Progress and Exploration

A British team has made "history" by reaching the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility "without mechanical assistance." Translated into English, that means that they skied.

I don't want to take anything away from the achievements of Henry Cookson, Rory Sweet and Rupert Longsdon. God knows that trekking 1093 miles to the most remote part of Antarctica is no walk in the park and you'd have pay me a sizable chunk of change to get me to try it-- twenty years ago, that is. However, it does show how seriously dead the Age of Exploration is in the 21^st century.

What makes the feat of Cookson et al newsworthy is not that they reached the Pole of Inaccessibility, but that they did so with a self-imposed handicap. If this were 1907, anyone hearing of such an idea would have thought the authors mad. When the Poles were conquered no one gave a tinkers damn whether it was done on foot, by dog sled, snowmobile, Zeppelin, gondola, or pogo stick. The important thing was to get there and hang how you did it. In fact, when Captain Scott made his ill-fated march on the South Pole he took snow tractors, ponies, dog sleds, and man-hauling equipment. When the Hunt Expedition finally managed to conquer Everest, it did so with all the scale and equipment of a military campaign and pinned its hopes on the latest in oxygen gear.

Today, we've so filled the map and reached every spot on the globe worth reaching that the business of "exploration" has been reduced to the level of stunts and extreme recreational activity. The big thing is not to climb Everest, but to do so without oxygen, or with as little equipment as possible, with an all-woman team, with paraplegics, alone, via the most insanely suicidal route possible, or while painting one's face blue. As for polar "expeditions," now that we can touch both of Earth's extremes in a few hours by plane, and it seems that no one has the stomach to go shoggoth hunting, the only thing "explorers" can do today is make their mark by pointless endurance tests that end with a nice, hot shower at the Scott/Amundsen base.

This is probably one of the few sound reasons I can think of for manned space travel. If no solid scientific or industrial reason can be found for mounting an expedition to Mars, we may need to do so anyway as a viable alternative now that Earthbound exploration has been reduced to the level of sport.