Some friends may have an issue with this opinion piece, others will laud it. I’m a member of more than a few adventure and exploration organizations, and, as such, have gotten to know, and interview, many folks within the discipline.

Being a journalist, I’ve also documented the changes in adventure tourism over the last few decades. As technology has increased, so too, has access to the world’s remote areas – the Galapagos Islands, Antarctica, Machu Picchu, the Namibian Desert, Patagonia. Average Joes like you and me can visit these places fairly easily, and often without spending a fortune.

More hard-core, riskier endeavors once considered exotic also have become fairly commonplace, but mainly for the wealthy – a five-star guided climb of Mt. Everest ($100,000), an 11-minute jaunt to suborbital space ($1 million), a submersible dive to the Titanic wreck ($250,000) or even further, down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth ($750,000).

There are good and bad sides to these developments, of course. First, the good. A $100,000 guided climb of Everest provides needed money to the indigenous Sherpa people in the region who take climbers up the world’s highest peak, as well as to the small guiding companies facilitating the climbs and the countries (Nepal, China) which sell expensive permits.

Those $1-million tourist rides to the edge of space boost the fledgling companies by helping engineers designing and launching the vehicles push rocket technology into the future (think reusable parts, new fuels, efficiency, etc).

And $750,000 dives to the bottom of the Mariana Trench help real-deal ocean exploration science by enabling operators to amortize the cost of building the expensive submersibles that do the research and also take the tourists down.

Now on to the bad, which, honestly, isn’t as bad as it could be. Let’s start with Everest. With all of the amateurs crowding the peak now, a conga-line often forms on the tourist route to the top – ie, literally hundreds of folks in a bottleneck queue similar to movie-goers in New York waiting for the hottest new film.

Other than unpleasantness to the climbers, the crowding poses a high risk to all involved. If an unexpected storm blows in, as with the 1996 “Into Thin Air” disaster, dozens or even hundreds will be killed as the climbers, starved of oxygen and possibly hypothermic, and their guides, will have nowhere to flee.

Then there is damage to mountain itself. Dozens of dead bodies already litter the slopes, as well as tons of garbage and human waste, all accumulating exponentially. The most recent development is a plethora of expensive helicopters on call to help climbers skip the peak’s lower camps, allowing the laziest and wealthiest a short-cut, both up and down.

As for the space stuff, don’t get me started. Like Everest, it is more dangerous than one might think. Some 4% of those who have attempted to reach space have died. Couple that with the dangerous fad of not wearing space suits on suborbital flights. A sudden cabin depressurization would kill all aboard in seconds. Nothing tragic has happened yet, thank God, but as Red Bull parachute daredevil Felix Baumgartner says, it’s probably just a matter of time.

Then there are the tourists calling themselves astronauts when they return. Huh? Believe me, I have a number of NASA astronaut friends who resent that claim, but are too polite to voice it publicly. Some tourists further justify the “astronaut” label by saying they did more than just sit in a tin can – they did “research” on their short flights. Seriously, what more can be garnered in five minutes of micro-gravity that hasn’t been uncovered in tens of thousands of hours on the International Space Station and during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions?

Finally, there are the submersible adventures. If you go down in a relatively safe craft – one tested multiple times and made of say, titanium – fine. But if you go in a sketchy sub, one you were warned about in advance like what happened with the widely-publicized Titanic dive disaster last summer, well. The deaths alone are disturbing, but so is the untold damage the disaster did to the once-great safety image of the submersible business. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of regulation, but some in this area might be good.

A big factor driving all of this agita is a desire to claim Guinness World Records. Adventure tourists are finding crazier and crazier ways to define them. Take the two women on Shishapangma recently dueling it out to claim an obscure mountain-first for females. Both were killed in separate avalanches on the same day heading to the top in what they both knew was questionable weather. For what?

In an old episode of the hit television series, “Happy Days,” the coolest character, Fonzie (played by actor Henry Winkler), devises a stunt where he waterskiis behind a boat, launches from a ramp and jumps over a long row of sharks. Basically, the stunt signaled that the end of the series was near; the writers were running out of meaningful ideas.

With all of this Guinness World Record hoopla, and the blatant overstating of commercial personal conquests, has adventure tourism jumped the shark? Is there anything meaningful left to do? Maybe. Does it matter? Depends upon who you ask.

(Editor’s Note: In full disclosure, the writer of this story is a previous long-time ticket-holder for a suborbital trip to space. He took his deposit back recently for some of the reasons outlined in this story.)