I get a real kick, a positive buzz, from a good vista. Few things can stir the mind as an awe-inspiring horizon. A few years prior, I had found myself sitting in the drivers seat of a Hagglunds Bandvagn 206 tracked personal carrier on high ground in mid-winter, on exercise in Norway, overlooking a vast ice field running way out to a distant horizon. The most desolate expanse of white I had seen; that horizon literally gave me an adrenaline rush. This is exactly what it is to be the hound watching the rabbit run. Is this just me, or was it us, it can’t be just me?
Again, on exercise in Kenya, at Archer's post. Sat atop of a water tower overlooking the arid desert African plains, during the most amazing sunsets. One of my favourite's had been gazing out spellbound on the edge of the Great Rift Valley. I was flirting with something else. I wasn’t sure what or why. Nonetheless, there was a true desire to reach out and touch those distant blue faded hills, to know them, to know what there was on the edge of something else. Horizons, it’s not just me it’s an us thing. Yet not all of us. They say humanity is fundamentally a species of explorers. However, that’s not necessarily the case. Most would be happier on the sofa with Netflix, a Big Mac, and a Diet Coke.
The question why! asked often, of explorers and adventurers, can be a tricky one to answer. You can see this, in the myriad of responses, everything from climbing mountains, because there'er there! , because we can, because wanderlust,... because, …yet ultimately, not really knowing why. Some, just don’t get it! some of us really, really do. Reminding me of the old adage, “If you need to ask the question, you are probably not going to understand the answer”.
During a midday break on the road In Kazakhstan, I sat looking over a field of poppies and dandelions. The vast majority of which, consists of a sea of green, dotted with a number of dandelion clocks, (the clusters of seeds). That sea of green, the bulk, is the support network, required to produce that limited seed. The seeds, those little winged explorers driven by an unseen force out to distant horizons, are the minority of that bulk. Most of the dandelion does not have to move, it can stay right there, with Netflix. You just need a few wind-driven individuals, to climb over the mountains, to the valley on the other side, to find the next fertile lands, the fresh hunting grounds, the next set of resources to keep the species alive. We are not a species of explorers, as much as a species, that produces explorers, and for a good reason.
Adventurers today are the cooling embers of our past glory days of exploration. Explorers were the people who made those maps, today we just keep following those maps in circles, driven by those unseen forces. Today humanity questions its ability to find purpose in a machine driven world. One solution would be to breathe life back into those cooling embers, reigniting the spirit of exploration ablaze. After all, this is about the survival of a species.
The next true explorers, will be lights in the sky; blazing trails off-world, across new black endless oceans to worlds yonder. Why? From dandelions, to the settlement of the inner solar system, it’s all the same thing, a survival mechanism. Don’t resist, let the wind take us, the universal algorithm knows best.
Suit up! the greatest human adventures are about to begin. Down here, in the dust and dirt, we old school adventurers can but only look up, as we watch the bright lights ascend, and dream of new vertical horizons. Like these clouds of dandelion seeds I watch drift across this field. One day, those bright lights, will become an explosion of thousands of shiny metal objects, cascading outward in all directions, from a small blue planet, driven, by the solar winds.