The 5 Most Badass Man vs. Nature Showdowns Ever Photographed

In Venezuela, just above the mouth of the Catatumbo River, a lightning storm has been raging for at least two centuries. I know that sounds like science fiction, or some hackneyed fantasy villain's lair -- but it's real. For 160 nights out of the year, the Catatumbo lightning strikes for 10 straight hours, at a rate of nearly 300 strikes per hour. Short of trees growing in the shape of a human skull or a good ol' screaming bog, that is the single best way Nature knows to tell you a place is cursed.

And it's freaking populated!

Thousands and thousands of people swung by the Earth's only eternal storm, plunked down their packs and said, "Welp: Looks like as good a place as any to settle down and raise some kids." But simply living beneath an electric sky wasn't nearly hardcore enough for the owner of this shack:

Thechemicalengineer

He didn't just buy property in the Lightning District; he moved out into the water, constructed a tiny hovel in the middle of that giant bathtub with God's old toaster perched permanently above it and then built himself a metal roof.

George Kourounis, Stormchaser

I don't know who the owner of the world's least insurable home is, but I know where you can find him: standing on his front porch with thimbles on both of his middle fingers, drunkenly flipping off the gods.

Well, some of us do, anyway. Others see the unleashed potential of countless billions of tons of surging water and think, "Man, wouldn't it be funny if I rode that?"

BBC
Hilarious!

In late 2004, Cornwall, England, suffered through several record-breaking storms: 70 mile an hour winds, flooding, waves so large they crashed over the promenade -- but the vast and bottomless rage of Nature is nothing when compared with human boredom. So here's some dudes surfing it:

Daily Mail

Look at the size of that breaking wave in relation to the surfers. They're so insignificant that the ocean didn't even mean to kill them; that's just how Poseidon steps on ants. To think you could possibly survive (much less ride) something like that takes not only a complete misunderstanding of physics, but a total failure to grasp the basic concept of scale itself. That's the biggest storm the world could throw at you, and you tragically mistook it for a vehicle. But holy shit, you're doing it! You're reall-

Daily Mail

Oh. Yeah, I guess that's about how you'd expect things to turn o-

Daily Mail

Jesus, dude. That looks like a frog getting hit by a truck. It looks like it actually went worse than I initially thought, and I initially thought you'd wipe out so hard that you'd literally cease to exist in the annals of human history.

I never imagined your leg would bend like that, though; that's messed up.

That's an expedition member walking on freshly cooled lava in the Nyiragongo volcano. But don't worry, the ground isn't actually glowing like hellfire itself -- that's just an optical illusion. The ambient red light is merely the reflection of the giant lake of still-molten lava just out of frame. The photographer described being inside the volcano as "a constant, low frequency rumble -- like being inside a giant subwoofer."

I assume he then added, "... made out of liquid fire."

I assume he then added a little bit of pee.

That just doesn't look real. It looks like a physics glitch in a video game. It's like the cosmos turned on Hacks; like somebody forgot to CGI in Godzilla.

But this is an article about people braving the fury of the natural world -- tiny little Davids spitting in the eye of Mother Nature's Goliath. So where's the human element here? Well, you have to look closely at that video again, at about 1:25, on the lower right:

And you'll see a little white car cruising by -- not even speeding, mind you -- just moseying along Main Street. Now turn your gaze a few inches up and to the left, and observe a goddamn semi hurtling through the air. Sure, there are other cars later in the clip, but they're much farther out and might not be aware that traffic conditions are currently "in the sky." Really look at the angles of that screencap with the white car again; this isn't somebody caught unaware. They can clearly see the 18-wheeler that just took these broken wings and learned to fly again ... and they do not care. They do not give one lonely shit that somebody just up and reversed gravity on them. They're going to goddamn Blockbuster, come hell or high trailer.

Holy shit, did they just ... did they just signal?

Kittinger was part of Project Excelsior, an experiment to study extreme high altitude bailouts. The project involved an open gondola suspended by helium balloons that brought Kittinger up over 100,000 (not a typo; one hundred thousand) feet in the air. That's 19 miles, straight up. In a previous, lower altitude jump, his limbs generated G-forces more than 20 times that of Earth's gravity. Once he left the gondola, it took him nearly 15 minutes to hit the ground. He broke the speed of sound ... with his torso. That image of the distant curve of the Earth up there at the start of this entry? That's not taken from the space station. That was Joseph Kittinger's helmet cam.

Source."Haha, I'ma git you, Earth!"

I went skydiving once. They had me crawl out onto the wing of a shaky little prop plane, wind howling and ripping at my clothes, and when I was far enough out, the instructor said: "Now, let go." To which I answered: "Fuck you." Joseph Kittinger went up in a tiny balloon, and when he reached space, somebody said, "Now, step out there and try to aim for the planet." And he said, "Sure thing!"

I've actually pinpointed it: The bravest nanosecond in human history. Those are his white boots up top, just leaving the platform.

It takes enormous balls to even get on that vehicle -- what is, essentially, a rickety little basket with no handrails, tied to a bunch of balloons. It takes even bigger balls to voluntarily ride that son of a bitch higher than air goes. It takes balls of incomprehensible proportions -- balls whose non-Euclidean geometry simply cannot exist on our earthly plane -- to look down at a planet so far below you that you can actually make out the shape of continents, then step outside for a stroll.

Those kinds of balls do exist, but only in an alternate dimension, parallel to ours but wholly separate, of which we mere mortals can comprehend only the smallest piece. The avatar of that vast dimension comprised entirely of great and majestic testicles has a name, but it cannot be pronounced by the human tongue. So you can just call him "Joe."

You can pre-order the next episodes of Rx right here, or buy Robert's other book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. Follow him on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

For more from Brockway, check out The 5 Weirdest Drug Experiments Performed on Animals and 5 Lovable Animals You Didn't Know Are Secretly Terrifying.