There’s a great tv show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive. Have any of you seen it?

In every episode of the show, a person or group of people end up in some dangerous situation and struggle to survive, whether in a desert, or an ocean, or a jungle, or the like. And in every episode, the situation gets so bleak that the viewer would fully expect the person or group of people to die. There appears to be no hope at all. But then, against all odds, the person is either rescued or they somehow find their way back to civilization, and survive.

There were six whole season of these heart pounding, nail biting survival stories. Here are the synopses of some of the shows just from the first season:

• - Traveling to Idaho to attend a funeral, a family from California becomes trapped in a blizzard; while trekking off to find help, a wrong turn leads them deep into the unforgiving wilderness.
• - A crew of five aboard a luxury yacht sailing from Maine to Florida that sank in a storm, leaving the crew adrift on a lifeboat with no food or water and menaced by sharks.
• - Three adventurers are captured by the Khmer Rouge and must either negotiate their release or take their chances escaping into the jungle.
• - A Hollywood camera crew in a helicopter crash into an active volcano they were filming. Rescue attempts are hampered by lava, toxic gases and bad weather ...
• - A plane crash in the Kalahari Desert leaves survivors without food or water, and two of them try to find help for other passengers who are injured.

Water sources are always precious, especially in a desert climate. According to Texas A&M Science:

Most wells don’t get their water from underground rivers, but instead get the water from aquifers. Aquifers are layers of rock and soil with water flowing through their small pores. Groundwater drips slowly and gently through the small spaces within rocks, between rocks, and between loose materials such as sand and gravel. In fact, water in aquifers can take years to centuries to flow back to the surface. A typical flow rate for water in aquifers is ten feet per year. For this reason, if a region experiences no rain for a few weeks, the wells will not immediately run dry. New water from rain and melting snow drips down into the ground through the pores and cracks in the rocks and soil. The well has to be deep enough so that it is below the water table so that the water fills up.

The word “deadline” has an interesting, and oft, well, “deadly” history.

Earliest occurrences of the word seemed to have referenced a fishing angler’s weighted line which would hang perfectly still, or “dead” in the water, bait attached, to attract unsuspecting fish who, upon biting such line, would soon find themselves also “dead.”

Its meaning was later expanded to refer to any fixed or immovable line.

But it was the ravages of war which would give the word its next iteration. Enter one infamous Confederate Civil War prison commander, Henry Wirz, responsible for the operations at the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

In 1864, Wirz was put in control of Camp Sumter, a newly-established internment camp for Union soldiers located near Andersonville in rural Georgia. Over the remaining 14 months of the war, Camp Sumter grew to become one of the largest prisoner of war camps in the entire Confederacy. At its peak, it held more than 30,000 Union prisoners, all of whom shared an enormous 16.5-acre open-air paddock—conditions inside of which were notoriously grim. Disease and malnutrition were rife, and a lack of clean water, warm clothing, and adequate sanitation led to the deaths of many of the camp’s prisoners. Of the 45,000 Union prisoners held in the Camp at one time or another, it is estimated that almost a third succumbed to Sumter’s squalid and inhumane conditions.

But wait, there’s more. One of most damning examples of his inhumanity was his implementation of what became known as the Camp’s deadline:

“ … a line around the inner face of the stockade or wall enclosing said prison, and about twenty feet distant and within said stockade; and so established said dead line, which was in many places an imaginary line, in many other places marked by insecure and shifting strips of [boards nailed] upon the tops of small and insecure stakes or posts, he … instructed the prison guard stationed around the top of said stockade to fire upon and kill any of the prisoners aforesaid who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under or across the said “dead line ... “ — Report of the Secretary of War, October 1865

Wirz must have been deemed to have of “crossed the line” of human decency, because he was found guilty of war crimes, and was hanged on the November 10, 1865. 

*Execution of Captain Henry Wirz in 1865 / Library of Congress

By the early 20th century, with its wartime inhumanity connotations nothing more than a speck in American culture’s rear view mirror, a new meaning emerged from the pages rapidly churning off journalistic printing presses.

Printers used the word to describe that point at the bottom of a type case (printing tray), below which typeset could not be added. It was the "deadline" on the tray. Journalists, rushing to get their stories to press, competed to get space on the page before the “deadline” was "set" and there was no more room to include another story.

While the typesetting machines of the early 20th century are likewise but a speck in our rear view windows, the connotation of the term has since stuck and expanded. Today, the word deadline is used broadly to refer to any date or time by which something must be accomplished.

It may no longer exclusively refer to matters of life and death, but urgency is still at the core of its meaning.