What Earth’s most extreme places teach us about being human

Who's in the Video Victor Vescovo Victor Vescovo is an American private equity investor and worldwide explorer. He is the first person to ever complete the Explorers' Extreme Trifecta: summiting Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth), diving[…] Go to Profile The Well What Earth’s most extreme places teach us about being human Having explored the Mariana Trench, the summit of Everest, and the edge of space, Victor Vescovo knows what awe feels like in its most dramatic forms. What surprised him most was how often that same feeling appears in everyday life. ▸ 12 min — with Victor Vescovo Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://What%20Earth’s%20most%20extreme%20places%20teach%20us%20about%20being%20human Share What Earth’s most extreme places teach us about being human on Facebook Share What Earth’s most extreme places teach us about being human on Twitter (X) Share What Earth’s most extreme places teach us about being human on LinkedIn Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe

Explorer Victor Vescovo has spent years reaching some of the most extreme places on Earth, from scaling the tallest mountains on every continent, diving to the deepest parts of every ocean, skiing to both of the Earth’s poles, and even rocketing to the edge of space. In those environments he discovered awe in three distinct forms — mental, physical, and existential.

These experiences changed the way he pays attention, teaching him to notice the quieter flashes of awe that appear in ordinary life. As a speaker at A Night of Awe and Wonder, hosted by Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation, Vescovo invites us to see awe as something we can practice every day life.

VICTOR VESCOVO: Imagine yourself in a titanium sphere, one meter wide. The seat next to you is empty, and you are 35,000 feet below the ocean. The pressure outside is 16,000 pounds per square inch, which is equivalent to four automobiles on your fingernail.

You've helped design and build the craft. You're piloting it. And this was me seven years ago in the Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench. As I was exploring with this craft, you can only see about 30 or 40 meters at a time because it's so dark. Below 6,000 meters, photons can't penetrate. It is the darkest dark you can imagine, darker even than space.

Out of nowhere at the edge of the Challenger Deep, in a place no human had ever been, a wall started coming up. It was like El Capitan in reverse at the bottom of the ocean. In that moment, it was absolutely breathtaking. It was indeed awe.

So tonight what I'm gonna try and do is walk you through what I call the three corners of the great fortune. I've had to explore the deepest point in the ocean, the summit of Mount Everest, and going into space, and why those are doorways, at least for me, to awe and what it felt like to do that.

Let's go to the deep — the ocean, the cliff.

When I encountered it at the bottom of Challenger Deep, it wasn't a thumping, raging, exciting feeling. It was very, very quiet. That was the thing that was probably most shocking about going to the bottom of the ocean, and I've done it 15 times because it's addictive. It's like a blanket wrapped around you. You're looking outside of a dinner-plate-sized window, and you can see the water.

You know the pressure is so extreme that if there is a catastrophic failure with the submersible, you'd be dead before your brain could even register the signal. You know that, but you have to ignore it or you couldn't function. Instead, you're enraptured by what's around you. People think it's a barren desert, and it's not.

There were small poly keate worms. There were horian sea cucumbers. There were bacterial colonies, organisms living without any chemosynthesis. They were living off the methane coming off the rocks and reacting with the minerals in the rocks — a form of life that doesn't exist here on the surface. If there is alien life off of Earth, it will look like what we saw in the deepest ocean trenches, not what we have up here. And it was unbelievable that there was so much life in such an incredibly brutal environment. And then there was just the silence.

Exploring the bottom of the ocean was like climbing around inside the pyramids. The greatest sense of awe that I encountered in the bottom of the ocean was a sense of time. You felt absolutely timeless. Here I was in a place that was very indifferent to my existence, where tectonic plates were moving together in geologic time, and yet I was just this speck of existence on the overall continuum of time.

So that's what it was like going to the bottom of the ocean — a sense of awe anchored in a sense of extreme time.

Let's talk about the mountains.

If going to the very deep oceans is like meditation, climbing Mount Everest is like fucking warfare. It is absolutely vicious. Above 26,000 feet, they call it the Death Zone, and they don't call it that to be melodramatic. If you stop above 26,000 feet to rest, you are simply dying more slowly. You will not recover. You must get down.

The mountain is utterly indifferent to your existence. Storms can come up out of nowhere. It has little regard for you, and you get a sense of where you stand on the planet and your importance to it. Your vision focuses down to the bare minimum. You are so far beyond fatigue — physically, even mentally, even spiritually — you just become this thing of will with tunnel vision, just trying to go step by step up that slope. Your entire existence is centered on that.

And that's really what you take away: you have this incredible power within you of sheer will that sometimes you don't get to feel until you're stripped down to the very bare essentials that you do. After climbing that mountain for two months, which is usually how long it takes, then you finally get to the summit. You feel like a combination of a revenant, but also an angel.

We went up in a storm. That's how we avoided the line. So we traded one risk for another, barely conscious of what we were doing, but we were successful and then went down after 15 minutes. But what didn't destroy us did make us stronger. And the thing that I felt most in that endeavor, especially coming back to Camp Four after a 14-hour summit day, was a sense of physical awe — what human beings can actually endure. Physically, yes, people die on Everest, but many people are able to summit with hypoxia, with illness, with injured legs, and yet we endure, and we can reach into this reptilian part of our brains to do extraordinary things.

And then there's space.

If the ocean is like meditation and the mountains are like physical warfare, then going to space is like being shot out of a cannon. It is awesome. Highly recommend it.

The launch is violent, noisy. You're with your friends — at least I was — on a Blue Origin flight, New Shepard Number 21. You're in your crash couch, your crash couch leaning back, and right in front of you is a panel that's showing what Mach you're going — that's the speedometer. The first time I ever went Mach One was vertically. Straight up. The launch was like going to a Metallica concert with your friends, with the volume at 11 — it's pounding in your chest.

And then after a three-minute burn straight up, you feel a kick. And all of a sudden you're lofted into space. And in Zero G, a beep goes off saying it's all safe. You unclip, and now you're floating in Zero G with your friends. You look outside the window, and you see the extraordinary view of Earth. Yes, I know you've seen the 4K or 8K pictures of the Earth from space, but there is nothing like seeing it for real.

The thin sca of the atmosphere, a white sun on a black sky — which you cannot see from Earth because of the atmosphere. It was just breathtaking. And then you experienced something the Apollo astronauts coined, called the Overview Effect. You may have heard about it. It is a real thing. It affects different people to different degrees. But you look down on planet Earth, you don't see borders, and you feel this connection that this is our home. And you see it in a way that you simply cannot see it from the surface of the planet.

And yes, it's a real thing — when you come back to Earth after having seen that and experienced that, you want to do better. You want to be more connected to people. You want to be a better person. You just do.

So this is existential awe. When you're looking out of a window of a rocket and you're looking into the blackness of space personally — not intellectualizing it from astronomy or something that you've read or seen on a documentary — when you've actually looked with your own eyes to the vast expansive space, you get a sense of human beings' space and how we relate to it.

So I feel extraordinarily fortunate. I've been able to experience the grand expansive in the bottom of the ocean, the physical brutality of what the Earth can do to you on a mountain, and also the incredible expansive space that we exist in.

So what does all this mean? What does my journey mean to someone else?

When we're born, we're born into a prison. It's a benevolent prison. We could not experience life if we did not have these bodies with these eyes and this mind. But it's limiting. We're vulnerable. We're born in fear. And as we grow older, even loneliness — these are the things that are our prison.

And I think for me, and maybe you as well, what we're trying to do throughout so much of our life is look through the bars of that prison to some greater connection, some strong feeling for other people, for the world around us, something bigger than us, as we've already discussed.

What I did going to these extremes — I brought explosives to the party to break down the prison walls, to feel that direct connection. Well, I did it so you don't have to. And what I'm trying to tell you is that in the wonderful experiences that I've had, I've now been a Zen Buddhist for 30 years because I've seen and felt what it's like to have that connection to the universe and to other people.

But you can feel that in your day-to-day lives. They're smaller windows than the ones I got to blow open, but they're still just as real. Looking at a perfect sunset, having a wonderful interaction with a cashier at your local coffee shop, watching a dog eat a pup cup — to me, those are moments of awe that are similar to the same things that I experienced at the extremes.

Make no mistake, everyone here is living in a teenage horror movie. None of us make it outta here alive. So appreciate every moment that you have. Work assiduously to grasp small moments of awe every day. In doing so, you will feel more connected to the people around you, to the world around you. You will not be so alone or as fearful, and you will allow joy to come more into your life.

Thank you.

Up Next 3 experts explain your brain’s creativity formula ▸ 3 min — with David Eagleman