Finding Perspective at the Edge of the World: 10 Days in Antarctica
I lifted my eyes from the journal I was writing in on the balcony of my hotel room, just in time to witness a towering block of ice split in half, splintering along its length with a thundering crack.
The iceberg it was part of shuddered, throwing off a shimmering coat of frost from its finely etched surface. For a moment, the block hovered in midair, seemingly unaware of its newfound independence. There was a moment of silence as it slowly began to pick up momentum.
After a few dramatic seconds, the wall of ice began to topple to the side, breaking up into several pieces that tumbled end over end as they crashed into the icy water with an immense splash.
My hotel room happened to be on a cruise ship crossing the most dangerous ocean passage in the world – the Drake Passage – on our way from the southern tip of South America to Antarctica on a 10-day voyage in December 2024.
Thirty-foot waves and seventy knot winds pummeled our ship from all sides as we plowed forward. The ship pitched from side to side, throwing our belongings off the table in our suite and making us seasick. The sea was a minefield of icebergs increasing in size and frequency with each passing hour.
The external environment of the cruise was accompanied by something equally special on the inside – a curated educational program on modern space exploration, organized by the advocacy nonprofit Future of Space.
The purpose of this voyage was to educate and inspire a group of 260 leaders from around the world on two of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change and space exploration – including how they might intersect and inform each other.
Ocean exploration pioneer Jacques-Yves Cousteau once said: “We only protect what we love, we only love what we understand, and we only understand what we are taught.”
We traveled to the edge of the world to discover how we could protect the planet, as well as potentially leave it.
Leaving the human world
We departed Los Angeles on December 17, flying to Buenos Aires via Miami. We stayed the night in the Argentine capital, before departing early the next morning on a charter flight to Ushuaia, a pioneer town perched at the very tip of the South American continent.
There we boarded the expedition vessel Seabourn Venture, along with 260 other guests who shared our dual fascination for Antarctica and outer space.
The program was made up of various luminaries, experts, scientists, and astronauts, including William Shatner, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, journalist Ann Curry, former NASA astronauts Scott Kelly, Charlie Duke, and José Hernández, Céline Cousteau (daughter of the famed explorer and a prominent environmentalist in her own right), UK artist Stephen Wiltshire, and physicist and author Brian Greene.
These speakers filled our days with a constant stream of educational talks, interviews, documentary film screenings, panels, and presentations, encompassing both the deep past and the far future. Those talks were also livestreamed on the Future of Space YouTube channel, where you can watch the recordings.
Why run a space exploration conference on an Antarctic voyage?
Because Antarctica is the closest analogue on Earth to the harsh conditions we face in space. It is the last uncolonized continent, thus serving as a laboratory and testing ground for how we’ll go about exploring and colonizing new worlds.
At the same time, Antarctica is the ultimate bellwether for how climate change will shape the Earth. It is ground zero for the warming that is driving all other kinds of environmental change. The deteriorating condition of its glaciers directly impacts the lives of millions of people along all the world’s coastlines.
I wanted to visit Antarctica to experience one of Earth’s rarest and most quickly disappearing environments. I had recently learned that since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable period in recorded history, and I wasn’t sure how long the continent would last.
I also wanted to see if immersing myself in such an utterly different and alien environment could give me a new sense of perspective for my annual review, at the tail end of a difficult year.
I was there to explore a triple frontier: humanity’s relationship to its home planet, our exploration of outer space, and my own inner world of goals and dreams for the future.
The itinerary
Each day, we’d arrive at a new destination, board a series of small, nimble Zodiac-style inflatables in small groups, and spend a couple of hours cruising (and sometimes landing) along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from the continent in the direction of South America like an inviting bridge.
We had many close encounters with vast colonies of charismatic penguins, and watched them comically run, jump, dive, and play like children at a water park.
We visited historical sites, such as the barren beach on Elephant Island where Ernest Shackleton’s men famously sheltered for 4 harrowing months in 1916, after their ship Endurance was crushed by encroaching sea ice on the way to the continent.
I was amazed to learn that, until the first landings by seal-hunting parties and explorers in the 19th century, it’s unlikely that any human had ever set foot on Antarctica. The Drake Passage was simply too forbidding, and the technology to endure it didn’t exist.
Antarctica is thus halfway to being a foreign planet, like a way station physically located on the same surface as all the other continents, but psychologically, a world apart.
As we traversed the peninsula, I could feel a version of the Overview Effect kicking in – the famed perspective shift reported by many astronauts upon first seeing the Earth from space.
We had a half dozen former astronauts aboard, and they described in vivid detail how that shift had affected them. They had realized firsthand how fragile and alone humanity is, clinging to its ball of dirt hanging in space. They’d been overcome with a sense of gratitude, awe, and humility at the miracle that is life on our planet.
Antarctica is so bare, so starkly devoid of any sign of human life, that I could easily perceive that we were skirting the edges of a polar ice cap, stuck to the side of a planet, hurtling through space with nothing but a thin band of atmosphere protecting us. The sun never quite set, demonstrating that its rise and fall each day is just a side effect of our particular location on the planet.
An imaging satellite from Planet Labs circling overhead took this photo of our ship as it was moored:
I was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation, of aloneness, despite being surrounded by my fellow travelers. I’d never realized how much comfort and security I’d derived from human structures, human affordances, and human-made environments my entire life. I hadn’t grown up on Earth – I’d grown up in a series of insulated bubbles that humans had created to shield themselves from the Earth.
We made a dozen stops on our journey, including Half Moon Island, Whaler’s Bay and Deception Island, Trinity Island, Brown Bluff, Neko Bay, Lemaire Channel, and Palmer Station, one of three US-operated year-round research stations on the Antarctic Peninsula.
At Neko Harbour, I went ashore and officially fulfilled a lifelong dream: setting foot on all 7 continents. In one sense, it was fulfilling, while in another, I realized how foolish such a goal was. As if setting foot on a continent taught you anything about such a vast, diverse place.
A council of teachers
I learned so much from the invited experts on the ship; it was like an intensive course and conference unto itself.
Céline Costeau shared fascinating stories about her work creating documentary films, trying to preserve both nature and the human cultures that existed in close communion with it. She is multi-hyphenate – a documentary film director, producer, explorer, artist, public speaker, brand ambassador, designer, author, and workshop facilitator – and I saw that my career could be similarly multi-faceted and pluralistic.
We watched A Million Miles Away, the documentary about the life of astronaut José Hernández, who was present and answered questions about what it had taken to become one of the first Latinos, and the first migrant worker, to go to space. I saw how meaningful it was to break through a glass ceiling for one’s people and create new possibilities for them through your personal example.
Former astronaut Scott Kelly told us about his record-breaking year in space, and how it had been inspired by the intrepid adventures of Ernest Shackleton a century earlier. I was deeply moved by the model of perseverance even through heartbreak and failure, of personal sacrifice in service of humanity.
Neil deGrasse Tyson regaled us with tales of black holes, the potential of time travel, pulsars, and updates on the recent mission to explore the environs of the sun.
The last astronaut to walk on the moon, Charlie Duke, told us what it was like to plant his feet on another planetary body.
Tom Mueller, employee #1 at SpaceX, told us some incredible stories about what the early days of the company were like – a bunch of nerds firing toy rockets in the deserts of California – in pursuit of a far larger dream that today is finally being realized.
I was inspired by the crew, who were made up of experienced scientists, researchers, explorers, guides, and naturalists who worked so hard to provide us with life-changing experiences while also keeping us completely safe.
Gaining a new perspective
As I sat down to complete my annual review, I had real trouble with it. All my projects and goals seemed so trivial, so pointless, in the face of the immensity surrounding me on all sides. My awareness had expanded to a timeline so vast, it made even the most ambitious accomplishments I could imagine seem totally insignificant.
I found that all my problems and worries were put into perspective. Our margins in the business were lower than I’d hoped for last year – who cares? The vast, unfeeling vistas of ice that stretched as far as I could see didn’t know or care about that. All of humanity, with all its achievements, was almost a non-event from the perspective of the glaciers inching forward across the millennia.
I couldn’t shake the idea that about 70% of the Earth’s water is frozen here in ice sheets nearly three miles thick, and that if all that ice melted, the world’s oceans would rise by 200 feet, completely inundating my hometown. My mind could scarcely grasp the tenuous but direct connection between the integrity of these glaciers I was seeing and my life in sunny Southern California.
It was disorienting to vacillate between the inhuman harshness of the ice in one moment, to the sumptuous luxury of our cruise as soon as I entered back through a doorway. All-you-can-eat buffets and round-the-clock room service on one hand co-existed in bizarre juxtaposition with windswept ice fields on the other. Outside, a world devoid of any trace of humanity; inside, a rich agenda of in-depth knowledge about humanity’s most advanced scientific fields.
There were extreme contrasts everywhere, and I almost felt whiplash as my perspective hurtled from one point of view to another.
The landscape outside was in constant change. Everything made of ice is temporary, as winds, heat, rain, and undersea currents continuously reshape it. But at the same time, the landscape is ancient, like a time capsule from across the eons.
The majesty and seriousness of ice cliffs looming above us contrasted with the hilarious silliness and jovial banter of the penguins.
There was one moment I’ll never forget, at Melchior. It was bitterly cold, with wisps of snow drifting slowly from the sky. A small group of us boarded an inflatable boat and set out among the ice floes.
We entered a narrow inlet between massive ice structures, and found ourselves in a pool of water with walls of ice shooting straight upward on all sides. It felt like a natural cathedral – sacred, majestic, peaceful. I hadn’t felt such a presence of the divine since the church of my youth.
I felt distinctly that Antarctica, and all the other continents, belong to all of us. They belong to humanity. I could foresee a future in which the whole world, and even other planets, might be governed the same way Antarctica is: collaboratively, through consensus, according to the long-term interests of all humans, even ones not born yet.
I could sense my allegiance shifting, that I wasn’t and couldn’t be loyal to one country above the others. We are citizens of the world, and for a brief moment perched atop an Antarctic glacier, I experienced what that was like.
Here’s a video depicting some of the key moments of the experience, which I recommend to anyone:
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