Speaker 1: You know, we spend so much time and energy looking outwards.
We're launching these incredibly sophisticated probes to the edges of
the Solar System. We build these vast, complex virtual worlds,
and I think there's this cultural assumption that we've kind
of solved Earth, that exploration here is done.
Speaker 2: The ultimate blind spot, isn't it. We have these beautiful,
high resolution satellite maps of every square inch of.
Speaker 1: The surface, right, you can zoom in on your house.
Speaker 2: Exactly, so we think we know it all. But that's
just the surface. When you start to think about the
true volume of our planet, you know, the miles of
ocean below us, the rock beneath the crust, the sheer
thickness of the ice.
Speaker 1: Sheets, and you realize how little we've actually.
Speaker 2: Seen fundamentally unknown. We're talking about some of the most extreme,
ecologically vital environments on the entire planet.
Speaker 1: And that's what I find so fascinating. This deep dive
is really about a paradox, right. It's not always about
finding a place no one new exists.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: It's about trying to get into places that are actively
physically fighting us back, places with I don't know, crushing
pressure or impossible cold.
Speaker 2: Or places with cultural obstacles that are just disormidable, places
where the human journey just stops dead in its tracks exactly.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is pretty ambitious. We're going to
dive into these zones of extreme isolation. We'll look at
why we haven't reached them, and I think, most importantly
why it matters. Yes, why understanding and maybe even protecting
these places, from the deepest trenches to the most isolated forests,
is absolutely vital for the future of the whole planet.
Speaker 2: I'm ready. I think the only place to start really
is where the unknown is most.
Speaker 1: Vast, the deep ocean.
Speaker 2: The deep ocean, its scale just dwarfs everything else combined.
Speaker 1: When most people think unexplored ocean, their mind probably goes
right to the very bottom. You know, the Mariana Trench
a famous one, Yeah, But the real volume of the unknown,
it starts way shallower than that. In this immense, sprawling territory,
the Abyssal planes.
Speaker 2: The sheer eight ridge of the abyssel planes is what's
truly astonishing. We aren't talking about small little sections. These
regions cover what something like forty percent of the entire
ocean floor.
Speaker 1: Forty percent. That's hard to even picture.
Speaker 2: It's almost a third of the Earth's surface just sitting
there at depths deeper than two thousand.
Speaker 1: Meters, And physically, these are the flattest places on the
planet right, almost like a gigantic underwater desert.
Speaker 2: A perfect analogy, but a desert defined by total permanent darkness,
I mean zero sunlight gets down that far.
Speaker 1: So what are the conditions like, I mean beyond the dark.
Speaker 2: Well, the temperature is one thing. It just hovers right
above freezing maybe four degrees celsius all year round. Oh, yes,
so it's cold, it's cold. But the pressure, the pressure
is the real killer. We're talking about forces up to
fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Wow, that's about one
thousand times greater than the air pressure we're feeling right
now just sitting here. Imagine trying to build a submersible
that can withstand that that constant, monumental crushing.
Speaker 1: You'd think that in that kind of environment, only the
most basic, maybe microscopic life could hang on.
Speaker 2: That's the logical assumption. But the data we have from
the very limited exploration that's been done, it just blows
that idea completely out of the water.
Speaker 1: This is the big surprise.
Speaker 2: Then it's a revolutionary surprise. Despite the dark, the cold,
the relentless pressure, scientists have found thousands of tiny creatures
just thriving down there.
Speaker 1: What kind of creatures are we talking about.
Speaker 2: Well, you have unique microscopic bacteria that create whole biomes
based on chemical energy, not solar energy. And then you
have these strange, really delicate looking critters crawling across the
fine sediment.
Speaker 1: And then there's the statistic that just always stops me
in my tracks.
Speaker 2: I know the one.
Speaker 1: You mean, Over eighty percent of the species they sample
down there are completely new to science.
Speaker 2: Eighty percent. It's not a small margin of error. It's
basically telling us that the deep ocean is a separate world.
And we have barely barely started to read the first
page of its encyclopedia.
Speaker 1: Which leads us right into the great conflict of our time.
Speaker 2: It does because why scientists are in this race against time,
you know, often with very little funding to just catalog
this biosphere. Is another race, an equally intense and much
more heavily funded global race.
Speaker 1: To exploit it deep sea mining, and it's targeting the
abyssle plane specifically.
Speaker 2: Yes, the big prize on the abyssle planes are these
things called polymetallic nodules.
Speaker 1: Okay, what are those?
Speaker 2: Picture these small potato sized rocks just sitting loosely on
the seabed. They're incredibly rich in all the things we
want for our modern tech, like what manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper,
all the elements you need for high density batteries for
advanced electronics.
Speaker 1: But if they're just little rocks on the seafloor, why
is getting them so destructive? I mean, can't you just
pick them up?
Speaker 2: Ah? Well, the destruction is tied to how they're made.
These nodules form through this incredibly slow process. Metals just
precipitate out of the seawater layer by layer over millions
of years. They might only grow a few millimeters every
million years. So to get them, you'd have to send
down these colossal machines, basically giant vacuum cleaners or dredging
systems kilometers.
Speaker 1: Beat and they would just scrape everything else.
Speaker 2: Scrape up the top five to ten centimeters of the seabed,
and that's exactly where the nodules are. But it's also
where almost all of that unique deep sea life.
Speaker 1: Exists, and regulating all of this is one specific, really
powerful institution, right the International Seabed Authority, the ISSA.
Speaker 2: They are absolutely central to this dilemma. The ISA was
set up under a UN convention and its job is, well,
it's a complex duality. How so it's tasked with organizing
and controlling all the mineral activities on the deep sea
bed and ensuring the effective protection of the marine environment
from the harmful effects of those activities.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a conflict of interests.
Speaker 2: It's an inherent conflict of interest. And they've already granted
over thirty exploration content around the world.
Speaker 1: And we don't have to guess what scraping the ocean
floor would do. We have a real world test case
for this, don't we.
Speaker 2: We do, and it's horrifyingly clear. Back in nineteen seventy eight,
in a place called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a research
group used mining equipment to create a small test track.
Is a small one, a very small one. When scientists
went back twenty six years later in two thousand and four,
the sediment still hadn't recovered.
Speaker 1: Twenty six years later.
Speaker 2: The fragile microbial mad the tiny organisms, the whole ecosystem
was still severely disturbed. There was no sign it was
returning to what it was before.
Speaker 1: That's staggering a single test track. It really highlights the
geological timescale these ecosystems are working on exactly.
Speaker 2: So if we move to full scale commercial mining, we're
not talking about damage that recovers in a few generations.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking about permanent annihilation, wiping out entire ecosystems
before we even know what's in them.
Speaker 2: It really forces us to ask the big question, you know,
are we willing to extinguish these vast libraries of unique
pressure adapted genetic material, material that could hold keys to
new medicines, a new understanding of life. Just for a
quick hit of minerals, we could probably get through better recycling.
Speaker 1: The speed of destruction versus the speed of evolution, it's
not even a contest, not even close. That is a
chilling thought. Okay, So let's move from those relatively flat
planes to the most extreme depths of all the deep
sea trenches. Right now, the Mariana Trench gets all the press,
but I want to talk about the Kermadek Trench. It's
way less documented.
Speaker 2: The Krimadek Trench is a world unto itself. It's off
the coast of New Zealand, stretches for about a thousand
kilometers and it plunges over ten thousand meters deep.
Speaker 1: That's nearly seven miles.
Speaker 2: It's deeper than Mount Everest is tall. I mean, just
try to imagine that entire mountain range, but flipped upsay
down underwater and crushing everything in it.
Speaker 1: And because it's so remote and so difficult to get to,
there's not a lot of exploration. But our sources pointed
to a pretty big mission in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Chinese submersible Strive a huge undertaking. They managed
sixteen dives, going all the way from about five seven
hundred meters to the full ten thousand meter depth.
Speaker 1: And what they found just reinforces this idea of hyper specialized.
Speaker 2: Life, absolutely life that is perfectly and bizarrely tailored to
its exact environment.
Speaker 1: So give us some examples. What kind of weird alien
life did they run into.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the most spectacular finds was an anglerfish,
which is already a bizarre creature, you know, with its
glowing lore, but this one was swimming completely upside down.
It was only the second time that specific behavior had
ever been seen anywhere in the world. Wow. And then
more subtly they found these se cucumbers. But they were tiny,
really delicate, and about three times smaller than the secucumbers
you find in the Mariana Trench.
Speaker 1: Okay, so why the size difference. Is that just random
or is there something driving that?
Speaker 2: Oh, there is absolutely a driver. It's all about isolation
and energy. This is where you really see the idea
of each trench being its own isolated evolutionary lab the lab.
So these deep sea environments they rely entirely on what's
called food rain, the.
Speaker 1: Little bits of organic stuff sinking from the surface exactly.
Speaker 2: And in the curve dec trench, because of its specific shape,
the currents, the type of sediment, the food supply is different.
It's likely scarcer or just lower in calories compared to
what reaches the bottom of the Mariana.
Speaker 1: So less food means life has to adapt, it has
to become smaller, more efficient just to survive.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the pressure is a constant, but the energy coming
in is the variable. If you don't need a big,
heavy body, natural selection is going to favor the smallest,
most energy efficient model.
Speaker 1: So the life in the Comma deck evolved completely independently
from the life.
Speaker 2: In the Mariana completely. The depth creates the isolation, and
that isolation breeds evolutionary novelty. And we've only seen the
tiniest fraction of it. Miles and miles of these chasms
are just holding unique branches of life. We may never
have the funding or the ten to even see.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. So we've covered the crushing unknown of the ocean.
Let's pivot now to a world that's sealed not by
water but by ice, a time capsule of frozen water
and ancient life.
Speaker 2: When you look at a map of Antarctica, it just
looks like this single, static, lifeless ice sheet.
Speaker 1: Right white continent.
Speaker 2: But underneath miles of that ice there is a dynamic,
hidden system of liquid water. These are the subglacial lakes.
Speaker 1: And they've been trapped down there for how long?
Speaker 2: Thousands and in some cases we think potentially millions of years.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just a theory, right, we know they're there.
The sources say we've found over six hundred of.
Speaker 2: Them, and that number just keeps going up as our
radar tech gets better. What's so fascinating is that they
aren't static ponds.
Speaker 1: They're active.
Speaker 2: Over two hundred and thirty of them are active. They
fill and drain, shifting these huge volumes of water under
the ice in cycles. We are still really struggling to understand.
Speaker 1: And the most famous of these, the king of these
sealed worlds, has to be Lake Vostok.
Speaker 2: Lake Vostok is the big one. It's the largest we
know of. It's in East Antarctica, and it's sitting under
about four thousand meters of solid.
Speaker 1: Ice two and a half miles of ice, and the.
Speaker 2: Lake itself is about five hundred meters deep, and it's
been sealed off from the surface for potentially fifteen million years.
Is the absolute definition of a natural time capsule.
Speaker 1: And when researchers finally painstakingly breached the ice to get
a sample, they found life.
Speaker 2: A monumental discovery. Yeah, they found piny living things, mostly bacteria,
but ancient and unique kinds. And they also found simple
organisms similar to ones you might find in the gut
of a fish, all adapted to total darkness and extreme pressure.
Speaker 1: The fact that a whole ecosystem can survive and evolve
in a closed system with no sunlight for that long.
It has huge implications it does.
Speaker 2: It's exactly what astrobiologists are looking for when they study
the icy moons in our solar system, like Jupiter's aeropo
or Saturns and solid.
Speaker 1: Which are thought to have these huge subsurface oceans.
Speaker 2: Exactly if life can survive in Lake Fostoc, it completely
changes our models for the probability finding life and similar
environments out there. Antarctica is our test case for extraterrestrial life.
Speaker 1: But beyond the ancient microbes and looking for aliens, these
lakes have a very real, very immediate importance that affects
literally everyone listening.
Speaker 2: That's the critical link that liquid water. It acts like
a lubricant under the massive weight of the ice sheet.
So when these lakes fill and drain, they control how
fast the huge glaciers above them slide towards the ocean.
Speaker 1: So if we want to accurately predict sea level.
Speaker 2: Rise, we have to understand the dynamics of these hidden
water systems. It's essential data.
Speaker 1: But the exploration itself is so incredibly difficult. You mentioned
the risk of contamination.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate scientific dilemma, the risk versus the reward.
You drill through two and a half miles of pristine ice,
but if you accidentally introduce modern bacteria from the surface.
Speaker 1: You're ruined the whole thing.
Speaker 2: You've contaminated a fifteen million year old environment. The protocols
to prevent that are just intense.
Speaker 1: Walk us through what intense means here.
Speaker 2: It means years of planning. They use specialized hot water drills.
But the key is that the borehole has to refreeze
immediately after they take the sample.
Speaker 1: So they're sealing it back up.
Speaker 2: Instantly, and they often only sample the water that refreezes
directly onto the drill bit itself, so it's a perfectly
clean sample of that ancient water. It's like performing surgery
on a continental scale just to get one tiny, precious sample.
Speaker 1: That focus on isolation by ice. It brings us north
to an equally if not more, hostile place, Northern Greenland.
Speaker 2: Northern Greenland is in some ways even more hostile than Antarctica,
just because of the logistics. The temperatures routinely drop to
negative fifty celsius minus fifty and with the wind shell exposed,
skin freezes almost instantly. It's the sheer, bone deep cold
that just makes sustained work impossible.
Speaker 1: So you can't really set up a long term research camp.
You can't even reliably land a plane in most of
these areas.
Speaker 2: It's a geographical fortress. So most of our knowledge has
to come from remote sensing. We can't drill easily, so
we fly planes over with ice penetrating radar.
Speaker 1: And the radar basically maps what's underneath all that ice.
Speaker 2: It sends a signal down and by measuring how long
it takes to reflect back, it can map the topography
hidden beneath thousands of feet of ice.
Speaker 1: And what has it found? What's the hidden landscape of Greenland?
Speaker 2: It has revealed this astonishing hidden world, mountains, huge valleys,
and yes, more subglacial lakes.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what's the difference here?
Speaker 2: The key difference is the potential isolation depth. Lake Vostok
is impressive at fifteen million years, but some of these
systems in Greenland are thought to have been sealed off
for potentially millions of years longer than that.
Speaker 1: Millions of years longer. That's just hard to comprehend.
Speaker 2: Geologically, we could be talking about life forms that were
isolated before the major ice ages of the plecesscene.
Speaker 1: So what kind of evolutionary power pathways could life have
taken down there in total darkness for that long?
Speaker 2: That's the billion dollar question. It raises this massive curiosity,
but the physical difficulty of getting there, of drilling through
that much ice in that climate, it means they remain
almost entirely unexplored. You just have these faint radar echoes
telling us they exist.
Speaker 1: All right, So we've done the oceans in the ice.
Now let's come back to the surface to places where
the Earth creates mazes of rock, water, and sand that
defeat us not with cold or pressure, but with sheer
physical danger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, terrestrial exploration isn't always about climbing up. Some of
the most complex and least explored areas are actually under
our feet.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Speaker 2: Exactly famous for its sinotes, those beautiful round sinkholes.
Speaker 1: They look so idyllic, God, but they're really just doorways.
Speaker 2: Portals to these unimaginably vast underwater labyrinths, and the scale
is just so hard to grasp. The biggest known system
is called sustained a sack actum. It's been mapped for
hundreds of miles, but we still don't know its full size.
Speaker 1: I think we need to really emphasize how dangerous this
kind of exploration is. This isn't just recreational scuba diving.
Speaker 2: No, this is extreme risk. You're in tight spaces, Visibility
can drop to zero in a second if you kick
up the silt, a silt out.
Speaker 1: And then you're lost, no light, no direction, and you.
Speaker 2: Could be hundreds of feet from the nearest air. Divers
have to squeeze through gaps that are barely wider than
their bodies, sometimes taking their tanks off and pushing them
through ahead of them.
Speaker 1: And you can't just swim back up to the surface
if something goes wrong.
Speaker 2: No way. Some of these tunnels drop more than three
hundred feet straight down. You're dealing with hours of plan
decompression stops just to get back safely. It requires military
level planning. Every single new meter added to the map
depends on a tiny handful of people willing to take
these massive risks.
Speaker 1: And that dedication led to a huge discover in twenty eighteen, right.
Speaker 2: A landmark discovery. Yeah, after fourteen years of this pains staking,
high risk searching, explorers finally found a connection between systemisac
Actin and another big system system in Dosopoles.
Speaker 1: And that made it the longest flooded cave in the.
Speaker 2: World, over two hundred and fifteen miles long. And even
at that colocal length, the experts are sure they've only
mapped a fraction of it. It's a deep, dangerous and
still largely unknown maze.
Speaker 1: Okay, from that suffocating, water logged darkness, let's go to
the complete opposite extreme, the brutal cloud covered heights of
the Star Mountains and Papua New Guinea.
Speaker 2: The Star Mountains really defined terrestrial hostility. They stretch for
about sixty miles, peaks hitting almost forty eight hundred meters.
That's fifteen thousand feet, so pretty high. But here's the
crazy part. They were officially documented in nineteen fifty eight,
but since then only about ten people have ever made
it to the top.
Speaker 1: Only ten. Why so few? It's high, but it's not
everest high.
Speaker 2: It's the climate. It's not just the altitude. The Star
Mountains are perpetually saturated, constant rain, constant high humidity, always
shrouded in cloud. The terrain isn't rock, its deep, slippery,
unrelenting mud.
Speaker 1: So Every step is a battle.
Speaker 2: An exhausting battle. You're just constantly fighting the environment to
stay upright, to stay warm, to move forward.
Speaker 1: And yet this miserable, extreme place is paradoxically a cradle
of life.
Speaker 2: It's a biological sky island. The brutal weather and terrain
isolate pockets of land.
Speaker 1: From each other, preventing gene flow.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it creates this intense pressure cooker for evolution. Scientists
have found over a thousand species there, and nearly one
hundred of them are strictly.
Speaker 1: Endemic, found nowhere else on Earth, nowhere else.
Speaker 2: Every single plant and animal there has had to specifically
adapt to that constantly wet, harsh, and difficult world.
Speaker 1: And that's the tragedy of its inaccessibility, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is the very environment that created this incredible biodiversity
also prevents us from fully studying it. We have these brief,
little snapshots, but vast amounts of biological information remain locked away.
Speaker 1: Let's transition now to a totally different kind of terrestrial maze,
one made of shifting ancient sand. The Namib Desert.
Speaker 2: The Anamiab in southern Africa is one of the world's
oldest deserts. It's a place defined by its remoteness and
the well the instability of its landscape. Traditional mapping is
almost useless because the terrain refuses to stay still.
Speaker 1: The extremes there are just phenomenal. It's scorching hot during
the day, but then temperatures can drop below freezing at night.
Speaker 2: And you combine that thermal shock with the sheer difficulty
of navigating these giant, shifting sand dunes. The ground is
literally moving under your feet. Sandstorms can pop up and
completely disorient you. It's just a very dangerous place.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a place where nothing could possibly live.
Speaker 2: And yet life has found these incredible specialized ways to thrive.
It's life in extremists.
Speaker 1: So what are some examples.
Speaker 2: You see elephants and lions that have evolved behaviors to
hunt along the dunes. You find insects that crawl deep
underground to escape the heat, small reptiles that hide in
gravel planes. Scientists are still discovering unique species there, all
perfectly specialized for that volatile environment.
Speaker 1: So the named proves that a vast shifting desert is
anything but empty.
Speaker 2: It's a complex, hidden ecosystem, completely defying our idea of
what's habitable.
Speaker 1: So we've looked at environments that are protected by pressure,
by ice, by a physical misery. Now let's talk about
places that are off limits for a different reason. Places
we avoid not because we can't get there, but because
we've decided we must not.
Speaker 2: This is a really profound shift. We're now talking about
a conscious choice to leave places unmapped, and the Valdo
Jevari in the Brazilian Amazon is a prime example.
Speaker 1: And this is a huge area we're talking about right,
a section of the Amazon that's bigger than the entire
country of Austria.
Speaker 2: A massive swab of territory, and the Brazilian government has
made it completely off limits to non indigenous people.
Speaker 1: And the reason for that is one of the most
compelling ethical imperatives on the planet.
Speaker 2: It is the valdu Javari is home to the highest
known concentration of uncontacted tribes in the world, people with
zer euro sustained contact with the outside world.
Speaker 1: So the simple presence of an outsider, even a well
meaning scientist, is an existential.
Speaker 2: Threat, a catastrophic threat. This isn't an exaggeration. Historically, when
uncontacted peoples have met outsiders, the result is tragic. They
have no immunity to our common diseases.
Speaker 1: A simple cold could wipe them out.
Speaker 2: A cold the flu it could annihilate an entire population
in weeks. So this non contact policy, it's literally a
life or death protective measure.
Speaker 1: And the consequence ecologically is that this huge stretch of forest,
its plants, its animals, remains completely unstudied by conventional science.
Speaker 2: We've drawn an ethical line on the mac and in
doing so, we've preserved an ecosystem in its most natural state.
It's a place where our maps are blank by choice.
Speaker 1: And if Valda Javari is the large scale example, then
North Centrael Island is the absolute extreme of non contact.
Speaker 2: It's globally infamous, yes, home to the scent Le's people,
one of the last isolated hunter gatherer groups on Earth.
Speaker 1: They have made it very very clear they want to
be left alone.
Speaker 2: They actively attack anyone who tries to approach their shores.
Speaker 1: So the Indian government maintains a strict ban, a three
mile buffer zone around the island.
Speaker 2: Right both to protect outsiders, but more importantly to protect
the sentineles themselves from our diseases.
Speaker 1: And because of this, we know basically nothing.
Speaker 2: Virtually nothing. We don't know their population count, what plants
or animals are on the island, what their language sounds like.
Speaker 1: All of our knowledge comes from just distant observation, a
quick glance from a boat or a helicopter.
Speaker 2: It's a literal black box of biological and cultural information.
And the isolation isn't maintained by a physical barrier as
much as it is by a cultural and ethical one.
They are defending their isolation and we are, for the
most part, respecting it.
Speaker 1: Finally, let's look at two islands where it's pure geography
that's created these ecological time capsules, Golf and Inaccessible Islands.
Speaker 2: These are way way out in the South Atlantic, extremely remote,
about twenty one hundred kilometers from the nearest town. And
inaccessible island well it earned its name. The journey there
is through some of the roughest ocean in the world,
and even if you make it, the landing harbor is
only usable a few days out of the entire year
because of the waves and the weather.
Speaker 1: So that physical barrier has led to this extraordinary ecological purity.
Speaker 2: That's the payoff. They've avoided the primary scourge of most islands, invasive.
Speaker 1: Species, no rats, no cats, no goats.
Speaker 2: None of the animals that have wrecked the natural balance
of nearly every other remote island on the planet. So
what you have is a pristine ecosystem, a literal time
capsule what these places look like before humans showed.
Speaker 1: Up, a baseline for a pre human world exactly.
Speaker 2: It allows scientists to study an ecosystem untouched by common
human influences and inaccessible. Island alone is a biological gold mine.
It has two bird species, eight plants, and at least
ten bugs and small creatures found nowhere else on Earth.
Speaker 1: They're a precious control group for the planet.
Speaker 2: They are. They show us what happens when evolution is
just allowed to run its course unpeded, and that data
is incredibly valuable for understanding how to manage our more
compromise ecosystems everywhere else.
Speaker 1: This has been an incredible journey. We've gone from the
crushing pressure of the abyssal planes and the Kermadec Trench.
Speaker 2: To the frigid, sealed world of subglacial lakes in Antarctica
and Greenland, and.
Speaker 1: Then through the physical mazes of the star Mountains and
the ethical boundaries of the Amazon.
Speaker 2: And the common thread through all of it is isolation,
whether it's physical, temporal, or ethical. Isolation creates these unique,
highly specialized, and often really fragile, evolutionary pathways.
Speaker 1: These aren't just empty spaces on the map.
Speaker 2: No, they are dense, specific, vital systems.
Speaker 1: And as we've discussed, understanding them, isn't just academic Subglacial
lakes affect sea level rise, the abyssal planes hold genetic
information that's at risk from mining. These remote zones hold
fundamental knowledge about how our planet works.
Speaker 2: Which, really this is a big question for you the listener,
to think about. What does it mean that the least
explored parts of our world are so often the most
ecologically critical or the most fiercely protected. Yeah, we've kind
of reached a point where the greatest discovery we can
make might be realizing the value of just leaving certain
places alone.
Speaker 1: We started out talking about space exploration versus Earth exploration,
but maybe the ultimate challenge is just knowing when to
stop knowing where the line is.
Speaker 2: Is the goal really to map every last centimeter, or
is the higher challenge learning to respect the boundaries and
the isolation of the places we already know about.
Speaker 1: That contrast you brought up between the drive to mine
the deep sea and the imperative to protect uncontacted tribes.
It says it all.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect dilemma. Yeah, sometimes the most responsible form
of exploration is simply non interference.
Speaker 1: Something profound to mull over. We have barely scratched the
surface until the next deep dive. Keep digging.