3 responses to “What are today’s frontiers and what is left to explore?”
Lauren Hart
In 2007 Discover magazine ran an article called, ‘The last Unexplored Place on Earth’. What was so interesting about this piece that it highlights that to discover new landscapes scientist still have to look were the naked eye cannot see. The scientist discussed in the article found a hidden landscape in Antarctica that is under ice that is ‘roughly two miles thick and a million years old.’ – Maria Gosnell. So like Cook we still dream and voyage too places we cannot see. In that sense the idea of the new frontier has not changed.
Mercy Sword
The big new frontier, also one we can’t necessarily see, is Artificial Intelligence, or AI. I was struck, seeing the beautiful works in The Art of Exploration exhibition at the NMM, at the romantic notion of explorers and exploration and how we love the idea of explorer heroes and of places of promise yet discovered. And yet reading about the reasons behind Cpt Cook’s voyages I learned how they were very much commercial as well as scientific. The paintings may seem romantic to our eyes, but the motive behind these voyages and their national backers certainly wasn’t! With my romantic hat on I was also thinking that now that the planet has been GoogleEarthed, it may seem we no longer have places on earth that are hidden and still undiscovered, or people that are not wired up and ‘connected’, like the noble savages of Cook’s and his men’s imagination. But we do have a new frontier. So back to AI! With Google again at the helm (for they are the ones at the forefront of AI research) we are yet being lead into a new frontier. And perhaps we and Cook and the British government of the time are not so different after all. We are motivated by commercial gain, and a fascination for science, for what can be discovered. As long as the robots don’t put us out of a job!
Caroline George
In this ‘scientific age’ we like to think that we have explored all that there is to explore, that our maps are complete. However, throughout history people have wanted to ‘know’ what is out there, with the certainty that brings. Captain Cook’s voyages set out to look for geographical feature which were ‘known’ to exist – the giant southern continent and e north west passage.
But there is much more left to discover than we think. The most major frontiers today are the wildest parts of the earth – rainforest, deep sea, deserts, the poles – as well as outer space. While we have these places ‘mapped’, this is often by deduction from what we do know for sure, so perhaps our assumptions will be proved wrong in the future.
Furthermore, our world is changing all the time. There may not have been a navigable north west passage in Cook’s day, but with climate change one has appeared. So exploration is also for finding out how our world is changing, from the landscape to the plants and animals within it. So exploration continues to be of scientific importance, perhaps more than ever before.
Finally, because our world is changing all the time, there are lost worlds for explorers, historians and artists to rediscover – ships, buildings or whole civilisations buried under earth and water. I saw a really interesting documentary earlier this year about the Cosquer Cave near Marseille – which is full of ancient cave paintings but now totally cut off by the sea – and the divers and archaeologists who are now using new technologies to create 3D reconstructions of the cave for a new museum.
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3 responses to “What are today’s frontiers and what is left to explore?”
In 2007 Discover magazine ran an article called, ‘The last Unexplored Place on Earth’. What was so interesting about this piece that it highlights that to discover new landscapes scientist still have to look were the naked eye cannot see. The scientist discussed in the article found a hidden landscape in Antarctica that is under ice that is ‘roughly two miles thick and a million years old.’ – Maria Gosnell. So like Cook we still dream and voyage too places we cannot see. In that sense the idea of the new frontier has not changed.
The big new frontier, also one we can’t necessarily see, is Artificial Intelligence, or AI. I was struck, seeing the beautiful works in The Art of Exploration exhibition at the NMM, at the romantic notion of explorers and exploration and how we love the idea of explorer heroes and of places of promise yet discovered. And yet reading about the reasons behind Cpt Cook’s voyages I learned how they were very much commercial as well as scientific. The paintings may seem romantic to our eyes, but the motive behind these voyages and their national backers certainly wasn’t! With my romantic hat on I was also thinking that now that the planet has been GoogleEarthed, it may seem we no longer have places on earth that are hidden and still undiscovered, or people that are not wired up and ‘connected’, like the noble savages of Cook’s and his men’s imagination. But we do have a new frontier. So back to AI! With Google again at the helm (for they are the ones at the forefront of AI research) we are yet being lead into a new frontier. And perhaps we and Cook and the British government of the time are not so different after all. We are motivated by commercial gain, and a fascination for science, for what can be discovered. As long as the robots don’t put us out of a job!
In this ‘scientific age’ we like to think that we have explored all that there is to explore, that our maps are complete. However, throughout history people have wanted to ‘know’ what is out there, with the certainty that brings. Captain Cook’s voyages set out to look for geographical feature which were ‘known’ to exist – the giant southern continent and e north west passage.
But there is much more left to discover than we think. The most major frontiers today are the wildest parts of the earth – rainforest, deep sea, deserts, the poles – as well as outer space. While we have these places ‘mapped’, this is often by deduction from what we do know for sure, so perhaps our assumptions will be proved wrong in the future.
Furthermore, our world is changing all the time. There may not have been a navigable north west passage in Cook’s day, but with climate change one has appeared. So exploration is also for finding out how our world is changing, from the landscape to the plants and animals within it. So exploration continues to be of scientific importance, perhaps more than ever before.
Finally, because our world is changing all the time, there are lost worlds for explorers, historians and artists to rediscover – ships, buildings or whole civilisations buried under earth and water. I saw a really interesting documentary earlier this year about the Cosquer Cave near Marseille – which is full of ancient cave paintings but now totally cut off by the sea – and the divers and archaeologists who are now using new technologies to create 3D reconstructions of the cave for a new museum.