Eric Larsen seemed ill at ease in his tuxedo. He is more inclined to trudge across an ice shelf than mingle at a fancy party in Manhattan. Yet here he was, in black tie, nibbling on canapés at the American Museum of Natural History.
Mr. Larsen came to this event because of how he makes a living. It’s printed on his business card: Explorer. He had trekked to New York City from his home in Boulder, Colo., for his profession’s version of the Oscars: the Explorers Club Annual Dinner and awards.
More than a thousand people joined him this month for the four-hour soiree beneath the museum’s fiberglass blue whale. Among them were astronauts like Buzz Aldrin, astronomers like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a panoply of others who make a point of seeking thrills and seeking knowledge, in varying proportions.
Founded in 1904, the Explorers Club is an international society dedicated to promoting field research and “preserving the instinct to explore.” Among its early members were the first humans to visit the North Pole, the South Pole, the summit of Mount Everest and the surface of the moon.
Theodore Roosevelt joined the club in 1915; at this year’s dinner, there was a look-alike in safari gear, hired by the hosts. But as this ghost of expeditions past bushwhacked through guests in evening wear, a less intrepid spirit came to mind — not exploration, but nostalgia.
For all the triumphs of the past, today’s explorers face a daunting prospect: Our maps are fully drawn, and there is not much left for them to do. We may still search the ocean floors and rappel into uncharted caves, but it is hard to shake the feeling that these expeditions are not fundamental. It’s like we are dabbing with a napkin at the few blank spots in the atlas.
The “instinct to explore” may still persist, but it’s lost its whiff of derring-do — more pickled than preserved. Do we really need explorers now, in the age of Google Maps?
The Explorer Club’s departing president, Alan H. Nichols, believes we do. “This is the golden age of exploration,” he said in a meeting at the club’s headquarters on the Upper East Side. Members come here to drink whiskey and host lectures amid the mounted tusks, sleds and axes. Some of Roosevelt’s trophies decorate the rooms.
In addition to his administrative duties, Mr. Nichols, 85, has been working on a project to find the tomb of Ghengis Khan. “They’ve been looking for the tomb for 750 years, and they haven’t found him,” Mr. Nichols said. “But we’ll find him. Why? Because we’ve got underground-penetrating X-rays, we’ve got drones, we’ve got magnetometry. We’ve got all this stuff that explorers haven’t had before!”
But the growth of new technology poses problems for one of the club’s most cherished precepts — that exploration means adventure in the field, carried out by visionary risk-takers. These days, many of our most thrilling expeditions are made remotely, using robot arms and sensors, and in place of legendary ship-captains and mountaineers — think of Ernest Shackleton and Sir Edmund Hillary — we have expansive teams of scientists and engineers. When NASA sends up rovers to study the Martian surface, they are controlled by committee in Pasadena, Calif.
It’s hard to say if these men and women are explorers in the classic sense.
“Their psychological experience is of being there,” said Bill Clancey, a cognitive scientist who embedded with the Mars Exploration Rover mission in February 2004. He remembers sitting in a dark room, with heavy shades drawn across the windows so the researchers could match their schedules to the days and nights of a planet 140 million miles away.
As the team sent commands up to the rovers, he said, the scientists built up a mental map of where they were. “They know what’s around the bend and what’s behind them. These are real experiences, the experiences of real explorers.”
It is easy to mistake the robots for explorers, Dr. Clancey said, even though they’re just elaborate tools. Yet even in Pasadena, there was uncertainty about who or what, exactly, was behind the work. In one of the NASA team’s first published science papers, the action was described in different ways: “We drove Spirit,” the authors wrote, and then later, “Spirit drove away.”
The Explorers Club has grappled with these confusing, modern expeditions by honoring the scientists in charge. Not everyone agrees with their inclusion, though.
Mr. Nichols caught some flack, he said, for offering Elon Musk a special honor at last year’s annual dinner. “Explorers were coming to me and saying, ‘It’s ridiculous to call him an explorer.’”
Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, has helped to foster journeys into space, but he has not gone on trips himself.
There are some places on Earth where exploration in the classic mode still seems viable, and where the issues are not quite so vexed. This year, the club honored a caver named C. William Steele, who was about to set off to spelunk in Huautla, Mexico, the site of the deepest cave system in the Western Hemisphere.
Mr. Steele takes biologists along on his expeditions, à la Darwin on the Beagle, and his teams have found cave-adapted species of tarantulas. There is no way to do this work with robots, he told the dinner guests. “It’s the purest form of exploration: You don’t know until you go.”
For most other projects, though, the definitions are less clear. Even in the realm of deep-sea exploration — among the last frontiers of unmapped Earth — work has been distributed, and now scientists on shore can dial in to missions in the field.
The whole idea of exploration “will get redefined over and over again, and it will continue to trouble people,” said Rosalind Williams, a historian of science at M.I.T. and the author of “The Triumph of Human Empire.” Even in the 19th century, she said, people understood that “the end was in sight.” They felt a new age coming, one in which humans dominate the planet, for better and for worse.
For some self-described explorers, this has meant turning inward.
“It’s about the story that I’m telling,” Mr. Larsen, the Colorado explorer, said at the dinner. He makes a living finding sponsors for his polar expeditions, but he does not promise travel to new places. Instead, he finds a way to fill the old ones with a novel set of meanings. A few years ago, he tried to reach the South Pole … on a bicycle.
“At this point, it’s not so much about ‘I did this,’” Mr. Larsen said. “It’s how I did it.”
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