It’s about that time of year again for the highlight of any explorer’s calendar – the aptly-named Explore conference at the Royal Geographic Society.
The RGS.
It’s all going down this weekend, when hundreds of explorers and field scientists will gather to exchange ideas, expertise, and inspiration. The speaker’s list is pretty intimidating; seems like about half have climbed Everest, and the ones that haven’t were too busy walking across Greenland in the winter with only a t-shirt while dragging a Land Rover behind them and juggling polar bears.
It all gets started tonight with a lecture from Paul Rose, the host of the BBC’s eye-candy Oceans series. I’ve become an addict of BBC documentaries, and “Oceans,” though prone to its fair share of eco-platitudes, can’t help but inspire wanderlust.
Explore also marks a noteworthy intersection between exploration and science. Exploration is rarely undertaken for its own sake – it has been tied throughout history first to survival, then to trade, evangalism, and politics. After the scientific revolution, science became a key partner, beginning with freelance scientists who would hitch rides on any ship they could find and progressing to multi-ship missions dispatched around the globe to solve scientific problems (i.e. by observing eclipses to get at the longitude dilemma).
Today, it seems that exploration serves four masters. Science is the most prominant impetus, for the quest to understand our universe naturally pushes us into the unknown: robots crawl around on Mars and teams hack through the rainforest looking for useful new drugs.
The second driver is difficult to characterize, but it involves the pursuit of physical, mental, and emotional limits – think of intrepid men and women trudging across continents or over mountains. This is slightly more “adventure” than “exploration”, but in many ways it is the pursuit of the new. (More on this in the future…)
Politics is also a driving factor for exploration, particularly with regard to state-sponsored manned space exploration. This component is a bit of a relic from the Cold War, but we see nationism rising again as the Asian Space Race heats up.
Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, economics. Even the supposedly noble causes of science and “limit-pushing” are often undertaken with economic motivations, either of commercial products down the line or good publicity for a sponsor. Space exploration (particularly of the manned variety) would no doubt cease to exist if it didn’t create jobs and generate so many lucrative spin-off technologies. Sad but true, money rules the world and our exploration of it.
So that to me is the state of exploration on the eve of Explore. I look forward to a couple days of engaging conversation and inspiration, and I hope to get a better sense of what exploration means in a modern and future context.
Updates to come!
