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Out in the desert,
I became a better athlete than I ever was before.
It was not uncommon for me to run 250 miles a week.
Two hundred and fifty miles a week
is a thousand miles a month.
Twelve months,
that's 12,000 miles right there.
When I started to lose my eyesight,
I kept pushing and pushing.
And after a couple of years,
I've honed myself to run across Death Valley.
My purpose was to start at Badwater
and go roughly 150 miles to the summit of Mount Whitney.
It had never been done before.
My very dear friend,
David, and I started training together.
But one of the things David didn't do
was the heat training.
Going down to Death Valley the first time in 1974,
we started at four o'clock in the morning.
Dave came down with heat stroke after about 18 miles.
If you get heat stroke, the clock is ticking.
At Furnace Creek, we put David in the bathtub.
I put over 100 pounds of ice on him.
And there were people there,
and they said they'd take care of him.
So then I took off and started running.
The only thing I could think of
was that my good friend was dying.
His temperature, core temperature, was over 104.
So I stopped.
It took him over a year, over a year before he recovered.
That's how close he was to dying.
And that's the reason why I didn't make it the first time.
The second time I went down there,
I showed Death Valley absolutely no respect whatsoever.
I figured I'm gonna go back and kill it.
I ran a mile in under six minutes
in that attempt.
I was charging instead of taking it easy.
And after 40, 50 miles,
I learned real fast who was the boss.
You don't charge Death Valley.
You treat Death Valley the same way you do
when you're making a meringue.
If you go too fast, the whole thing will collapse.
It's not so hard physically.
What's really hard is mentally, to slow down.
It had never been done before.
It wasn't important how fast I did it.
Bristlecone pines live in a pretty high altitude
near Death Valley.
The bristlecone pines survive where other things wouldn't
because they are slowing down
to a painstakingly slow growth rate.
The bristlecone pines are so beautiful
because you really can see their struggle
is sort of inherent in their forms.
So it's almost like
you can watch their movement over time
and understand that they really want to live.
There's a...
There's a sense of doing whatever it takes to survive
in a pretty harsh environment.
It actually wasn't until the '60s
that people knew that they were that old.
A grad student had lost his coring bit
in the middle of a tree, and the Forest Service said,
"Well, just go ahead and cut it down.
There's plenty of them."
And it turned out he cut down
what ended up being the oldest known tree
in the world, at the time, that was the Prometheus tree.
The oldest bristlecone pines are over 5,000 years old.
The oldest unitary organisms on the planet.
It's really interesting to think
about what was going on in history at that time,
the invention of the wheel...
and cuneiform, the first written language.
So it really actually demarcates the beginning of human history.
I had been working on a lot of landscape work
that was about the relationship between humanity and nature.
And I got an invitation to visit some friends in Japan.
I took the advice
that several people had given to me,
which was, if you're interested in nature,
you should go visit the 7,000-year-old tree.
And it's on this remote island called Yakushima.
I just bought a new camera.
It was a medium format film camera,
and I photographed it.
But I had no idea when I started
that it would be a ten-year endeavor
photographing the oldest living things.
Looking for things
that were continuously living for 2,000 years and longer.
Two thousand, being, you know, why is it 2018 right now,
like, isn't it, you know, 4,500,002,018?
Like really trying to create this framework
for understanding human timekeeping.
So, initially, I thought,
"Oh, I'll find somebody who's going to partner with me,
an evolutionary biologist."
They said, "Well, look at what you're doing.
It's really broad.
This is not something that one scientist
would ever claim expertise at."
That was the first moment when I realized
I would have to be the expert.
It was thrilling to learn
that there were so many organisms
that have been alive for 2,000 years or longer.
I had no idea.
The honey mushroom
is a 2,400-year-old humongous fungus
that lives almost entirely underground
that is actually the largest organism
in the world.
Its unique footprint, if you will,
is that it will kill trees in this circular pattern,
and so that's known as Armillaria Death Rings.
And it's quite clever
because it doesn't kill the trees
until after they've reached reproductive age.
So thereby, it's ensuring
that it will continue to have a food supply.
There's an 80,000-year-old clonal colony
of aspen trees in Utah.
It's known as Pando, and this is fascinating
because what looks like a forest is essentially one tree.
Like 106 acres in size.
And what I mean by that
is that it's this giant interconnected root system,
and each tree is actually a stem coming up from that system.
This whole system communicates with all parts of itself.
So, you know, if one section needs water,
an area that has more water
can send it through the root system
to the place that needs it
or likewise nutrients or warning signs.
I was surprised to learn that there were any animals
that were over 2,000 years old,
and it turns out there's several.
In Antarctica, there's the volcano sponge,
some of which are thought to be up to 15,000 years old.
The one that I got to photograph, however,
I had to learn to scuba dive for that, around 60 feet deep.
It actually took my breath away
seeing this just enormous creature.
It almost looked like some lost meteorite
at the bottom of the sea.
What are the things that connect these organisms
that seem so different?
I came to understand that fast and furious
is not the way to live and grow.
Map lichens in Greenland
grow one centimeter every 100 years.
The continents are actually drifting away from each other
faster than these lichens are growing.
A number of the oldest living things
thrive in a pretty harsh environment.
Not in spite of this harsh environment they live in,
but because of it.
And the Atacama Desert is really one of my favorites.
It has seen almost no rainfall in all of recorded history.
I drove from the coast
to farther and farther up this, you know, tremendous elevation,
and it just gets drier and drier and more desolate,
and truly, you could be on another planet.
I was there in search of the llareta plants.
They look like moss over rocks, but they're actually shrubs.
So they're made up of thousands
of these really tightly compressed branches,
and they're so dense you could actually sit or stand
on top of them.
But, at that altitude, you're likely
to fall over from dizziness, so I don't recommend it.
And who knows what else exists?
We've really only scratched the surface
of understanding what's on our own planet,
let alone looking out to the rest of the universe.
We are all living in a base camp here
in the middle of the desert.
The driest desert of the world.
This is the weather that astronomers like.
So we see back in time
where no visible light is emitted.
Imagine light that began traveling
and coming towards us
from eight billion light years away.
Through empty space, this light travels
unimpeded by anything, untouched,
and then it hits Earth,
and there's this very thin layer of Earth's atmosphere,
which can completely destroy that light.
This layer is the reason why we can't look further
and further into the universe,
further and further back in time.
One of the ways in which we can do that on earth
is to go up to the Atacama Desert
in the Chilean Andes,
where you're above most of the dense layers
of Earth's atmosphere.
And, to me, it's really amazing that these ancient lands
have been chosen as the site
to look nearly to the beginning of time
when the first stars were being born.
The VLT is made of four telescopes,
the largest mirrors ever made
from a monolithic piece of glass.
And the surface had to be so precise.
Imagine grinding a city like Paris down,
so that the only bumps left are about a millimeter high.
That's the kind of precision
that they needed for the kind of astronomy
that we need to do now.
These telescopes have become so sensitive,
and the kind of things that we are studying
have become so faint
that astronomers are essentially
in search of very, very special land
that is completely radio-quiet.
Which means no interference
from television towers, mobile phones,
transmission from airplanes, radios, urban centers.
And that's what set me on journeys
to these very extreme locations all over the Earth.
These amazing places, which in themselves are poetic
where there was extreme physics being done.
And also, to share this sense that I have
of what physics can do to us as human beings,
not in terms of the knowledge,
just simply in terms of how it makes us feel.
And I wanted a way of exploring that feeling.
A certain comprehension of an infinity.
How immense everything is.
That we are part of it
and probably a very tiny dot in this vast scheme of things.
The Hanle Observatory lies
in one of the remotest regions of India.
One of the remotest regions in the Indian Himalayas.
There are almost no people there.
It's quite an impressive, remote, cold, beautiful place.
When I was standing on top of Mount Saraswati,
which is the hill on which the telescope has been built,
looking across the valley floor, perched really precariously
at the other end of the valley
was this 400-year-old Buddhist monastery.
The thing that became clear there,
looking at the monastery from the telescope,
was that both monks and cosmologists need silence.
It's because of this silence
that we are able to look deeper into the cosmos,
and further back in time.
We need to preserve these places on Earth
because if we don't, then we'll end up on a planet
that is so noisy...
from television towers, mobile phones,
or light pollution, which is a kind of noise,
that we will be stranded in this cosmos
without an ability to look outwards
to understand our very beginnings
and maybe understand where we are headed.
We live in a very busy world
that doesn't foster silence.
My childhood backyard was an ancient coral reef
many, many millennia back.
It's like a cathedral.
A place of great beauty and silence.
It's easier to capture the evidence
of some of the old passages of time here...
through the fossilized crustaceans of the mountains,
through the pictographs that remain on those rocks,
highly polished ancient mammoth rubbings,
known trails from early settlers.
So there's this beautiful echo of what's passed through
and I like to think about the people that came
way before my own passing through
that their echoes are still here as well.
I've been a founding member of Paul's Out of Eden Walk.
He conceived of the idea
while he was walking across this landscape.
I got this idea on this ranch in West Texas
where I was doing a little help
with the local vaqueros, the local cowboys.
In the mid to late '90s,
the genetic revolution was just taking off in a big way
and scientists were able to start extracting
very useful information about ancient migrations,
which you could, you know, you can trace through our DNA.
I thought, "What if I retrace the route
of the first human beings who walked out of Africa...
to recreate the first primordial walk
that we made across the world?"
The first discovery of the world by the first Homo sapiens,
the first exploration of the Earth
back in the Stone Age.
I drew out the map of the intended global trail
about 20,000 plus miles on foot
from Ethiopia to the tip of South America,
Tierra del Fuego,
which scientists tell us is the last virgin beach
that our ancestors reached about 7,000 years ago.
- Okay. Go ahead. - All right.
I've been a foreign correspondent
for the past 15 years.
Foreign correspondents normally cover stories
as they happen.
They fly to story A and they fly to story B.
What this project hopes to do
is connect the spaces in between.
And the argument there is that there are hidden links
between major stories of our day that never get covered
because we simply don't slow down enough to see them.
Paul's walk comes at a time when journalism
is pressed on all sides by short attention span
because of the immediacy
of the Digital Age and the internet.
We're still carrying around a Pleistocene brain
that absorbs information and processes the world
at the pace of walking, at three miles an hour.
Do you remember what Linda's reaction was?
Uh-huh.
Over a cup of coffee,
maybe not even looking up from a newspaper or a book
and just saying, "Uh-huh,
so you're gonna walk around the world?
All right. That sounds good."
Again, she knows me.
When I was 14, I walked across the Sierra Nevadas alone.
Later, across Papua New Guinea and through Alaska,
just living off a rifle.
He had walked from the border of Arizona to Mexico City,
retracing the footsteps of an early Victorian explorer,
took a packed mule,
and that took something like nine months.
So then, it was not too big of a leap
to jump into a dugout canoe,
a pirogue, to float down the Congo River for weeks,
to tell the story of the Congo Civil War.
Or to walk away
from a broken down Russian Jeep in Afghanistan
and walk and ride horses
over the Hindu Kush through hip-deep snow,
to get to the front lines of the Afghan War.
I think whether we realize it or not,
we're all on some form of pilgrimage,
and that includes commuting to work,
you know, these micro migrations,
even those are a form of pilgrimage.
Um...
And it's our task maybe to find the meaning under them.
Being fearless is important for anyone
who is trying to do something of the unknown.
So I started to extend my training,
acclimating my body to temperatures.
For example, I rode
a stationary bicycle in the sauna.
The air temperature was 165 for 10 hours.
I made sure that my skin did not touch the bike
because it would've been like a soldering iron,
I would have scourged myself.
I didn't know I had this capacity.
I did not know.
Ten hours is a long time,
but it's not two, it's not three days.
I wanted to know how much I can take.
All the pain that I inflicted to find out about myself,
each step pushing the boundaries further and further.
It took me 4 years and 15,000 miles.
And then I started thinking, you know,
"Maybe I can run Death Valley."
I headed North across the Panamint Desert.
The temperature was climbing and climbing,
and I lost visual contact with the surrounding mountains.
I have glaucoma. I can only see so much.
I knew where the sun was supposed to be.
Following the sun, I repositioned myself.
Focused on it, I almost became hypnotized to it.
I had to pay attention to my footing.
I was by myself, my life depended on it.
Before setting out in December of 2012,
I went down to the finish line to meet the last native speaker
of her indigenous language in that part of the world.
So I spent a day with her at her cabin
next to the Beagle Channel in Chile.
This is just across the channel from Argentina,
listening to her talk,
and she would walk around and say, you know,
a canoe is this,
and a rock is this, and the river is this.
Recording this language
is a form of gathering a precious stone
at this point in time
where language is about to wink out,
to carry with me across the world.
To remind myself partly why I'm doing this
because this project is rooted in the bedrock of history.
And, in that sense, it's also an act of remembering.
And I just wanted to remember her
as I walk towards her.
I don't know if she'll still be there
I don't know. When I get there, she was quite old.
I had first photographed
the 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree
just outside of Orlando in 2007, I believe.
A few years ago,
some kids snuck in to do drugs inside the tree,
and they actually set it on fire from the inside out,
and then posted about it on Facebook
and got caught, thankfully,
but it was actually on fire for over a week
before anyone knew.
It was impossible to save.
There it was, smoldering and dead.
It really changed my perspective
about everything that I was doing.
It was a very painful reminder that just because something
is incredibly old, does not mean that it's immortal.
In South Africa, a researcher I was speaking with
introduced me to something
that are collectively known as the underground forests.
That area is very prone to fire, and what these trees did
was basically migrate
the bulk of their structures underground.
And that way, when the fires inevitably come through,
it just singes the top of the leaves off,
which they can easily reproduce.
And so I visited 1 that was around 13,000 years old,
that's been around since mastodons
and saber tooth tigers when humans started farming.
However, a few years later,
I was informed that it had been destroyed
when they decided to change the traffic patterns
outside of the garden and paved right over it.
It hit another note of the chord
of what it means to be looking at time.
The whole point of the project, really,
was to create a relationship
with timescales that are far removed
from our normal human experience,
and by doing so, to create a relationship
with that time that's personal.
When you see something that's alive, that's alive now,
that you can have an interaction with
and has experienced 80,000 years of the world's history
leading up to this moment that you meet it,
and then on the other end of the spectrum,
you have the click of the shutter of a camera,
so a 60th of a second.
And then, somewhere in between those two,
we somehow then all come together
to share this moment.
And, to me, that's a way
to start looking at time with a different perspective.
Even though we are part of this giant continuum,
it's actually a reminder to look at the small moments
that make up the fabric of the time
that we all spend here.
One of the places where some
of the oldest Homo sapiens fossils have been found
is the Rift Valley of Ethiopia.
Bones about 156,000 years old.
So I chose that as my starting line
back in January of 2013,
and walked away from that boneyard,
up the Rift Valley of Africa.
The Afar Region where Paul started
requires every bit of forethought
and planning to survive.
I'm grateful that I was able to join Paul
seeing him take the first few steps.
As we continue to know
each other, our paths have, um...
They converge and diverge.
He has been trying to understand the world
and who we are through the soles of his feet.
The antidote to instant news and abbreviated viewpoint.
In my case, my path has to move
through a level of abstraction to pursue those questions.
For a period of time, we knew each other
in the template of a traditional marriage.
Though our practices are vastly different,
what we share is appreciation
for slowing down and seeing the invisible.
But I suppose one of the more harrowing moments for me
uh, was when Paul was abducted along the Sudan-Chad border
in 2006, and he went missing.
There's always the element of risk
because Paul does not shy away from challenging stories.
So you wonder, "Are you going to see this person again
as they walk off into the Afar desert?"
We were moving in opposite directions now.
I saw horrible things
about how we treat each other as human beings
in my career as a war reporter.
But walking has given me hope
about our generally messed up species.
Walking creates bonds, you get to know people.
You talk about your life with each other.
It's a bridge to that person's mind and heart,
to their cosmos.
On this journey, though, across continents,
I hoped that things were gonna be okay.
It was a physically demanding starting line to the journey.
Temperatures were extreme.
The very first days of the journey
were defined by this harsh reality
of walking through a drying landscape
where pastoral groups were fighting each other
over shrinking pasture lands and drying water holes.
So it became the war story almost immediately.
And they were, in fact, killing each other.
So we have actually walked through the Rift Valley
along a very strange snaking route
that if you took like a satellite picture
would seem nonsensical because there was no barrier,
but they were following
these invisible edges of conflict zones
that most people couldn't see that were invisible to the eye,
but were as real as any trench works,
you know, on front lines of any war.
And I remember we had to kind of do
a silent camp one night without fire,
so as not to be spotted to get through a danger zone
before anybody noticed us.
Climate change,
it's a very difficult thing to convey to people
because it appears to be moving so slowly.
It's an incremental calamity.
But when you're walking, you have no choice,
but to experience it through your own body
in ways that reading about it never will,
or looking at equations never will,
or hearing politicians lie about it never will.
And sure enough, after crossing the Djibouti border,
we stumbled across men, women, and children who didn't make it.
A couple days ago, we found the bodies
of seven migrants in the desert.
They died of thirst,
trying to reach Saudi Arabia.
And they were just one ridge line away
from reaching the Red Sea,
their watery finish line to get out of the desert.
It's made my own journey seem... frivolous.
So I'll just ask the question again.
Okay.
Abdi Nasir, it took you one week to walk here.
What did you... Is the journey worth the danger?
Is the journey worth going to Saudi Arabia
when people are dying?
I was stuck in the port of Djibouti for six weeks,
because I couldn't convince a commercial cargo ship
to take on a passenger,
with the risk of being attacked by Somali Pirates.
There's been a lot of murder out at sea.
Piracy is like a lottery
for poor people that are starving,
and they're ready to risk their lives, you know.
- They're desperate. - Yeah.
Maybe I'll see you in Saudi Arabia.
I should come to Ali
because I've been trying for a month to get a boat,
and I can't find a boat, so, Ali, I might need your help.
I wasn't getting a visa to walk through Eritrea.
We've been waiting on a visa for four months.
It wasn't coming through.
I'm a 56-year-old man,
and I don't have forever to accomplish this.
It's unfortunate because some of these countries
are just magnificent in terms of cultural resources,
and they're important pieces
of the puzzle of human migration.
Political borders have been the biggest obstacle.
There's no question about it.
I've had to do what our ancestors did
when they hit a glacier, they had to walk around it.
We've always been grasping for something beyond our reach.
The journey itself makes us human.
I didn't have to travel only to mountaintops.
The questions that we're asking, understanding ourselves,
understanding the history of the universe,
have become so difficult to answer
that we require massive experiments
all being done in some very extreme locations
because of the sensitivity that you need
to even begin answering these questions.
Dark matter may be the scaffolding of the universe.
We don't see it, but it's there.
It's what draws visible matter into place.
But there's much more of it
than there is of the visible matter.
It represents 85% of the matter in the universe, we believe.
And we don't know what it is.
Dark matter will pass right through an atom.
What are you going to build
that's going to actually capture one of these particles?
You need about half a mile of rock or more to shield you
from all the particle noise
that will create the same signal on the surface.
Even after you've gone half a mile underground,
humans are radioactive enough that if you stand near one
of these detectors, it could go off
as if a dark matter particle had hit your detectors.
We know lead can shield us from radioactivity,
but new lead itself is radioactive.
What these physicists did is they found some lead
that had been salvaged from a ship
that had sank off the coast of France
in the 18th century.
These are the kinds of lengths that they've gone to,
to build a detector that is completely shielded,
so that it can detect this very, very tiny signal
of a dark matter particle.
Most theories suggest that at very, very small scales,
the structure of space-time is not completely smooth.
It might be frothy.
How would you find such a structure?
Theory tells us that neutrinos are particles
that will interact with the structure of space-time.
Some of the earlier neutrino detectors
were essentially large tanks of water
that were lined with photomultiplier tubes
put inside mines looking for the flash of blue light
that happens when a neutrino hits a water molecule.
And in order to have any chance of detecting them,
you need larger and larger volumes of water.
The Russians came up with a really ingenious way
of addressing this problem.
Lake Baikal has 20%
of the world's unfrozen freshwater.
It's tucked away in a remote corner of Siberia,
deep enough to submerge three Empire State Buildings
and not see a trace of them.
So they wait for the lake to completely freeze over.
When the ice is about a meter thick all across,
they use that ice as a platform,
send in divers and use the lake itself as a detector.
They have about two months in which they can do this work
before the ice starts cracking
and it becomes dangerous to be on the ice.
Even to get to the experiment, you have to ride over this ice
for about 40 kilometers,
scouting for zones of good ice on which they can drive.
One of the challenges of doing neutrino physics in a lake
is that for every neutrino,
there are about a billion cosmic-ray muons
that also hit the water,
also creating the same kind of blue light.
So one solution is to go deep down,
so that you can use the water
as a shield against the cosmic-ray muons.
But even at the depth of about a kilometer,
the cosmic-ray muons will outnumber by 1,000 to 1.
So the neutrino physicists have come up
with a very ingenious solution.
It so happens that cosmic-ray muons
cannot go through rock, but neutrinos can.
So imagine now that you're looking at neutrinos
that are coming from the other side of the earth,
and hitting the bottom of Lake Baikal.
So you're essentially using the entire planet
as a shield against the noisy cosmic-ray muons,
and you're creating a zone of silence
just at the bottom of Lake Baikal.
Out in the desert, there was just no noise.
It was just my world of silence.
I have no clue why I do these things.
Losing my eyesight,
I saw better within than I ever saw before.
The real world was blurred,
so I went with seeing from with inside.
That enabled me to run for phenomenal distances.
One foot in front of another, mile after mile.
During the night, I had to keep moving.
I kept focused on the white line that was on the road.
And that white line always kept me focused
as to where I'm going...
until that moon started to climb over the peak.
I arrived in Saudi Arabia on a Syrian cargo ship
that was carrying 9,000 sheep and 800 camels from Africa.
To be able to walk through this part of the world
that has been so closed off for centuries, actually,
was pretty remarkable.
What do you think makes people so restless?
You know, my project is about discovery.
It's about humankind's natural impulse
to always look over the next mountain,
cross the Bab el-Mandeb.
What's your philosophy,
your theory about why we're that way?
I think it's mankind's nature.
And I think our Bab el-Mandeb now is outer space.
We have walked two days
out of the vast port city of Jeddah.
Ahead, the long austere salt plains of the Hejaz coast,
a white ramp that leads 700 miles north to Jordan.
A strip of Saudi Arabia
not traversed by an outside traveler on foot
since the days of Lawrence of Arabia.
The photos I captured of the Arabian Hajj trail system
may be the first ever taken
of those particular stretches of the network,
at least since cars began bumping down
old caravan trails in the early 1940s.
And already, we are lost.
Modern day Saudi Arabia has lost so much memory
beneath sleek highways, parking lots, hotels, malls.
Saudi Arabia is a more urbanized society
than the United States today.
Because they've had oil wealth,
they live in these westernized bubbles.
Cars with rolled-up windows.
And herein lies a paradox.
As our species becomes more successful,
more populous,
we fracture the world into ever tighter panoramas,
into countries,
provinces,
neighborhoods,
houses,
private space.
In this way, a proportionally larger share of the planet
becomes alien, exotic, threatening, unknown.
In a sense, the car has become a prosthetic
for a world that is no longer human in scale.
On foot, I have reconnected with fellow human beings
in ways I could never conceive
as a reporter crisscrossing maps by jet and car.
Out walking, I constantly meet people.
Mm, that's good.
I cannot ignore them or drive by them.
I chat with strangers 5, 10, 20 times a day,
people unlike me,
who carry very different ideas and universes
inside of their heads.
It's the opposite
of the echo chambers of the internet.
It's the difference between a tweet
that's exchanged at the speed of electrons
and a heart to heart that can change your life.
I'm not just talking about walking across the world,
I'm listening my way across it.
In this way, walking builds a home everywhere.
Scientists who have strapped GPS devices
to the world's last hunter-gatherers report
that the typical male forager walks about seven miles a day,
like walking annually from New York to Los Angeles.
This is roughly the distance I'm covering year to year.
It's normal.
It's sitting down that's actually insane.
We do way too much of it.
It makes us sick with depression,
addiction, and attention deficit disorders.
All motorized societies
classify walkers as suspicious beings.
I personally have encountered hundreds
cast up everywhere like flotsam,
escapees from the wrath
of nationalist mobs in the cities.
They put me up in their grubby tents.
More than half were women and children.
I'm in a valley called Wadi Natuf.
The first human beings to ever stop walking
took up residence in a cave here 10,000 to 13,000 years ago.
They concocted a world-changing idea, home.
No longer was all movement worship.
Meaning, not to mention God, began to assume a fixed address.
A Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, once wrote,
"The struggle of man against power
is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
As we set out on this project, the lives of 2.3 billion people,
a third of the world's population,
are potentially linked through electronic devices.
By the time this walk ends in Tierra del Fuego,
that global connectivity may very well be complete.
Wireless messages are soaring above us,
crisscrossing the world at the speed of light.
What impressions will they leave behind
that resonate with human beings 50,000 years from now?
Will they be beautiful or even worth a glance?
I find ancient petroglyphs
scattered throughout the landscape.
I try to capture their facsimile with a digital camera,
a tool whose only record, electronic zeros and ones,
won't last even 20 years, much less 20 centuries.
We are the ghosts.
So the oldest living thing that we know of...
is some bacteria living in the Siberian permafrost...
doing DNA repair below freezing,
meaning that it's not dormant.
It's been living and growing there
below freezing for half a million years.
So I made images of the bacteria under the microscope,
and it turns out no one had done that before.
There are stromatolite fossils all over the world.
The stromatolites date back to 3.5 billion years ago.
The stromatolites actually did the job
of oxygenating our atmosphere.
It took 900 million years.
So I'd like to say, you know,
"The next time you take a breath, thank a stromatolite."
The oldest colony is living in Western Australia.
Astrobiologists have studied this idea of bacteria
potentially having piggybacked in on a meteorite
and landed on Earth somewhere,
and it turns out there's a meteor impact site
right over the crest of the beach
where I photographed the stromatolites.
So I'm not saying that's where life on Earth began,
but it's certainly really fun
to try to start to puzzle that out.
I had an opportunity to visit CERN
where fascinating questions
that would answer so many things for us
are being explored.
What is the nature of the universe?
Can we replicate the moments after the Big Bang?
What happened in the depths of time
that we wouldn't normally have any relationship to otherwise?
The Large Hadron Collider is where you get a sense
of how extreme these detectors are.
When you actually enter the caverns that house
the world's biggest machine...
the coldest thing in the universe.
Colder than outer space.
At CERN, we built a machine
that's the size of a city,
recreating the kind of high energy environment
that has not existed in the universe
since a fraction of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
What we're looking for is the genetic code of the universe.
This is a device
with 80 million channels of electronics.
It uses one full year
of the planet's production of helium to run.
Magnets have had to be developed
250,000 times the strength of the Earth's magnetic field.
It's like a racetrack spread out over 27 kilometers,
and you have particles
that are moving close to the speed of light.
They're going around 11,000 times per second,
and they collide in a very small space
finer than a human hair.
The equivalent to firing knitting needles
from Europe and from America,
and having them collide head-on midway over the Atlantic.
If you put enough energy into a collision,
you can create particles out of nothing.
We seem to need 17 particle types
to build a universe.
I was elected the leader of the experiment
to search for the Higgs.
It has been called the "God Particle"
because we require atoms.
Atoms are what builds the structure
of everything we have, including ourselves.
And without the Higgs, there would be no atoms.
We're producing 200 million collisions a second.
This is huge.
And this is a worldwide enterprise
to pick out the interesting one.
Down the hallway for me,
Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web
for us to coordinate all this information.
We built the LHC as a collaboration
of 178 Institutes worldwide, 40 countries.
That's something our civilization
may be known for, as one of the key things we've done.
We keep extending into new regions,
beyond our imagination.
Extra dimensions, the fabric of space-time,
the production of black holes.
And if there's no more accelerators built,
because the next ones
would need magnets the size of the galaxy,
It often occurs to me that the work we're doing now
may have to stand for millennia.
Who else is going to look back to one trillionth of a second
after the Big Bang?
Believe it or not, I ended up going into physics through art.
And that brought me back into these questions
I've been asking in the background of my life.
Where do we come from?
You know, what is this place we're in?
What's driving the universe to be as it is?
What we're trying to understand is a timeless thing.
A hundred thousand years ago,
pigments were being made for the purposes of art.
Forty thousand years or so ago,
we have the oldest surviving artwork,
and it's this red dot painting.
That artwork it turns out
was made by a Neanderthal artist.
To me, what that says
is art was important to the human experience
even before we were fully human.
My mother was a self-taught painter
of this region.
Because of the remoteness of this area,
there was virtually impossible television reception.
So if I wasn't outdoors riding on my horse, I was drawing.
As I matured more with my work,
eventually, the actual depiction of the landscape
began to fall away.
The process of drawing for me
is really about accessing the edge of memory.
Some sort of preconscious
or unconscious knowledge that we all share.
That if we can get out of our own way,
we could access this place and access what we know.
And it's this kind of deep memory
that I find is the inexhaustible reason
why I keep working.
This is a kind of memory
that I believe has to exist in us
from the tiniest level of being of who we are
and what we have evolved from.
And that's why stillness is so important.
That, that deep, deep recessed knowledge can surface.
Something is being accessed that I can't know consciously,
and yet it's there.
If I don't dictate ahead of time what the drawing is to be.
I do feel that the grasses have memory,
that the soil has memory, the air has memory.
The memory of water.
When you think about the DNA we carry
and the heredity that we carry,
why can't we have cellular memory?
That reverberation is going all the way through.
The universe's first light
has in it the imprint of primordial sound waves.
They essentially set the universe ringing
with a fundamental frequency and a whole bunch of harmonics.
And the imprint of the primordial sound waves
can now be seen in the way galaxies
and clusters of galaxies are structured...
the cosmic microwave background.
So this is the cosmic microwave background,
which is the earliest light in the universe.
So 380,000 years after the Big Bang,
this radiation was imprinted on the sky.
And before that, there was actually no light.
I realized my subjects
were getting beyond geologic time
and into cosmic time.
And so, as I was starting
to wrap up the oldest living things,
I knew that deep time and deep space
were going to be my next subjects.
The cosmic microwave mandala
combines a traditional Tibetan-Buddhist sand mandala
with an image of the cosmic microwave background.
Both are trying to make sense of our place in the universe.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there are a lot of correlations
between the human body and the cosmos.
You try with the help of the mandala
to realize this interconnectedness.
It's also the depiction of an inner cosmology.
You carry the cosmos within you.
The tantra sand mandala is a 2,600-year-old design.
It took me over 25, 30 years practice.
I've been doing this fighting for my country.
I'm not carrying any weapons in my hand.
I'm simply carrying a beautiful art
for the welfare of all sentient beings.
When I first saw it,
this beautiful mountain with the sun
breaking over behind me and capturing the peak,
I said, "Okay, sweetie, I see you.
I've been training a long time to get here,
but it's still a long way to go.
I've got a lot of miles, a lot of footsteps."
It's a little over 14,500 feet.
As I was approaching the last mile on the climb,
I just savored every step.
It was almost a fantasy,
and I was afraid to let go of it.
That was cumulatively about a 200 mile run.
Eighty-four hours.
I'm awake for over four days.
I thought about all these things,
and when I got to the top, I was just crying.
I couldn't believe it, I started to cry.
And I looked back towards Badwater,
and I knew that I had gone up that desert by myself,
as far as I could see.
But I didn't realize my adventure was just starting.
I ran probably about 50 miles the next day.
There were all kinds of people
who wanted me, television, radio,
and I didn't want to talk to anybody.
It was a... It was a...
It was a personal thing.
My wife, Betty, was preparing for a dinner party,
and I said, "Well, I'm gonna go body surfing."
Next thing I knew, I was sucked
into the first of a series of rogue waves.
Eventually, I was washed ashore, and they were able to find me.
And at that point, I was totally paralyzed.
It severed half my spinal cord.
I could visualize my wife preparing for a dinner party
that would never take place.
It's still with me.
The therapist put me in a wheelchair.
I said, "I'm gonna walk again."
Then she says,
"You'll be lucky if you walk at all even with a walker."
I couldn't make anything go on my stationary bicycle.
I couldn't hold anything in my hand.
But my legs,
after repetitive efforts, I was able to function,
but there's little or no strength.
It was at...
It was at that point I realized that I've come a long way.
It was three days short of one year earlier
that I was totally paralyzed.
I said, "Put me on my stationary bicycle."
And I remember that I prayed.
And I rode that bike for ten miles.
In January of 1978, I ran the Paul Mason marathon.
Twenty-six and a quarter miles, there was a fire station
just before the start of each loop.
And I went in, I told the guys, "I've lost all my fine motors.
If I fell, you'd have to pick me up.
I couldn't get up.
And I could have bowel movement. I have no control.
I'd like to leave clean clothes, shoes, and everything,
and use your shower that you use for the trucks
to clean up before I start again."
And they said, "No problem."
I just took off everything, messy as it was,
right in the shower.
When I came back, they had cleaned the other stuff,
dried it, I put that on.
And then they...
They all ran along with me to the finish line.
They gave me clean clothes, they gave me dignity.
I guess it takes really getting beat up
to realize how strong you are.
You know, I've lost my external mobility,
but the internal mobility expands just like the universe.
I've walked with many people
across the world so far.
The African proverb is
"If you want to walk quickly or fast, you walk alone.
And if you want to walk far, walk together."
By walking with a local person,
they allow me to see that landscape through their eyes.
In Ethiopia, I was walking
with one of Ethiopia's finest fossil finders.
With a desert guide in Djibouti who was running for parliament
on a very strange clunky
kind of 1980s radio phone, marshaling votes
as we were walking through the desert.
I'm not too surprised to say that he lost.
I've walked in Saudi Arabia with Mohamad Banounah,
a special forces general in the Saudi army,
who was a true life force.
A man who was a great raconteur,
who was a wealth of Bedouin folk knowledge,
who was willing to walk hundreds of kilometers
through the Hejaz desert
during some of the hottest part of the year.
Cheerful, full of off-color jokes.
Woo-hoo!
With an abdominal hernia,
a part of his gut had actually come out
through his abdominal wall, and he refused to tell me.
He kept it secret for weeks
and actually walked about 250 miles
in this condition, quietly wrapping up his abdomen
with a cloth in the mornings before I woke up,
so he could take the pain.
Um, and when I finally stopped the walk and medevaced him,
the doctor was amazed that he was still alive.
And he is my Saudi Arabia.
In Turkey,
I met a young Kurdish photographer, Murat Yazar,
who expressed an interest
in walking with me for nine days.
Murat so loved the walk that he ended up walking with me
all the way across Turkey for seven months.
And then didn't even stop at the Turkish border,
but continued walking through Georgia with me.
I stand back from my own project and watch in awe
as my walking partners become the driving force,
rediscovering their own home on foot.
I partnered with Kazakh wolf hunters,
joined by an archaeologist creating petroglyphs
on the landscape across Kazakhstan.
For Kazakhs, separated from their ancestral nomadic ways,
as a way of not forgetting.
A mounted archer taller than three football fields.
A stylized camel
stretching nearly a quarter-mile from nose to tail,
and two other gigantic motifs borrowed from local history.
When Google Earth updates
its satellite imagery of Central Asia,
you'll be able to appraise Astafyev's artwork from orbit.
A melon seller from far western Uzbekistan
decided to join the walk,
and he was also a forced migrant.
A man who was so poor
that he'd been forced dozens of times
to go work illegally in Kazakhstan
as a construction laborer,
and had the scars on his body
from Kazakh police beatings to prove it.
And Tolik was almost a folkloric figure.
His attitude to life was totally unflappable.
Whether we were being arrested and detained more than 30 times,
whether the donkeys would escape into the Kyzylkum Desert,
whether our water was stolen and we were without water
in the middle of the desert,
he was this calm, steady, inspiring person
who would have been dismissed as kind of a street-side vendor
if you had driven by him in a car.
The idea is to gather them all.
I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm gonna do it.
I'm gonna find somebody to pay for their air tickets
to gather hundreds of these people
to whom the walk belongs, as much to them as to me,
in Tierra del Fuego, at the finish line,
and then have us all walk together
for the last day down to the Antarctic Sea.
Because, in truth, this isn't only my journey,
it's yours, too.
If you go far back enough in your family tree,
some ancestor walked the trails that I'm following.
We're all walking together into the 21st century.
Paul's walk comes at a time
when our ability to connect has been increasingly replaced
by interactions with our screens and our devices,
when we have so many reasons to be strangers to one another.
I knew that many, many lives would be touched by his walk
and that many would be touching him.
To be a walker on a planet
conquered by suspicion, flags,
the incessant babble of television,
I'm often asked about safety.
Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets at me
as I zigzagged through the West Bank.
A militia of village guards
nearly shot me from behind a tree
while walking through Turkey.
And to date, the police in ten countries
have detained me 84 times for, well, suspicious walking.
Still, as a member
of one of the most disempowered minorities
in our motorized age,
a pedestrian,
I can assert with confidence that, by and large,
our shared planet is not a dangerous place.
In the Arab world,
I learned to scale human compassion by the pound.
Daily invitations to meals and tea had the effect
of lightening my rucksack
in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the West Bank.
And in the Caucuses,
the Georgians did Christian charity proud.
During my 42-day trek through their mountainous nation,
I was kindly invited into private homes every night.
In Western Kazakhstan, my cargo horse foundered.
A local nomad transported a healthy replacement
from his own herd more than 100 miles away.
In Uzbekistan, a police state where I was detained 37 times,
villagers sometimes did turn me away.
"I'm sorry," they'd whisper,
"I don't want trouble with the KGB."
Often, they looked acutely embarrassed,
their fear clearly at war
with their own thwarted neighborliness.
They sent out children
with fresh baked bread as I walked away.
All the Abrahamic faiths espouse compassion towards wayfarers.
"Love the foreigner as yourself
for you were foreigners in Egypt,"
says the book of Leviticus.
As I now point my boot tips towards India and China,
I'll doubtless find similar resonances
in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.
When I talk to school kids, which I do pretty frequently,
I use these positive interactions to remind them
to not be afraid.
Because I think in today's day and age, when we're inundated
with a tsunami of anxiety-causing news
about the Other dumped on your head every day,
the weird aftereffect of the information age explosion
is a recurrence of tribalism.
The walk has provided a through line
that is connected,
not from mountaintop to mountaintop,
but from person to person.
I'm not walking to "somewhere."
I would not be sitting here talking to you
from Southern Pakistan
if I didn't get this help of thousands of people,
almost all of them strangers,
who have no warrant to help me at all.
I have to remind people
don't let digital overload strike fear into them,
a paralyzing fear that would immobilize them
from going out into the larger world
and exploring places and experiences
beyond their immediate horizon.
This whole place,
this chaotic, heartbreaking, maddening,
beautiful, ecstatic place is yours.
It belongs to you, it's home, all of it.
I was born in suburban California,
but raised in semi-rural Mexico.
Like many children who straddle borders,
I learned to pour my loyalty into relationships, not places.
I'm making for Tierra del Fuego, the last continental horizon.
I'm not walking toward the exotic Other.
I'm walking toward a better part of myself,
these people.