The exhibit comprised two of the 64 skeletons unearthed from the sands of Jebel Sahaba, in northern Sudan, in 1964. Believed to be over 13,000 years old, the bodies in this prehistoric cemetery were significant for what they revealed about how their owners died. Of those 64 skeletons, at least 38 showed signs of violent deaths: caved-in skulls, forearm bones with parry fractures from victims staving off blows, or other injuries. Whether a result of organized warfare, intercommunal conflict or even outright massacre, Jebel Sahaba is widely considered to be some of the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record.

According to Kemp, these shattered bones were a foreshadowing of another object in this room. Ten feet away, displayed at knee-height, was the Palette of Narmer. Hewn from a tapering tablet of grey-green siltstone, the item on display was an exact cast of the 5,000-year-old original — discovered by British archaeologists in 1898 — that now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

At the center of the stone stands the giant figure of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. His left hand clasps the head of an enemy, presumed to be a rival ruler of the Western Delta. In his raised right hand he holds a mace. The image is thought to depict Narmer bludgeoning his greatest opponent to death, an act that solidified his sovereignty over all Egypt. Beneath his feet lie the contorted bodies of two other victims, while overhead a falcon presents Narmer with a ribbon, believed to represent the god Horus bestowing a gift of the Western Nile. “Here we have perfect historical evidence of what the social contract is. It’s written in blood,” Kemp told me. “This is the first depiction of how states are made.”

In the British Museum’s repository of ancient treasures and colonial loot, the palette is by no means a star attraction. For the half hour we spent in the room, few visitors gave it more than a passing glance. But to Kemp, its imagery “is the most important artwork in the world” — a blueprint for every city-state, nation and empire that has ever been carved out by force of arms, reified in stone and subsequently turned to dust.

Systematizing Collapse

When Kemp set out seven years ago to write his book about how societies rise and fall — and why he fears that our own is headed for disaster — one biblical event provided him with the perfect allegory: the story of the Battle of the Valley of Elah, recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Fought between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 11th century BCE, it’s a tale more commonly known by the names of its protagonists, David and Goliath.

Goliath, we are told, was a Philistine warrior standing “six cubits and a span,” or around 9 feet, 9 inches, clad in the alloy of copper and tin armor that would give his epoch its name: the Bronze Age. As the rival armies faced off across the valley, the giant stepped onto the battlefield and laid down a challenge that the conflict should be resolved in single combat.

For 40 days, Goliath goaded his enemy to nominate a champion, until a shepherd named David came forward from the Israelite ranks, strung a stone into his slingshot and catapulted it into Goliath’s brow, killing him at a stroke, and taking his head with the giant’s own sword. For centuries thereafter, the story of David and Goliath has served as a parable challenging the superiority of physical might. Even the most impressive entity has hidden frailties. A colossus can be felled by a single blow.

According to Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” it’s a lesson we would do well to heed. Early on, he dispenses with the word “civilization,” because in his telling, there is little that might be considered civil about how states are born and sustained. Instead, he argues that “Goliath” is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.

Like the Philistine warrior, the Goliath state is defined by its size; in time, centralized polities would evolve to dwarf the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens. Ostensibly, it is well-armored and intimidating, exerting power through the threat and exercise of violence. And, in kind with the biblical colossus, it is vulnerable: Those characteristics that most project strength, like autocracy and social complexity, conceal hidden weaknesses. (A more modern allegory, Kemp writes, can be found in the early Star Wars movies, in which a moon-sized space station with the capacity to blow up a planet can be destroyed by a well-placed photon torpedo.)

Kemp is, of course, by no means the first scholar to try to chart this violence and vulnerability through the ages. The question of what causes societies to fail is arguably the ultimate mission of big-picture history, and a perennial cultural fixation. In the modern era, the historian Jared Diamond has found fame with his theories that collapse is usually a product of geographical determinism. The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, hosted by the historian Paul Cooper, has over 220 million listens. Perusing a bookshop recently, I spotted a recent release, entitled “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World,” among the bestsellers.

What distinguishes Kemp’s book from much of the canon is the consistencies he identifies in how different political entities evolved, and the circumstances that precipitated their fall. A panoramic synthesis of archaeology, psychology and evolutionary biology, “Goliath’s Curse” is, above all, an attempt to systematize collapse. Reviewers have hailed the book as a skeleton key to understanding societal precarity. Cooper has described it as “a masterpiece of data-driven collapsology.”

Moreover, it is a sobering insight into why our own globalized society feels like it is edging toward the precipice. That’s because, despite all the features that distinguish modern society from empires of the past, some rules hold true throughout the millennia.

Becoming ‘Dr. Doom’

In September, Kemp traveled down from Cambridge to meet me in London for the day. Given his subject, I half-expected a superannuated and eccentric individual, someone like Diamond with his trademark pilgrim-father beard and penchant for European chamber music. But Kemp, 35, would prove to be the antithesis of the anguished catastrophist. The man waiting for me on the concourse at King’s Cross was athletic, swarthily handsome and lantern-jawed. He’d signed off emails regarding our plans to meet with a puckish “Cheerio.”

Kemp’s background is also hardly stereotypical of the bookish scholar. He spent his early years in the dairy-farming town of Bega in New South Wales, Australia, where cattle outnumbered people three-to-one. It was “something of a broken home,” he told me. His father was an active member of the Hell’s Angels, involved in organized crime, a formative presence that would later germinate Kemp’s interest in power dynamics, the way violence is at once a lever for domination and for ruin.

Escaping to Canberra, after high school, Kemp read “interdisciplinary studies” at the Australian National University (ANU), where he found a mentor in the statistical climatologist Jeanette Lindsay. In 2009, it was Lindsay who persuaded him to join a student delegation heading to COP15 in Copenhagen, where Kemp found himself with a front row seat to what he calls “the paralysis of geopolitics.”

At one stage, during a symposium over measures to curb deforestation, he watched his own Australian delegation engage in endless circumlocutions to derail the debate. Representatives from wealthier countries, most notably America, had large teams that they could swap in and out of the floor, enabling them to filibuster vital, potentially existential questions to a deadlock. “If you’re from Tuvalu, you don’t have that privilege,” Kemp explained.

Afterward, Kemp became preoccupied by “a startling red thread” evident in so many spheres of international negotiation: the role of America as arbiter of, and all too often barrier to, multilateral cooperation. Kemp wrote his doctoral thesis on how pivotal issues — such as biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons and climate change — had grown captive to the whims of the world’s great superpower. Later, when he published a couple of academic articles on the same subject, “the ideas weren’t very popular,” he said. “Then Trump got elected, and suddenly the views skyrocketed.”

In 2018, Kemp relocated to the United Kingdom, landing a job as a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk” (CSER, often articulated, in an inadvertent nod to a historical avatar of unalloyed power, to “Caesar”). His brother’s congratulatory present, a 3-D printed, hand-engraved mask of the Marvel character “Dr. Doom,” would prove prophetic. Years later, as Kemp began to publish his theories of societal collapse, colleagues at CSER began referring to him by the very same moniker.

It was around this time that Kemp read “Against the Grain,” a revisionist history of nascent conurbations by James C. Scott. Kemp had always been an avid reader of history, but Scott’s thesis, which argued that the growth of centralized states “hadn’t been particularly emancipatory or even necessarily good for human wellbeing,” turned some of Kemp’s earlier assumptions about human nature on their head.

Such iconoclastic ideas — subsequently popularized in blockbuster works of non-fiction like Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind” (2019), and “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) by Graeber and Wengrove — would prompt years of research and rumination about the preconditions that enable states and empires to rise, and why they never last forever.

‘Hobbes’ Delusion’

“Goliath’s Curse” opens with a refutation of a 17th-century figure whose theories still cast a long shadow across all considerations of societal fragility. In “Leviathan” (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed that the social contract was contingent on the stewardship of a central authority — a “Leviathan” designed to keep a lid on humanity’s basest instincts. Political scientists refer to this doctrine as “veneer theory.”

“Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire,” Kemp surmises. “Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.”

For decades now, the predominant version of history has been beholden to this misanthropic worldview. Many of the most influential recent theories of collapse have echoed Hobbes’ grand theory with specific exemplars. Diamond has famously argued that the society on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, unraveled due to self-inflicted ecocide before devolving into civil war. That interpretation, in which the islanders deforested the land in the service of ancestor worship, has since been held up as a species-wide admonition — evidence, as researchers John Flenley and Paul Bahn have written, that “humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), Steven Pinker estimated that 15% of Paleolithic people died of violent causes.

But Kemp was struck by a persistent “lack of empirics” undermining these hypotheses, an academic tendency to focus on a handful of “cherry-picked” and emotive case studies — often on islands, in isolated communities or atypical environments that failed to provide useful analogs for the modern world. Diamond’s theories about the demise of Rapa Nui — so often presented as a salutary cautionary tale —have since been debunked.

To further rebut such ideas, Kemp highlights a 2013 study by the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum. In what amounted to the most comprehensive survey of violence in prehistory, the authors analyzed almost 3,000 skeletons interred during the Paleolithic Era. Of the more than 400 sites in the survey, they identified just one instance of mass conflict: the bones of Jebel Sahaba. “The presumed universality of warfare in human history and ancestry may be satisfying to popular sentiment; however, such universality lacks empirical support,” Haas and Piscitelli wrote.

If there was any truth to the Hobbesian standpoint, the Paleolithic, with its absence of stratified social structures, should have been marked by mass panic and all-out war. Yet the hunter-gatherer period appears to have been a time of relative, if fragile, peace. Instead, conflict and mass violence seemed to be by-products of the very hierarchical organization that Hobbes and his antecedents essentialized. Cave art of armies wielding bows and swords dates only to around 10,000 years ago. “As soon as you start tugging on the threat of collapse, the entire tapestry of history unravels,” Kemp told me.

But if Hobbes was wrong about the human condition — if most people are averse to violence, if mass panic and mutual animosity are not the principal vectors of societal disintegration — what then explains the successive state failures in the historical record? Where or what, to mix metaphors, is Goliath’s Achilles’ heel?

What Fuels Goliath?

In seeking to disentangle a template of collapse from this historiography, Kemp turned to historical data, searching for traits of state emergence and disintegration shared by different polities. “When I see a pattern which needs to be explained, it becomes a fascination bordering upon obsession,” he told me.

A central pillar of his research was the Seshat Global History Databank, an open-source database incorporating more than 862 polities dating back to the early Neolithic. Named after the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Seshat includes a range of metrics like the degree of centralization and the presence of different types of weaponry; it aggregates these to create nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs), including polity size, hierarchy, governmental framework and infrastructure.

Using this and other sources, Kemp set out to collate his own novel dataset, this time focusing on the common features not of complexity, but of collapse. In keeping with Seshat’s old-god nomenclature, he dubbed it the “Mortality of States” index, shortened to “Moros”, after the Greek god of doom. Covering 300 states spanning the last five millennia, the resulting catalogue is, Kemp claims, “the most exhaustive list of state lifespans available today.”

To some extent, Kemp’s data told a story that has become received wisdom: As Earth thawed out from the last ice age, we entered the Holocene, a period of warmer temperatures and climatic stability. This shift laid the terrain for the first big inflection point: the advent of agriculture, which encouraged our previously itinerant species to settle in place, leading to greater population density and eventually proto-city-states. These early states rose and fell, often condemned by internal conflict, climatic shocks, disease or natural disasters. But gradually the organization of human societies trended toward higher levels of complexity, from the diffuse proto-city-states, through the birth of nations, then empires, to the globalized system of today. The violent paroxysms of the past were merely hiccups on a continuum toward increased sophistication and civility, and perhaps someday immortality. Such is the tale that is commonly framed as the arc of human progress.

But trawling through the data in more detail also revealed unexpected and recurrent patterns, leading Kemp to an early realization: states observably age. “For the first 200 years, they seem to become more vulnerable to terminating. And after 200 years, they stay at a high risk thereafter,” Kemp told me.

The other glaring commonality concerned the structure of these societies. “The common thread across all of them is not necessarily that they had writing or long-distance trade,” Kemp said. “Instead, it’s that they were organized into dominance hierarchies in which one person or one group gains hegemony through its ability to inflict violence on others.”

Kemp argues that dominance hierarchies arise due to the presence of three “Goliath fuels.” The first of these is “lootable resources,” assets that can be easily seen, stolen and stored. In this respect, the advent of agriculture was indisputably foundational. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be taxed and stockpiled, giving rise to centralized authorities and, later, bureaucracies of the state.

The second Goliath fuel is “monopolizable weapons.” As weaponry evolved from flint to bronze, the expertise and relative scarcity of the source material required for early metallurgy meant that later weapons could be hoarded by powerful individuals or groups, giving those who controlled the supply chain a martial advantage over potential rivals.

The third criterion for Goliath evolution is “caged land,” territories with few exit options. Centralized power is predicated on barriers that hinder people from fleeing oppressive hierarchies.

In Kemp’s telling, every single political entity has grown from one of these seeds, or more commonly, a combination of all three. Bronze Age fiefdoms expanded at the tip of their metal weaponry. “Rome,” Kemp writes, “was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords,” its vast armies sustained by crop imports from the Nile Valley, its endless military campaigns funded by the silver mines it controlled in Spain. In China, the Han dynasty circumscribed its territory with its Great Wall to the north, intended both to keep Xiongnu horseback raiders out and the citizenry in. Europe’s colonial empires were built, in Diamond’s famous summation, by “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

For millennia, the nature of forager societies kept these acquisitive impulses to some extent contained, Kemp argues. The evolutionary logic of hunting and gathering demanded cooperation and reciprocity, giving rise to “counter-dominance strategies”: teasing, shaming or exile. With the advent of Goliath polities, however, the “darker angels of our nature” were given free rein, yielding social arrangements “more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.”

“Rather than a stepladder of progress,” Kemp writes, “this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.” Moreover, Goliaths “contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.”

In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Consequently, history has been shaped by pathological figures in the Narmer mold, dominance-seekers predisposed to aggression. Reinforced by exceptionalist and paranoid ideologies, these strongmen have used violence and patronage to secure their dominion, whether driven by a lust for power or to avenge a humiliation. Several of the rebellions that plagued dynastic China, Kemp points out, were spearheaded by aggrieved people who failed their civil service examinations.

Wherever Goliath took hold, “arms races” followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious. The growth of “one bellicose city-state” would often produce a domino effect, in which the threat of an ascendant Goliath would provoke other regional polities to turn to their own in-house authoritarian as a counterweight to the authoritarian next door.

In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Many of the great men of history, who are often said to have bent society to their will, Kemp told me, are better thought of as “a rollcall of serial killers.”

The 1% View Of History

Back downstairs, on the British Museum’s ground floor, we walked into a long gallery off the central atrium containing dozens of megalithic totems from the great ages of antiquity. The giant granite bust of Rameses II sat beatific on a pediment, and visitors peered into a glass cabinet containing the Rosetta Stone. Kemp, slaloming through the crowds, murmured: “The 1% view of history made manifest.”

Along both walls of an adjacent corridor, we came upon a series of bas-reliefs from the neo-Assyrian city of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. Depicting scenes from the life of the Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud in the 9th century BCE, the gypsum slabs were like an artistic expression of Kemp’s historical themes: Ashurnasirpal sitting on a throne before vassals bearing tribute; Ashurnasirpal surrounded by protective spirits; Ashurnasirpal’s army ramming the walls of an enemy city, rivals dragging themselves along the ground, backs perforated with arrows. The entire carving was overlaid with cuneiform script, transcribed onto signage below, with sporadic sentences translated into English: “great king, strong king, king of the universe. … Whose command disintegrates mountains and seas.”

Across the atrium, in a low-lit room containing a bequest from the Rothschild family’s antique collection, Kemp lingered over an assortment of small wooden altarpieces, with biblical scenes and iconography carved in minuscule, intricate detail. Elite status could be projected in the imposing size of a granite statue, he said. But it could just as well be archived in the countless hours spent chiseling the Last Supper into a fragment of boxwood.

It is, of course, inevitable that our sense of history is skewed by this elite bias, Kemp explained. While quotidian objects and utensils were typically made of perishable materials, the palaces and monuments of the governing class were designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring and durable. In the hours that we spent on the upper floors, we spied just one relic of ordinary life: a 3,000-year-old wooden yoke from Cambridgeshire.

Likewise, early writing often evolved to reinforce the “1% view of history” and formalize modes of control. The predominance of this elite narrative has produced a cultural blind spot, obscuring the brutality and oppression that has forever been the lot of those living at the base of a pyramid, both figurative and actual.

From all this aristocratic residue, Kemp sought to extract a “people’s history of collapse” — some means of inferring what it was like to live through collapse for the average person, rather than the elites immortalized in scripture and stone.

The Curse Of Inequality

If Kemp’s research revealed that historical state formation appears to follow a pattern, so, too, did the forces that inexorably led toward their demise. To illustrate how the process works, Kemp provides the example of Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that arose on the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey around 9,000 years ago, one of thousands of “tells,” mounded remnants of aborted settlements found throughout the Near East.

Excavations of the site’s oldest layers suggest that early Çatalhöyük was notable for its lack of social differentiation. Crammed together in a dense fractal of similarly sized mud-brick dwellings, the settlement in this period exhibits no remnants of fortification and no signs of warfare. Analysis of male and female skeletons has shown that both sexes ate the same diet and performed the same work, indicating a remarkable degree of gender equity.

This social arrangement, which the Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder has described as “aggressively egalitarian,” lasted for around 1,000 years. Then, in the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, the archaeological record starts to shift. House sizes begin to diverge; evidence of communal activity declines. Later skeletal remains show more evidence of osteoarthritis, possibly betraying higher levels of workload and bodily stress. Economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient, which measures disparities in household income, doubled in the space of three centuries — “a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil,” Kemp writes. Within a few centuries, the settlement was abandoned.

The fate of Çatalhöyük established a template that almost every subsequent town, city-state and empire would mirror. Its trajectory resounds throughout the historical record and across continents. Similar patterns can be discerned from the remnants of the Jenne-Jeno in Mali, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Tiwanaku in Titicaca, and the Cahokia in pre-Columbian North America.

Occasionally, the archaeological record suggests a fluctuation between equality and disparity and back again. In Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City, the erection of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid by an emergent priestly class in around 200 CE ushered in a period of ritual bloodletting. A more egalitarian chapter followed, during which the temple was razed, and the city’s wealth was rechanneled into urban renewal. Then the old oligarchy reasserted itself, and the entire settlement, beset by elite conflict or popular rebellion, was engulfed in flames.

Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same. As Acemoğlu and Robinson explored in “Why Nations Fail” (2012), the correlation between inequality and state failure often rests on whether its institutions are inclusive, involving democratic decision-making and redistribution, or extractive: “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Time and again, the historical record shows the same pattern repeating — of status competition and resource extraction spiraling until a tipping-point, often in the shape of a rebellion, or an external shock, like a major climate shift or natural disaster, which the elites, their decision-making fatally undermined by the imperative to maintain their grip on power, fail to navigate.

In almost every case, decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality. A rise in the presence of large communal pots indicates an upsurge in feasting. Deviation in the size of dwellings, preserved in the excavated footprints of early conurbations, is a measure of social stratification, as wealth accumulates among the elite. Graves of that same nobility become stuffed with burial goods. Great monuments, honoring political and religious leaders or the gods who were supposed to have anointed them, proliferate. Many of the most lucrative lootable resources throughout history have been materials that connote elevated social standing, an obsession with conspicuous consumption or “wastefully using resources,” that marked a break from the hunter-gatherer principle of taking only what was needed. (Kemp wears a reminder of the human compulsion to covet beauty as much as utility, an obsidian arrowhead, on his wrist.)

All the while, these signs of burgeoning inequality have tended to be twinborn with an increasing concentration of power, and its corollary: violence. War, often instigated for no more reason than the pursuit of glory and prestige, was just “the continuation of status competition by other means,” Kemp writes. On occasion, this violence would be manifested in the ultimate waste of all: human sacrifice, a practice custom-made to demonstrate the leadership’s exceptionality — above ordinary morality.

Better Off Stateless

As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.

Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said.

In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.

Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.”

Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.)

Elsewhere, too, collapse was not necessarily synonymous with popular immiseration. The demise of the extravagant Mycenaean civilization in Greece was pursued by a cultural efflorescence, paving the way for the proto-democracy of Athens. Collapse could be emancipatory, freeing the populace from instruments of state control such as taxes and forced labor. Even the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, became in time an economic leveler, slashing inequality and accelerating the decline of feudalism.

It’s a pattern that can still be discerned in modern contexts. In Somalia, the decade following the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 would see almost every single indicator of quality of life improve. “Maternal mortality drops by 30%, mortality by 24%, extreme poverty by 20%,” Kemp recounted from memory. Of course, there are endless caveats. But often, “people are better off stateless.”

Invariably, however, Goliaths re-emerged, stronger and more bureaucratically sophisticated than before. Colonial empires refined systems of extraction and dominance until their tentacles covered diffuse expanses of the globe. Kemp, never shy of metaphor, calls this the “rimless wheel,” a centripetal arrangement in which the core reaps benefits at the margins’ expense.

At times, such regimes were simply continuations of existing models of extraction. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés unseated the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, it was merely a case of “translatio imperi” — the handing over of empire. The European imperial projects in the Americas were an unforgivable stain, Kemp said. But, more often than not, they assumed the mantle from pre-existing hierarchies.

Endgame

In the afternoon, we walked north from the British Museum over to Coal Drops Yard, formerly a Victorian entrepôt for the import and distribution of coal, now a shiny vignette of urban regeneration. The morning rain had cleared, and Granary Square was full of tourists and office workers enjoying the late summer sun. Kids stripped to their underwear and played among low fountains; people chatted at public tables beneath a matrix of linden trees. Kemp and I found an empty table and sat down to talk about how it could all fall apart.

As “Goliath’s Curse” approaches its conclusion, the book betrays a sense of impending doom about our current moment. The final section, in which Kemp applies his schema to the present day, is entitled “Endgame,” after the stage in chess where only a few moves remain.

Today, we live in what Kemp calls the “Global Goliath,” a single interconnected polity. Its lootable resources are data, fossil fuels and the synthetic fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Centuries of arms races have yielded an arsenal of monopolizable weapons like autonomous drones and thermonuclear warheads that are “50 trillion times more powerful than a bow and arrow.” The land — sectored into national borders, monitored by a “stalker complex” of mass surveillance systems and “digital trawl-nets” — is more caged than ever.

We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe. However, the resulting interdependencies and fetishes for unending growth have created an ever-growing catalog of “latent risks,” or accumulated hazards yet to be realized, and “tail risks,” or outcomes with a low probability but disastrous consequences. Kemp characterizes this predicament, in which the zenith of human achievement is also our moment of peak vulnerability, as a “rungless ladder.” The higher we go, the greater the fall.

Under a series of apocalyptic subtitles — “Mors ex Machina,” “Evolutionary Suicide,” “A Hellish Earth” — Kemp enumerates the existential threats that have come to shape the widespread intuition, now playing out in our geopolitics, that globalized society is sprinting toward disaster. After the post-Cold War decades of non-proliferation, nuclear weapons stockpiles are now growing. The architects of artificial intelligence muse about its potential to wipe out humanity while simultaneously lobbying governments to obstruct regulation. Our densifying cities have become prospective breeding grounds for doomsday diseases. Anthropogenic climate change now threatens to shatter the stability of the Holocene, warming the planet at “an order of magnitude (tenfold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90% of life on earth 252 million years ago,” Kemp warns.

The culprits in this unfolding tragedy are not to be found among the ranks of common people. The free market has always been predicated on the concept of Homo economicus, a notional figure governed by dispassionate self-interest. But while most people don’t embody this paradigm, we are in thrall to political structures and corporations created in that image, with Dark Triad personalities at the wheel. “The best place to find a psychopath is in prison,” Kemp told me. “The second is in the boardroom.”

Now, deep into the Global Goliath’s senescence, several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red. Donning his risk analyst hat, Kemp arrives at the darkest possible prognosis: The most likely destination for our globalized society is “self-termination,” self-inflicted collapse on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Goliath is more powerful than ever, but it is on a collision course with David’s stone.

Lootable Silicon

All of this seemed hard to reconcile with the atmosphere of contented civility in Granary Square on this sunny September afternoon. I proposed that an advocate for global capitalism would doubtless view our current circumstances as evidence of the Global Goliath’s collective, trickle-down bounty.

“We should be thankful for a whole bunch of things that started, by and large, in the Industrial Revolution,” Kemp said. “Vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, low infant mortality and the fact that over 80% of the population is literate. These are genuine achievements to be celebrated.”

Kemp argued that most redistribution has been a product of “stands against domination”; for example, the formation of unions, public health movements and other campaigns for social justice. Meanwhile, underlying prosperity still depends on the rimless wheel: the hub exploiting the periphery. “If we were here 150 years ago, we’d be seeing child laborers working in these courtyards,” he said, gesturing at the former coal warehouses that are now an upmarket shopping mall and that once served as a nerve center of the fossil fuel industry that built the modern age.

The same dynamics hold sway today, albeit at a further remove. Just south of us, across the Regent’s Canal, sat the London headquarters of Google, a billion-dollar glass edifice. At first glance, Kemp gave the building an enthusiastic middle finger.

Later, he explained: “The people sitting in that building are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”

Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization.

Another plausible eventuality, which Kemp dubs the “Silicon Goliath,” is a future in which democracy and freedom are crushed beneath the heel of advanced algorithmic systems. He is already at work on his next book about the evolution of mass surveillance, an inquiry that he told me “is in many ways even more depressing.”

Slaying Goliath

Toward the end of “Goliath’s Curse,” Kemp imagines a scenario in which the decision of whether to detonate the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 was made not by a Department of War but by a “Trinity jury,” an assembly of randomly selected members of the public.

In such a counterfactual, with the Nazis defeated, Japan already inches from surrender and Manhattan Project physicists warning of a non-zero possibility that the test could ignite the whole atmosphere and exterminate all life on Earth, Kemp contends that a more inclusive decision-making process would have changed the course of history. “If you had a random selection by lottery of 100 U.S. citizens and asked them, ‘Should we detonate the bomb?’ What decision do they come to? Almost certainly ‘No,’ he told me.

As Kemp sees it, the widespread adoption of such open democracy is the only viable route to escape the endgame. These citizen juries wouldn’t be free-for-alls, where the loudest or most outrageous voice wins, but deliberative procedures that necessitate juror exposure to expert, nonpartisan context.

Such assemblies wouldn’t be enough to “slay Goliath” on their own, Kemp told me. “Corporations and states … [must] pay for the environmental and social damages they cause … to make the economy honest again.” Per capita wealth, Kemp added, should be limited to a maximum of $10 million.

I challenged Kemp that this wish-list was beginning to sound like a Rousseauvian fever-dream. But seven years immersed in the worst excesses of human folly had left him in no mood for half-measures. “I’m not an anarcho-primitivist,” he said. There was no point trying to revivify our hunter-gatherer past. “We’d need multiple planet Earths!” Kemp conceded. And yet the urgency of our current circumstances demanded a radical departure from the existing status quo, and no less a shift in mindset.

His final demotic prescription, “Don’t be a dick,” was an injunction to everyone that our collective future depends as much on moral ambition as political revolution. Otherwise, Goliath won’t be just a Bible story. It could also be our epitaph.

The post Humanity’s Endgame appeared first on NOEMA.

EXETER, United Kingdom — It was an overcast morning in southwest England, but Kirk Waite was staring at the sun. In the open-plan forecasting room of the Met Office, the U.K.’s national meteorological agency, the country’s senior weather-watchers were monitoring low-pressure systems sweeping in from the Atlantic and across the British Isles. Waite was studying weather of a very different sort.

He sat at a crescent-shaped desk arrayed with computer monitors displaying real-time images of our local star. Generated by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a NASA satellite that has been taking second-by-second snapshots of the sun since 2010, the images had been processed by a spectral filter to display the solar surface in a range of lucent wavelengths measured in angstroms (Å).

At 6,173 Å, the sun appeared as a mostly featureless sphere with a couple of rogue blemishes: active sunspots that showed high levels of electromagnetic activity. The most spectacular projection was 171 Å, which depicted the star in the deep ultraviolet range. At this wavelength, it was an explosive yellow orb encircled by a chaotic nimbus of sunbursts and looping streamers. For around six years, the sun has been in what is called Solar Cycle 25, and the tumult shown at 171 Å was characteristic of the “solar maximum,” its most turbulent phase, which commenced last October.

This morning, Waite, the on-duty forecaster at the Met’s Space Weather Observation Centre (MOSWOC), was scrutinizing sunspot number 3998, an archipelago of blotches around four times the Earth’s diameter. On his central monitor, he brought up a greenish image of the sun at 94 Å, highlighting radiation in the X-ray range, and toggled the timestamp back around 24 hours to display 3998 just as it erupted in a torpedo-shaped expulsion of light. This was a solar flare, a massive discharge of radiation and solar energetic particles (SEPs).

Next, Waite turned to a pair of projections, each with a black circle overlaying the solar disc. These were coronagraphs, images taken from another observation platform stationed around a million miles from Earth. The spokes of light emanating from the disc showed the solar wind, a constant flow of ionized particles streaming off the sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, at a rate of one million tons per second.

But sun-watchers like Waite are more preoccupied by the more intermittent crescendos, outbursts with the explosive power to reach Earth with unusual velocity and volume. These can be divided into two distinct but intertwined phenomena: solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Orbital sensors had determined that the flare Waite showed me was an M3.3 — moderate but worth keeping an eye on. “It lasted around two hours, quite a long duration, which is often a sign that a CME might follow,” Waite said. Sure enough, a couple of hours later, the coronagraphs showed a blast of matter exploding from the right “limb” of the photosphere. Waite’s task during his 12-hour shift was to forecast “space weather” — to monitor these two types of solar eruptions and to predict their potential impact on Earth.

Using a mouse cursor, Waite lassoed the outer limits of the CME. Scrolling forward a few minutes — the ejection now greatly expanded — he drew another. The time-lapse between the two would provide an estimate of the CME’s ejection speed (this one was travelling at almost 800 miles per second), from which computer modelling could extrapolate an estimate of the eruption’s volume, density and its likelihood of hitting Earth.  

“The data says there’s an ever-so-slight chance of it just grazing us. So we can incorporate that into our forecast,” Waite said. In the subsequent hours, 3998 had become less complex. This particular event wasn’t large enough to cause significant disruption, Waite concluded. But the question of what these phenomena could do is a different story.

If you took a straw poll of the general public, chances are that few people would have any idea what space weather is, if they’ve ever heard the term at all. In contrast to terrestrial weather, space weather cannot be felt. It doesn’t warm your skin, drench your clothes or blow down your fence. Unlike the floods, droughts and hurricanes that have beset human civilizations since ancient times, it is not an age-old threat. For the first 10,000 years of human civilization, the sun’s flares and CMEs would have had no impact on life at all. 

It is only since humanity constructed a planet-scale network of electromagnetic technologies, and subsequently grew to depend on that network for just about everything, that the sun’s activity became a potential hazard. In basic terms, the primary danger of space weather is its capacity to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Upon making contact with the upper reaches of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), charged particles thrown out by the sun can instigate a “geomagnetic storm,” inducing currents in the Earth’s crust that overwhelm electrical equipment and its infrastructure, resulting in cascading malfunctions, power surges and blackouts. Anything that relies on electricity is vulnerable. Satellites, power grids, aviation, railways, communications, farming, heavy industry, military installations, global trade, financial transactions — the categories of vital systems that could be impacted by a sun-borne EMP are endless and interconnected, affecting every facet of our networked society.

The United Kingdom-based MOSWOC is one of only three institutions worldwide tasked with assessing and forecasting that risk. (The other two are in Boulder, Colorado, and Adelaide, Australia.) Each monitors solar activity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Low-severity space weather, like the expulsions Waite was scrutinizing during my visit, occurs all the time. During the solar maximum, MOSWOC usually records around 1,000 such events per year.

But playing at the back of every forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical centennial event, the moment when a sunspot might dispatch a solar storm at a scale that we know has happened historically, but never in our modern, technological age.

Across the desk from Waite, his colleague Krista Hammond recalled an event in May 2024 when a fusillade of CMEs careened into Earth’s atmosphere. “This was a really interesting one,” she told me, “because rather than just one enormous CME, we had multiple smaller ones, each travelling faster than the one before.” Geomagnetic storms are ranked from G1 to G5, and this one topped the scale, the first G5 in over two decades. As photos of unusually vivid and extensive auroras saturated social media, the forecasters at MOSWOC were working overtime. Waite, on scheduled leave at the time, came in anyway.

On this occasion, adverse impacts were mercifully slight. Starlink’s satellite constellation reported degraded service. In the U.S. and Canada, where agriculture relies on precise satellite positioning, some large farming operations were forced to pause work at the height of the planting season.

It could have been worse. But the event reignited concerns that space weather could precipitate a “black swan” event — a seemingly improbable, unexpected catastrophe, with severe ramifications. Space weather was first added to the U.K. National Risk Register in 2012. In 2023, its threat level was increased from level 3 (moderate) to level 4 (significant), which includes floods and emergent infectious diseases.

This is why the work at MOSWOC and its sister observatories is so crucial. It is also why governments and academics are deploying more resources to understand solar storms and to anticipate how a really big one might play out. The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability. The more umbilical our relationship to technology becomes — the more our lives and livelihoods become governed by algorithms and automation — the greater the risk of disaster.

II

For those tasked with observing and understanding the sun, apprehending it as a threat requires an inversion of some perennial assumptions. At a basic level, the sun exists as a largely beneficent force. Bestowing light and heat, it is the determinant of our “Goldilocks zone,” the sliver of cosmic conditions that render our planet habitable. Were it larger or smaller, closer to Earth or farther away, life as we know it would not exist.

In ancient cosmologies, the sun was a first-rank divinity — carried on the falcon-shaped head of the Egyptian god Ra or dragged across the sky by Apollo’s celestial chariot. For the Aztecs of Mesoamerica, the sun god Huitzilopochtli was a capricious overlord who demanded daily oblation. Most of the ritual human sacrifices for which the culture has become infamous were carried out in obeisance to the great orb, whose whims dictated the harvests and hence the fate of civilization.

It was Galileo Galilei who pioneered telescopic astronomy: By projecting the sun onto a flat pane, he found that he could transpose its blinding incandescence into an observable form. The German British astronomer William Herschel spent 40 years recording the evolution and passage of sunspots from 1779 to 1818, an admirable empirical endeavor only faintly undermined by his conjecture that each one comprised an “opening in the sun’s luminous atmosphere which is likely inhabited.” A couple of decades later, the German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe discovered the existence of the solar cycle, the approximately 11-year period in which the sun transitions between the solar minimum, when it exhibits its lowest level of activity, to the solar maximum and back again. This was later backdated, based on the earliest sequential records, to 1755: Solar Cycle 1.

Then, on Sept. 1, 1859, Victorian brewery owner and amateur sun-watcher Richard Carrington found himself observing a sunspot from his garden in Surrey when he saw a sudden burst of light.

• • •

In the Met Office library, archivist Catherine Ross waited for me with a fabric-bound compilation of “Philosophical Transactions,” the academic journal of the Royal Society. On page 423 was a report first published in 1861 describing a strange celestial event two years earlier, accompanied by a sketch of some sunspots drafted by a precise hand.

This is what Carrington had been doing on that early fall morning in 1859. After cranking open the domed roof of his personal observatory, he projected an image of the sun from the viewfinder of his brass telescope onto a pane of glass painted with distemper and then set about engaging in what had become an obsessive undertaking: tracking and drawing the progress of sunspots across the solar surface.

At 11:18 a.m. came the flash. “Two patches of intensely bright light broke out,” he later recalled. “My first impression was that by some chance a ray of light had penetrated a hole in the screen attached to the object-glass. … [T]he brilliancy was fully equal to that of direct sun-light.”

Carrington later confessed to being “somewhat flurried by surprise.” But his unusual observation might have remained an astronomical footnote, dismissed as an equipment fault or hallucination, had it not been for the mass of solar material soon barrelling toward him, oblivious, at 5 million miles per hour. 

By the time it reached Earth, around 18 hours later, dawn was breaking over Carrington’s home. In America, it was still the dead of night.

The ensuing auroras were, to this day, among the most expansive ever recorded. Sightings of the Northern Lights were reported as far south as El Salvador, at just 13 degrees north of the Equator. Encroaching from the opposite pole, the Southern Lights flickered over Santiago.

Across the Western Hemisphere, local newspapers chronicled all manner of strange nocturnal happenings — of people awakening as they mistook the lights for sunrise and cocks crowing to greet a false dawn.

Eyewitnesses described seeing the heavens illuminated by “a livid red flame,” a radiance “so bright that one could easily read common print,” the sky cascading with “showers of nebulous matter like star-dust.” On America’s Atlantic coast, the Charleston Mercury reported: “No one could look at [the ocean] without thinking of the passage in the Bible which says, ‘the sea was turned to blood.’ The shells on the beach, reflecting light, resembled coals of fire.” So intense and haunting were the lights that several people admitted thinking it was the end of the world.

It was also one of the first times a solar event disrupted human technology. As the sky blazed overhead, telegraph operators in America and elsewhere found that Morse code messages sent across electrical wires failed to transmit. In many cases, their machines fizzed and spat fire or short-circuited completely. American Telegraph Company employees in Boston, having disconnected their malfunctioning apparatus, found that they could communicate with Portland, Maine, 100 miles north, using only the auroral current. Unseen, something alien had suffused the telegraph wires with an electrical charge.

What Carrington had witnessed would come to be known as a “white-light flare,” a prelude to a massive CME. As he watched, the points of light became “enfeebled” and then vanished. His famous sketch of the start and end points of the erupting sunspot suggested that, over the course of the eruption, it had migrated 35,000 miles across the photosphere.

In the final pages of the Royal Society report is a compilation of graphs showing the peaks and troughs of activity recorded by rudimentary magnetometers. Connecting these magnetic jolts to Carrington’s observation, the report surmised: “We have grounds for supposing this primary disturbing force to reside in our luminary.”

Retrospective analysis of the CME from the “Carrington Event,” as it would come to be known, estimated that it released energy equivalent to 10 billion megatons of TNT. It would go down in history as the benchmark by which future space weather would be measured, and a potential harbinger: If a Carrington-class solar storm were to strike Earth in the modern age, what then?

Not long after the flare, coronographs show a colossal CME expanding at the edge of the sun. The on-duty forecaster’s first question is: What’s the trajectory? This one manifests as an advancing halo, like a giant smoke ring radiating outward, indicating that this coronal mass ejection is heading straight for Earth.

The forecasters feed the data into a computer model, which projects that the cloud contains a billion tons of plasma. On the geomagnetic storm scale, anything G3 and above warrants an alert. This one is a G5+, a once-in-a-century event. It’s the biggest Earth-directed CME in living memory.

The managing forecaster issues a “geomagnetic storm watch” alert that provides an estimate of the CME’s arrival and its projected repercussions. Observatory heads are notified; meetings are hastily convened with government emergency planners.

Amid all this activity, there is a waiting game. The event’s true magnitude won’t be known until it is right at the doorstep.

III

For decades afterward, no one was entirely sure what had caused all those geomagnetic jolts in September 1859. Looking at the sun on MOSWOC’s monitors, one thing that becomes clear is its astonishing dynamism. Often erroneously described as a hot ball of gas, the sun is in fact composed of plasma, the fourth state of matter, which is created when a gas is heated to the point where some of its electrons break free from their atoms.

Weighing around two octillion (2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) tons, the sun measures 865,000 miles from pole to pole and has a volume equivalent to 1.3 million Earths. Temperatures within its core are believed to reach 28 million degrees Fahrenheit; its expansive energy is held in check by the countervailing force of gravity.

Decades of spectroscopy reveal that this gargantuan furnace contains all manner of trace elements — oxygen, magnesium, silicon, sulfur — but 98% of its mass is composed of the two simplest elements in the universe: hydrogen and helium. The fundamental physical reaction that generates the sun’s energy occurs when two atoms of hydrogen, each with one proton, fuse together to produce one atom of helium with two protons. The heat created by this fusion strips electrons from atoms in the main body of the sun, and this convective motion combines with the sun’s rotation to produce a powerful and complex electromagnetic field. This is the process that characterizes a “main-sequence star.”

Born from a cloud of interstellar gas around 4.6 billion years ago, our sun is now believed to be around halfway through its lifespan. In 5.5 billion years, the hydrogen in its core will be all but exhausted and it will push against the confines of its gravitational field, becoming a red giant that engulfs Mercury and Venus before collapsing into a white dwarf, a stellar corpse so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh as much as a bull elephant. The Earth, if it survives this cataclysm intact, will be cast adrift into the void, no longer held in the sun’s orbit by its gravitational pull, no longer warmed and energized by its glow, a dead husk spinning in the darkness.

But back to more immediate concerns. At the start of a new solar cycle, the complex dynamics of the sun’s magnetic field cause its poles to switch places. During the solar minimum, the field can be thought of as a series of taut lines running north to south.

“You start off with a dipole not unlike the one you have on a solid celestial body like the Earth,” said Ryan French, speaking to me on a video call from his home in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a solar physicist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. This equilibrium is corrupted by the sun’s differential rotation. In contrast to the Earth’s consistent 24-hour rotation, the fluidity of all that roiling plasma causes the sun to spin faster at its equator, where it takes around 25 days to complete a full rotation. At the poles, the same rotation takes around 36 days. To illustrate what happens as a result, French held up an iPhone charging cable that he had lying on his desk. Gripping it taut between two fists, he then gradually moved his hands together, while simultaneously rotating each fist in opposite directions. The cable began to sag and concertina, then folded in on itself, forming a loop.

Similarly, over the course of a solar cycle, the lines of the sun’s magnetic field bunch, crisscross and tangle, particularly around the mid-latitudes. The intensity of the magnetism at these junctions — over 1,000 times more powerful than the sun’s general field — prevents the convection of plasma from the core to the photosphere, resulting in darker regions: sunspots. Burning around 3,600 degrees cooler than the average surface temperature of 9,900 degrees, each sunspot is a crucible of magnetic potential energy, a hotbed of space weather.

The largest sunspots, like the one Carrington was scrutinizing in 1859, grow to more than 100,000 miles from edge to edge, over 10 times the Earth’s diameter. As the solar cycle approaches its maximum, the tangling of the magnetic fields accelerates; plasma circulation is impeded until the trapped energy breaches the resistance tamping it down, and bursts free. 

French jerked his hands apart and the looped cord snapped taut. “All the energy that is stored in that magnetic field has got to go somewhere,” he said. “So when the loop snaps, all of the electrons and ions stored within it rush outward in every direction. Some of them collide with the sun’s lower atmosphere. The rest accelerate out into the solar system.”

Solar flares are the initial pop. Moving at or close to the speed of light, the radiation and particles they release can traverse the 93 million miles between the sun and Earth in a matter of minutes. By the time a flare registers on orbiting sensors, then, it has already arrived.

CMEs are a different beast. Often presaged by a flare, they travel more slowly, taking between 15 hours and five days to reach Earth. The material they carry is also heavier, more capable of penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere, and significantly more consequential. French differentiated between the two using a commonly cited metaphor. “You can think of it like a medieval cannon,” he said. A solar flare is the flash of ignited powder. The CME is the cannonball.

Nineteen and a half hours after the giant CME was observed exploding off the sun’s photosphere, its leading edge has just reached Lagrange-1, a point a million miles from Earth on a straight line to the sun.

Here, a flotilla of observation modules gauges the cloud’s polarity and hence its “geoeffectiveness,” or disruptive capacity. If its magnetic orientation matches Earth’s, even the most colossal CME will follow the Earth’s dipole around the planet, like water running over a boulder in a stream. But if its magnetic orientation is off-kilter or inverted, the particles will trigger “magnetic reconnection” with molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, releasing a burst of energy. So it is with our hypothetical storm.

At the observatories, forecasters put out a “sudden impulse warning.” Mitigation strategies, long in the planning, now kick into gear. The CME will infiltrate the ionosphere in approximately 20 minutes.

IV

The decades following the Carrington Event were marked by other uncanny occurrences. In 1921, as another spectacular auroral display tripped across the night skies of the eastern United States, railway switching systems in Manhattan went haywire and sparks flew from overhead telegraph wires, igniting fires across New York state. In 1967, at the height of the Cold War, a series of powerful flares caused part of the U.S. Air Force Ballistic Missile Early Warning System to jam, almost provoking the military to scramble nuclear-equipped aircraft in response to a presumed Soviet attack. In 1989, a large CME took out the power grid across Quebec, leaving 6 million people without electricity for nine hours. In July 2012, sun monitors at the Met Office’s embryonic space-weather desk watched anxiously as a massive geomagnetic storm, comparable in size to the Carrington Event, tore through the orbital path that Earth had vacated just a few days earlier.

By the time of that near miss, the potentially cataclysmic implications of extreme space weather had become a subject of intensive research and conjecture. In 2008, America’s National Academy of Sciences held a workshop to study “the effects of ‘a space weather Katrina,’ a rare but, according to the historical record, not inconceivable eventuality.” The subsequent report noted that while the devastating 2005 hurricane cost an estimated $125 billion, the damage wrought by a centennial solar storm could potentially run into the trillions.

Mark Gibbs, a 38-year veteran of the Met Office who has headed MOSWOC since its inception in 2012, admitted that his first reaction upon being approached to lead the U.K.’s new space-weather desk was to ask: “What is space weather?” But he quickly understood the importance of the new assignment. The London Olympics were just around the corner, Gibbs recalled, “and you could just imagine a big space event taking out satellite communications just as the 100-meter final was going on.” Today, he doesn’t do the forecasting legwork, but if a Carrington-class storm ever happened, he would be the one in the hot seat.

Despite his years of experience, he conceded that there is still much that forecasters don’t know about how such a centennial event might transpire. Smaller pulses like the geomagnetic storm last May that Waite and Hammond at MOSWOC characterized as a “once-in-20-year event” have served as salutary trial runs. “It was big enough to test all our processes,” Gibbs said. “We were in constant contact with government, we were briefing stakeholders. It meant that we could test everything without the place being on fire.”

One man thinking about what might happen the day the fire arrives is Jim Wild. A professor of space physics at England’s University of Lancaster and a member of the Space Environment Impacts Expert Group, he’s spent the last 15 years drawing up “reasonable worst-case scenarios” that form the basis of government mitigation and resilience strategies. His research is mainly concerned with what is arguably a solar storm’s most far-reaching hazard: the potential of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) to cripple terrestrial electrical networks.

When an Earth-directed CME careens into the magnetosphere, additional amperage is injected into the complex network of electrical currents encircling the planet. The extent of a particular region’s vulnerability to GICs depends on its underlying geological profile. “The intensity of the induced electric field is inversely proportional to the conductivity of the ground,” Wild told me. In areas sitting on top of resistive basement rock, “the excess current will inevitably find its way into long pieces of electrically conducting infrastructure — lengths of metal that are bonded to the Earth.” Once inside such networks, the surplus electricity can overload the system, causing malfunctions and, in extreme cases, rendering them inoperable. This is how global telegraph networks were overwhelmed in 1859.

Recently, Wild and other researchers found that GICs could trigger “wrong-side” failures in railway signalling, erroneously flipping trackside signals from red to green. But he’s more worried about the power grid — specifically the vulnerability of extra-high voltage (EHV) transformers. 

EHVs are huge structures, sometimes four stories high, that are responsible for ratcheting voltage up for long-term transmission and down for domestic use, depending on need. When a GIC infiltrates an EHV transformer, the collision between the auroral charge’s direct current (DC) and the alternating current (AC) of our national power grid generates voltage variations and excessive levels of internal heating that can trip out transformers or even destroy them completely. This process, operating in a chain reaction as the rogue current saturates one part of the network and then another, can culminate in “voltage collapse” — a metastasizing power cut or complete system shutdown. Blackout.

Recovering from serious damage to EHV transformers is an agonizing process in the best of times. Each one is custom-made, constructed by only a handful of specialist manufacturers, and the supply chain is grindingly slow. A new transformer can take anywhere from several months to two years to build and install. They are so large that moving them into position requires whole highways to be shut down.

In 2016, the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies published the “Helios Solar Storm” study, a stress test based on a scenario in which a Carrington-class storm sparked a U.S.-wide power system collapse. According to the study, such an eventuality would cause a third of America’s transformers to go offline, with 3% incurring major damage, plunging almost half the national population into darkness. In the most extreme scenario, up to 10 million people would be stranded without power for 300 days.

Wild and many of his counterparts at what he characterizes as “the ground end of things” remain hopeful that it will never come to that. Experts have spent much of the last two decades coordinating with government and private sector contingency planners on emergency mitigations.

But making predictions and planning suitable responses is becoming more complicated with newer, runaway technologies, especially those “embedded ubiquitously across multiple systems,” Wild explained. Among the hardest to quantify is the risk to satellite services, which operate outside the protection of the Earth’s atmosphere. Our global satellite constellation is diffuse and growing fast, spread across multifarious government and private operators, with minimal central oversight or control. Radiation from solar flares can invade and corrupt onboard circuitry, while the injection of space-borne matter from CMEs densifies the atmosphere, causing satellites to veer off course or even bump entirely out of orbit. In February 2022, when a flotilla of new Starlink satellites was hit by a G2 storm, at least 40 of the 49 suffered catastrophic failure. Last May’s solar storm temporarily doubled the rate at which the NASA Hubble Telescope descended Earthward, or its orbital decay, from 130 to 260 feet per day.  

One area of particular vulnerability is the Global Positioning System (GPS). Mostly confined to high Earth orbit, these satellites are less susceptible to atmospheric drag. However, the accuracy of their measurements and transmissions is still predicated on the atmosphere retaining a consistent chemical and electrical character. As CME material adulterates that barrier, it can distort the wavelength of signals traveling between satellites and the ground, an effect known as “scintillation.” This inevitably results in location errors and “loss of lock,” or signal, corrupting GPS accuracy by tens or perhaps hundreds of feet.

Today, GPS reaches into every corner of communications, including navigation, logistics, utilities, travel and commerce. High-tech farms use it to plant and harvest; aviation authorities depend on it to coordinate air traffic. At ports around the world, autonomous cranes use GPS positioning to load containers onto ships. Oil and gas exploration utilizes the same triangulations to calibrate drilling operations. Financial trades, once recorded manually on paper certificates, now rely on timing signals transmitted from atomic clocks within GPS satellites, which are accurate to within a billionth of a second. Media broadcasts, cellphone networks and a multitude of other sectors similarly depend on the transmission and recombination of timestamped digital data. A solar storm on a scale sufficient to frazzle satellite electronics and scintillate their signals could cause all of these vital functions to falter.

A 2021 report from the U.S. National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee on the hazards of our growing societal reliance on GPS satellites concluded that “their vulnerabilities pose a near-existential threat.” In the coming years, with the anticipated growth of AI and autonomous vehicles, that dependence is only expected to grow.

At the bow-wave of disaster, there is beauty. As the electrified nebula slams into atmospheric atoms, its south-oriented polarity triggers magnetic reconnection. On the dayside of the Earth, few people will have a clue that anything unusual is happening. But on the nightside, the sky erupts into shimmering cirri of light: auroras. 

Auroral greens, blues and purples typically appear when solar particles interact with oxygen and nitrogen molecules at altitudes of between 60 and 150 miles. However, the intensity of the barrage on this occasion excites oxygen at much higher altitudes, generating light at lower frequencies, which manifests to the human eye as an apocalyptic red.

Meanwhile, GICs are rampant everywhere above the 40th parallel, and contingency planners face screens that are flashing with alerts. Power-grid operators hasten to reroute electricity away from saturated parts of the system. But there’s not enough time for all the necessary mitigations to be implemented.

Within seconds, extra-high voltage transformers in power plants and substations in multiple geographical regions are rattling and groaning under the strain. Power cuts soon blanket entire conurbations.

V

So just how bad could a Carrington-class storm be? While the protocols have been in gestation for some time, the answer remains a subject of dispute, inviting prognostications ranging from the blasé to the apocalyptic.

Speaking to a congressional hearing in 2014, Peter Vincent Pry, then the director of the Electromagnetic Pulse Taskforce, contended that a prolonged power grid outage could kill 90% of Americans through starvation, disease and other consequences of rapid societal collapse. Pry, who died in 2022, wasn’t particularly known for his sangfroid; his corpus of work includes books titled “Electric Armageddon,” “Blackout Wars” and “Apocalypse Unknown.” 

But even more sober experts have conceded that the threat posed by space weather is primarily due to its totalizing potential — its capacity to induce cascading failures in multiple social and economic functions. A 2019 FEMA report presented two possible catastrophes that could affect the entire U.S. — a pandemic and a solar storm. In the event of a truly massive storm affecting multiple nations all at once, Gibbs told me, “The concept of mutual aid goes out the door.”

The Helios stress-test predicted worst-case economic losses of $2.7 trillion in the U.S. alone, around 8% of its national GDP, and insurance industry losses of $333.7 billion. But even the most rigorous worst-case scenarios remain poorly constrained. “We can model it, estimate the impact, and try to prepare,” Wild said. “But we can’t predict the implications of a solar storm on this scale with total surety because we’ve never experienced one.”

As we enter what some have dubbed “the golden age of heliophysics,” physicists and forecasters are seeking new data and building new projections. Last Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a 10-foot-long module bristling with sensors and encased in 4.5 inches of carbon-composite shielding, passed within 3.8 million miles of the photosphere, the deepest incursion of any human spacecraft into the sun’s outer atmosphere. Having picked up speed by sling-shotting around Venus, it was zipping along at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to circle the Earth’s equator in a little over three minutes. Parker is just one component of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, a growing fleet of spacecraft tasked with furthering our understanding of solar dynamics.

Earlier this month, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its “Solar Orbiter” had sent back the first pictures ever taken of the sun’s southern pole. In 2031, ESA will launch its “Vigil” observation platform to Lagrange-5, a cosmic coordinate equidistant from the sun and Earth. Once in position, it will transmit a “side-on” image of the sun, enabling observatories to see solar activity up to five days ahead of visuals generated from Lagrange-1.

Yet for all the brainpower and innovation deployed in its direction, the true extent of the energy expelled by the sun is rife with unknowns. Heliophysicists remain stumped by the “coronal problem,” where regions of the corona blaze at temperatures of up to 1.8 million degrees — orders of magnitude hotter than the surface itself. Nor can they be sure that the centennial event for which they are preparing will be Carrington-sized, or something bigger.

Over the following days, human society enters unknown territory. A power-grid failure on this scale, known as a “black sky” event, disrupts or incapacitates every utility that depends on electricity and computer technology. In the modern age, that means virtually everything.

Failures cascade through the infrastructure. Lights go out, telecommunications crash, supply chains grind to a halt. Shops close as card transactions cease to function; food spoils from a lack of refrigeration. People in affected areas are advised to shelter in place. Not that they have much choice. Gas pumps have stopped working, all air traffic is grounded and trains are at a standstill. If the blackout hits populous areas during a period of extreme high or low temperatures, the collapse of climate control systems poses a grave threat to life at a time when critical hospital equipment is compromised.

For the general public, this has come out of nowhere. The loss of communications leaves governments with limited means to broadcast information to anxious populations. During a societal disruption on this scale, it is all but inevitable that crime will surge, with looting widespread. Conspiracy theories proliferate. Rumors swirl of a malicious foreign attack; fringe millenarian groups declare that we have entered the final rapture.

The sun, the source of all life, has temporarily plunged society back into a pre-technological age.

VI

A couple of years ago, on a quiet stretch of the Drouzet River in the southern French Alps, a team of dendrochronologists extracted samples from a group of partially fossilized stumps of ancient Scotch pines that had spent millennia encased in alluvial sediment.

Within a single tree-ring carbon-dated to 14,300 years ago, they discovered an abrupt spike in the presence of the carbon radionuclide C-14. C-14 is cosmogenic, produced when cosmic rays traveling at close to the speed of light collide with atmospheric nitrogen. Absorbed into the trees’ tissue, researchers explained in a subsequent paper in Philosophical Transactions, its presence provided “a mirror image of solar activity.”

The discovery marked the latest addition to a growing catalogue of “Miyake Events,” named after the cosmic ray physicist Fusa Miyake, who in 2012 first made the connection between tree-ring archives and cosmogenic C-14 levels in a group of Japanese cedars. Miyake, who dated the spike in the cedars to 774, posited that it was evidence of a superflare, a solar expulsion many times larger than the Carrington Event in 1859. The Drouzet River spike was twice as large again.

Raimund Muscheler, a professor of geology at Sweden’s University of Lund who has been working to corroborate tree-ring isotope records with ice core archives, told me that there is no way of knowing whether the flares responsible for the anomalous readings were accompanied by CMEs of commensurate magnitude. Nevertheless, Muscheler fears that the Carrington benchmark may be a wholly inadequate metric of the threat. “Considering the enormous events we can observe in the paleodata, it seems probable that present-day contingency plans don’t go nearly far enough,” he said.

At the time of writing, the latest American Space Weather Implementation Plan, updated last year by the Biden administration, has been removed from the U.S. government’s websites.

The post The Unseen Fury Of Solar Storms appeared first on NOEMA.

Once they reached a point around a mile deep, they planned to augment the borehole with lengths of metal casing. By February, they’d stopper its narrow surface aperture with a configuration of valves connected to an insulated pipe, the latest strand in a spaghetti of carbonized steel tubes that snaked for miles through forests and over hill passes toward a turbine hall at Valle Secolo.

To my eye, the whole operation looked like a drilling rig for oil or gas. Across the horizon, flanking the junction points where the pipes converged, I could see voluminous chimneys, structures that seemed emblematic of our toxic industrial age. Yet the gas spilling from their gaping mouths was a mostly harmless vapor. Cannata and his team weren’t drilling for hydrocarbons. They were drilling for steam. “You can use the same tools,” said Cannata, who’d started his career in the oil and gas industry in India and Peru before switching to geothermal at Enel, Italy’s largest energy company. “But the process, and the result, is totally different.”

Christened Lamarello-1, this new well had a long local ancestry. One hundred and twenty years ago, on a pediment in the town square of nearby Larderello, a local aristocrat and entrepreneur by the name of Prince Piero Ginori Conti had channeled steam from a fumarole into a reciprocating steam engine, producing just enough power to heat the filaments of five incandescent lightbulbs.

For centuries before, people in the Valle del Diavolo, or “Devil’s Valley,” had utilized the region’s bubbling waters and mineral deposits, surface manifestations of a vast reservoir of hot water deep underground. In bygone mythologies, the simmering pools and sulfurous belches became the fire and brimstone of lands of the dead. The ancient Etruscans used the warm water to heat thermal baths; a journey here in the early 14th century is thought to have inspired Dante Alighieri to write “Inferno.” Later, early industrialists harvested boron to make boric acid, a common ingredient in glass and ceramics. But Conti’s five lightbulbs represented something new. Nine years later, he oversaw the opening of the world’s first geothermal energy plant. A century on, geothermal operations here lattice an area of over 100 square miles. Once online, Lamarello-1 will become one of around 500 wells feeding steam to 34 power plants scattered about the valleys. Collectively, these cavernous turbine halls have an installed capacity of 916 megawatts and provide a third of Tuscany’s electricity.

But no less apparent, as I explored the time-honored Larderello complex, was how much the promise of Conti’s five lightbulbs had failed to fully materialize. For decades, this region of Italy was the only geothermal field in existence. Even today it is the only one of its scale in the European Union. 

While other clean energy sources like solar and wind have expanded rapidly over recent years, geothermal has become an appendix and an afterthought, the renewable that got left behind. So why, then, do its most determined advocates still insist that the furnace beneath our feet could yet power the world?

For all the effort of generations of geologists, it’s remarkable how little we know about the planet’s internal dynamics. The familiar standard depiction of the inner Earth — the globe with a wedge or hemisphere cut out to reveal the four descending layers of crust, mantle, outer core and inner core — conceals a world of uncertainty.

Most of what we claim to understand about this mysterious realm is inferred from laboratory simulations and seismic reflection surveys — observations that measure the speed and amplitude of seismic waves traveling through the Earth’s interior to different points on the surface. The consensus holds that the mantle is a semisolid mass of silicate rock and that the inner core is a giant ball of iron and nickel some 1,500 miles in diameter. But this is ultimately supposition. Scientists have long dreamed of reaching the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, the theoretical boundary between the crust and the roiling mantle that could reveal much about our planet’s hidden workings, but no hole has been drilled deep enough to retrieve a sample. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, that ignorance, infiltrating the underground has long been synonymous with discovery and truth-seeking. The modern world was forged with the fossil fuels we greedily extracted from subterranean seams and reservoirs, even as their combustion on the surface now imperils our future. Down below, enlightenment and destruction are intertwined. Treasure, like death, is buried.

One characteristic of the Earth’s interior that we do know with near certainty is that the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Some of this heat is primordial, a remnant of the Earth’s incendiary creation. But most of it is radiogenic. The inner Earth is a crucible where unstable isotopes fizz in a state of inexorable radioactive breakdown. 

Humanity’s excavations to date, shallow as they are, suggest that crustal heat increases by an average of approximately 100 degrees Fahrenheit for each vertical mile. Way deeper, in the hottest parts of the core, temperatures are believed to burn at nearly 11,000 degrees — as hot as the surface of the sun. We live, in other words, on the external casing of a giant, functionally inexhaustible battery. Geothermal experts have claimed that tapping just 0.1% of the heat stored within the Earth would satisfy global energy needs for the next two million years.

The overwhelming majority of geothermal plants in operation today are in areas of pronounced tectonic activity, where superheated water can get trapped close to the Earth’s surface, producing fumaroles, geysers and hot springs. Iceland, perched above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, generates 30% of its electricity from these underground hydrothermal reservoirs. America’s first geothermal power complex, the Geysers in Sonoma County, has been generating electricity for Northern California since 1960 and remains the most productive plant of its kind in the world.

Globally, however, the total capacity of such installations is comparatively tiny. The current maximum output, generated by 198 geothermal fields in 32 countries, stands at 16.3 gigawatts, less than 0.2% of total electricity capacity and 1% of photovoltaic solar. 

Various governments and international organizations are eager to ramp up geothermal production, and it remains a component of many decarbonization roadmaps, not least owing to its potential as a baseload “gap-filler” for more fickle renewable energy sources. In 2017, at a summit organized by the Global Geothermal Alliance, representatives from 42 national governments signed the Florence Declaration, committing to increase geothermal power capacity by 500% by 2030. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy declared its intention to “unlock” affordable geothermal energy for over 65 million American homes by 2035 as part of its Energy Earthshots program.

However, these political gestures have yet to translate into truly consequential capital investment and expansion. The overhaul of America’s energy policy contained within the government’s landmark infrastructure bill of 2021 earmarked $8.6 billion for carbon capture and storage, $3 billion for battery recycling. Geothermal research and extraction was allocated $84 million.

The inertia comes back to the geographical scarcity of extraction points at shallow depths and is exacerbated by issues of upfront cost and inefficiency that have dogged production from its earliest days. “It’s not uncommon for today’s plants to operate at between 7 and 10% efficiency,” said Terra Rogers, a geothermal energy expert at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). “It’s pitiful.”

In order to really kickstart the geothermal revolution, the sector needs a bolder strategy, one that centers on solving a stubborn engineering puzzle: how to get deeper underground.

Back in the 1970s, geological surveys beneath the Valle del Diavolo identified an anomaly, a variation in the property of the rocks that impeded seismic waves. “Nobody knows what causes it,” Geoffrey Giudetti, Enel’s head of geothermal resource evaluation, told me. “We just knew it was a huge spot in the basement where the isotherms start to bunch.” Isotherms are contour lines for temperature; the fact that they bunched at the anomaly, which geophysicists labeled the “K-horizon,” most likely signaled a magmatic intrusion. Whatever the cause, what really mattered was that this part of the crust promised very high temperatures at potentially accessible depths. 

In 2017, Enel engineers working near the village of Lago began extending an existing well, dubbed Venelle-2, down toward the anomaly. The goal was to probe the exigencies and challenges of drilling into rock far deeper and hotter than those routinely tapped in the area. The operation stress-tested novel materials and technologies, including a “Full Stinger” polycrystalline diamond compact drill head specially designed to cope with extreme subterranean conditions. Within a year, the drill hit a depth of over 9,500 feet. The spiraling heat precluded further progress, but the researchers had already obtained what they were after. When they lowered a bespoke Kuster thermometer, the reading maxed out its temperature gauge: almost 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Further testing on crystal fragments, suspended within a capsule made of gold and lowered to the well bottom, yielded a final figure of 960 degrees, the highest subterranean temperature ever recorded in the European crust. The scientists at Larderello had taken a small stride toward a tantalizing new frontier in geothermal power production. Industry insiders call it “superdeep” or “superhot rock geothermal.” Giudetti captured its implications with a more expansive label. He called it “geothermal everywhere.”

This form of power could represent an altogether transformative advancement in geothermal — indeed, in the generation of electricity in general. It starts with supercritical water. “Supercriticality” describes the atmospheric threshold beyond which an element or molecular compound enters a fourth state beyond solid, liquid and gas. In the case of water, that threshold is at just over 700 degrees and 221 bars of pressure. Supercritical water has some extraordinary physiochemical properties, but the key factor for those working at the frontier of geothermal power is its volumetric enthalpy: its capacity to carry heat.

In practical terms, this means that sinking a geothermal well into temperatures like those at Venelle-2 could radically upscale geothermal energy output. It would no longer be necessary to depend on subsurface reservoirs of hot water. Instead, cold water could be injected into deep, dry rock where the ambient heat and pressure would bring it up to supercriticality. Then it could be extracted again to drive turbines. The consensus among geothermal experts is that such wells would offer 10 times as much enthalpy per cubic meter as current geothermal. A researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico concluded in a 2019 study that the differential could be double that.

Rogers, who spearheads the CATF’s superhot rock geothermal research and advocacy, told me that this untapped resource could provide energy in volumes “far beyond what we could conceivably consume at the surface.” Just as importantly, its efficiency relative to extant geothermal systems could overcome the geographical and economic constraints that have thus far stymied expansion and technological standardization. “At the very center of our bullseye is being able to extract energy from dry rock conditions, from formations that are adequately hot or energy dense to allow the lowest possible cost for the electron,” she said.

Getting there presents a formidable technical challenge. Venelle-2 is one of around two dozen test wells around the world that have drilled down to superhot rock conditions. Others in Japan, Iceland, New Zealand and Mexico are all at relatively shallow depths, usually two to five miles deep. Accessing the necessary temperatures more widely would sometimes require drilling much deeper, along with all manner of contingent innovations. Do that, Rogers told me, and “the potential is out of this world.”

As with existing geothermal production, the flow rate would be constant, with close to zero carbon emissions at the point of generation and without the intermittency of wind and solar. The surface footprint would be comparatively small: no open-cast mines, land-intensive energy storage or endless square miles of solar panels. It wouldn’t require the ecologically destructive terraforming of hydroelectric dam construction and would carry none of nuclear energy’s radioactive risk. Geographically agnostic, it could be made available almost anywhere on the globe, offering the prospect of universal energy security and negating the cost volatility that affects fossil-fuel markets. In theory, it is equitable, endlessly scalable, disaster-resilient. And it is the logical successor to oil and gas, leveraging the core competencies — subterranean prospecting, deep-drilling and extraction — of the very sector that greener alternatives urgently need to supplant.

In an age when energy policy is so often hostage to fierce partisanship, there is hope that geothermal can be politically agnostic, too — the one clean energy solution that could satisfy climate change campaigners and the “drill baby drill” lobby alike. “Environmentalists and drillers, dogs and cats, right and left: We all get what we want,” said the technologist and climate activist Jamie C. Beard in a TED talk in August 2021. “Clean energy where we need it, climate change solved, energy poverty solved, and drillers keep drilling. If we build the right collaborations here and unite behind a shared vision, we solve energy in the next 30 years.”

The prospective rewards are hard to overstate. A landmark report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), published last month, claimed that next-generation geothermal has “the technical potential to meet global electricity and heat demand many times over.” The analysis estimated that the national geothermal resource for America alone, based on an average well depth of just over 3 miles, is in the region of 7 terawatts, seven times the country’s current total energy capacity for all other electricity sources combined. CATF projects that a fully matured global superhot rock industry could produce electricity at around $25-30 per megawatt-hour, below the U.S. market average. In the context of the climate crisis, it seems on paper to be a panacea — hellfire recast as salvation. But the question remains: how to reach it?

Although industrial drilling remains something of a dark art, the principles are the same as with primitive rotary tools: A sharp-tipped instrument applied to a solid mass and rotated will create downward pressure, boring a hole.

On a mechanical deep-drilling rig, excavation is carried out by a heavy-duty bit: typically a “tricone” assembly, with three inward-canted rotating cones, each set with teeth forged from tungsten carbide. A motor at the surface keeps the whole apparatus spinning at around 50 rpm. As the drill’s weight and fluting guide it downward, a constant flow of drilling fluid, or “mud” in industry shorthand, is pumped through apertures to cool and lubricate the cutting face and to carry pulverized material, or “cuttings,” back to the surface for disposal. This technique has achieved some remarkable feats of engineering. Progress on a modern-day oil or gas well can approach 200 feet per hour. The world’s longest oil well, in the UAE’s Upper Zakum oilfield, runs 50,000 feet beneath an artificial island off the coast of Abu Dhabi.

The record for the deepest borehole — a “true vertical” hole drilled perpendicular to the Earth’s surface — belongs to Russia, though this one was excavated not in pursuit of hydrocarbons, but in the name of scientific idealism and Cold War competition. In 1970, a team of Soviet scientists and engineers broke ground on what would come to be known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Located a hundred miles west of Murmansk in a tract of bleak tundra close to the Norwegian border, the site was selected for its position atop the Baltic Shield, a great slab of Precambrian metamorphic rock, where engineers anticipated the stable geology would suppress subterranean temperatures.

At the center of a utilitarian compound of laboratories and barracks, they erected a nearly 250-foot-high derrick called the Uralmash-15000, a specially designed drilling platform weighing 15,000 tons. Around 700 personnel worked in shifts to keep the machine running day and night. Over the course of two decades, they extracted some 10,000 cylindrical cores. Analysis of these rock samples revealed the presence of mineralized water deeper than had ever been thought possible and fossilized plankton up to four miles down that carbon-dating identified as Paleoproterozoic — remnants of the earliest life on Earth. The Scottish geophysicist David Smythe, who visited in 1992 in the wake of perestroika, described the project as “the geological equivalent of going to the moon.”

But it was also a lesson in the difficulties of digging very deep holes. Three miles down the substrate began to behave in unexpected ways. The rock became more permeable and porous but also more malleable, as if the drill was moving through plastic. The drilling angle had to be adjusted several times in order to stay on a true vertical line. The resulting pattern of aborted shafts splayed like the root system of a tree. As the rig crunched through layers of plutonic bedrock, the heat rose in increments far greater than the project’s scientists had anticipated. Downhole equipment began to warp in temperatures nudging 400 degrees; drill bits splintered on progressively harder rock. Pressure toward the bottom reached 150 megapascals, greater than that found in the deepest oceanic trenches. 

In 1994, they halted drilling due to a lack of funds, never progressing past 40,230 feet. The facility was officially mothballed in 2007 and abandoned to the mercy of Siberian winters, reemerging now and again as a conduit for claustrophobic schlock-horror, like the recent film “The Superdeep” (2020), where a group of scientists catch an elevator down the hole into a catacomb and are set upon by an array of killer mutants. 

In reality, the hole has a diameter of just nine inches. The only outward sign of its existence today is a small iron cap, held with a dozen rusting bolts, surrounded by the disintegrated scrap of the derrick scaffold. The number “12,226,” the borehole’s depth in meters, is scrawled on its surface, though the shaft below has long since collapsed, inundated by the invisible shifting of the Earth.

For all its extraordinary depth, the Kola borehole crossed just 0.2% of the Earth’s total radius. The very heat that thwarted its progress is precisely the thing that those working at the cutting edge of geothermal innovation hope to exploit.

In a small hangar near Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas, sits a device that could redefine the future of deep drilling. In a cream-colored shipping container at one end of the hangar is a gyrotron, which looks to the untrained eye like a stack of aluminum and copper cylinders fed by a chaotic array of cables, gauges and color-coded pipes. At its base is a diamond window opening into a thin aluminum tube. Known as a “waveguide,” this tube exits the shipping container and enters a second, from which there emanates a loud monotone hum. 

On shelves and pallets around the edge of the room are the remnants of experiments that emerged from that second container: hundreds of square slabs of basalt and granite, each one perforated by a neat vitrified hole.

The underlying technology of the gyrotron has been around for several decades, a vestige of Soviet state-sponsored invention. It is a type of maser, a device that uses an electron gun and electromagnetic field to create an adjustable beam of energy. Unlike a laser, which uses visible light, the gyrotron’s beam utilizes lower-frequency microwave radiation, invisible to the human eye but still capable of generating extraordinary levels of heat. Its primary utility, then and now, is to turn hydrogen isotopes into plasma to assist with research into nuclear fusion. But the gyrotron humming in this Houston lab is being mobilized in pursuit of another elusive energy grail: opening the portal to superdeep geothermal.

The innovation pipeline that resulted in the experiments being conducted in this hangar began in 2008 when Paul Woskov started training a gyrotron beam onto chunks of basalt. A senior research engineer at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Woskov demonstrated that the gyrotron could make short work of the kind of igneous and metamorphic rock you would expect to find in deeper portions of the Earth’s crust.  

Calibrate the microwave beam frequency to the millimeter range, Woskov discovered, and the rocks yielded to it like a ream of paper held over a naked flame. By his calculation, the gyrotron could cut through Tholeiitic basalt, among the most common substances in the Earth’s crust, at a rate of over 65 feet per hour. Sustain that speed and the technology could conceivably blast past the Kola nadir in less than a month. In place of “mud,” the excavated material could be removed by the simultaneous injection of a “purge gas” composed of nitrogen or argon, which binds to the vaporized rock, bringing it back to the surface as a cloud of volcanic ash.

The company founded in 2018 to commercialize Woskov’s technology is Quaise Energy. It’s one of several enterprises working in the field of superdeep geothermal R&D, though its proposition is among the most audacious: to penetrate the Earth’s crust to over 12 miles. At such depths, Quaise contends that it should be possible to harvest superhot geothermal in more than 90% of terrestrial locations around the globe. “It’s crazy, but it’s not undoable,” Henry Phan, the company’s vice president of engineering, told me. “It’s not outside the realm of physics.”

The next big task, according to Quaise co-founder and CEO Carlos Araque, is to test whether the efficacy Woskov confirmed over years of benchtop experiments holds true in the field. Armed with $95 million in funding from investors, including some gold-chip fossil fuel and drilling companies, Araque’s more long-term ambition is to “demonstrate that we can achieve power and economic parity with oil and gas.” But first he needs to make the numbers balance. “There’s two metrics that matter,” Araque told me. “One is the rate of penetration, the speed at which you’re destroying the rock. And the second metric is nonproductive time.”

The feasibility of expensive deep-drilling missions rests on a bald economic calculus, Araque explained. At shallow depths, a rotary drill is perfectly efficient. The crust’s uppermost layers comprise a veneer of softer sedimentary rock that has accumulated from the deposition of weathered minerals or organic matter that subsequently lithifies over eons. Drilling through rocks like limestone, gypsum, breccia or sandstone exerts less wear and tear on downhole equipment, which in turn means less downtime.

Lower down, the economic noose starts to tighten. Beneath the sedimentary rock lies the basement complex. This is the granite and basalt laid down in the depths of primordial time, crystalline in structure and very dense. Once you progress toward the basement rock, the rotary drill slows to a crawl. The massive abrasion at the cutting face means that even the toughest conventional drill rigs require incessant “trips” back to the surface so their worn-out or damaged bits can be replaced. This procedure becomes more time-consuming and costly the deeper you go; swapping out an exhausted bit from a multi-mile borehole might take seven days. Here, in the deeper strata, Quaise’s technology should come into its own. Not only does the non-contact method negate wear and tear, but it also sustains power output; lab-test data suggests that the gyrotron’s beam will lose only around 50% of its power at a depth of six miles. “To put that into perspective, the attenuation of a rotating drill string at 10 kilometers can be 98%,” Araque said. “You only get 2% of the mechanical power down to the pit.” It’s this cold arithmetic — penetration rate versus downtime, efficiency versus cost — that could make or break efforts to evolve geothermal into a terawatt-level power source.

For Quaise, proving the concept in the field will take place on a disused oil drilling pad in the northern exurbs of Houston. Next month, a gyrotron 100 times as powerful as the one in the laboratory will be pointed at the earth and switched on. By spring, Quaise will have erected another platform in a disused quarry near Marble Falls, a city on the Colorado River northwest of Austin. 

Araque migrated to geothermal after 15 years at the oilfield services giant Schlumberger and was keen to emphasize that he is “building a company out of oil and gas people, capital and infrastructure.” The company’s ultimate ambition is that its drills can be “dropped-in” to existing oil and gas wells, transforming the infrastructure responsible for the majority of anthropogenic carbon emissions into an apparatus for their mitigation. By 2026, Quaise should be positioned to launch its first commercial venture. Within that short timescale, an answer to the question of whether superdeep geothermal can be truly transformative should come into clearer focus.

Quaise Energy is part of a growing ecosystem of pioneering companies that together fall under the umbrella of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), all leveraging novel technologies that aim to revolutionize the sector. These systems have been a subject of conjecture and sporadic R&D for some time. (A seminal MIT report on their potential from 2006 runs to 372 pages.) But drilling a deep hole has only ever been half the battle. The other, arguably trickier challenge is to cultivate circulatory systems where injected water can absorb heat before being brought back up to the surface. In short, harvesting supercritical water from hot rock formations necessitates the creation of reservoirs, or “pore-space.” For years, engineering such complex lattices seemed to be beyond the scope of human ingenuity. But much of the pivotal innovation has emerged in the last decade or so as part of the “shale revolution” in oil and gas, and the development of pioneering techniques like hydraulic fracturing, hydroshearing and directional drilling. These methods, which can be used both to dilate natural fractures and to cultivate new ones, are directly transferable to geothermal extraction.

Such innovations precipitated a surge in the number of superdeep geothermal startups amid renewed optimism that they could succeed. In early 2023, another Houston-based outfit, Fervo, reported that it had successfully stimulated fractures stretching for over 3,000 feet between two 8,000-foot boreholes at its test site in Nevada. Though the temperatures in the reservoir were 375 degrees, far short of supercritical, the achievement was nonetheless widely hailed as a vital step; last October, the company received government permission to build a cutting-edge plant in Beaver County, Utah. Fervo claims that the plant will have an eventual capacity of 2 gigawatts, enough to power 2 million homes. Another startup, Eavor, based in Alberta, Canada, is developing the “Eavor-Loop,” a technology that will use magnetic sensors to drill lateral conduits between injection and extraction wells, a configuration that looks like a giant underground radiator. Its first commercial facility is currently under development in southern Germany.

Even as these novel techniques evolve and dovetail, significant obstacles remain. The success of future EGS systems depends not just on optimizing drilling and fracturing methods, but also on the simultaneous development of myriad supplementary technologies. Casing, cements, alloys, polymers, electronics: Every component of the deep-drilling toolkit needs to be armored, upgraded and re-engineered to cope with the extreme thermal stresses of supercritical conditions.

The industry also has to tackle questions of risk, both real and perceived. Hydraulic fracturing for superdeep geothermal wouldn’t involve the hazardous chemicals or scale of fractures that are involved in shale gas extraction. But the controversy surrounding fracking, born from a legitimate public anxiety that we can never be fully in control of subterranean forces, is not without foundation. In 2017, water injection at an EGS pilot project near Pohang, South Korea, triggered a magnitude 5.5 earthquake. The shock injured 90 people and caused an estimated $52 million worth of damage. One Korean seismologist described the incident as “a wake-up call.”

Subsequent investigations determined that the tremor was caused by the presence of a deep tectonic fault that earlier seismic profiling had failed to identify. In this context, the discovery made by the scientists at Kola — that, under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, subterranean rock becomes more ductile and less brittle — may transpire to be a blessing. Industry experts remain bullish that EGS projects tapping deep regions of the crust, accompanied by rigorous subsurface profiling, will be able to minimize the risk of “induced seismicity.” This science, like so much in the superhot geothermal space, requires further intensive research.

A common sentiment among geothermal experts is that marginal breakthroughs will eventually reach critical mass, luring more expertise — and, crucially, capital investment — away from oil and gas. But some advocates are equally keen to emphasize that the techno-utopian enthusiasm around superdeep geothermal risks obscuring more immediate gains. Beard, the activist whose impassioned TED talk on geothermal’s untapped potential has now been viewed over 2 million times, told me that there is a world of iteration between superhot rock and traditional geothermal production that is being overlooked.

Today, Beard heads up Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit geothermal research unit and think tank. Top of her agenda is persuading stakeholders of the need to start expanding geothermal production even while the more long-term supercritical engineering solutions are still gestating. This would involve going after the “low-hanging fruit”: the great quantities of dry-rock geothermal that could be harvested with current technology.

Beard remained a keen proponent of the superhot projects. But the tendency to get sidetracked by “super-sexy” concepts like vaporizing rock or drilling into magma gave energy policymakers an excuse to kick the can. “Government advisors say: ‘This is a moon shot that we can’t do anything with in the next 10 years. So thank you very much and come back later,’” Beard told me. “But the world needs projects in the ground. We don’t have time for later.”

Rather than wait for superhot rock projects to come online, there is a wealth of shale boom expertise and capital that could be leveraged right away. December’s long-awaited IEA report, which was published in partnership with InnerSpace, forecast that an expanded geothermal industry could meet “15% of global electricity demand growth to 2050.” However, Beard is convinced that this still undersells the potential dividends of an immediate transition. She pointed me to another InnerSpace study, this one written in conjunction with the University of Texas, which calculated what would happen if the whole oil and gas universe — every dime and drilling rig — switched from harvesting hydrocarbons to harvesting heat. The results saw geothermal providing 77% of global electricity demand within 20 years. In this dream-case scenario, Beard said: “The oil and gas industry becomes the geothermal industry, and we’re off to the races.”

The biggest barrier to such a wholesale conversion was less a technological challenge than “a people problem,” Beard said. All of the necessary expertise existed, just in two ecosystems — climate activism and Big Oil — that were mutually allergic. Beard took heart from the fact that some of the necessary crossover between deep-pocketed industries and geothermal startups has already begun. Devon Energy, an Oklahoman oil and gas exploration firm, has already plowed $100 million into Fervo. Some tech giants, keen to sate the burgeoning energy needs of A.I., have also thrown cash in the ring. In August, Meta struck a deal with Sage Geosystems, another Texan geothermal venture, to open a 150-megawatt dry-rock power plant to supply its data centers by 2027. Cranking up this kind of collaboration, Beard argued, offers the only plausible pathway to a geothermal future.

As for the environmental lobby, it would take some convincing. “When I walk into a group of climate donors and say the industry that you hate the most, and that you’ve spent your entire life villainizing and funding to sue, I think that we need to join forces with them and give them a redemption arc … there have been times where I felt like I was going to get booed out of the room,” Beard said.

From the Quaise office in Boston, Araque was clear-eyed about the stakes. “Our civilization uses 25 terawatts, and it doubles every 25 years,” he said. “By 2050 we need 50 terawatts. By 2100 we need 200 terawatts. When you look at those numbers, you realize that diffuse and intermittent renewables don’t have the scale. The externalities are too high.”

That left “only three options on the table”: nuclear fusion, nuclear fission and deep geothermal. Fusion doesn’t yet exist. “Even if it worked tomorrow, the industry would have to grow from scratch. So that’s going to take time,” Araque said. Fission, he argued, works in wealthy nations but is too complex and geopolitically sensitive for universal adoption. By a process of elimination, that left superdeep geothermal as the only resource with the scale, abundance and extant know-how to be universalized. “It’s a solution that lands in the world that actually takes off,” Araque told me. “But you have to break that technological barrier.”

Around midday on a slope above Larderello, I stood behind a red line painted onto the asphalt. A hundred feet away, inside a small chain-link cage on the verge, an oxidized cap marked the presence of a “spent” well, maintained, now, for demonstration purposes. From one of its vents coiled a restive wisp of steam.

An Enel technician donned a pair of yellow earmuffs, walked to a control panel on the other side of the service road, and turned a switch. Suddenly, the small puff of steam metastasized into a ferocious plume that billowed skyward before dissolving into the blue sky. The hiss as it exited the vent was so loud that I had to abandon my plan to take photos and instead thrust fingers in my ears. The volume, I learned afterward, was 140 decibels, like standing next to a long-bodied jet engine at take-off.

In that moment I understood at once the enduring menace and mythos of the underground. Within this burgeoning steam cloud was the merest glimpse of a vast power that simmers beneath us in volumes difficult to corral or comprehend. It was tempting to feel carried away with a wildcatter’s fever. Perhaps, through a combination of ingenuity and will, this resource could become the elixir that cures the energy crisis. If only we could acquire the recipe.

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The lower dot, he guessed, was the greenhorn, Sandy Irvine, a first-timer to the Himalayas who had nonetheless proved himself to be indefatigable on the mountain. The man he was following was the most feted climber of his generation. The leading light of the expedition and already a global celebrity, George Mallory was now edging toward the greatest unclaimed trophy in exploration. Judging by their steady progress and convinced of Mallory’s resolve and prowess, Odell felt sure they would make the summit. The moment was transitory and everlasting. “Then the whole fascinating vision vanished,” Odell would recall later, “enveloped in cloud once more.”

The next person to see Mallory was Conrad Anker, on May 1, 1999. Anker, a preeminent American climber, was part of an expedition assembled to find Mallory and Irvine’s bodies. Following gut instinct, Anker’s furlough in the Death Zone was mere hours old when he spotted “a patch of alabaster … [a] body that wasn’t modern.” He conveyed the news to teammates elsewhere on the mountain over an open radio channel with a prearranged coded message: “I’ve got a thermos of Tang juice and some Snicker bars. Why don’t you guys come down and have a little picnic with me? Over.”

A nametag sewn onto a shirt collar confirmed the corpse’s identity: “G. Mallory.” For 75 years, Mallory’s body had lain on this spot at 26,670 feet. Jet-stream winds had shredded his clothes to rags. Years of harsh sun had bleached his exposed skin a pearlescent white. His right leg was broken at a grotesque angle and the mummified torso was abraded on its right side, evidence of a catastrophic fall. Aspects of his posture — the left leg placed protectively over the shattered right, fingertips dug into the shale as if fighting to stymie a slide — led his discoverers to conclude that he had died not from the fall but from exposure.

Before they buried the body beneath a pile of stones, Anker’s team frisked it for possessions. Decades after the 1924 expedition, Mallory’s eldest daughter Clare had recalled her father’s promise to leave a photograph of his wife, Ruth, on Everest’s summit. Among the items in his pockets were a brass altimeter, a monogrammed handkerchief, a tin of bouillon cubes and a pocketknife. No sign of the photograph could be found.

This month marks 100 years since Mallory’s last dance with the sublime. Debate persists over whether a 1920s climber in hobnail boots, even a phenom like Mallory, could have made it past the Second Step, a technical and challenging 100-foot promontory, to reach the summit.

“It’s the ultimate exploration detective story,” said Mick Conefrey, whose new book “Fallen” (2024), is the latest to dissect the 1924 expedition and its aftermath. “Mallory was the most romantic figure in the early history of mountaineering. The fact that he climbed ‘unplugged,’ without any down clothing, satellite phone or Kevlar oxygen bottle, means that people really want to believe he could have done it.” Definitive proof may never arrive. Irvine may have been carrying a Kodak Vest Pocket camera, the film inside which, were it ever recovered, might solve the question. But his body remains missing, imprisoned somewhere in the Himalayan deep freeze.

Behind the mystery of the first ascent of Earth’s tallest peak lurks another conundrum, one to which Mallory’s own answer still echoes through the decades. Beyond vainglory, what was drawing these men toward the roof of the world? A year or so before his disappearance, while Mallory was on a fundraising lecture tour in America, a persistent New York Times pressman asked him a question he’d been subjected to many times before: Why climb Everest at all? An antic Mallory answered: “Because it’s there.”

It is strange to consider that a laconic retort should become the most famous explanation for the human urge to climb mountains, if not for all exploration. However, wittingly or not, Mallory’s words captured an enigmatic allure which, in the decades after his disappearance, would only grow. The summit pyramid that was once Mallory and Irvine’s alone is today a lodestar for modern thrill-seekers, some of whom pay tens of thousands of dollars to endure the annual traffic jam beneath the Hillary Step, even though cold probability suggests that some of them will never return.

The past and present votaries of Everest are merely the most conspicuous exemplars of a universal longing. For millions of hikers, climbers, skiers and weekend ramblers, the mountains are places of romance, recreation and refuge. Our love affair with them has shaped a shared culture as well as our ideas and ideals. On that day a century ago, Mallory became a martyr to a visceral compulsion: the urge to ascend.

Into The Alps

A couple of months ago, in the ebbing weeks of the European winter, I traveled to the Swiss Alps to contemplate a mountain. Like many armchair adventurers, I’d chewed over the Mallory mystery for years; the story always seemed like the ultimate allegory of a fascination I shared. Though I am no climber, I’ve rarely seen a mountain without wanting in some deep fiber of my being to be on top of it. Determined to explore what drew Mallory and today entices millions of others toward the great ranges, I set my sights on the Bernese Oberland.

Specifically, I wanted to see the Eiger. Topping out at 13,015 feet, the Eiger ranks 33rd on the list of the Alps’ highest peaks. The most straightforward route to the summit, the west flank, was first climbed in 1858 by Charles Barrington, a merchant from County Wicklow in Ireland, and two Swiss guides. “Thus ended my first and only visit to Switzerland,” Barrington wrote later. “Not having enough money with me to try the Matterhorn, I went home.”

The Eiger is notorious for its north face, or Nordwand, the vertiginous limestone cliff that menaces the Grindelwald Valley. For years now, I’d been reading about this fabled slab, which for many embodies the mesmerism and overwhelming physicality of the quintessential mountain. But I had seldom spent much time in the Alps, deeming the developed and populous countries of Western Europe too trodden and too tamed. The naivety of this presumption struck me foursquare when I caught first sight of the Nordwand as the train neared the station at Kleine Scheidegg.

An hour before dusk, with the Eiger glowering through evening clouds, I pushed through the revolving doors of the Bellevue des Alpes Hotel. The descendent of a hotel that has stood on the Scheidegg Pass for almost two centuries, the Bellevue is a grand dame kept in aspic, all wood-paneled drawing rooms and haute cuisine served by white-jacketed waiters. It is also a waymarker in the progress of an infatuation.

The Urge To Ascend

The human tendency to ascribe meaning to mountains is common to the societies that live in their shadow. As civilization spread around the globe, numerous peoples settled in mountainous areas, adapting their lifestyles and even their physiologies to existence at altitude. Archaeological records suggest that people have been present on the Tibetan Plateau for at least 30,000 years. The Andes have been inhabited year-round since at least 5,000 B.C.E.

From afar, these mountain peaks, by virtue of their salience and metaphorical potency, have long inspired awe and reverence. Massifs like Olympus, Himinbjörg and Kailash have served, in different eras and for different religions, as holy mountains, abodes of the gods. Today, in Bhutan, where Buddhism still merges with animist mythology, the high peaks are sacrosanct and mostly unclimbed. Others, like Tài Shān in China or Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka, are objects of daily pilgrimage. Setting foot on a mountain can be devotional or blasphemous. Either way, the high peak, talismanic and remote, is often viewed as a surrogate for heaven.

The secular impulse to climb mountains for respite and adventure is much younger. Up until the middle of the 18th century, regions like the Bernese Oberland were viewed with fear and suspicion, environments inimical to human survival. Beauty was seen in landscapes pacified by human hands — in the bucolic picturesque of the English painter John Constable, in rolling fields bound by hedge and furrow. The highlands, with their impassable terrain, freezing temperatures and asphyxiating air, represented ungovernable chaos; it was commonplace to describe them as blemishes or “warts” and to explain their formation as scars, deformities wrought on the once-virginal land by the cataclysm of the biblical flood.

A seismic shift in our perception of mountainous landscapes can be traced back to the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. As science challenged religious orthodoxy, it ushered in a new humanistic way of seeing the world and a concomitant desire to rationalize wild places. Soon, this inquisitiveness turned skyward. It was as if, in demystifying the processes once ascribed to the supernatural, the empiricists sought to dethrone the deities and claim the firmament for their own.

In late 1783, the first manned untethered hot-air balloon, designed by the Montgolfier brothers, soared for 25 minutes through the skies over Paris. Three years later, when Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard made the first successful ascent of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, an imaginative barrier was breached. Over the next century, almost every Alpine peak succumbed to human trespass, and cartographers and geologists colored in the surrounding topography. In 1857, the Alpine Club in London became the world’s first climbing society, a graduation for mountaineering into an organized endeavor.

For the less intrepid traveler, too, the mountains were starting to exert a peculiar aesthetic gravity. By the middle of the 19th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s exhortation to retour à l’état de nature, subsequently refined by the artistic movements of Romanticism and Transcendentalism, had taken seed in the minds of a growing leisure class. Early Grand Tourers traversing the Alps en route to Italy were known to pull the blinds of their carriages to spare their gaze from the unsightly disorder of mountain vistas. Now their successors were traveling to places like Kleine Scheidegg to seek them out. The Eiger and its titanic neighbors Mönch and Jungfrau took their place among the iconography of “Alpenbegeisterung,” enthusiasm for the Alps.

The hostelry that would evolve into the Bellevue des Alpes opened its doors in 1840. It began as nothing more than “a mountain hut where ten or so people could sleep next to each other in the hay,” the current owner, Andreas von Almen, told me. Over the ensuing years, it would grow with the tourist footfall. A major expansion coincided with the arrival of the railway from the low valleys in 1893. Its present incarnation dates back to 1925 when the whole joint was refitted for its first winter season. By then, an activity that would evolve into a global pastime, alpine skiing, was gaining popularity. The cruel landscape of pre-Enlightenment superstition had receded. The mountains had become scenery, and then a playground.

Among the high peaks, new generations of Nietzschean supermen were pushing the fascination to its upmost limits. Tales of courage and tragedy from the precipice, recounted in books and periodicals, fed a public appetite for vicarious adventure. In 1871, Edward Whymper’s “Scrambles Amongst the Alps,” which included an account of a descent on the Matterhorn when four of Whymper’s companions plunged to their deaths, was a publishing sensation. Mallory’s forays on Everest in the 1920s were chronicled in daily bulletins in The Times of London.

The Nordwand, a 6,000-foot concave rampart, sheened in verglas, was a different proposition — “the epitome,” wrote the Austrian alpinist and explorer Heinrich Harrer, “of everything tragically sensational in mountain climbing.” Well into the 20th century, as ski lifts and funiculars began to appear in the surrounding valleys, many an accomplished mountaineer insisted it was unclimbable. In time, its ribs and crannies would assume a fantastical toponymy: “White Spider,” “Death Bivouac,” “Traverse of the Gods.” Von Almen, who is lank and patrician with a stentorian Teutonic voice like Werner Herzog’s, called it “a vertical arena,” the climber’s Colosseum.

The first attempts to surmount the Nordwand ended in catastrophe. On the most infamous occasion, in 1936, a four-strong team made it halfway up the face before turning back. On the retreat, an avalanche killed three of the party, leaving a lone survivor, Toni Kurz, dangling helplessly from a rope. Held up only by the stuck body of a dead colleague, unable to climb or descend, Kurz battled to free himself for 14 hours, as a rescue party strove in vain to reach him, before succumbing to exposure and exhaustion.

Here was the mountain’s pull operating at different valences. At the bleeding edge was Kurz, suspended above the void. But also beholden were the guests at the Bellevue, who watched the tragedy play out from their bedroom windows, and millions of others, who read about Kurz’s operatic demise in the newspapers at home.

The route would eventually yield to Harrer and his team in 1938. Their photographic portraits, sun-leathered faces squinting into the lens, sit alongside those of the Nordwand’s other victors and victims on the wall of the Bellevue’s central corridor. “You could sit, drink a coffee, eat a cake, all while watching the climbers through a telescope,” said von Almen, who took over the hotel with his wife Silvia in 1998. “Nobody had seen anything like it before.” The idea of mountain country as the ultimate proving ground of human fortitude was now etched onto the modern mind.

Conquering The Heights

The burgeoning love affair between human and mountain was kindled by a new Romantic sensibility, but it also intersected with that other European preoccupation, the race of nations. To the empire-builders looking to plant flags on the last unexplored tracts of terra incognita, the peaks, like the poles, were first and foremost prizes to be won.

“As I sat daily in my room, and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky … I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit,” wrote Lord George Curzon, later the viceroy of India, as he gazed at the Himalayan horizon from the hill station of Simla in 1899. In 1952, the year before Curzon’s vision was fulfilled, the Manchester Guardian newspaper alleged that an abortive attempt Everest set out with an intention to erect statues of Lenin and Stalin at its apex. When news that the ninth British expedition to the mountain had finally put two men on the summit reached London the day before Elizabeth II’s coronation, the same journal heralded the achievement as “a new, timely, and brilliant jewel in the Queen’s diadem.”

Still today, highlands play host to fierce competition; summits are “conquered” or “bagged,” connoting mastery over nature, however illusory. Julie Rak, a professor at the University of Alberta and the author of “False Summit” (2021), has written about how the alpine Rückenfigur — literally “back-figure,” the artistic depiction of a person looking out over a mountain panorama — has become an enduring motif of individual romantic status. “Mountaineering would become intimately connected to personal sovereignty and the development of the self,” she told me over a video call. “Climbing a peak and looking out from the summit becomes a way of possessing the surrounding land.”

For the climber, one aspect of the mountains’ allure undoubtedly stems from the physical and mental challenges they pose. Another victim of the Nordwand, the American climber John Harlin, put it concisely: “Control of fear is the spice.” But even the most pedestrian interaction with mountains might also impart a sense of accomplishment and the endorphin rush of physical effort. The simple act of walking through rugged terrain fosters agency and self-possession — what Rebecca Solnit, in “Wanderlust” (2000), called the “kinesthetic pleasures of one’s body moving at the limit of its ability.” Footsore and ravenous, the hiker at the end of a day in the hills will often find that food tastes better, that they have never slept so well.

Dissolution & Awakening

On October 14, 1976, another pair of British tyros, Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker, were inching up the west wall of Changabang, a granite spire in the Garhwal Himalayas. Boardman later described the experience of climbing the final pitch as something close to rapture:

I first encountered this passage in “Fallen Giants” (2008), a history of Himalayan mountaineering by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, and it is now inscribed in my memory. There is something incantatory about the words, which, in conveying the climb as totalizing and transcendental, resemble the utterances of a disciple groping toward enlightenment. For Boardman and Tasker, chasing that pure high would prove costly. Both would perish attempting a new route up Everest in 1982.

Many of us who will never know the exhilaration of a vertical rock face in the Himalayas will nevertheless have some inkling of the heightened consciousness that Boardman articulates. Ascent yields aesthetic rewards, but it also confers perspective. “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again, the surrealist René Daumal wrote in his unfinished novel, “Mount Analogue” (1952). “So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below but what is below does not know what is above.” Like all knowledge, however, attaining it only makes the recipient appreciate how little they truly understand.

For all the hubris and one-upmanship that might serve as ostensible motivation for a mountain adventure, the takeaway is often less a sense of triumph than of humility. After summiting the Nordwand, Harrer said: “I was conscious of the privilege of having been allowed to live.” Within the climber’s honor code there exist right ways to pay homage — or, as the journalist and climber Jon Krakauer put it, “a very strong sense of how the game ought to be played.” In time, mountaineers would disavow the siege-like methods of Mallory’s era, instead prioritizing self-reliance, ethical purity and the brotherhood of the rope. Today, Mount Everest is often lamented for its human litter and commodification; even in 1997, Krakauer was describing it as a “slag heap.” Just this year, a signboard welcoming visitors to basecamp stirred controversy. The closer the furniture of civilization presses, the more the mountain is defiled.

One concept that recurs again and again in accounts of time spent among the mountains is immanence, a desire to become one with the landscape. In “The Living Mountain” (written in 1945 but only published in 1977), Nan Shepherd’s slender panegyric describes the author’s experiences and meditations during a lifetime of walking in the Cairngorms, “a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills,” in northeast Scotland.

Shepherd writes of the mountains as a place of existential immediacy and primordial magic. Her Cairngorms are an elemental sensorium, intimate but unknowable; spending time among them “intensifies life to the point of glory.” Most of all, Shepherd pursues dissolution. As she explores the ridges and recesses, bathes naked in tarns, and sleeps in the wide open, she presents the environment as a single animate body, a place that “does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.” It is with this vast entity that the open-minded visitor might seek to become merged. Like the crofters and gamekeepers who live in its valleys, Shepherd wishes to become “bone of the mountain.” And so, through all seasons and weathers, with “senses keyed,” she “walks the flesh transparent.” In places, “The Living Mountain” reads like an animist hymn:

Among the heights, Shepherd gave lyrical weight to a widespread intuition: that being in the mountains precipitates awakening. It is common for walkers and climbers to report experiencing reveries in high places. People talk about the radiance of the light, of pregnant silences and quickening skies. Forever prone to anthropomorphizing the mountain, we refer to its brow, shoulders, flanks and feet. Though it is absurd to accord sentience to a pile of rock, we often perceive mountains as mercurial, places of moods. At times they are beneficent, river-bearers, all-seeing guardians; at others, they transmute into implacable godheads conjuring wrathful weather.

This idea that the mountain is a repository of esoteric energy tends to be central to the various religious doctrines that venerate them. Recently, I spoke to Tim Bunting, an adherent of Shugendō, an ancient form of mountain worship still practiced in some areas of Japan. Originally from New Zealand, Bunting moved to Yamagata Prefecture to teach English in 2010 but threw himself into Shugendō in 2016 after the sudden death of his father. “Most people come to Shugendō at some sort of turning point in their life,” he told me. “We see mountains as a space to reflect and gather, get direction.”

Soon, Bunting was initiated as a yamabushi, literally “one who prostrates before mountains.” Based around the three sacred peaks of Dewa Sanzan, his sect follows a Shinto-adjacent form of Shugendō and incorporates elements of Buddhism and nature worship. Devotees walk for miles through the thick-forested slopes dressed in white vestments and take part in weeklong ascetic retreats punctuated by prayer, chanting and rituals, the contents of which are closely guarded. Upon arriving at a place of meditation, a conch is blown to greet the Shinto divinities, the kami, “to let them know that we’re entering their realm.”

For the yamabushi, the mountains’ potency resides in their liminal nature. Toward the summit of Mount Gassan, highest of the Dewa Sanzan, you eventually emerge above the tree line, Bunting told me. Even in July, when the low valleys swelter, the mountain’s upper reaches might be fogbound and covered in snow. The environmental transition between upland and lowland serves to demarcate a metaphysical boundary. Bunting’s video call background showed a torii, a square red archway at the base of forested hills. “They mark the border between the profane and the sacred,” he explained. Beyond it, the mountain becomes a spiritual plane where the yamabushi can converse with the dead, practice acceptance and pursue rebirth.

“The mountains are the womb,” Bunting said. “Yamabushi believe that entering this landscape takes us back to a time before we were born. You go in and you’re changed. From there, you can rebuild.”

Though the forms by which they express their devotion vary significantly, Boardman, Shepherd and Bunting — climber, poet and pilgrim — all share a conception of the mountain as a threshold, a portal to self-actualization. In communing with landscape, each sees themselves gaining access to a deep wisdom that can only be approached through embodied experience. “To know Being,” Shepherd concluded, “this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.”

The Edges Of The Wild

On my second morning in Kleine Scheidegg, I caught a train into the bowels of the Eiger. In 1896, emboldened by the Alpine tourism boom, a construction team broke ground for a single-cog railway that, even today, seems an astonishing feat of engineering. Thousands of mostly Italian migrant laborers, digging with pick and shovel, burrowed nearly six miles into the limestone, reemerging, 16 years later, onto a saddle above 11,000 feet between Mönch and Jungfrau.

A century on, Jungfraujoch, “the highest station in Europe,” is a magnet for modern mountain lovers — not the lunatic poets of the Nordwand but the tourist public (a million a year according to the railway), who come to take in the view. It is a place to experience modern Alpenbegeisterung in stereo.

The train climbed steeply from Scheidegg Pass, then tunneled into the Eiger’s west flank. My ears popped as we gained altitude, and upon disembarking, many of the passengers staggered drunkenly as they recalibrated to the change in atmosphere.

Up top, beneath the Sphinx Observatory, a wraparound balcony overlooked the glacial junction of Konkordiaplatz. Today’s crowds milled about in a very modern kind of communion. The combination of clear skies and thin air had made everyone giddy. People held their arms wide, as if trying to embrace the panorama. Many selfies happened.

The vibe wasn’t what you might call reverential. The indoor galleries were a study in Alpine kitsch, and a boutique sold Omega and Tissot watches to visitors who hadn’t already been bankrupted by the price of the rail tickets. Later, when I spoke to von Almen about the experience, he despaired of the attraction’s bare-faced commercialization, saying it demonstrated a “disrespect for the mountains.”

But if the crowds at Jungfraujoch seemed touched by a certain fever, it was hard to begrudge. It was a pristine, windless day. The slopes of Mönch and Jungfrau, after the previous day’s dump of snow, stood imperious against a cobalt sky. On the glacier plateau, visitors queued to have their photo taken holding the Swiss flag. Youngsters threw snowballs and slithered down the slope on their backsides. Mountains, it must be remembered, are places of fun as well as enchantment.

Still, there were notes of obeisance. In one tunnel, a bronze statue of Adolf Guyer-Zeller, the entrepreneur who conceived the railway, depicted him in forward motion, naked and muscular, and semi-encased in stone. Back up at the Sphinx terrace, I noticed dozens of votive offerings — Buddhist prayer flags and lovers’ padlocks tethered to the wire balustrade.

Yet I realized with some misanthropic guilt that I hankered to be elsewhere, alone or in more placid company. The proximity of the ridgelines, mingled with a sense that I had cheated the mountain by catching a train to its upper reaches, only amplified my longing to be higher still. I yearned to feel the exposure and solitude of the fastness, to give myself up more completely to the mountain — perhaps even to jump.

Science is yet to settle on a coherent explanation for the compulsion many people feel to launch themselves from precipices. Psychologists call it “the high place phenomenon” or, more poetically, “the call of the void.” Successive studies have found little evidence that it is a form of suicidal ideation, suggesting instead that it indicates the misinterpretation of a survival signal. The reflex does not prefigure an appetite for oblivion but rather escape. We don’t envisage ourselves hitting the ground. We think only of the liberating moment of lift-off.

I waited patiently for a lull in the hubbub. I found a quiet spot on the handrail, got up on tiptoes, and leaned right over the edge.

A Sanctuary In The Sky

Occasionally, an obsession with mountains can slip into mania. In “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), Francis Fukuyama singled out the mountaineer as an exemplar of a distinctly modern restlessness. In seeking altitude, he speculated, climbers revealed themselves as fidgety malcontents bent on rebelling against what Fukuyama called the end of history, but which could less contentiously be reframed as the nagging banality of bourgeois existence. “The Alpinist has, in short, re-created for him or herself all the conditions of historical struggle: danger, disease, hard work, and finally the risk of violent death,” Fukuyama wrote.

In 2022, a German-Austrian psychiatric survey of alpine club members seemed to support this idea that the uphill impulse might be forged in neurosis. Of people who self-identified as regular or “extreme” mountaineers, those with preexisting psychological disorders were also more likely to push their climbing to extremes. Participants with experiences of anxiety or depression, high levels of stress, or with histories of eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive behavior or alcohol and drug abuse, tended to report climbing harder for longer. They took greater risks and were more intent on “sensation-seeking.” Although the study fell short of establishing the causal direction, the authors speculated that subjects may have been using excessive mountaineering as a form of “self-therapy.”

It’s contentious to suggest that these observations may signify a correlation between a desire to ascend and a penchant for self-destruction. Conjectures about the Freudian “death drive,” the idea that there exists within everyone a bodily instinct to return to a state of quiescence, would seem to contradict the much-documented pleasure that so many of us derive from mountain encounters.

What does seem more universally applicable is that one part of the highlands’ allure lies not in what the mountain is — but what it is not. In contrast to the lowlands, so utterly reshaped by society, the mountains permit only visitation. We covet them precisely because they resist our dominion. Sentinels of geological time, the peaks are often seen to embody a reassuring impassivity, aloof to the human ants playing in their shadow. Elevation, danger, sensory abundance: All of these facets of mountain country cultivate an aura of remoteness. Ascent is also departure. The mountain, in other words, is a place to regress, a sanctuary in the sky.

“Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful?” says the High Lama in Frank Capra’s movie adaptation of “Lost Horizon” (1937), about the fictional Tibetan lamasery of Shangri La. “What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. … The world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.”

Many have tried. In 1934, a decade on from Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance, a traumatized ex-soldier called Maurice Wilson flew a Gipsy Moth biplane from London to India, then, disguised as a Buddhist monk, he traveled overland by rail and foot to the base of Everest. With no mountaineering experience, he had emerged from a nervous breakdown two years earlier harboring an eccentric mission to climb the world’s highest mountain alone. As his one-man expedition became bogged down on the intermediate slopes, 6,000 vertical feet from his goal, he must have apprehended the impossibility of the task he’d set for himself. And yet he persevered, setting out for a final time on the last day in May onto the North Col. His body was found there the following year. The last note in his diary, written as he prepared to leave the tent that morning: “Off again, gorgeous day.”

The Potent Myth Of Mallory’s Ascent

Notions of mountains as an enticing refuge where the poetic soul might achieve immanence doubtlessly shaped how Mallory has been remembered. Tragic as it was, the mystery surrounding the exact circumstances of his disappearance invited many to paint it as the ideal hero’s death, the death that posterity demanded.

After combing through the evidence for his new book, Conefrey came to believe it is “almost inconceivable” that Mallory and Irvine summited Everest. “Mallory was a prolific writer,” he told me. “But in this key period of his life there’s no diary, no letters. You’re left with a void that people want to fill.” For Mallory’s contemporaries, and many people thereafter, that has meant conjuring, as Conefrey put it, “a romantic vision of Mallory striving upwards and dying on the summit.”

The reality was that the cultural desire to view the mountaineer as a paradigmatic hero had found, in the lithe and handsome Mallory, an irresistible archetype. In life, many biographers have noted, much was made of his physical perfection. “Mon dieu, George Mallory!” wrote one acquaintance, the writer Lytton Strachey, in a letter to a friend. “My hand trembles, my heart palpitates … He’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles and a face — oh incredible — the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print.”

Decades later, this characterization of Mallory as an inanimate artwork would echo in the testimonies of those who found him embalmed near the crest of Everest. Steeped in the mythos of gallantry and sacrifice that had grown around Mallory’s story, Anker and his team were less inclined to see a battered corpse than a priceless artifact. One expedition member, Dave Hahn, recalled feeling “like I was viewing a Greek or Roman marble statue.” Talk about immanence. Mallory had become stone.

Such eulogies left little room for the nuances of Mallory’s story, not least the fact that, for months leading up to departure, he had vacillated over whether to leave his wife and young children. In truth, the immortal “Because it’s there” barely scratched the crust off the cauldron of reasons that drew him towards the Himalayas; instead, it is the perfect complement to a romantic legend.

“Modern ideas of individualism and aestheticism coalesced around Mallory,” said Rak, who has argued that Mallory’s lionization in the eyes of the press and public bequeathed a spirit of elitism that still pervades climbing culture. “It’s Mallory who makes mountaineering understandable to the ordinary people, but as a result, his legacy becomes outsized. No one can ever climb as well as him. No one can be as pure as him. Everyone who comes afterward can only ever hope to imitate Mallory.” As the myth gathered potency, all of Mallory’s shortcomings, along with the fellow climbers and porters who enabled his ascent, were elided. “Mallory gets pictured later as somebody who almost did it by himself, which is categorically untrue,” Rak added.

Based on his own extensive writings, it is clear that Mallory was bewitched by the mountains because he wanted to be first, and because they made him feel alive. “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy,” he once wrote. “And joy is, after all, the end of life.” But it seems fair to suppose that he may also have been a fugitive from reality. Like Maurice Wilson, Mallory had fought in the First World War, serving as an artillery officer during the carnage of the Somme. In “Into the Silence” (2011), Wade Davis concluded that the horrors they’d witnessed on the Western Front imbued the 1920s climbers with a special intensity, and perhaps also a desire to flee the lowland world that had so betrayed their generation. For them, Everest had become “a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad.”

Davis posited that the best epitaph for Mallory wasn’t “Because it’s there” but an equally spare sentiment summoned by another expedition member, Bentley Beetham, as the grieving survivors retreated from the mountain: “The price of life is death.” Mallory might have died, but my how he had lived. “Could any man desire a better end?” Beetham asked.

This, then, would be Mallory’s role in death: a cipher for the idealism that swirled about the mountaintops where he met his demise. It is an idealism that straddles secular and spiritual traditions, and one that clarifies the futility of all human endeavor with the promise that, beyond our ken, there resides something higher, something more, something completely outside human control. And because the truth of it can never be truly known, we are free to believe that Mallory, in his final moment, might have attained an apotheosis — that he died not distraught and in agony, but in ecstasy, glimpsing the face of God.

On my final afternoon in Kleine Scheidegg, I walked east from the Bellevue until I found a snowy hill perpendicular to the Nordwand. I walked upward, crunching through foot-deep snow, until I’d freed my sightlines from the human drapery of wires and ski-lifts. I found a dry tussock raised out of the snow, and sat there for some time, neck craned to the wall. Finally, I had the mountain to myself. I thumbed through Krakauer’s account of a failed attempt to breach the Nordwand’s “formidable mythology,” picking out the features I knew from years of reading. More than once, I heard the distant crack and rumble of rockfalls or avalanches reverberate through the valley. It was a perfect hour.

Four thousand miles east, just like in the Alps, the ice is receding from the high Himalayas. Perhaps on some distant future day, sooner than we expect or wish, that inexorable thaw may extrude an antique Kodak camera from the cold grasp of Everest. It occurred to me, with a certainty I hadn’t felt before, what a shame that would be.  

The post The Unending Allure Of High Mountains appeared first on NOEMA.

The announcement appeared in the Journal Officiel de la République Française in the spring of 1886. To mark the forthcoming Universal Exposition of 1889, the burghers of Paris were holding a competition to design a colossal centerpiece, something bold and eye-catching to occupy the riverine end of the Champ De Mars.

In the northwestern suburb of Lavallois-Perret, the advertisement caught the eye of an entrepreneurial engineer with a taste for the grandiose. Now in his 50s, he had already secured a place in history. He’d overseen capital projects from Portugal to Peru, designed the metal substructure for the Statue of Liberty. But Gustave Eiffel was not one to turn down an opportunity to create what he instantly understood could be “the tallest edifice ever raised by man.”

A few years earlier, two of Eiffel’s engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, had drafted plans for a tapering wrought-iron tower constructed from latticework girders. At first skeptical of the design, it now struck Eiffel as the perfect candidate. When he submitted it to the competition, the panel of judges, reviewing more than a hundred proposals, agreed. (A 1,000-foot guillotine, conceived in commemoration of the French Revolution’s centenary, was discarded as a little gauche.)

The construction team broke ground for the foundations in January 1887. Over the next two years, teams of perspiring riveters worked to assemble the 18,038 pieces, each prefabricated to within a hundredth of an inch in Eiffel’s factory across town. Visiting the site, the journalist Émile Goudeau described being “deafened by the din of metal screaming beneath the hammer.”

As the giant structure grew beside the Seine, public reactions were mixed. Few could deny it was a miracle of engineering, but to some its monumental presence begged a question: What was the point of it? Eiffel’s justification — that it could be used as a laboratory for various scientific and meteorological experiments — seemed inadequate to the scale of this expensive boondoggle, which would eventually loom 984 feet above the Paris skyline. In an open letter, a coalition of writers and artists, among them Guy de Maupassant and Sully Prudhomme, protested “against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.” The poet Paul Verlaine slammed it as a “belfry skeleton.”

Upon its inauguration, however, the tower defied the cynics. No sooner had the final hot rivet cooled than the great and the good of Paris convened at the tower’s summit to present Eiffel with the Legion of Honor. Almost two million visitors paid the five-franc fee to climb it during the Exposition alone.

Afterward, people kept coming. Parisians frequented the four large restaurants on the first floor. Boutiques offered souvenirs, refreshments and rental binoculars on the upper levels. Originally intended to stand for 20 years, the “Iron Lady” had, by the middle of the 20th century, become indelible. Its scientific pretexts forgotten, it existed now merely as an object to gaze upon, and to gaze from. It was a monument to a new raison d’etre: tourism.

The question of utility receded because the object itself became hallowed, a secular icon transported into the homes of people around the world in the form of tourist photos and a million die-cast replicas. “Glance, object, symbol,” wrote the semiotician Roland Barthes. “Such is the infinite circuit of functions which permits it to be something other and something much more than the Eiffel Tower.” It remains today the most visited paid monument in the world.

The question of what motivates so many journeys to see the Eiffel Tower is more nuanced than it may first appear. Certainly, no one ought to begrudge a visitor for thrilling at its architectural charisma or for coveting the sprawling views of Paris from its balconies. But something about being drawn moth-like to a foreign object speaks to a deeper, more metaphysical yearning of a sort that propelled human movement long before the word tourism entered the lexicon. This is the traveler as pilgrim, who lights out not just to look upon beautiful and interesting things, but to glimpse some essence, to be enriched.

How strange, then, that prevailing ideas of travel are also contemptuous. While tourism is often romanticized, it is equally reviled and disparaged as shallow — or, worse, rapacious. Sometimes it seems as if the “tourist gaze” cannot help but despoil whatever it fixes on. Perhaps this, too, echoes a more ancient incarnation: the traveler as colonizer, a vector of destruction.  

From the beginning, recreational travel has been Janus-faced, straddling this dichotomy between the profound and the profane, the ennobling and the transgressive. But it is the dark shadow that is now ascendant amid a gathering sense that tourism’s drawbacks are starting to outweigh its rewards.

Inessential by definition, responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions, tourism has become bound up with all manner of anxieties about human behavior and the damage we wreak on the world around us. In places that have been overwhelmed or remolded in ways its inhabitants regret, there is growing resistance; taxes, prohibitions and no end of local antipathy are now as much an inconvenient feature of the holiday season as sunburn and gastroenteritis.

This past summer, as holidaymakers flocked back to Europe in their tens of millions, heatwaves and wildfires interrupted hallowed periods of rest with pressing temporal dread. Two contradictory statements felt simultaneously true. Tourism has never been more integral to society — but neither has it ever felt so problematic.

“[T]he cognitive dissonance of summer travel in a warming world is catching up to us,” conceded an article in The New York Times. “Tragic headlines and statistics are prompting hard looks at the nature of tourism: who benefits and who gets to participate.”

An inveterate traveler myself, I felt a need to learn how we got here, but to also probe the more consequential question: Where the hell are we all going?

TWO

For the great span of history, innate curiosity has always drawn people toward the unknown. Prior to the industrial age, most human movement was compelled, whether by disaster, scarcity or enslavement. During interludes in the wars of empires, however, travel could also mean seeking respite, spiritual enrichment and intellectual stimulation — at least for the wealthy. Contemporary chroniclers describe rich Romans sating their curiositas with forays to Egypt. Before it was engulfed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, Herculaneum was renowned for its littoral pleasure palaces.

The genesis of “tourism” as we have come to understand it can be traced to a series of social phenomena that emerged in the United Kingdom in tandem with its precocious modernity. It began with the practice that became known as “the Grand Tour.” For moneyed young gentlemen in the 17th-19th centuries, travel was a rite of passage — and a finishing school. By journeying overland, ordinarily to Italy via France, Britain’s aristos would set out callow and come home urbane.

The contemporaneous ideal of the traveler is often said to be embodied by the “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.” In the painting, composed by Caspar David Friedrich in 1818, a lank figure stands on an outcropping before a pastel sea of mist-wreathed mountains. In this image, we get a sense of travel’s post-Enlightenment values. Undaunted by terra incognita, the wanderer looks outward at the inscrutable horizon. However, it is also possible to discern a duality that would characterize the traveler’s motivations until the present day. The cocked leg. The jaunty walking cane. This figure is somehow both intrepid and effete, curious and self-absorbed. The focal point is not the landscape, but the individual, hero of his own story.

This hint of travel as a fount of vanity illuminates another of its enduring facets: the preoccupation with surface. From the outset, tourism was enmeshed with the image — both the object of the tourist’s gaze and the forms by which they chose to project their experience to others.

For a time during the 18th century, it became fashionable among travelers to carry upon their person a “Claude Glass,” a small convex mirror darkened with a smoky grey patina. Turning their back to any given view, the viewer could look at the reflection in the glass and see the scenery’s edges magically smoothed, its texture gauzy, the sky deepened to reflect the picturesque ideal of the landscapes of the French painter Claude Lorrain, for whom the device was named. The glass, according to Arnaud Maillet, “allowed tourists — those quickly passing visitors — to discover in an instant the luminous effects produced by nature, for which they would otherwise have to wait.”

In the age of the Grand Tour, which later spread among the upper classes of continental Europe and America, participants often commissioned paintings of themselves. The sitters were portrayed in postures of intellectual contemplation or in heroic repose, emulating the swagger of Friedrich’s wanderer against backdrops of unfurling scrolls and Greco-Roman ruins. But if travel was outwardly expressed in the iconography of classical education, its inner life was often one of solipsism and the indulgence of illicit appetites. To cynical eyes, there was always ample cause to interpret the Grand Tour as something vacuous: a foppish performance undertaken primarily in pursuit of cultural cachet. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, observing the Tourers’ peccadilloes from her vantage among the overseas aristocracy, wrote acidly that their main pursuit was “to buy new cloaths, in which they shine in some obscure coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another. … I look on them as the greatest blockheads in nature.”

It was therefore in a spirit of repudiation as much as emulation that the early architects of mass travel would set out their stall. In mid-19th century England, as coastal resorts in places like Blackpool and Morecambe sprang up to cater to a new industrial working class, the upwardly mobile set their sights further afield. Innovations in mass transit, notably the railway and ocean liner, opened the continent to new classes of traveler.

Many of these tourists, or “excursionists” in the parlance of the time, followed the contours laid down by their affluent predecessors. The kind of trips organized by pioneers like Thomas Cook sought out the classic sites of antiquity and the Renaissance, but also wild places like the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coastline, liminal zones that appealed to those seeking temporary escape from a bewildering modernity.

“People saw before their very eyes pastoral Britain being covered by urbanization, by smokestacks, by a new way of living,” Lucy Lethbridge, the author of “Tourists” (2022), told me. “Nineteenth-century writers often describe people at the time feeling like the cogs and wheels of a vast machine. But there remained some collective memory of the pre-industrial life, which made us seek the unspoiled. That memory is with us still.”

For Cook, the temperance campaigner turned travel magnate who is widely credited with inventing the package tour, taking tourism to the masses was a project both capitalist and egalitarian. “God’s earth, with all its fullness and beauty, is for the people,” he wrote, responding to the elitist sneers that so often pursued his tour groups. Over the coming decades, a consensus grew that the holiday should be a universal right, due recompense for a life of labor. Our very concept of mass movement was assuming a new, voluntary impetus driven not by conquest or coercion but by free will and the pursuit of leisure.

By the 1930s, progressive legislators across the developed world began to introduce statutory paid holiday leave. Léon Blum’s socialist government in France authorized two weeks of paid vacation in 1936. Britain passed the Holidays with Pay Act two years later. After the Second World War, America committed billions of dollars to rebuild the economic capacity of a ravaged Europe, and Marshall Planners plowed investment into hotel building, holiday advertising and subsidized airfares. But any vestige of Thomas Cook abstinence — of the holiday as a vehicle for sobriety and self-improvement — soon evaporated. Henceforward, pleasure and indulgence came to the fore in what would prove to be an eternal cycle: After the tide of upheaval recedes, the wave of hedonism crashes in.

Tourism’s new sybaritic spirit found expression in sun worship. In South Florida and the Mediterranean rivieras, a proliferation of new resorts would become loci for bacchanals, offering the covetable combination of sun, sand, sea and sex. The preferred skin tone was no longer porcelain, connoting the delicacy of sheltered privilege, but “the tan,” a signal of vigor and eroticism. Increasingly, wrote Simon Carter in “Rise and Shine” (2007), sun-browned skin became part of the bourgeoisie’s “cultural repertoire,” a means of showing themselves “distinct from either the ‘debauched’ aristocracy or the ‘disease-ridden’ working classes.”

In turn, an onus on fun and abandon meant lax moral standards and opportunities for the unscrupulous. In 1946, the opening of the Flamingo on an underdeveloped highway in Las Vegas kickstarted the era of the luxury casino. Its bankrollers? A consortium of East Coast gangsters led by Bugsy Siegel. This would prefigure a common pattern in resort development. No matter its provenance, capital was always welcome at the tourism frontier, where eager, transient punters seeking fun and frolics were willing to look the other way.

Throughout the decades, tourism continued to provoke the disdain of jaundiced commentators. D. H. Lawrence, writing to his friend Mary Cannon after an unhappy spell in Lombardy, described travel as “a splendid lesson in disillusion.” Vladimir Nabokov channeled a similar ennui through his character Humbert Humbert’s summary of a yearlong American road trip in “Lolita”: “We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.” Evelyn Waugh pinioned the traveler’s habitual self-regard in six words: “The tourist is the other fellow.”

As the acceleration of mass travel started to irrevocably alter landscapes both social and geographical, these anxieties redoubled. In “The Image” (1962), his critique about the rise of artificiality in America, Daniel J. Boorstin portrayed tourism as an arena increasingly pervaded by “pseudo-events,” the reductive illusions that now plagued a consumerist society. Hotels were homogenizing, becoming “models of American modernity and antisepsis.” The purpose-built tourist attraction was “an artificial product to be consumed in the very places where the real thing is free as air.” What was left, he claimed, was merely a soulless residue of reality: “The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey.”

To Boorstin, whose thesis prefigured the intellectual despair of late-century Postmodernists, the innovations and changes that were making travel cheaper and more widely available were simultaneously anesthetizing people to the challenge and happenstance that made it all worthwhile. In “Come Fly with Me,” released in 1958, Frank Sinatra’s velvet voice ushered in the jet age, depicting the quickening process of transcontinental flight as a dream space in which travelers could simply “float down to Peru” and “beat the birds down to Acapulco Bay.” Long-distance movement, once the work of weeks and months by land and sea, had become stupefying in its speed and ease.

The mobsters’ Vegas would soon evolve into the apotheosis of this surreality. Mega-casinos themed around historical treasures — Venetian canals, Egyptian pyramids, of course the Eiffel Tower — appeared as little more than backdrops to hermetic gambling halls. In bringing the world to their customers, the casinos reduced it to a vulgar caricature.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the east’s tilt towards consumer capitalism, the whole world opened up to the tourist. The number of people taking foreign vacations every year continued to climb rapidly — from 69 million in 1960 to 286 million in 1980 to almost 1.5 billion in 2019.

Amidst it all, a growing nag: a suspicion that all this going and seeing was devouring the very diversity it professed to covet, a snake eating its own tail. “International tourism is like King Midas in reverse,” wrote Louis Turner and John Ash in “The Golden Hordes” (1975), “a device for the systematic destruction of everything that is beautiful in the world.”

THREE

In “Overbooked” (2013), the journalist Elizabeth Becker traced the first true realization of tourism’s vast economic consequence to the founding of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), a business forum for some of the industry’s biggest players, which held its first annual meeting in 1991. Previously, there had been a reluctance to acknowledge the industry’s importance, as if travel, with its inherent carefree and escapist overtones, was beneath sober assessment.

Soon after its inauguration, the WTTC commissioned the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to develop a means of substantiating tourism’s economic contribution as a whole. By the turn of the millennium, the statisticians had refined a formula known as the Tourism Satellite Account system (TSA), which could consolidate the economic value of multifarious tourist-dependent industries — hotels, airlines, agents, vendors and more, all operating in different currencies and across borders — into an aggregate dollar amount. “Its calculations were nothing short of a revelation,” Becker wrote.

By 2019, as the TSA revealed, tourism accounted for 10.4% of global GDP and 334 million jobs worldwide. A combination of individualism, technological advancement and a hardening ethical consensus built around the pursuit of happiness had transformed the tourist gaze into one of the most valuable commodities on Earth. What many tended to dismiss as a frivolous sideshow in fact ranked among the biggest industries in the world.

Today, the comforting bromide we tell ourselves to counteract any unease about the burgeoning scale of travel remains unchanged. At its heart, any celebration of it is founded on an ethical ideal that a global human heritage should be open to everyone, exempt from the private marketplace. As the anthropologist Dean MacCannell has written: “The inclusiveness and openness of the modern tourist compact is twinborn with the modern project of democracy.”

Why, then, does the modern figure of the tourist find themselves forever anathematized? “Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot,” wrote the cultural critic Jonathan Culler. “They are said to move in droves, herds, swarms or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects.”

In “The Tourist Gaze” (1990), among the most seminal modern works on the social theory of tourism, John Urry explained how the democratic ideal of tourism was subject to multiple complicating factors. Chief among them was space. The view might be free, but the context for its appreciation, and often the very survival of the environment, is indivisible from its finite geography. (Three decades later, it is notable that many of the places most synonymous with “overtourism” are definitively circumscribed: Venice by its canals, Dubrovnik by its medieval walls.)

In this analysis, much of the problem with modern travel is spatial and aesthetic — a tragedy of appearances. Behold Angkor, built by generations of master stonemasons as a seat of gods and kings, the divine metropole of an empire that dominated Southeast Asia for 600 years. And here, centuries later, is a 50-strong tour group in matching baseball caps, murmurating at the behest of a tannoy-wielding guide, jostling to take their identikit photos of the sunset over the moat while their very presence threatens to precipitate the temples’ subsidence into the mud.

Here is tourism’s intractable contemporary paradox — that the democratization of our geographical and cultural riches too often precipitates their ruination. Again and again, tourism sacralizes the objects of its gaze, then desecrates them with footprints.

A crowd’s contaminating tendency does not necessarily correspond to weight of numbers, but how those numbers behave. People abroad are people at play, and the anonymity of being far from home invites disinhibition. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so the maxim goes, and this inevitably means that holidays often provoke our most gluttonous, selfish and ignorant impulses. Camera phones have turned every tourist into a potential chronicler of the profane, meaning that each instance of touristic barbarism is now caught on film. Hence, in a video of a man scratching his initials into the nearly 2,000-year-old masonry of the Colosseum or a woman’s smiling selfie at Auschwitz, we see all of human perfidy distilled.

Age-old observations about the narcissistic tendencies of travel — of tourism as a means of self-actualization and a marker of status — have only been amplified by digital phenomena as more layers of mediation pile on top of those that came before. Each revolution designed to make travel more accessible and convenient seems, in time, to exact lamentable collateral costs. Airbnb-style rentals hollow out the very neighborhoods their users profess to cherish. Google Maps, online translators and internet reviews diminish host-visitor interaction and nullify the process of getting lost that is a non-negotiable precondition of serendipitous discovery.

The appetite for self-delusion foreshadowed by the Claude Glass — for manipulating the object of the tourist gaze until it subscribes to preconceived desires — has become universalized. People converge on celebrated sites, taking turns to have their photo taken at the viewpoint, while out of shot a queue of other aspiring influencers await their turn. What is this if not travel as pure aesthetic performance? The poser knows that the romantic communion with the view — the golden-hour light, the sibilant surf — was fatally marred by the impatient multitude off-stage. Only the Instagram follower, seeing the soft-filtered image, is fooled.

“Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best,” the philosopher Agnes Callard wrote in an essay titled “A Case Against Travel” in The New Yorker last June. Citing misanthropic antecedents from Emerson to Pessoa, Callard portrayed travel as an exercise in mimesis and banal one-upmanship. Whatever a traveler’s professed motives, she argued, they are more truthfully engaged in the most egocentric pursuit imaginable: escaping (or at least postponing) the “certainty of annihilation.” By removing us from the routine of domestic life, travel disguises the ineluctable fact of mortality “in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.”

Meanwhile, the closed environments decried by Boorstin continue to multiply. In recent decades, the fastest growing sector in tourism has been arguably its most mediated, the cruise, where customers can enjoy Italian food with a Jamaican sunset, then go ice-skating in the morning. It’s a floating pseudo-event that does nothing so much as echo Humbert Humbert: You have been to the Caribbean. You have been nowhere at all.

“None of the folderol about finding oneself,” Becker wrote about the burgeoning desert playground of Dubai, “or disappearing from the troubled world to discover anew the beauty of Mother Nature or the wisdom of an exotic culture.” Here is travel completely detached from the “tourism compact” of democratic ideals and curiosity, characterized as much by labor exploitation and offshored profits as the visitors’ incuriosity about where they are. And people are becoming desensitized to the fakery the more it becomes the norm. According to Google Ngram, use of the phrase “tourist trap,” which grew in lockstep with the explosion of tourism between the 1960s and 2004, has since dropped by about a third.

Out in the real world, there persists a sense that every tourist cheapens the objects they light upon. The more the crowd swells, the more value is placed on bypassing it. Each stride in travel’s democratization persuades some people, keen to advertise their discernment, to seek yet more esoteric, “bespoke,” brag-worthy experiences. The wreckage of a century-old travel disaster like the Titanic latterly becomes yet another diversion for multimillionaires to seek out, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. War, genocide, poverty, industrial decline, nuclear fallout: all become valid objects for the tourist’s gaze in its thirst for originality and “authenticity.”

As MacCannell wrote: “Tourism, leisure and travel are the fastest growing and most profitable sectors of the global economy because of their easy adaptability to neoliberal economic schemes that seek to transform every aspect of human existence into a commodity.”

The contradictions pile up. The traveler is a paragon of curiosity and generosity of spirit; the tourist is a facile automaton, a constituent of a witless herd. Travel is an expression of democratic freedom and the economic lifeblood for millions; tourism is an instrument of capitalist expropriation, an engine of inequality. The act of travel opens the heart and the mind to the lives of others, but it can equally be regarded as an exercise in selfishness, pursued for the accrual of personal gratification and cultural capital. Travel was better when there were fewer people doing it, but saying so out loud is nothing but snobbery.

It is impossible to count how many communities worldwide are caught on the horns of these dilemmas. Last summer’s terrible wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, to take one stark example, exposed tourism as a Faustian bargain in which local calls for tourists to stay away were quickly followed by petitions for them to return.

Today, we are witnessing this endless tug-of-war between selfish desire and moral doubt culminate in the whispered sentiment, at once covetous and perverse, of tourists in an age of collapse: See it now before it’s gone.

FOUR

One morning in early November, I walked into the west entrance of the ExCel Centre, a giant hangar in east London. A Mexican band in traditional dress was playing in the atrium, serenading a crescent of onlookers with their phones out, filming. It was day one of the World Travel Market, an annual expo where travel agents, vendors and marketers congregate to glad-hand and cut deals, and where, I hoped, some indication of tourism’s future might be divined.  

This year, the country with the glitziest stand, and one of the event’s major sponsors, was Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s section of the cavernous exhibition space was wrapped in 20-foot-high video screens showing footage of desert scenery and Red Sea fauna. Functionaries in pristine thobes served aromatic tea from golden ewers to passersby.

My eye was drawn to an elevated section of the display. A tanned man in outdoor gear, holding a pair of skiing poles, stood beside an architectural mock-up of a gigantic multi-level resort capped with a tapering white dome. This was the ski village Trojena, currently under development in Saudi Arabia’s mountainous northwest corner. It forms one part of Neom, the much-vaunted “giga project” that is central to the country’s ambition to attract 70 million international visitors a year by 2030. Like Vegas and Dubai before it, a stretch of desert has become a blank slate for a Promethean enterprise, the realization of a lurid fantasy. Much of the region, including the ski village, is due to start welcoming guests in 2026. Upon that sweeping white roof, a network of pistes will operate year-round.

“It’ll use a mixture of real and fake snow,” the man with the poles explained. “Most ski resorts use some fake snow nowadays,” he added, with a shrug.

“So you’re a ski instructor?” I asked.

“Oh, no, I’ve never been,” he said, sheepishly. “I just look the part.”

Nearby, a tall screen previewed another component of Neom’s purpose-built paradise. The video toggled between jungled coastlines, some Greco-Roman ruins and a row of Moai on Easter Island. “Islands … home to advanced civilizations,” a caption announced. Then the screen faded to black, and a landscape erupted from the picture in a matrix of fiery lines — “a new world is unveiled” — like a continent being born from lava. Out of this primordial cauldron sprang the outline of Sindalah, Neom’s island development, with futuristic lodgings surrounding a nine-hole golf course. Cut to a superyacht gliding through a calm sea. A snorkeler chased a turtle, fireworks exploded, a chef garnished a plate of haute cuisine with a purple flower. The caption read: “An island where you can be the hero of your own story,” and I imagined Boorstin turning in his grave.

A few days earlier I’d spoken to Ian Yeoman, a futurist at the Dutch university NHL Stenden who has spent two decades writing and teaching about tourism futures and scenario-planning for national tourist boards. The future of travel, he believes, is likely to be shaped by two perennial but now accelerating forces: “the culture of fear,” an anxiety that foreign places are becoming scarier, less enticing, which is exacerbated by the invasive tenor of digital culture; and “the assault on pleasure,” the idea that, in an era of growing panic about overconsumption, leisure travel — unnecessary, conspicuous — is destined to become increasingly stigmatized.

Yeoman foresaw that these social forces had the capacity to steer tourism toward several divergent pathways. The potential future that had haunted me since I began researching this story, and which seemed to be embodied by the kind of purpose-built luxury monoculture gestating at Neom, represented “the path to exclusivity.” This would be “a very volatile world, where wealth in the middle class has fundamentally eroded,” Yeoman told me. “Tourism will continue in clusters of gated communities, but it’s basically tourism for the rich — apartheid tourism.”

A rosier forecast was embodied in what Yeoman called “adaptive masses,” a future in which the tourism marketplace responds wholesale to customers’ growing demands for ethicality. Maybe the incipient forces of degrowth and mandated sustainability that are taking hold in some over-touristed destinations become mainstream. Yeoman was optimistically adamant that this would be the eventual trajectory. After all, if tourism’s defining characteristic is its shape-shifting versatility, surely the right confluence of consumer demand and sage policy could twist the kaleidoscope until it settles on something better.

I explained my bleaker intuition that tourism’s history suggested a gathering momentum toward meaninglessness, in which the incurious and self-indulgent side of travel was given free rein, but then the professor interjected: “Can you imagine if we stopped going on holiday?”

Yeoman is an avowed science-fiction fan; he proposed another possible future. As artificial intelligence evolves, it could reach a point of “technological singularity,” wherein experiences within a digital metaverse are sensorially indistinguishable from reality. “It would be like the Holodeck in Star Trek,” he said.

Such a scenario would yield some obvious benefits, he went on. All of the environmental degradation wrought by tourism? Reset to zero. Perfect conditions wherever and whenever you want? Yours at the press of a button. “Go to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute in the red-light district,” said Yeoman, highlighting sex tourism as one of the industry’s most abject symptoms. “But there’s no human trafficking, no H.I.V. There’s no issues of morality.”

In the meantime, though, the costs would be unconscionable. What the thought experiment served to underscore was the extent to which tourism has become more than just one of several economic options for places with little else to sell. Oftentimes, it is the only option. For every hermetic purpose-built playground there are a thousand older and more precious communities that, having lost whatever economic purpose might have led to their original establishment and growth, had bet the house on foreign visitors. Shorn of those visitors’ gaze, there was a chance that such places — our most prized natural and cultural treasures among them — would simply atrophy.

Endless quandaries surfaced in my mind. Without tourists, there would be no more safari vehicles bundling across the savannah to rubberneck at animals, it’s true. But would the national park still exist? And what is worse: the tourist with a telephoto lens or the poacher with a gun? For somewhere to matter, it had to be beheld, Yeoman insisted. “If you want people to genuinely care about a place, they need to make the physical effort to go there,” he said. Would anyone bother to repaint the Eiffel Tower, or would it be left to rust?

Drifting among the stalls at the ExCel Centre, I was at a loss to predict where the circus was heading. I only knew that it would continue, in one form or another, for as long as people have agency and borders stay open — and that it will always be fraught, for one person’s respite would forever be another’s bane.

In the afternoon, I entered one of the side stages, cordoned off from the main exhibition space by a black curtain. Up on the dais, travel company executives and thought leaders were holding forth on tourism’s sustainability problem. Over and again, speakers stepped up to vaunt exemplars of best practice from around the world, but I couldn’t help but notice that all of these laudable case studies were niche, with customers in the dozens and none of the terraforming heft of the Saudi destination-builders out on the floor.

A spokesperson from California laid out the stakes. No one in the Golden State could be in any doubt about the shelf-life of the current tourism model, he explained. With each passing season, California’s glorious landscapes, not to mention its very habitability, were coming under greater threat from wildfires, drought, floods, rising sea levels. “Next year, California is bringing in a ban on hotels using plastic toiletry bottles,” he said.

Somewhere at the back of the auditorium, someone stifled a laugh.

The post Nice View. Shame About All The Tourists. appeared first on NOEMA.

I disembarked from this flight of fancy and came back to reality in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town of Bedford, a couple hours north of London. For now, the airship of my imagination sat disassembled in front of me — an engine, the top section of a tail fin, a salubrious sample cabin.

Hybrid Air Vehicles calls it the Airlander: a colossal, state-of-the-art dirigible that was originally conceived as a military surveillance platform for the U.S. Air Force. That idea was scrapped as America de-escalated its operations in Afghanistan, but by then a new application for airships was emerging. Aviation is the most energy-intensive form of transport, and in recent years the industry has come under intense scrutiny for its environmental footprint. Unlike a passenger airplane, a passenger airship — buoyant and slow — doesn’t have to burn much fuel to stay in the air. 

“We’ve completely normalized flying in an aluminum tube at 500 miles an hour, but I think we’ve got some big changes coming,” said Tom Grundy, an aerospace engineer and HAV’s CEO, who was showing me around the research facility.

Many of the scientific principles behind Grundy’s airship are a throwback to a bygone age, when Goodyears and Zeppelins carried affluent clientele around America and Europe and occasionally between the two. Other aspects are cutting-edge. The cambered twin hulls will be inflated with 1.2 million cubic feet of inert helium, not flammable hydrogen like most of the Airlander’s interwar forebears. The skin, a composite of tenacious, space-age materials, is barely a tenth of an inch thick but so strong that there is no need for any internal skeleton. Grundy handed me a handkerchief-sized off-cut. “You could probably hang an SUV off that,” he said. When it goes into production later this year, it will be the world’s largest commercial airliner: around 300 feet long, nearly the length of a soccer field.

But arguably its key selling point — the reason HAV resuscitated a mode of aerial transport once thought to have gone down in flames with the Hindenburg — is that it’s green. Even powered by today’s kerosene-based jet fuel, the total emissions per kilometer from its four vectored engines will be 75% less than a conventional narrow-bodied jet covering the same distance. The Airlander of course is much slower. A maximum velocity of under 100mph means that it’s never going to compete directly with jet airliners. “We tend to think of it as sitting between the air and ground markets — a railway carriage for the skies,” Grundy told me.

A 100-seat cabin designed for regional travel has already attracted orders from carriers in Spain and Scotland. The prototype we were sitting in, with a futuristic carbon-fiber profile and wine glasses dangling above a wraparound bar, is the central section of another configuration called the “expedition payload module.” When it enters service, perhaps as soon as 2026, it will offer premium, multi-day cruises to hard-to-reach places like the Arctic Circle. Behind the communal lounge, a central corridor will lead to eight double ensuite bedrooms. “You’ll even be able to open the windows,” Grundy said. 

Earlier, I’d joined David Burns, a former British Airways pilot, on a simulator flight. He explained how the vehicle could stay low over wilderness areas, soaring slowly past redwood forests in California or desert dunes in the Sahara. Near cities, it would stay a little higher, around 1,500 feet, about as far up as the blimps above American football games. “It’s a big beast,” Burns said. “You don’t want to scare the bejeezus out of people!” When he took an early prototype for its maiden flight near Bedford in 2016, half the town turned out to see it, their necks craned toward the sky as a white leviathan cruised slowly overhead.

What the Airlander really brought home is the range of variables at play when you attempt to clean up arguably the hardest of all industries to decarbonize. Vital to the modern way of life, air travel requires vast amounts of ground infrastructure and careful coordination between armies of employees and software. So many aspects of aircraft design influence its commercial viability and environmental impact: materials, speed, payload, costs. A slower vehicle means more hours in the air. But Grundy claimed that it also means less risk to mitigate and therefore less time-consuming boarding protocols. Constructing an airport for today’s hub-and-spoke air-route system necessitates the razing of a vast area. The Airlander, with its vertical takeoff and landing, requires just an acre of clear land — or water. The retractable studs can set down on both.

This hangar is part of a growing ecosystem of enterprises, from small, garden-shed startups to governments and aeronautical giants, which are all wrestling with similar trade-offs in an effort to sever aviation’s dependence on fossil fuels. There are chemists trying to refine jet fuel with algae, aerospace engineers revolutionizing wing configurations and physicists squeezing more and more energy out of advanced batteries. 

“There’s a chance,” writes the journalist Christopher de Bellaigue in his new book “Flying Green,” “that the cumbersome, needy, petulant, change-averse behemoth that is modern aviation is starting to rediscover the fearlessness and zest of [the first aviators], and that in saving itself it will help save the world.”

For this generation of innovators, steering the business of flight toward a sustainable future might be one of the great technological challenges of the age. But then flight, by its very nature, has always been about defying gravity.

On a clear late summer day in 1911, a celebrated reporter named Richard Harding Davis stood on a polo field outside Aiken, South Carolina, and cast a skeptical eye over another prototypical aircraft. The plane was a Wright Model B, an evolution of the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flyer, which eight years earlier had achieved the first sustained flight of a heavy aircraft — 12 momentous seconds above the sand of Kitty Hawk, in North Carolina. The Model B’s twin wings, one atop the other, were made from muslin fabric pulled tight over a spruce frame. Two pairs of bicycle wheels comprised the landing gear.

Davis climbed into a space for a single passenger next to the pilot, Frank Coffyn, both of them perched on the front edge of the lower wing. “My toes rested on a thin steel crossbar,” Davis later wrote. “It was like balancing in a child’s swing hung up from a tree.” Behind their heads, the plane’s twin propellers were “thrashing the air like a mowing machine.” 

Coffyn pushed forward on a long lever and the contraption skittered along the grass. By the time they reached the edge of the field, a terrified Davis was surprised to discover that they were already airborne. “And then a wonderful thing happened,” he wrote. “The polo field and then the high board fence around it, and a tangle of telegraph wires, and the tops of the highest pine trees suddenly sank beneath us.”

Davis’s description of his flight was a breathless hymn to a new mode of human experience. “What lures them,” he wrote of flight’s pioneering generation, “is the call of a new world waiting to be conquered, the sense of power, of detachment from everything humdrum, or even human, the thrill that makes all other sensations stale and vapid, the exhilaration that for the moment makes each one of them a king.”

Coffyn’s Model B had whirred above the countryside for just six miles. “But we had gone much further than that,” Davis wrote. “And how much farther we still will go no man can tell.”

It would be decades before the general public could be convinced to follow Davis into the air. Early passenger carriers were vomit rockets. Unpressurized cabins restricted them to lower and more turbulent altitudes. The first air stewards employed by the predecessor of United Airlines were conscripted from the nursing sector to manage the anxiety, vertigo and air sickness passengers experienced aboard.

Aviation’s quantum leap came after the Second World War with two inventions forged in the battle for aerial supremacy. The first was radar, which enabled air traffic controllers to choreograph congested skies. The second was the jet engine. The first truly successful passenger plane, the Boeing 707, was a jet tanker designed to refuel bombers in midair refitted to carry 181 people. Its cruising speed of 550 mph was almost three times faster than its propeller-driven antecedents. 

In the ensuing decades, market-based competition between carriers and manufacturers has ensured that the evolution of aeronautic technology continued. Through deregulation and economies of scale, the invisible hand has made flights faster, more convenient — and much cheaper. “In 1960, a one-way flight between New York and London would have cost you around $300,” writes de Bellaigue. “If you shop around now, you can travel the same route for the same price, despite the fact that inflation has depreciated your $300 by 900 percent.”

All this growth has also overseen an exponential rise in the jet engine’s corollary: ton after metric ton of greenhouse gases. 

The genius of a jet engine is its simplicity. When set in motion, rotating titanium blades suck in air at a tremendous rate: over a ton per second during take-off, the engine’s most active phase. Much of this air is then fed into a series of fans of decreasing blade size known as a compressor. The compressed, superheated air enters a central chamber where it is combined with jet fuel — most commonly Jet A-1, a highly refined kerosene — at an air-fuel ratio of approximately 50:1. When ignited with an electrical spark, this mixture combusts, reaching temperatures of almost 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit. This controlled explosion drives a turbine before being released through a rear outlet, generating huge amounts of thrust. 

The process is elegant and powerful but unavoidably pollutive. The fumes that emanate from this exothermic reaction are a combination of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulfates, water vapor, soot, contrails and other aerosols. Efforts to quantify how this cocktail of fumes contributes to anthropogenic climate change tend to focus on CO2 because it is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas — 76% of global emissions. In 2018, civil aviation produced an estimated 896 million tons of CO2 — 2.4% of the global footprint.

But most of the other components of a jet engine’s exhaust fumes are also heat-trapping. The best metric to track the prodigious emission of these particulates, which are especially damaging to the atmosphere because of the high altitude of their release, is called “effective radiative forcing.” This is the extent by which a given human activity alters the energy balance of the atmosphere. By this measure, aviation is responsible for 3.5% of human activity’s total “warming impact.”

According to a recent study, the world has already burned through half of the “carbon budget” — the limit of what the atmosphere can handle and still stay beneath 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — that was set during the 2015 Paris Agreement. The remaining budget, around 250 billion metric tons, equates to a lifetime allowance of around 31 metric tons of CO2 per person. Someone flying economy from London to Sydney uses up a fifth of that quota on a single round-trip flight. In a first-class seat, which has a bigger carbon footprint owing to the additional space it takes up on a plane, they would deplete 60%.

For many years, the response of airlines to the calcifying international consensus about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change has been sluggish, characterized by foot-dragging, dispensations and greenwashing. 

Aviation has always been a precarious business, vulnerable to economic shocks. Profits tend to be razor-thin. Ethical considerations cause friction with the imperatives that have shaped the industry for decades: to keep expanding the number of planes and passengers in the air for as competitive a price as possible. 

However, the industry is also viewed as an indispensable infrastructural resource. Jet fuel is not taxed like gasoline for cars. Carbon emissions are not priced into the cost of flight tickets, which also tend to be exempt from any form of sales tax. During Covid, as global air traffic dropped by 94%, the American government approved a $25 billion bail-out package for the U.S. airline industry within days of the first lockdown. Traditionally, these forces in concert have ensured that the question of sustainability was relegated to an afterthought or paid lip-service with half-measures like opt-in emissions-offsetting schemes. 

The kind of innovations that feature on the newest airliners like the wide-bodied A350, Airbus’s latest flagship, are often promoted as an environmental boon. Progress in fuel efficiency, aerodynamics and lighter composite materials has made jet-fueled aircraft much more efficient. A flight today produces half as much CO2 as it did in 1990. 

But whatever gains have resulted from incremental efficiencies have been swallowed by the growth in air traffic. Between 1990 and 2019, the number of passengers traveling by air globally rose from 1 billion to 4.5 billion. The International Air Transport Association predicts that these numbers, driven by burgeoning commercial markets in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, will breach 10 billion by 2050. As the decarbonization of other industries accelerates, some forecasts estimate that aviation’s share of global emissions could balloon to 27% over the same period. 

In spite of this, the aviation industry has thus far avoided the kind of environmental regulation that is precipitating reform in other sectors. Borderless by definition, aviation is exempt from the terms of the Paris Agreement primarily because its international nature convolutes the easy apportioning of responsibility. If Emirates runs a route from Paris to Mumbai across the airspace of a dozen other countries, who owns the emissions?

Nevertheless, as the accounting has grown starker, so, too, has the mood begun to shift. In October 2021, at an IATA conference in Boston, signatories pledged to make the aviation industry net zero by 2050. A year later, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N. body that defines industry standards, adopted “a long-term global aspirational goal” to achieve the same. But if “long-term aspirational goal” seems mealy-mouthed and noncommittal, it is because every option is fraught with drawbacks and difficulty.

The bedrock of most industry blueprints for reaching net zero by 2050 is “sustainable aviation fuel.” SAFs can be derived from a variety of sources including household waste, agricultural residues and non-food crops. Although using them to power an aircraft still entails combustion and a pollutive exhaust, they generate fewer greenhouse gases over the course of their lifecycle: A flight fueled by SAFs can claim to have produced 80% less CO2 than one fueled by traditional jet fuel.

Arguably the most compelling business case for transitioning to SAFs is that they are a “drop-in” technology. The hardware involved in its transport and utilization is little different from the kerosene-compatible equipment it would replace. You still have a flammable liquid that is moved around by truck and pipeline, stored in silos and combusted in conventional jet engines. Theoretically, it could be rolled out quickly, with a relatively minor overhaul to existing fleets and ground infrastructure. And its efficacy as a substitute for kerosene is proven. Last March, Airbus took its A380 super-jumbo for a three-hour flight powered by fuel refined primarily from used cooking oil.

For planes like the A380, the world’s largest passenger airline — nearly 240 feet long, with a take-off weight of 617 tons — most observers agree that SAFs are the only pathway to reducing emissions. Even the most starry-eyed proponents of alternative technologies concede that no other technology looks likely to decarbonize long-haul flight, certainly in the near term. The IATA’s net zero blueprint envisions that SAFs will provide 65% of aircraft propulsion by midcentury. 

Spurred by such projections, governments are starting to mandate and incentivize SAF use and production. In April, the European Parliament agreed to a new raft of laws and subsidies that will require fuel suppliers and airlines to introduce an ever-increasing proportion of SAF to their aviation fuel mix, starting from 2% in 2025 and rising to 70% by 2050. 

Concurrently, the U.S. government is rolling out its “SAF grand challenge,” which will use tax credits and grants to ramp up SAF production to 3 billion gallons a year, around 10% of national demand, by 2030. The Energy Department aspires to see SAFs replace conventional fuel wholesale by 2050, an ambition that, according to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, “will help American companies corner the market on a valuable emerging industry.” 

Where things get sticky is in producing the biomass, or feedstock, from which SAFs are refined in the first place. The world’s most popular vegetable oil is palm oil. In the mid-2000s, as Western governments incentivized fuel suppliers to increase the production of biofuels, the net result was an unintended catastrophe, the extent of which is still not fully known: In the rush to meet demand, Indonesian farmers cut down millions of acres of mostly untouched rainforest, replacing it with a sprawling monoculture of oil palms. So much methane escaped from Borneo’s freshly exposed peatlands that observers began characterizing it as a “carbon bomb.” Research from NASA subsequently found that, during the peak of its slash-and-burn frenzy, Indonesia was producing more CO2 than all of Europe.

Hoping to avoid a repeat of such devastation, both EU and U.S. initiatives include stipulations about the sustainability of the feedstocks that can be used in SAF production. A handful of companies are researching the potential of fuel derived from algae or yeast, both of which are abundant. United Airlines has invested in a company that is trying forest windfall and agricultural waste. But the practicalities are daunting. A February report from the Royal Society found that switching all U.K.-based airliners to SAFs derived from homegrown rapeseed would require the conversion of 68% of the country’s existing agricultural land.

If SAFs seem problematic, the more radical alternatives, which the industry tends to bundle together in the basket of “new” or “clean-sheet” technologies, are arguably more so. Electrofuels (or e-fuels), in which CO2 is extracted from the air and synthesized into a liquid hydrocarbon, look promising on paper — they effectively close the carbon loop, recycling CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. The world’s largest airplane manufacturer, Airbus, is betting big on hydrogen, which releases zero CO2 when combusted and has an astonishing energy density — almost three times that of kerosene. But farming and storing the constituent gases for either option remains prohibitively expensive. With current technology, isolating hydrogen from the molecules in which it naturally occurs consumes 30% more energy than it generates.

The stark reality is that no one has yet conceived of a product or menu of products that can realistically scale to match demand. For now, the promises look flimsy and the roadmap formidable. Only four years ago, global SAF production accounted for less than 0.1% of global jet fuel consumption. 

In a spotless hangar at an ex-military airport northwest of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, Guilherme Albuquerque invited me to sit at the controls of an ES-30, a 30-seater electric plane. In front of us was an array of buttons, switches and instrument panels, and behind was an open skeleton of aluminum and electrical wiring. The view through the cockpit windows was a simple 3D rendering of London’s City Airport.

Albuquerque issued some instructions: Push forward on the thrust levers. Depress a small button on the central console to release the breaks. When the speedometer hits 80, pull back on the joystick. 

Airborne, the four rotating discs on the wings accelerated to a blur. It was all quite serene, drifting back and forth above the Thames, until Albuquerque asked me to land. I came in at a suicidal angle of around 40 degrees, perspiration beading on my forehead, the plane coming to rest on the grass beside the runway. Looking over my shoulder, Heart’s chief engineer, Markus Kochs-Kämper, said my performance made him “feel sick.” The avionics worked seamlessly. 

The life-size simulation model that sits in the “Integrated Test Facility” of Heart Aerospace, a Swedish start-up founded in 2018, is some way from taking to the skies, but it still exudes an atmosphere of clinical, state-of-the-art potential. A sepia portrait of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, hangs in the break room, a nod to the polluting era of flight that the company hopes to revolutionize. Heart has more than 200 employees who hail from 28 different nations. Their Promethean mission: To prove the commercial viability of battery-powered flight. 

Heart’s initial prototype was the ES-19, so named for the number of passengers it could hold. Pieces of the old design — an engine, a composite nose — now ornament the periphery of the hangar. The ES-30 borrows much from its predecessor’s design, but its larger capacity takes it into a different category of certification, commonly known by its FAA designation “Type 25.” This means that it will be held to the same standards of airworthiness as today’s jets. 

The increase in the size of the airframe has necessitated some compromises. In place of the ES-19’s pure electric assemblage, its larger sibling will operate with a “reserve hybrid” system. The finished plane, which should be ready for its first test flights by 2026, will have four electric motors and a large undercarriage containing five metric tons of batteries. Using extant technology, Heart says those batteries will be able to carry the ES-30 over distances of 200 kilometers (124 miles). Its most obvious applications would be to fly routes that are currently underserved by on-the-ground infrastructure like roads and rail — or as “puddle-jumpers,” small aircraft designed to hop between islands (or, this being Scandinavia, across fjords). 

In order to pass certification, commercial airliners must have a reserve energy capacity. Any plane you’ve taken recently probably carried 50% more fuel than it needed in case it was forced to reroute or stay in a holding pattern above the destination airport. In the ES-30, this backup power will come from a gas turbine housed in the tail assembly. The fuel to power it, whether kerosene or SAF, will be stored in the wings. In order to augment this heavy wingspan, diagonal struts run from the underside of each wing to the base of the fuselage. 

To a purist dreaming of clinical engineering and space-age aesthetics, these might seem like unwieldy concessions. But if sleekness is nice, achieving proof-of-concept is better. 

The Tesla precedent — a private company defying the naysayers to prove a green technology’s viability, and in so doing reshape the very concept of transport — is a lodestar for advocates of electric aviation. The skepticism surrounding its potential echoes the same that dogged early electric cars: Electric could never rival combustion; V8s forever. Fast forward a decade, and Tesla’s latest Model S has a top speed of 200mph and a range of 390 miles. 

It is of course a different proposition when you need to get the machine off the ground. Five hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci sketched experimental “ornithopters” in a Florentine workshop, the work of getting and keeping something aloft boils down to the same ineluctable physics. Power and weight. Lift and drag. Out of all the technologies in the solution pipeline, full electrification offers by far the lowest energy density. A kilogram of lithium-ion battery provides around 2-3% of that supplied by a kilogram of kerosene. And batteries, unlike liquid fuel, don’t expend their weight. 

But if the ES-30’s long-term potential is contingent on breakthroughs that are anticipated rather than actual, each month seems to bring fresh encouragement. In April, the Chinese company CATL announced that it had successfully developed a condensed battery with an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram, a significant increase in capability. (For comparison, Tesla’s most advanced batteries have less than 300 Wh/kg.) In May, Scandinavian Airlines released a batch of tickets for seats on the ES-30s it has on order, which are due to go into service in 2028. They sold out within 24 hours. 

It is hard to resist being swept up in the romance and crusading optimism of such endeavors. Flight has captivated people since we first looked up and felt envy for the birds. Supplementing that fascination with moral purpose makes for an intoxicating combination. For skeptics, however, the imaginative power of what Davis described as the “new world waiting to be conquered” risks blinding consumers to their limitations. 

Some of the buzziest projects under development in electric aviation are not passenger planes but autonomous urban air taxis. Also known as eVTOLs (for electric vertical takeoff and landing), with cute names like “Joby” and “Cityhawk,” these vehicles are essentially scaled-up iterations of drone technology: multi-rotor, driverless limousines. Critics say they are seeking to disrupt a sector (urban transport) that already has a clear road map to decarbonization, and that they merely replicate short journeys already being done cheaply and easily on the ground using a fraction of the energy.

“It’s a dangerous combination — technophilia plus investment bubbles,” Richard Aboulafia, the managing director of Aerodynamic Advisory, told me. He noted that eVTOLs travel more or less the same distance as a family car, electric versions of which are rapidly being adopted by consumers. While sustainable mass-transit aviation screams for investment, terawatts of brainpower and billions of dollars in venture capital are being expended to fulfill the sci-fi fantasy of a flying car. Aboulafia calls it “the greatest recarbonization scheme the industry has ever seen.”

Back in the U.K., I spoke to Finlay Asher of the advocacy organization Safe Landing. An engineer, Asher previously worked at Rolls Royce, the world’s third-largest aircraft engine manufacturer. The prototype engines he worked on — with lightweight carbon-fiber fans and smaller compressors — made small gains in power-to-weight ratios that would equate to marginal emissions reductions. But over time, Asher became concerned about the dissonance between the aviation industry’s environmental PR and its determined pursuit of scale. If these new jet engines required 10 to 15 years of exhaustive R&D and certification, the idea that transformative new technologies could come online and scale in time to fulfill net-zero pledges by 2050 seemed fanciful. 

This calculus wasn’t being reflected by a sense of urgency within the industry. In 2019, Greta Thunberg captured headlines by sailing across the Atlantic to attend a climate summit in New York, and the Swedish concept of flygskam, or “flight shame,” gained traction. In response, Rolls Royce’s sustainability team circulated charts illustrating the way its engines had grown more efficient over time. Asher asked to see data that showed the total fuel being burned in the growing number of engines being brought to market, but was met with silence. When he did the calculations himself, it was a diagonal line shooting ever upward. 

That same year, at the Paris Airshow, chief technology officers from a group of aerospace giants issued a joint statement emphasizing the indispensability of their businesses, while reassuring the public that the net-zero transition was well underway. Asher found himself disagreeing with every word.

“It felt like sleight of hand,” he told me. “The industry is going: ‘Look at these shiny electric aircraft over here.’ Meanwhile, we’re continuing to massively expand the number of aircraft powered by jet fuel.”

After founding Safe Landing alongside a group of fellow industry malcontents, Asher sought to voice a litany of reservations about nascent eco-friendly flight technologies: SAFs are unscalable, hydrogen is decades away, batteries will never develop enough energy intensity to cope with long-haul. The insuperable enemy is time. 

But he’s also keen to emphasize a more holistic point: that in a global race to decarbonize all energy consumption, throwing huge quantities of renewable energy into a utility as uniquely wasteful as aviation is counterproductive. Based on current technology, for example, an e-fuel derived from renewables ends up converting just 10% of the energy used in its production and combustion into actual thrust. That same energy put into the grid uses 100%. 

Neither do the more optimistic projections account for the fact that the efficacy of any new energy source depends on the sustainability of the wider lifecycle. If the power used to liquefy hydrogen or charge lithium-ion batteries comes from an unsustainable source, or if hectares of rainforest are denuded to mine a battery’s constituent materials, any ecological gains will be negated.

Thinking about aviation in this way exposes the hidden drawbacks of so much of what is going on in the innovation space. In Greensboro, North Carolina, Boom Supersonic is in the process of developing a needlepoint supersonic plane that will cut flight times in half. Designed to be run on e-fuels, it is being marketed as a flagship of carbon-neutral flight. But the amount of energy it consumes will be five times that deployed on an ordinary jet airliner flying the same route. While major aerospace corporations extol their investment in green technologies, private jet sales are through the roof.

Aboulafia worries that the industry is indulging in “the triumph of appearance over reality.” As he told me: “It’s out of sight, out of mind. You don’t see the massive petrochemical facilities that have to make the stuff we’re talking about. You just see this sleek, cool thing.”

What’s required above all else, according to Asher, is to put a price on emissions. At present, subsidies and tax exemptions make flying “artificially cheap,” he told me. Adding an emissions surcharge to the price of airfare and directing that money toward abatement strategies like offsets, direct-air capture or sustainable innovation is the only way to mend the cleavage between the ecological ramifications of flying and the marketplace.

Such proposals tend to raise egalitarian hackles. For Western governments to slap a tariff on flying just as millions of people in less economically developed nations might be interested in trying such a luxury for the first time is a hard, hypocritical sell. Only 20% of people around the world have ever been on a plane. And the majority of flight tickets are purchased by a sliver of frequent flyers, around 1% of the global population. A recent study published by the International Council on Clean Transportation found that a progressively distributed “frequent flyer levy,” in which a tariff increases in proportion to the number of times a person flies in a given year, would raise 98% of its revenue from the richest 20% around the world. The introduction of such a levy would invert the current perverse paradigm, which sees the most prodigious polluters rewarded through air miles and “frequent flyer” programs.

“We don’t need technology, we need policy,” Asher said. “Get the policy right and the technological solutions will follow. It’s inevitable that the cost of flying is going to increase. The questions are: Do you want to drive over a cliff edge, or do you plan for it now? Is it going to be early design or late disaster?”

There is, of course, another option. In technological terms, it is the least nettlesome. It is a strategy that could be implemented overnight with the right amount of public and political will. Psychologically and culturally, however, it presents an almighty challenge. People could decide to fly less. 

Perhaps the most intriguing dynamic in the conversation around flight and the environment is one that is rarely countenanced and that most of us who fly would rather ignore. In the majority of cases, flying is inessential. In “Flying Green,” de Bellaigue notes that aviation “has a strong claim to be the most damaging leisure activity in the world.” 

By taming distance, the plane opened up the world. In so doing, it reshaped our expectations of what constitutes a fulfilling life. It’s why air travel and the foreign holidays it facilitates are always marketed in the language of freedom. That annual trip to Mexico or Greece or Thailand has come to be seen as the ultimate dividend for the drudgery that brackets it. And while a growing cohort of people have started to forsake flying for ethical reasons, poll after poll (not to mention passenger numbers) suggests that it’s one indulgence most people are unwilling to relinquish for the sake of the climate, even though it is among the most consequential. 

One recent British survey found that 48% of respondents were unprepared to reduce the amount they fly for leisure. In another, 96% said that an annual overseas holiday was important to their mental health. Several older polls revealed that Green Party members and voters are more likely to fly long-haul than supporters of other political parties.

This reluctance to translate environmental consciousness into personal self-sacrifice points to the underlying impasse that is thwarting a head-on reckoning with our addiction to the air. No one wants to be first to act. 

The unpalatable truth is that any objective appraisal of green aviation’s potential remains clouded by denial. If enthusiasm for new technologies is deceptive, it is a masquerade in which much of the flying public is all too happy to collude. We are all Icarus now, mesmerized by our wings, soaring too close to the sun.

In May, after I finished demonstrating my ineptitude on the Heart Aerospace simulator, I went underground and back in time. A few minutes from Heart’s facility is an old Swedish Air Force base. Early in the Cold War, the military dug hangars into these granite hills, a network of concrete-lined tunnels designed to withstand a nuclear attack. When it was decommissioned in 1998, an enterprising squadron commander transformed it into a museum.

I entered the “Aeroseum” through a small door and walked into a cavern that descended past ranks of jet fighters and helicopters, some of the cockpits occupied by vintage mannequins. The ominous strains of Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” rumbled from wall-mounted speakers. At the base of the slope, the space opened into a series of side tunnels, each one full of aging aircraft and engines. On one wall, heroes and milestones in the evolution of flight — the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, the first jets, the debut of the Boeing 747 — were memorialized in a timeline of placards.

Transitioning from Heart’s dustless modernity to this dim-lit mausoleum of extreme combustion was a dizzying experience. What struck me as I walked was the sheer speed of the technological evolution the museum chronicled. We went from Davis clinging to Frank Coffyn’s arm for dear life as a rickety biplane wheeled for a few brief minutes over South Carolina fields to a million air passengers a day in a little over a single century. And how much farther we still will go no man can tell.

It was tempting to imagine that the planes polluting the skies today would be the relics of tomorrow. Perhaps, on some distant future date, an Airbus A350 and a Boeing Dreamliner would find themselves parked here, wingtip to wingtip, monuments to aviation’s dirtier past, while overhead a new generation of planes — and even the odd airship — transported passengers through a troposphere without contrails. 

It was a seductive vision. But it couldn’t overcome my wider misgivings. Successful flight cannot only be measured in how high and how fast you soar, but in whether you make it back to Earth in one piece. It doesn’t just require thrust. It requires brakes.

The post The Seductive Vision Of Green Aviation  appeared first on NOEMA.

“I love that highway of sun,” I said to Keltner, who was standing on my left, looking out to sea.

“Yeah, that’s very nice,” he replied in a slow, portentous way, which I took to imply that I should stop commentating. And then we stood in silence for a long time. 

“I’m 60, so I need to pee,” Keltner said suddenly, striding off down the slope. “It’s the great antagonist of awe in later life!”

With that, the moment passed. Where did I go in that pregnant quiet before the intervention of Keltner’s bladder? Something had certainly stirred. Watching the interplay of sun and sea, I’d felt enlivened, gently electrified. The ocean, in its immensity and unseen depths, seemed to harbor hidden meaning. 

It was at this point that a traditional account of a brush with awe might end. There were feelings. They were deep, they were ungraspable. God knows why. But I knew that Keltner was going to argue that I’d just experienced something altogether more tangible. 

For the last two decades, Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has been a leading light of a scientific movement to examine our least-understood emotional state in all its gauzy complexity. His latest book, “Awe,” describes two decades of research and arrives at a radical conclusion. Far from being an undefinable caprice, awe, to Keltner, is a panacea, an evolutionary tool that holds the key to humanity’s capacity to flourish in groups.

On an average day, a person might come to a place like Point Reyes without feeling anything more profound than a slight unburdening of the soul. But if you lean into that feeling even for just a moment, the benefits can be manifold. Proponents of this new science believe that experiencing awe may be an essential pathway to physical and mental well-being. By taking us out of ourselves and expanding our sense of time, it counteracts the self-focus and narcissism that is the root of so much modern disenchantment. To experience awe, to fully open ourselves up to it, helps us to live happier, healthier lives. 

The lightning-in-a-bottle sensation that had fizzed through me at the viewpoint is the keystone of religious devotion and the wellspring of human curiosity. It’s a feeling that inspires our desire to seek novelty, to see and make art, to gather in celebration, in worship and in grief.

According to Keltner’s book, seeking “brief moments of awe is as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.”

Keltner reappeared next to me on the escarpment. “Shall we continue?” he asked.

The word “awe” derives from the Old Norse “agi” and the Old English “ege,” both of which denoted feelings of fear or terror. Its modern English derivative evolved to encapsulate a more nuanced emotion, one in which that same medieval dread mingles with a sense of pleasing, almost euphoric, overwhelm.

During the Scientific Revolution in Europe, awe fell into vogue as an explosion of discovery prompted fascination in all that remained inexplicable and out of reach. Europe’s wealthy developed a fashion for wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, collections of esoteric miscellanea from around the world. These displays, which often included animal specimens, arcane artworks and scientific instruments, were partly an ostentation: a show of their owner’s discernment. But they were also a cognitive tool. Awe, and its milder cousin “wonder,” had come to be seen as an aesthetic prompt for the inquiring mind. 

In 1757, the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke revolutionized the intellectual contemplation of awe with his celebrated “Philosophical Enquiry,” in which he described the distinction between beauty and “the sublime,” a de facto synonym for awe. Burke argued that the sublime was “our strongest passion.” It could often stem from sensory impression, but it differed from beauty in that it also required a note of astonishment, the hint of threat. “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close,” he wrote.

Soon, this blossoming interest in wonder would give rise to great literary movements. In Europe, the Romantic poets found lofty words to echo the rarefied feelings of the awestruck soul. America’s transcendentalists struck out into the woods and mountains of New England to seek sanctity in the everyday. 

Such thinking was at once a retort to the burgeoning fields of empirical science and a source of inspiration for some of its most famous exponents. In his history of the Romantic scientists, “The Age of Wonder,” the biographer Richard Holmes quotes an early poem by William Wordsworth, in which he describes a statue of Isaac Newton in terms that transform him from scholarly philomath to dauntless navigator, “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”

William Herschel’s maps of the cosmos; Alexander von Humboldt’s concept of the web of life; Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: Generations were spurred to genius by a desire to unlock the mysteries of the interconnected universe. Decades later, Albert Einstein would write: “He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.” For trailblazers and heretics, awe was a driving force, the handmaiden of revelation. 

As these notions of the virtue of explorations both physical and intellectual percolated through to the masses, this era yielded what we might recognize today as the modern pursuit of awe. The transition away from agricultural work and intermittent peace in Europe would eventually give rise to the weekend, to holidays, to leisure. “When previously wildernesses had been shunned,” Robert Macfarlane wrote in “Mountains of the Mind,” “now they were sought out as arenas of intense experience.”

Still, awe itself remained a scientific enigma. In his 1605 treatise “The Advancement of Learning,” the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon, described wonder as “broken knowledge” — a facet of the human condition, in other words, that defied his scientific method. For all the words expended on its cause and effect, awe was still the preserve of the metaphysical, its vagaries explained away as the handiwork of God, beyond human comprehension. Awe and science existed in tension, even as the one fed the other. It was a lacuna in our understanding of the human condition that future wonderers would seek to fill. 

On a cloudless day in September, Dacher Keltner and I went for a walk. In the correspondence that preceded my trip to visit him in California, his emails appeared in spare, declarative lines. One of his staccato suggestions — “We can hike in the Berkeley Hills where I found a lot of awe during grief, etc … and still do …” — became our initial meeting.

In person, Keltner is warm and expansive, his lean face tanned from decades of hiking under the Californian sun. Now 61, his blonde hair has faded to grey, but he still wears it long, as he has since childhood. He admitted that friends have started teasing him that he is morphing into his idol, Iggy Pop. A stylized cartoon of the Stooges frontman, head cinched in a crown of thorns, sits on his desk in his office at Berkeley. 

We parked in a gravelly lot by the road and started up the trail. Redwoods, oaks and eucalyptuses, some with great torsional trunks, alternated at the trailside. Unseen wildlife rustled in the underbrush. Keltner was telling me how, a couple of years ago, after losing his grip on awe, he’d walked this up-down circuit day after day to try to recapture it. 

When Keltner was 10, his family moved from hippy, middle-class Laurel Canyon to Penryn, a hardscrabble, one-store town northeast of Sacramento. Life on the western fringe of the Sierra Nevada wasn’t exactly charmed. His parents were often hard-up, and their marriage was tempestuous; it would end in divorce when Keltner was 16. Despite the strain, it was a household rich in awe. Keltner’s father was a freewheeling artist. His mother, an English professor at Sacramento State, was prone to quoting lines of William Blake over dinner. 

It helped that there was a wonderland on the doorstep. On weekends, Keltner and his younger brother Rolf would go adventuring on the banks of the Yuba River, or light out into the Sierra foothills. “It was rope swings and exploration and getting into trouble,” he told me. “It was a good beginning.” 

Born 14 months apart, the brothers remained tight into adulthood. They were each other’s best men at their weddings and spoke most weekends. Every year, as a matter of ritual, they’d go for multiday hikes in their beloved Sierras. Keltner describes Rolf as his “companion in awe.” In January 2019, when Rolf died after a two-year battle with colon cancer, Keltner was at his bedside. 

Rolf’s death plunged Keltner into a deep communion with awe — first its presence, in the aura of love, memory and mortality as he watched his brother slip away. Later, in the numbness of bereavement, he felt its absence. 

External factors pressed down. Keltner’s malaise was a microcosm of a world that he would later characterize as “running hot.” American individualism had yielded no end of instant gratification. But it also had given rise to epidemics of loneliness and diseases of despair. Drawing a parallel between climate change, the rising temperature of partisan politics and the inflammatory response of the human immune system to psychological stress, Keltner would later aggregate these various pressures, dubbing them “the inflaming problems of the day.”

For months after Rolf’s passing, Keltner felt unmoored. “I was blown off the map,” he said. “I was really vibrating with grief.” That May, after months of insomnia, he travelled down to Baja, in Mexico, with “a bag full of sacred texts” — Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching” — and began to write. “I just spewed out 110 pages in 20 days,” he said. “That was the start of the book.” 

Keltner’s new book may have come together in a fit of catharsis, but the intellectual journey it describes had been preoccupying Keltner for years. Studying for a Ph.D. at Stanford, his first paper was an inquiry into the mood-elevating qualities of Brian Eno’s ambient instrumentals. As a postgrad at UC San Francisco, he worked as a junior researcher for Paul Ekman, one of the pioneers of the so-called emotion revolution. Since the 1960s, Ekman’s studies of non-verbal behavior had sought to demonstrate that some of our most common emotions are universal. He found, for example, that the expressions for happiness, sadness and disgust among isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea were recognizable to citizens of globalized cultures, and vice versa.

Ekman argued that emotions were evolutionary tools, vital to human survival. In Darwinian terms, the passions had evolved not in spite of natural selection, but because of it. Disgust, for example, helps to ensure that we avoid eating rotten food. Surprise focuses attention on a potential threat. 

Keltner was captivated by Ekman’s ideas, which he saw as a repudiation of the cognitive theory that viewed the human brain in objectivist, computational terms: data goes in, the brain appraises, a decision based on rational self-interest results. “What was missing from this portrayal of the human mind was passion,” he said. “The idea that you could explain politics, morality or prejudice without understanding the emotions seemed absurd.” 

In 2003, by then a tenured professor at Berkeley and the founding director of its Greater Good Science Center (GGSC), Keltner turned his attention to a gap in Ekman’s taxonomy. Collaborating with Jonathan Haidt, then at the University of Virginia, he immersed himself in philosophical and religious literature from Burke to the Bhagavad Gita, and co-authored a paper titled “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.” 

The first issue was how to define awe. What is it? The thesis they alighted on rested on two key appraisals: “perceived vastness” and “a need for accommodation,” qualifying the latter as “a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast.” 

“Emotional experiences that lack one or both of these features are best called by some other name,” Keltner and Haidt wrote.

There were caveats and footnotes. Vastness could be conceptual as well as physical. The microscopic symmetries of a leaf’s cellular substructure could be as marvelous as the patterns of the cosmos. Awe had “flavoring themes”; apprehensions of threat, beauty or supernatural belief would influence awe’s hedonic tone.  

The paper speculated that awe could result in negative outcomes. Citing Max Weber’s work on charisma and leadership, Keltner and Haidt wondered whether awe might be an adaptive function of hierarchical societies, rendering people spellbound and subservient, and therefore susceptible to the manipulations of a charismatic leader or ideology. Keltner would later observe to me that the ritual surrounding the recent funeral of Queen Elizabeth II represented an archetypal instance of a state “instrumentalizing awe.”

In most scenarios, however, awe was covetable, often counterintuitively so. “When I watched my brother die, it was like: This guy is going. I know what I’m in for,” Keltner recalled. “And yet I feel good. I want to throw myself into this mystery.”

Keltner’s book outlines how, in the years that followed, he and his students set out to further refine their understanding of the processes that trigger awe. Among their most wide-ranging surveys was the “26-culture study,” which hasn’t yet been published but Dacher writes extensively about in “Awe.” Respondents from 26 countries and a spectrum of religious, economic and cultural backgrounds were asked to submit their “awe stories,” recounting a moment that brought them their most memorable and potent encounter with awe. 

In came anecdotes of childbirth, falling in love, natural reverie and spiritual rapture. Out of this trove of 2,600 personal narratives, the team at Berkeley distilled a definitive catalogue of awe’s elicitors. Keltner dubbed them “the eight wonders of life.” The most common source of awe was the moral beauty of other people, such as witnessing instances of compassion or courage. Also prevalent was “collective effervescence,” the sense of transcendent unity we might feel at a sporting event or when dancing in unison with others. Then came two predictable ones: nature and music, to which was added a third aesthetic stimulus, visual design. The last three could be lumped together by those of a romantic disposition as matters of the soul: spiritual awe, life and death, and epiphanies, like Archimedes’ Eureka moment, or the Damascene conversion of St. Paul. 

One thing was already becoming clear: Awe is universal, as familiar to a devout Hindu in India as an atheist in Switzerland. The narratives also pointed to a phenomenology, one in which cultures archived awe, primarily in religion, but also in other “elaborated forms”: song, architecture, sport, ritual.  

Subsequent studies would hint at a deeper heritage, one that predated language. Experiments conducted by Keltner and others into whether people of disparate cultures recognize each other’s common “vocal bursts” — think of the “ow” of pain or the “mmm” of pleasure — suggested that “woah” or “wow” or “aaaah,” the vocal bursts associated with awe, is the most universal in the world. 

Indeed, awe may not necessarily be the preserve of Homo sapiens. As Keltner notes in “Awe,” the primatologist Jane Goodall observed members of a chimpanzee society in Tanzania approaching a rushing cataract in a forest clearing. Goodall found that the apes fell into a swaying dance, threw rocks and swung across the waterfall’s spray on lianas. Afterward, some would sit on a boulder to watch the rushing water, seemingly in a state of deep contemplation. 

“I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are,” Goodall said. “You get the feeling that it’s all locked up inside them, and the only way they can express it is through this fantastic, rhythmic dance.”

Over the course of Keltner’s research, one recurring motif — and the facet of awe that best unlocks the question of what the emotion is for, and why it might be good for us — is that it precipitates “ego death,” the dissolution of the self.

In one experiment, a Berkeley postdoctoral researcher, Yang Bai, spent several days with research assistants in Yosemite Valley, persuading more than 1,100 visitors to draw themselves while standing at a viewpoint overlooking the valley. Another group were asked to do the same from the more urban vantage of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In the resulting pencil sketches, the urban set filled the page with their self-image. The Yosemite subjects, by contrast, tended to draw themselves small, often dwarfed by the valley’s splendor. Being in a monumental natural environment apparently shaped the participants’ self-image. The individual diminished. The surroundings came to the fore. 

The data from this and other similar experiments lent some empirical scaffolding to an assumption that shamans, spiritualists and romantics have toyed with through the ages. In the 1836 essay “Nature,” one of the seminal texts of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”

This phenomenon is best understood not as a fracturing of some brittle self-conception but as a form of sublimation. In awe, the self-image becomes diffuse, intermingling not just with other people, but common humanity, the biosphere and everything. Keltner uses the word “merging.”

In his earlier book, “Born To Be Good,” Keltner lamented the ascent of Homo economicus, the supposedly rational model of human behavior that evolved alongside laissez-faire economic doctrines and was later augmented by Richard Dawkins’ influential “Selfish Gene” theory. Keltner was dismayed by the way obsessive self-focus, supercharged by digital technologies, impacted his daughters’ teenage years. It’s a narcissistic, high-stress mindset he continues to encounter among his students in the pressure-cooker atmosphere at Berkeley.

Keltner became convinced that awe could be a counteragent to these immiserating modern neuroses. Notably, not a single respondent in Berkeley’s 26-culture study cited consumer purchases as the source of their awe-story. In “Awe,” Keltner writes: “Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition and status signaling — a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.”

At the western edge of the Berkeley campus, on the north bank of Strawberry Creek, there is a remarkable stand of trees. Eucalyptus globulus, common name Tasmanian blue gum, is a fast-growing invasive species brought to California by Australian prospectors during the Gold Rush. 

Originally planted as a windbreak for the university’s old cinder running track, the grove has since shot up to a majestic size. Some 200 feet high, it’s said to be the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America. 

Keltner and I met there on the morning after our walk in the Berkeley Hills. Shafts of sun broke through the high canopy. Dauntless squirrels harvested the ground. “It’s the light, the height, the collectivism,” Keltner said, placing a reverential palm on the base of one of the trees, where the old fibrous bark peeled back to reveal a smooth grey underlay. “I love the touch. They feel animal-like. Elephantine. And there’s something about looking up.”

Years ago, Berkeley’s eucalyptus grove was the setting for one of Keltner’s most illuminating experiments. A group of students took turns standing on the edge of the copse and staring into the trunks and branches for one minute. Another group stood in a similar spot but faced the opposite direction, towards the southern façade of Weill Hall, an austere natural sciences building.

Immediately afterward, participants completed a questionnaire. The results demonstrated a clear divergence between the two groups. Team Eucalyptus scored lower on the psychological entitlement scale, which measures egocentricity. Upon being asked to imagine how much they should be paid for their participation in the study, they asked for significantly less money. Finally, in response to a staged accident in which the experimenter dropped some pens, the eucalyptus group were observed to react more helpfully. A short burst of awe seemed to leave participants feeling more altruistic, more collaborative and less entitled.

Keltner says that these “saintly tendencies” are a gateway to understanding awe’s evolutionary purpose. Further clues are found in physiology — in the bodily responses people experience when awe takes hold. 

Think back to the last memory you have of feeling awestruck, and chances are that the sensation was “embodied.” Like Ekman’s original universal emotions, awe is often expressed by facial and physical modulations that defy cultural boundaries. During one conversation, I told Keltner about my then four-year-old daughter’s bawling reaction to the emotional climax of “Inside Out,” the Pixar movie for which he was the scientific advisor. The memory sent a shiver up my arms and Keltner spotted it (“Ah! Awe’s bodily response!”), which seemed to give him no end of glee. 

Keltner believes that the tears and chills that often follow awe are, at root, signaling strategies designed to transmit unspoken messages to other members of a social group. Tears, or welling up, signal that a person is upset, provoking compassion in others. Horripilation, better known as goosebumps, induces cognitive associations of coldness and a mammalian urge to huddle — to comingle into a cohesive whole. This strength-in-numbers impulse, Keltner hypothesizes, binds social groups in common purpose. If awe feels good, and it usually does, it’s because it is an essential mechanism for collective survival.

One afternoon, in the shade of a dense-canopied redwood in Keltner’s bosky hillside garden in north Berkeley, I asked him about the elephant in the wunderkammer. Arguably the greatest impediment Keltner faces in convincing a wider public about the far-reaching benefits of awe is a vein of modern cynicism, a sense that awe has been co-opted by a vapid culture of self-improvement and new-age psychobabble. 

Often, it can be difficult to employ the language of positive psychology without sounding gauzy or grandiose. The GGSC was originally called the Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being, but Keltner later changed it, concerned that its work wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Keltner’s the first to admit that his cause probably isn’t helped by his stereotypical mien: the hair, the laconic manner, the mythos that has grown up around his inadvertent embodiment of “Berkeley guy.” “You know, people think I surf. I don’t surf,” he said. “There’s a legend that I was in a rock-and-roll band. I’m a horrible musician.”

Awe, perhaps more than any other positive emotion, can sound corny or vague or over-earnest. It probably doesn’t help that its adjectival form, “awesome,” has been deadened by overuse. Fans of HBO’s “Succession” might recall a moment in season two when Kendall Roy stares blank-faced at a new girlfriend after she shares an awkward interaction with his father. “You said awesome a lot,” Kendall observes, in a contemptuous monotone. Minutes later, he is asking an attendant to fetch her coat.

Wonder, of course, is synonymous with innocence. It can seem antithetical to the imperatives of sober, rational adulthood. Over the last year, my seven-year-old son’s extemporaneous questions have included: “Why do people die?” and “If the Big Bang made the universe, what made the Big Bang?” Yet it shames me to admit that I have seldom properly indulged these magical inquiries. Such generational indifference, familiar to time-pressed parents of inquisitive seven-year-olds the world over, is symptomatic of a cultural tendency to conflate awe with naivety — and in so doing, to dismiss its value. 

Another strain of resistance comes from the gatekeepers of religion. More than once, Keltner has received blowback from Christian critics, who’ve said that, by attempting to demystify awe, he is diminishing God. 

“There’s this assumption that scientists don’t get to write about the sublime,” Keltner said. “I get it. Some people don’t want the tools of science to touch the numinous and the sacred. If I say I’m studying sexual desire or fight-or-flight physiology, they’re like, yeah, of course. If I say that I’m studying awe with the same tools, people assume it’s going to miss the whole phenomena.”

But what if awe manifested in ways that were less ambiguous, less subjective and more readily quantifiable? What if awe makes you better? 

Over the last three years, as epidemiologists around the world scrambled to map the morbidity and lethality of COVID-19, much of their attention alighted on cytokines: small inflammatory proteins that coordinate the immune system. In a healthy body, cytokine molecules are the vanguard of a body’s defenses against pathogenic attack, like a sailor in a ship’s crow’s nest yelling “iceberg ahead!”

If cytokine levels become chronically elevated, however, they can cause acute illness. In severe cases, COVID can catalyze a “cytokine storm,” in which an overactive immune system begins to attack the body, triggering a catastrophic chain reaction that can lead to multiple organ failures and death. 

For psychologists like Keltner, who trade in emotion, this suggested a far-reaching implication: that an individual’s susceptibility to grave or life-threatening COVID outcomes might owe something not just to their constitutional make-up, but also their emotional disposition.

Recent decades have seen a raft of research pointing to a strong correlation between chronic cytokine elevation and negative emotions like fear and shame, and to their more enduring corollaries: anxiety, alienation, depression. But studies led by Jennifer Stellar of the University of Toronto sought to establish whether the relationship held in the other direction. What effect do positive emotions have on the cytokine system? Stellar’s team concluded that several positive emotions, including joy and love, did indeed appear to predict lower levels of the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), a reliable index of inflammation levels. But the biggest predictor by far — as much as three times more than joy — was awe. 

“These findings have changed how I think about awe in my own life,” said Stellar, in a subsequent TED talk. “I used to see a walk in nature or a trip to the museum as a luxury I could rarely afford in my busy life. Now I see these experiences as essential to my mental and physical health.”

Other studies have suggested that awe — alongside another self-transcendent emotion, compassion — is the emotion most likely to activate the vagus nerve. The longest of our 12 cranial nerves, the vagus is believed to regulate the so-called gut-brain axis, the interface between the nervous system and the digestive tract. Though this science is still young, the prevailing hypothesis is that an active vagus nerve, or “healthy vagal tone,” helps to relieve depression and anxiety as well as inflammatory autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and Crohn’s disease.

While much of the data accrued in support of Keltner’s theories rested on self-reported evidence, the cold biology of these findings tends to cut through. “One of the audiences I speak to the most is medical doctors,” Keltner told me. “They traffic in the language of the body. And if you go to them and say awe lowers inflammation —” he clicked his fingers “— they start prescribing getting into nature.”

Leif Hass, a clinician at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, is one of several doctors in Keltner’s orbit who have started supplementing electronic prescriptions for meds with old-school paper prescriptions recommending feel-good activities like “Sing in the shower” and “Go for a walk in a beautiful place.” He recalls one patient from last year — mid-60s, chronic heart condition — who thanked him for saving his life: “I thought, did I give him a diuretic, some blood-pressure meds?” Hass said. “And he goes: ‘That prescription you gave me to watch the sunset. I would have never made it through this year without it.’” The patient recently told Hass that he still keeps the note on the fridge at home.

Keltner himself has witnessed no shortage of awe’s curative effects first-hand. Back in 2015, the GGSC partnered with the Sierra Club to arrange some whitewater rafting trips on the American River. A narrow tributary of the Sacramento, the American uncoils from the high snowpacks of the Sierra Nevada in a series of rapids with menacing names like “Meat Grinder” and “Satan’s Cesspool.” The participants on the expeditions included victims of tough circumstances: teenagers from deprived backgrounds from high schools in Richmond and Oakland, military veterans who were in treatment for a variety of combat-related psychological conditions. 

Prior to launch and again a week later, Berkeley psychologists asked them a range of questions to assess their state of mind. They also took before-and-after samples of saliva, from which they were able to measure levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. At the end of a day’s rafting, the cortisol level of each participant had converged with their crewmates — “merging” happening in real-time. 

In the days that followed, every participant reported an upsurge in well-being and social connection. The veterans, many of whom were terrorized by flashbacks of the horrors they’d witnessed in conflict, reported a 32% drop in symptoms associated with PTSD. Subsequent analysis revealed that the subjects associated these benefits not with joy or exhilaration, but with awe. 

“Looking up at the star-spattered sky, I thought about the universe and how infinite it is,” one veteran wrote. “It makes what I do feel less important, but the opportunity of what I could do more powerful and lightweight.”

If “inflaming problems” like anxiety and alienation can provoke an inflammatory response, awe presented itself as a potential antidote, becalming people’s neurochemistry and elevating their mood. A day spent in nature was the therapeutic equivalent of dunking an overheating body into a refreshing mountain torrent. An awe-rich person could expect to be happier, healthier and kinder: the holy trinity of good vibes.

Several months ago, when I first heard about Keltner’s science-based faith in the relationship between awe and happiness, I was intrigued. This wasn’t purely a case of academic curiosity. I felt personally invested in his findings. In many ways, finding awe has been my lifelong quest. 

I have traveled, sometimes obsessively, in pursuit of awe moments. Over time, I convinced myself that exposure to novel experience might somehow assuage my fear of premature death, which has haunted me in one form or another since my father died when I was four. Over the years, I developed a conviction that the immateriality invoked by awe helped silence the ticking clock in my mind. In the GGSC’s awe quiz, which you can take online, I scored 72/75, indicating “a high level of awe.”

For the most part, however, awe was something I incubated by chasing what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences.” Like Keltner, I have always been interested in the difficult art of happiness precisely because happiness has so often felt slippery. I was skeptical about how much awe could be corralled at will, and even more that it could be reliably cultivated in mundane contexts.

An hour after we met up in the eucalyptus stand, I watched Keltner give a talk on awe as part of Berkeley’s homecoming weekend celebrations. At the outset, as he summarized the lecture’s content, he joked: “I’ll do a little digression into psychedelics, and that will dominate the Q&A. Such is life.”

Sure enough, when Keltner opened things up to the floor, every question revolved around the relationship between awe and therapeutic interventions: psychedelics like psilocybin and ayahuasca, or procedures like transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Later, as we set off in his car across San Francisco Bay to go walking in Point Reyes, Keltner seemed uneasy. The surge in psychedelic use in America marked a revolution, he said. Much of the emergent science, which has been promulgated by his friend and former Berkeley colleague Michael Pollan, seemed encouraging.

But to emphasize the role of organic precipitants in inducing awe was to overlook Keltner’s most radical proposition. Awe wasn’t some intangible state dependent on high-wattage prompts like the Grand Canyon or magic mushrooms. It just seemed that way, because the big stuff is so amplified, and the regular moments so fugitive, that they dominate the memory. 

In reality, opportunities to feel awe are all around us — in our surroundings, our relationships, our daily lives. In Keltner’s surveys, subjects reported feeling awe an average of around twice a week. Moreover, awe is regenerative. “That was one of our most surprising discoveries — that the more you feel awe, the more it becomes omnipresent,” he said. “That runs counter to an assumption about human pleasure — that the more we eat ice cream, the less we like it. Awe is different. But you have to put the work in.”

A week later, back home in South London and keen to test the availability of “everyday awe,” I packed a bag with a day’s provisions and went to the woods alone.

Half a mile from where I live is a tract of woodland. It is a last fragment of the Great North Wood, an ancient oak forest, most of which has long since been subsumed by the expanding suburbs. I’ve been there countless times. And though it is popular with families and dog walkers, it has always felt like an oasis of unfettered nature amid the city’s bricks and concrete.

Driving back from the supermarket a few days earlier, I had seen a gate that I’d never noticed before. A small laminated sign beside it read: “Welcome to Dulwich Upper Wood.” It led into another tract of woodland, divided from the area with which I was familiar by a busy road. 

The Upper Wood? This struck me as extraordinary — that there could be another wild place so close to home that I had never set foot in. It seemed symbolic of the problem that so much of hedonic psychology — and Keltner’s work — sought to counteract: the idea that many of the best and most spiritually nourishing things in life are all too often rendered invisible by the tyrannies of time, money and force of habit.

I walked through the gate an hour before dawn. Two minutes later, I emerged to the other side. The Upper Wood turned out to be more of a spinney than a gloaming forest. It was bordered on the up-slope by a housing estate and an embankment of Victorian brick arches. For an hour or so, I walked in the tight circle of its main trail, investigating various off-ramps, until eventually, I found my way onto a path that dog-legged uphill along a concrete stairway of indeterminate age. It leveled off at a small clearing where someone had placed a bench and erected a simple balustrade. From here, the trunks and leaning boughs formed a natural aperture looking back out over the woods, with a great bifurcating oak at its center. 

I sat on the bench and tried to be present. I did my best to block out the sounds of early morning traffic and leaned in, instead, to the trills and chirrups of the dawn chorus. I tried to remember my Emerson: “In the woods, all mean egotism vanishes …”

Awe came to me that morning in many forms. Its dominant protagonist was the big oak, whose branches subdivided in a fractal pattern like the capillary system of the lungs. Looking up, I could see the upper branches waving idly in the breeze against a metal sky. Leaves spiraled groundward from its crown. 

With the onset of daylight, the birds grew raucous, then quieter. Every five minutes or so, their emissary, a red-breasted robin, landed on the balustrade to ponder my intrusion. As the day progressed, I started to see people walking along the main trail. But I realized with some delight that no one was coming up the side-path. Everyone was hastening somewhere else. 

Some of the awe I felt that day was serendipitous: the oak, the robin, the modest overview effect granted by my elevated position. But I also found that I could will it into being simply by thinking about it. There was reverence in considering this ancient wood that had outlived the great felling, and the people — hundreds over time, I guessed — who had fought for its survival in defiance of urban sprawl.

Now and again, I felt that delightful shiver. It wasn’t full-blown reverie, a dance with the divine. This was gentle and self-conjured. It was awe all the same, though. The prescription was nothing more complicated than a simple eyrie, half a mile from home, and some time to sit still.

What surprised me, I realized, was that I’d known I would find it, here in the woods. After weeks of thinking about awe, I was more attuned to its wavelength than ever. The reality was that much of what Keltner was trying to substantiate consisted of things that we know intuitively to be true. The ideas that the new science of awe illuminate — that money doesn’t bring happiness; solvitur ambulando — are timeless, axiomatic. Their antecedents recur throughout history, from the musings of antique theologians to the exhortations of flower-power bumper stickers and beyond.

That their origins were yet to be fully brought into focus suggested that they probably never would be, for all Keltner’s efforts. In the conclusion to “Awe,” he writes: “Our experiences of awe hint at faint answers to these perennial questions.” Hints and faint answers. The tension between awe and science could never be fully reconciled because, in the end, ambiguity was awe’s operating principle.

The robin lifted off on another enigmatic circuit. A spaniel ran joyfully across the forest floor, its owner in tow. The uppermost branches of the great oak waved on an unfelt breeze. And the Earth turned around the sun.

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