Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationThe Birth of Exploration
When did exploration begin? A difficult question. If we consider exploration in its broadest sense as an activity that takes people to places they’ve never been before, then we have to start very early indeed. Evidence suggests that hominids left Africa in a series of migrations over millions of years. If we limit ourselves only to homo sapiens sapiens, we still have to go back 50,000 or 60,000 years, the time when many sorts of evidence suggest a small population of humans left Africa, probably without a road atlas.
Out of Africa
But perhaps we should narrow our definition a bit. Most of us now think of exploration as something more than mere migration, something that includes a self-conscious pursuit of the unknown. If this is our definition, we need to start much later. How much later is hotly debated, perhaps as late as the 14th or 15th century CE.
Even this starting point has problems. First, many Renaissance explorers like Columbus were not primarily interested in discovery of unknown regions, but hoped to find new routes to known locations such as Cathay (China) and the Spice Islands (Indonesia). On this see my earlier post. Second, terms such as “explorer” were not yet used to describe people who set off in search of discovery. For all of their impressive nautical muscle-flexing, Columbus, Cabot, Hudson were viewed as “travelers,” and their voyages, “travels.”
By the 1800s, however, the umbrella of “travel” had become very large indeed. Not surprisingly, the idea of the traveler was also in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation. As the concept of traveler lost definition in the eighteenth century, “explorer” entered the vernacular to delineate it, to distinguish the serious investigator of the unknown from more quotidian voyagers, the doe-eyed ingénues of the Grand Tour.
Planning the Grand Tour, Emil Brack
So we could start our study of modern exploration in 1800. A very judicious decision. Except that we would be basing this starting point on the use of words, “explorer” and “exploration,” rather than a shift in thinking or practices. This is not very satisfying either. Certainly ideas about mapping unknown regions have been around a long time, even if they were called something else.
In his excellent book The Beginnings of Western Science, David Lindberg identifies a parallel problem for the history of science. If words like “science” or “biology” constitute one’s starting point for modern science, then the historian begins her task quite late, in the nineteenth century. If she considers scientific ideas or methods to be the key, then the starting line could be pushed back into the early Renaissance. But even this date ignores the work of earlier scholars (naturalists or philosophers we might call them) who spent their lives trying to understand the functioning of nature deep into recorded history, say 600 BCE.
In short, no starting point is perfect. One thing is clear though; the relationship between exploration and travel is too strong to be ignored. It might sound easy to group them together, but for scholars of the voyage, this can be more difficult than it appears. The division that grew up between these concepts in the 19th century has also come to define a modern boundary of sorts. The subject of exploration attracts many scholars today, with historians probably represented in largest numbers. By comparison, the study of travel, particularly travel writing, has become a favorite subject of literary and cultural studies scholars. One sees this division in the academic journals and websites devoted to travel vs. scientific exploration.
So in the next few months I will be doing some exploring of my own, wading into the travel literature from the other side of the disciplinary fence. In the meantime, if you are interested, I’ve put up some links on travel writing.
Announcements
Image by Jacob MacGraw-Mickelson, New York Times
Maurice Isserman, professor of history at Hamilton College, writes an interesting op-ed about K2 in the Sunday New York Times, describing the changing ethos of mountain climbing over the past 50 years. He compares the tragedy on K2 last week, in which everyone was trying to save themselves, to the American attempt on K2 in 1953, when an entire party abandoned their efforts at the summit to save one member who was suffering from potentially lethal blood clots in his leg.
The Scott Polar Research Institute is putting on an exhibition called “Face to Face: Polar Portraits.” The show includes portraits and profiles of over one hundred Polar explorers, including a companion volume edited by Hew Lewis-Jones (who’s talk at the North By Degree conference was first-rate).
The Giant’s Shoulders, a new history of science blog, is organizing a monthly carnival in which people submit posts about classic scientific papers. Hosts for the event change each month. For the latest carnival, head to The Lay Scientist on August 15th.
Polar projection, Willem Barentsz, 1599
In 2009 International Conference on the History of Cartography will be meeting in Copenhagen to discuss papers on “Cartography of the Far North: Maps, Myths, and Narratives.” 1 October 2008 is the deadline for submissions. See the Call for Papers and other information here: ICHC 2009
A Place to Plant the Flag
Thanksgiving, that magical day, a time of gathering, fellowship, and unrestrained serial eating. Like all holidays, Thanksgiving unfolds in the present, tethered in complicated ways to the past. “Tradition” probably best describes these personal, historical, links. Consider turkey. We eat turkey in our house because we like it, it keeps well, and can be transmuted into any number of post-Thanksgiving dishes: turkey soup, turkey sandwiches, turkey fricasse. But turkey remains on the menu every year not only because of its tastiness and longevity, but because it’s always been on the menu, seared as it is into the mystic chords of turkey memory. I cannot think of a time when we considered having something else for Thanksgiving. Such is the power of tradition.
Exploration has its own traditions, ways that link current endeavors to historical precedents. Some of these traditions are obvious enough, such as the naming of vessels, probes, etc. in honor of previous people or ventures: Galileo, Cassini, Enterprise, and Challenger. But others are more difficult to detect without hindsight. Many explorers prided themselves on being careful empiricists, objective observers of the regions they described. Reading these works now, however, its hard to miss the imprint of culture on their narratives, the martial descriptions of exploration as a “war on nature” and the kindly, patronizing descriptions of native peoples as “children of nature.” These tropes were also traditions of a sort.
Yet some things are still hard to see with the benefit of hindsight, even when they are staring at you in the face. Consider Dan Lester and Giulio Varsi’s article at the Space Review on the current Vision of Space Exploration. Lester and Varsi observe that NASA’s tradition, implicit (perhaps unconscious?) has been to associate exploration with solid places, rocky grounds suitable for “footprints and flags.” There are good reasons for going to the Moon and Mars, particularly for astrogeologists who want to know more about, well, the Moon and Mars.
But what about those scientists who seek to uncover more about the broader galaxy? This is a form of exploration best conducted remotely, with telescopes, rather than suited-up astronauts. For these purposes, the Moon and Mars are not ideal locations. To get the most bang for the buck, telescopically speaking, NASA would send its space telescopes to one of a number of “Lagrange points,” regions of space where telescopes could remain stationary relative to larger objects such as the Earth and Moon. Freed from planetary surfaces, these telescopes could observe broad reaches of the sky, unencumbered by planetary atmosphere or blind spots.
Five Lagrange points relative to the Earth, Moon, and Sun (L1-L5)
Costs and operational simplicity seem to favor by a large margin locations in free space such as the Earth-Sun Lagrange points over the lunar surface. While lunar soil may offer a record of solar activity that is valuable to heliophysicists, realtime monitoring of the Sun and the solar wind does not need to be anchored on regolith. Overall, the lunar surface presents a challenging environment, with dust and power generation problems as well as the difficulty of precision soft landing.
Relative to the push for human exploration of the Moon and Mars, “Lagrangian exploration” is a low priority for NASA. Why? Perhaps, as Lester and Varsi observe, it’s because of the historical importance of discovering land, of sinking one’s feet into the soil and then planting a flag in it.
As I read this article, it suddenly made other pieces of historical data fall into place. When Robert Peary and Frederick Cook brought back their photographs of the North Pole, why did both men choose to plant their flags in the highest hummock of pack-ice they could find? No such location would have been identifiable so precisely from astronomical calculations (if indeed either of them reached the North Pole, which I doubt). Clearly then these men had other reasons to plant the Stars and Stripes on a high hummock, rather than, say on a flat stretch of pack ice or floating on the water of a “lead.”
Clearly “earthiness” remains a tradition in exploration, an element that remains in the western imagination of discovery. When the nuclear ice-breaker Yamal steamed north in 2000 with its burden of high-paying tourists bound for the North Pole, it found open water there. What to do? The party could have celebrated the watery top of the world from the deck. Paddled around it in inflatable boats! Instead the Yamal steamed south far enough to reach solid pack ice. There the crew planted the “North Pole” flag around which the passengers danced, celebrating their attainment (kind of) of the top of the world.
Maybe its time to break tradition.
Tragedy on K2
K2
It now appears that eleven climbers perished Sunday on K2, the world’s second highest mountain. K2 is steeper and rockier than Everest and more prone to changeable weather. That makes it, in climbing circles, the mountaineer’s mountain. But I fear that this is about to change. In 1996, a number of climbers lost their lives on Everest, an event made famous by Jon Krackauer in his book Into Thin Air. Krackauer’s book was fiercely critical, not only of the actions of fellow climbers, but of a new selfish ethos that pervaded the culture of Everest. Yet new accounts of the Everest industry, by Michael Kodas (High Crimes) and Nick Heil (Dark Summit), show that the mounting body count on Everest has done nothing to slow the march of “clients” pouring into Base Camp. Indeed, the number has increased.
Arctic exploration exhibits a similar phenomenon. When 37 men died on two failed expeditions to the North Pole in the 1880s, it unleashed a torrent of criticism about North Pole expeditions, their motives and methods. Nevertheless, attempts to reach the North Pole increased over the following two decades.
Let’s face it, death imbues value on extreme accomplishment. Many climbers speak of an inner force driving them up the mountain (and I admit, I am not immune to this sort of thing either). But the reality is that there are many motivations for heading above tree line, that mortal danger and “bagging” mountains have a certain social cachet. In scaling K2, which has now once again asserted itself as one of the most dangerous of summits, the climber-who-sees-mountains-as-trophies accomplishes something of greater symbolic heft than an ascent of Everest.
Given this precedent, news of these deaths on K2 won’t deter new climbers but spur them on. Maybe the experienced high-altitude climbers, the Ed Viesturs of the world, will be able to deter the weekend adventurers. But I doubt it.
So here are my depressing predictions: 1) attempts to summit K2 will double by 2010 and 2) these ranks of climbers will have less experience in high-altitude climbing on average than they do now.
I hope I’m wrong.
Isis Review: Science in the Everyday World
For those who don’t read it regularly, Isis is an academic journal “devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences.” Isis has published some path-breaking work as well as some, well, path-clogging ones. My one, long-standing complaint is that Isis tends to be rather dull, best read with coffee, never before bed, always with a pencil. I don’t know if the dullness is the result of the writing, the editing, or some combination of both. I know and respect many of the Isis crew. (Full disclosure: I’ve served as an advisory editor to Isis since 2006). I like the decision to introduce a “Focus Section” for 3-4 short articles dealing with a particular topic. But there are times when reading Isis feels more like a chore than a pleasure.
Reading the June Issue
So with this in mind, I am grateful to Will Thomas, historian of science, for profiling Isis articles on his blog Ether Wave Propaganda. In this pursuit, he has become my intellectual trainer, forcing me to get up and run through the articles before I have to lie down and smoke a cigarette. As always, I feel better for the effort.
I just finished reading Katherine Pandora and Karen Rader’s article “Science in the Everyday World” which considers the relationship between scientists and the general public. To summarize Pandora and Rader’s points: professional scientists have become closed off from the general public and its conceptions of science. As a result, these two communities do not engage each other very well, to the detriment of both. Historians of science used to side with professionals on this, seeing “real science” as stuff that happened in labs and research institutes, carried out by card-carrying scientists. As for the public, they received scientific information after the fact, in diluted form. In effect, this presented a “trickle-down theory” of science that posited doers (scientists) and receivers (everyone else). This is often called the “diffusionist theory” of scientific ideas.
In recent years, however, historians of science have begun to broaden their view of what constitutes science, now including ideas and activities that occur in the public sphere. As such, Pandora and Rader believe that historians of science are in an excellent position to help bridge the divide that has grown up between the scientific community and the public at large. Estranged by years of miscommunication, science and public can be brought back together, with historians of science acting as marriage counselors.
Together Again
I had trouble with this article.
First, I think Pandora and Rader paint scientists with a pretty broad brush here. Overall, scientists come across as out of touch, oblivious and/or unconcerned about public reactions, viewing them at times as “childish, shallow, superficial, emotional, irrational, and subjective.” The solution? “Laboratory specialists could better communicate the key ideas of their research with their publics if they attended…carefully to the relationship between form and content in their public interventions.” Maybe this is the sense one gets reading Transactions in Physical Science, but I get a very different feeling about the views of scientists when reading science blogs. Consider, for example, the blog The World’s Fair, which is a collaboration of scientists and historians of science. Or science blogs such as The Beagle Project or Laelaps who are run by scientists committed to public engagement. When one looks at the network of scientists and humanities people who are citing each other and cross listing each other on blog rolls, it becomes harder to think of these groups as two balkanized communities.
Second, Pandora and Rader talk the talk of “two-way” science, but don’t walk the walk. They certainly challenge the diffusionist model of science, stating that scientists need to take the public seriously. But why? Not because it would influence the content of their scientific findings, but because scientists run the risk of alienating the public on which their work ultimately depends. Also, its their civic duty. “If scientists ignore the arguments to be found there [in popular culture], they exacerbate a sense of disenfranchisement on the part of the public in regards to science.” At no point do Pandora and Rader give examples of how the content of scientists’ work might affected by taking the public seriously. While the authors promote the idea of diologue and collaboration, it seems to stop short at shaping the content of science.
Finally, I think that the article is a little late out of the gate. Pandora and Rader give due credit to historians of Victorian science for figuring out that science in the public is significant. But the “big-tent” view of science is now widely shared and has spread far beyond Victorian studies. Thinking of the work being done by my science historian pals (in German biology, twentieth century space science, British geography, or my own field of exploration) I am hard pressed to think of projects that don’t consider the public as an active agent in the story of science.
Jogging finished. Time to lie down.
Time to Eat the Dogs 