Transcriber: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Denise RQ
Six years ago, I found myself standing on a very different sort of stage,
looking out into a very different sea of darkness.
I was in the middle of the vast Antarctic Plateau,
in the depths of an austral winter.
It had been four long months since I'd seen the sunlight.
The temperature was 100 degrees below zero,
and I just lost my bearings for the third time since lunch.
August at the South Pole…
there is very little resemblance to August here in Canada.
Exposed skin freezes solid in seconds,
so the only crack in my armor was to see,
a thin gap between my many hats and many scarves.
Every blink risked freezing my eyes shut, but it was worth it.
The night-time view from the highest, driest, coldest, and harshest continent
is absolutely spectacular.
That view tells a story, the story of the Universe,
and of the lengths people will go to in the name of curiosity.
I'm here to tell you that tale.
It follows two paths: one with the Universe, and one with me.
In the Antarctic,
you are not entirely cut off from the rest of the world.
A few hours each day,
you can use all geostationary satellites to communicate.
The problem is those satellites are a long way up.
A conversation carried on a beam of light takes time
to get up to them and back to the civilization.
Between question and answer, there's about a one second delay,
an awkward pause that creeps between words,
a disconnect that stops casual conversation,
undermining any real sense of human contact.
If you look further away, those delays get longer.
The Moon is 1.3 light seconds from Earth.
When Neil Armstrong took his one small step,
the hundreds of millions watching around the world
saw it 1.3 seconds after it happened.
Because light takes time to make the trip to Earth,
the viewers were seeing an event from the past.
They were looking back in time 1.3 seconds.
On astronomical scales, things get a little more serious.
The Sun is eight light minutes away.
We see it as it was eight minutes ago, an image of the past.
Our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri
- Proxima because it's so close -
is four light years away.
If there are aliens there, the Earth AC is still in 2010,
just about to invent the iPhone 4.
(Laughter)
The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is a hundred billion suns strong,
and a hundred thousand light years edge to edge.
From the farthest side, modern humans don't exist;
the Earth as seen has not evolved us yet.
I know what you're all wondering, and the answer is yes,
there is a South Pole, and yes, it's candy-striped.
(Laughter)
There are, however, no penguins at the South Pole,
and with good reason:
it's 1,200 kilometers from the coast, a barren, desolate place,
a frozen ocean, a desert of ice,
extending into the horizon in every direction.
It takes a week of travel to get there, five long flights from Pearson,
and the trip alone transforms you,
from happy-go-lucky adventure
to a sleep-deprived grizzled veteran of airports and layovers.
(Laughter)
As humans, we have a hard time dealing with scales beyond our own.
We can handle a neighborhood, maybe a city,
but larger scales, nations and continents, can be hard to absorb.
Galaxies span enormous scales.
But we can see farther, beyond our own local group,
billions of light years away,
to ancient filaments of galaxies,
stretching their way across the Universe and backwards through time.
Honestly, we have pictures of this.
That is what telescopes do all day now.
And we can see past that,
to a time before galaxies, before stars, to a dark and dead Universe.
And we can see past that.
Telescopes are more than esoteric devices,
overgrown spyglasses that let us peer at something a little farther away.
They let us see the entire history of existence laid bare before our eyes.
The furthest thing we can see is not an edge to existence
- as far as we know, space continues forever in all directions -
not an edge, but a beginning of vast encircling wall of fire.
The light from that fire is ancient. It's the oldest in the Universe.
It's been stretched and diffused for billions of years,
so that's no longer visible to human eyes,
arriving here instead, as microwave light.
With the right equipment, you can see it:
a sight from 14 billion years ago, a baby picture of the Universe.
(Laughter)
To see that light, you need a few things.
One is a camera that can detect microwaves.
Another is a desert,
because water vapor moisture absorbs microwave light.
A third is stable air.
On most of the planet,
the daily rise-set of the Sun heats and cools the atmosphere,
stirring things up.
The South Pole is an awkward, inaccessible, and uncomfortable place
to build and operate telescope,
but it is the driest place on Earth.
All the water bound up
in a three-kilometer-thick sheet of ice underfoot.
The air on top is thin and ephemeral,
and that sunrise-sunset only comes once a year.
I went to the driest place on Earth, one of the coldest places on Earth,
to see a fireball from 14 billion years ago.
The first moments of the Universe's life were spent in frenzied existence.
Space was filled with an unimaginable inferno,
and it was expanding fast.
This is the Big Bang, the thing we've all heard of,
the birth of our cosmos.
But it was growing, and as it grew, that inferno calmed;
the bang became a flame, a plasma expanding and always cooling.
Travel to and from the South Pole is only possible three months of the year,
when it's warm enough to get a plane in, warm here meaning minus 50 C.
Those three months are a mad rush of activity:
planes coming and going every day,
bearing loads of people, cargo, fuel, supplies,
and the station works 24/7 to get things ready,
because everybody knows winter is coming.
(Laughter)
The schedule is made a little bit easier by the constant sunlight.
From September through March, the Sun never sets.
Day fairly quickly loses all meaning.
I lapsed into a 36-hour rhythm,
working for 24 until I could no longer stand,
then collapsing, sleeping for 12.
Others on station developed chronic insomnia, narcolepsy,
awake or asleep for days on end.
Meanwhile, 14 billion light years away, or, if you prefer, 14 billion years ago,
the fiery birth of our Universe is continuing.
Shock waves crisscross through the plasma,
emanating from quantum disturbances in the first instance of time,
laying in the blueprints for everything to come.
The growth spurt continued, the Universe still engulfed in flame,
until, quite suddenly, all that growth cooled things off too much.
The fire winked out, technically the plasma recombined,
matter no longer able to see or feel the light that filled the Universe.
That light is the reason I went to the South Pole.
It's the reason I found myself one frigid day in February
waving as the last flight departed.
There's a moment, as that plane disappears into the distance, when it clicks,
the reality of the situation hits home:
you're trapped,
isolated for the next nine months with a few dozen strangers
and nothing but good manners
to keep your world from becoming "Lord of the Flies".
(Laughter)
That first evening,
it's traditional for everyone to gather in the gym to watch "The Thing".
(Laughter)
It's a horror movie from the 80s
about an alien that kills everyone at the South Pole.
It's good for morale.
(Laughter)
A month after last flight, we celebrated sunset,
and the temperature began to plummet.
Our world frosted over overnight, temperature dropping to -50, -60, -70 C.
Over the next two weeks, twilight faded, and we were plunged into darkness.
Then came the auroras, stretching from horizon to horizon.
They became our near, constant companions,
bathing the Earth in their eerie green light.
The temperature continued to drop,
and the days took on a similar aspect: cold, dark, and unchanging.
My daily commute, a one-kilometer trudge
through the icy blackness from station to telescope,
began as an adventure of foray into a dangerous, but beautiful landscape.
Over time, it became the norm -
just another day in the dark,
auroras overhead,
and galaxies somewhere off in the distance.
The Universe's dark ages were a time of relative calm.
The initial conflagration had ended, and space was filled with a diffuse gas.
There was no life, no planets, no dust, nothing solid.
Galaxies and stars hadn't yet come into being,
but things had begun to gather
under the gentle, but ever-present tug of gravity.
Enormous structures grew, large enough to birth 1,000 galaxies,
and these spun into a vast cosmic web.
Hundreds of millions of years passed in darkness,
gas slowly collapsing, coalescing.
Now, what's good for science is not always good for people.
The air at the South Pole dries everything.
It desiccates your skin, turning it papery and fragile
so that it tears when you reach in a pocket,
and then never fully heals; healing takes moisture.
You might think that reprieve would come with a hot shower,
but even with 60% of the world's freshwater underfoot,
there's a strict limit: two showers a week, two minutes each.
That ice is cold, and it costs precious fuel to melt.
By August, Pole had taken its toll on me.
The cold, and the dark, the isolation, and the repetition
had worn me down.
I was in Poly speak "toasty".
Toast is a sort of extreme cabin fever experienced in the Antarctic,
a psychosis that sets in after too many months without scenery,
without novelty, without variation.
Fully toasty people alternate
between desperately seeking the company of the rest of world,
desperately avoiding the rest of the world,
and being furiously angry at the rest of the world.
(Laughter)
Anything can set off a toasty winter over.
One particularly memorable dinner:
one of us just missed the last piece of coconut shrimp.
(Laughter)
He spent the next five minutes in an expletive-laden diatribes,
screamed at the galley full of people.
Incidentally, in mid-winter,
it's traditional for everyone to gather again in the gym,
this time to watch "The Shining"
(Laughter)
to empathize.
(Laughter)
The Sun reasserted itself in late August,
first appearing as a pink, then orange, slowly tracing its way along the horizon.
As it rose, the brilliance overwhelmed.
The glow unmade the darkness that had become our home.
The first direct rays shook my mind.
Contrast returned;
the world changed from black-and-white back into color.
The birth of the first stars marked a similar transition for the Universe,
filling space again with light.
They burned hot and fast, furiously forging the elements.
In death, they underwent cataclysmic explosions,
scattering their ashes far and wide.
Those ashes mixed with other gas, and gravity again collapsed them,
forming a new generation of stars,
new furnaces for the further enrichment of the cosmos.
Billions of years rolled by,
and in the disks of some newly-forming stars,
lumps began to form out of the ash and the dust.
Those lumps crashed together;
some form the cores of rocky planets,
some of those were later bombarded by comets, layering them with water,
and on at least one of them, molecules began replicating.
Time continued to roll by, and those molecules ganged together,
achieving enough complexity to stand up, wander around,
give TEDx talks, and look out and wonder where we came from.
(Laughter)
The first freshies, fresh fruit and veggies,
arrived with a preseason flight in late October,
and I will celebrate that moment until the day that I die.
I have never before, nor since,
tasted anything so sweet as that first slice of pineapple.
After living without color, without taste, without smell for eight months,
fresh fruit was pure ambrosia, and in eating it, I rediscovered food,
experiencing it in a way that I hadn't my entire adult life.
Still, in our toastiness,
the arrival of the new people began to take on a sinister tone.
Through winter we've bonded, we had become a family,
and they were "the other", strange, orange people, skin-tanned and healthy
(Laughter)
coming to tear our community apart.
Our rescuers had become a threat, and they could see it in our eyes.
Summer-folk had known to leave the toasty winter-overs alone.
I've told you a creation story, a history of existence.
What sets this one apart
from all the thousands that have come before
is that it's always been subject to challenge and revision.
It's based on evidence. I mean, we've watched it happen.
There are parts I haven't told you,
the mysterious dark matter, 5 times more common in the regular staff,
even stranger dark energy,
which seems to be inflating the Universe, tearing space itself apart.
We don't know yet where it land,
but for now, don't worry; it's billions of years down the road.
I'd been living for a year without contrast
and returned to a foreign land.
We stumbled blinking into the New Zealand's summer,
a world full of vibrancy and life, unlike anything we were ready for.
That world was terrifying.
Everything moved too quickly, so much going on, people everywhere,
the Sun rising and setting every bloody day.
(Laughter)
The real world, real life washed over us,
inundating us with a hundred daily stresses and concerns.
In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy",
Douglas Adams posits a machine, the Infinite Perspective Vortex,
which shows its occupant their true insignificance
in relation to the vastness of the rest of the Universe.
It's portrayed as the most heinous known form of torture,
and it's more or less my day job.
Cosmology has offered us a spectacular and powerful window on existence.
We've seen across the Universe and back to the dawn of time.
The enormity of that space, of the history, can seem overwhelming,
relegating us to a petty and insignificant corner of reality.
Living for a year without sunlight, without warmth, without contrast,
proved equally overwhelming for me.
It broke down my defenses, my body, my mind.
But we are a curious species. We consume knowledge, and it changes us.
When I looked out at the Universe, then back to Earth,
when I lived at the South Pole and came back to civilization,
it was new perspective.
By putting ourselves out there,
by reaching beyond our comfort zones and grasping at a larger picture,
we can expand our horizons, see newness in the familiar.
By exploring, we find ourselves.
(Applause)