor until his health and behavior.

But there’s room for your more specialized fears, as well.

- Maybe darkness freaks you out. In deep diving, light is often very scarce, so you’ll need to rely on the touch of other divers to guide you, and be connected via rope to the surface, which is extra fun if you have a

- fear of ropes or being tied up! This is more commonly a kink than a fear, but still. Becoming entangled in a net is an exceedingly common cause of diver fatality: Divers get tangled up trying to free a propeller from a net, or trying to untangle a large fish, or whale, whose flopping tail can deliver a fatal blow.

- Afraid of being trapped? Become a polar ice safety diver, where your job is to monitor and rescue the scientist-divers who are working under ice, which is somewhere between 8 and 20 feet thick.

- Fear of losing feeling in your body? This sounds like a kind of sissy fear, at first. But if you listen to someone who’s undergone paralysis—temporary or permanent—describe that initial feeling of not feeling, you may well develop a phobia on the spot. Down beneath the Antarctic ice, water temps are at 28F, and oxygen regulators can freeze up and free flow—so divers must use two. They must be trained how to take one regulator out of their mouth and put another one in without panicking. Rob Robbins, a supervisor for Raytheon Polar Services, drily notes: “It’s amazing how hard it is to find your mouth when your face is frozen.”

- Hate radiation? Become a nuclear reactor diver. Charlie Vallance, an accomplished reactor diver, explains that water is a main driver for reactor turbines, but that water also is an extremely effective radiation shield. He actually hasn’t heard of diver casualties inside the reactor, but says, “I know of at least 8 deaths from divers working outside the plants, in the intake pipes and turbines. Guys get drowned. Guys get crushed. That’s where the real danger is.” But perhaps you don’t’ hate nuclear radiation, at least, not as much as you

- hate sewage. Stinky, germy sewage. If you become a hazmat sewer diver, you’ll get to work in it! all day! Syringes and broken glass find their way into raw sewage, so the risk of contracting diseases is continually high.

Diver or Smokejumper? What’s worse.