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Out in the desert,

I became a better athlete
than I ever was before.

It was not uncommon for me
to run 250 miles a week.

Two hundred
and fifty miles a week

is a thousand miles a month.

Twelve months,

that's 12,000 miles right there.

When I started
to lose my eyesight,

I kept pushing and pushing.

And after a couple of years,

I've honed myself
to run across Death Valley.

My purpose
was to start at Badwater

and go roughly 150 miles
to the summit of Mount Whitney.

It had never been done before.

My very dear friend,

David, and I started
training together.

But one of the things
David didn't do

was the heat training.

Going down to Death Valley
the first time in 1974,

we started at four o'clock
in the morning.

Dave came down with heat stroke
after about 18 miles.

If you get heat stroke,
the clock is ticking.

At Furnace Creek,
we put David in the bathtub.

I put over 100 pounds
of ice on him.

And there were people there,

and they said
they'd take care of him.

So then I took off
and started running.

The only thing I could think of

was that my good friend
was dying.

His temperature,
core temperature, was over 104.

So I stopped.

It took him over a year,
over a year before he recovered.

That's how close
he was to dying.

And that's the reason why
I didn't make it the first time.

The second time
I went down there,

I showed Death Valley absolutely
no respect whatsoever.

I figured I'm gonna
go back and kill it.

I ran a mile
in under six minutes

in that attempt.

I was charging
instead of taking it easy.

And after 40, 50 miles,

I learned real fast
who was the boss.

You don't charge Death Valley.

You treat Death Valley
the same way you do

when you're making a meringue.

If you go too fast,
the whole thing will collapse.

It's not so hard physically.

What's really hard
is mentally, to slow down.

It had never been done before.

It wasn't important
how fast I did it.

Bristlecone pines live
in a pretty high altitude

near Death Valley.

The bristlecone pines survive
where other things wouldn't

because they are slowing down

to a painstakingly slow
growth rate.

The bristlecone pines
are so beautiful

because you really
can see their struggle

is sort of inherent
in their forms.

So it's almost like

you can watch
their movement over time

and understand that
they really want to live.

There's a...

There's a sense of doing
whatever it takes to survive

in a pretty harsh environment.

It actually wasn't
until the '60s

that people knew
that they were that old.

A grad student
had lost his coring bit

in the middle of a tree,
and the Forest Service said,

"Well, just go ahead
and cut it down.

There's plenty of them."

And it turned out he cut down

what ended up being
the oldest known tree

in the world, at the time,
that was the Prometheus tree.

The oldest bristlecone pines
are over 5,000 years old.

The oldest unitary organisms
on the planet.

It's really interesting to think

about what was going on
in history at that time,

the invention of the wheel...

and cuneiform,
the first written language.

So it really actually demarcates
the beginning of human history.

I had been working
on a lot of landscape work

that was about the relationship
between humanity and nature.

And I got an invitation
to visit some friends in Japan.

I took the advice

that several people
had given to me,

which was, if you're
interested in nature,

you should go visit
the 7,000-year-old tree.

And it's on this remote island
called Yakushima.

I just bought a new camera.

It was a medium format
film camera,

and I photographed it.

But I had no idea when I started

that it would be
a ten-year endeavor

photographing
the oldest living things.

Looking for things

that were continuously living
for 2,000 years and longer.

Two thousand, being, you know,
why is it 2018 right now,

like, isn't it, you know,
4,500,002,018?

Like really trying
to create this framework

for understanding
human timekeeping.

So, initially, I thought,

"Oh, I'll find somebody
who's going to partner with me,

an evolutionary biologist."

They said, "Well, look
at what you're doing.

It's really broad.

This is not something
that one scientist

would ever claim expertise at."

That was the first moment
when I realized

I would have to be the expert.

It was thrilling to learn

that there were
so many organisms

that have been alive
for 2,000 years or longer.

I had no idea.

The honey mushroom

is a 2,400-year-old
humongous fungus

that lives almost
entirely underground

that is actually
the largest organism

in the world.

Its unique footprint,
if you will,

is that it will kill trees
in this circular pattern,

and so that's known
as Armillaria Death Rings.

And it's quite clever

because it doesn't
kill the trees

until after they've reached
reproductive age.

So thereby, it's ensuring

that it will continue
to have a food supply.

There's an 80,000-year-old
clonal colony

of aspen trees in Utah.

It's known as Pando,
and this is fascinating

because what looks like a forest
is essentially one tree.

Like 106 acres in size.

And what I mean by that

is that it's this giant
interconnected root system,

and each tree is actually a stem
coming up from that system.

This whole system communicates
with all parts of itself.

So, you know,
if one section needs water,

an area that has more water

can send it
through the root system

to the place that needs it

or likewise nutrients
or warning signs.

I was surprised to learn
that there were any animals

that were over 2,000 years old,

and it turns out
there's several.

In Antarctica, there's
the volcano sponge,

some of which are thought
to be up to 15,000 years old.

The one that I got
to photograph, however,

I had to learn to scuba dive
for that, around 60 feet deep.

It actually took my breath away

seeing this just
enormous creature.

It almost looked like
some lost meteorite

at the bottom of the sea.

What are the things
that connect these organisms

that seem so different?

I came to understand
that fast and furious

is not the way to live and grow.

Map lichens in Greenland

grow one centimeter
every 100 years.

The continents are actually
drifting away from each other

faster than these lichens
are growing.

A number
of the oldest living things

thrive in a pretty
harsh environment.

Not in spite of this
harsh environment they live in,

but because of it.

And the Atacama Desert
is really one of my favorites.

It has seen almost no rainfall
in all of recorded history.

I drove from the coast

to farther and farther up this,
you know, tremendous elevation,

and it just gets drier
and drier and more desolate,

and truly, you could be
on another planet.

I was there in search
of the llareta plants.

They look like moss over rocks,
but they're actually shrubs.

So they're made up of thousands

of these really
tightly compressed branches,

and they're so dense
you could actually sit or stand

on top of them.

But, at that altitude,
you're likely

to fall over from dizziness,
so I don't recommend it.

And who knows what else exists?

We've really only
scratched the surface

of understanding
what's on our own planet,

let alone looking out
to the rest of the universe.

We are all living
in a base camp here

in the middle of the desert.

The driest desert of the world.

This is the weather
that astronomers like.

So we see back in time

where no visible light
is emitted.

Imagine light
that began traveling

and coming towards us

from eight billion
light years away.

Through empty space,
this light travels

unimpeded by anything,
untouched,

and then it hits Earth,

and there's this very thin layer
of Earth's atmosphere,

which can completely destroy
that light.

This layer is the reason
why we can't look further

and further into the universe,

further and further
back in time.

One of the ways in which
we can do that on earth

is to go up
to the Atacama Desert

in the Chilean Andes,

where you're above
most of the dense layers

of Earth's atmosphere.

And, to me, it's really amazing
that these ancient lands

have been chosen as the site

to look nearly
to the beginning of time

when the first stars
were being born.

The VLT is made
of four telescopes,

the largest mirrors ever made

from a monolithic piece
of glass.

And the surface
had to be so precise.

Imagine grinding
a city like Paris down,

so that the only bumps left
are about a millimeter high.

That's the kind of precision

that they needed
for the kind of astronomy

that we need to do now.

These telescopes
have become so sensitive,

and the kind of things
that we are studying

have become so faint

that astronomers are essentially

in search of very,
very special land

that is completely radio-quiet.

Which means no interference

from television towers,
mobile phones,

transmission from airplanes,
radios, urban centers.

And that's what set me
on journeys

to these very extreme locations
all over the Earth.

These amazing places,
which in themselves are poetic

where there was extreme physics
being done.

And also, to share
this sense that I have

of what physics can do to us
as human beings,

not in terms of the knowledge,

just simply in terms
of how it makes us feel.

And I wanted a way
of exploring that feeling.

A certain comprehension
of an infinity.

How immense everything is.

That we are part of it

and probably a very tiny dot
in this vast scheme of things.

The Hanle Observatory lies

in one of the remotest regions
of India.

One of the remotest regions
in the Indian Himalayas.

There are almost
no people there.

It's quite an impressive,
remote, cold, beautiful place.

When I was standing
on top of Mount Saraswati,

which is the hill on which
the telescope has been built,

looking across the valley floor,
perched really precariously

at the other end of the valley

was this 400-year-old
Buddhist monastery.

The thing
that became clear there,

looking at the monastery
from the telescope,

was that both monks
and cosmologists need silence.

It's because of this silence

that we are able to look
deeper into the cosmos,

and further back in time.

We need to preserve
these places on Earth

because if we don't,
then we'll end up on a planet

that is so noisy...

from television towers,
mobile phones,

or light pollution,
which is a kind of noise,

that we will be stranded
in this cosmos

without an ability
to look outwards

to understand
our very beginnings

and maybe understand
where we are headed.

We live in a very busy world

that doesn't foster silence.

My childhood backyard
was an ancient coral reef

many, many millennia back.

It's like a cathedral.

A place of great beauty
and silence.

It's easier to capture
the evidence

of some of the old passages
of time here...

through the fossilized
crustaceans of the mountains,

through the pictographs
that remain on those rocks,

highly polished
ancient mammoth rubbings,

known trails
from early settlers.

So there's this beautiful echo
of what's passed through

and I like to think about
the people that came

way before my own
passing through

that their echoes
are still here as well.

I've been a founding member
of Paul's Out of Eden Walk.

He conceived of the idea

while he was walking
across this landscape.

I got this idea
on this ranch in West Texas

where I was doing a little help

with the local vaqueros,
the local cowboys.

In the mid to late '90s,

the genetic revolution
was just taking off in a big way

and scientists were able
to start extracting

very useful information
about ancient migrations,

which you could, you know,
you can trace through our DNA.

I thought, "What if I
retrace the route

of the first human beings
who walked out of Africa...

to recreate
the first primordial walk

that we made across the world?"

The first discovery of the world
by the first Homo sapiens,

the first exploration
of the Earth

back in the Stone Age.

I drew out the map
of the intended global trail

about 20,000 plus miles on foot

from Ethiopia to the tip
of South America,

Tierra del Fuego,

which scientists tell us
is the last virgin beach

that our ancestors reached
about 7,000 years ago.

- Okay. Go ahead.
- All right.

I've been
a foreign correspondent

for the past 15 years.

Foreign correspondents
normally cover stories

as they happen.

They fly to story A
and they fly to story B.

What this project hopes to do

is connect the spaces
in between.

And the argument there
is that there are hidden links

between major stories of our day
that never get covered

because we simply don't
slow down enough to see them.

Paul's walk comes
at a time when journalism

is pressed on all sides
by short attention span

because of the immediacy

of the Digital Age
and the internet.

We're still carrying
around a Pleistocene brain

that absorbs information
and processes the world

at the pace of walking,
at three miles an hour.

Do you remember
what Linda's reaction was?

Uh-huh.

Over a cup of coffee,

maybe not even looking up
from a newspaper or a book

and just saying, "Uh-huh,

so you're gonna walk
around the world?

All right. That sounds good."

Again, she knows me.

When I was 14, I walked
across the Sierra Nevadas alone.

Later, across Papua New Guinea
and through Alaska,

just living off a rifle.

He had walked from the border
of Arizona to Mexico City,

retracing the footsteps
of an early Victorian explorer,

took a packed mule,

and that took something
like nine months.

So then, it was not
too big of a leap

to jump into a dugout canoe,

a pirogue, to float down
the Congo River for weeks,

to tell the story
of the Congo Civil War.

Or to walk away

from a broken down
Russian Jeep in Afghanistan

and walk and ride horses

over the Hindu Kush
through hip-deep snow,

to get to the front lines
of the Afghan War.

I think whether
we realize it or not,

we're all on some form
of pilgrimage,

and that includes
commuting to work,

you know,
these micro migrations,

even those
are a form of pilgrimage.

Um...

And it's our task maybe
to find the meaning under them.

Being fearless
is important for anyone

who is trying to do something
of the unknown.

So I started
to extend my training,

acclimating my body
to temperatures.

For example, I rode

a stationary bicycle
in the sauna.

The air temperature
was 165 for 10 hours.

I made sure that my skin
did not touch the bike

because it would've been like
a soldering iron,

I would have scourged myself.

I didn't know I had
this capacity.

I did not know.

Ten hours is a long time,

but it's not two,
it's not three days.

I wanted to know
how much I can take.

All the pain that I inflicted
to find out about myself,

each step pushing the boundaries
further and further.

It took me 4 years
and 15,000 miles.

And then I started thinking,
you know,

"Maybe I can run Death Valley."

I headed North
across the Panamint Desert.

The temperature
was climbing and climbing,

and I lost visual contact
with the surrounding mountains.

I have glaucoma.
I can only see so much.

I knew where the sun
was supposed to be.

Following the sun,
I repositioned myself.

Focused on it, I almost
became hypnotized to it.

I had to pay attention
to my footing.

I was by myself,
my life depended on it.

Before setting out
in December of 2012,

I went down to the finish line
to meet the last native speaker

of her indigenous language
in that part of the world.

So I spent a day
with her at her cabin

next to the Beagle Channel
in Chile.

This is just across the channel
from Argentina,

listening to her talk,

and she would walk around
and say, you know,

a canoe is this,

and a rock is this,
and the river is this.

Recording this language

is a form of gathering
a precious stone

at this point in time

where language
is about to wink out,

to carry with me
across the world.

To remind myself
partly why I'm doing this

because this project is rooted
in the bedrock of history.

And, in that sense,
it's also an act of remembering.

And I just wanted
to remember her

as I walk towards her.

I don't know
if she'll still be there

I don't know. When I get there,
she was quite old.

I had first photographed

the 3,500-year-old
bald cypress tree

just outside of Orlando
in 2007, I believe.

A few years ago,

some kids snuck in
to do drugs inside the tree,

and they actually set it
on fire from the inside out,

and then posted about it
on Facebook

and got caught, thankfully,

but it was actually on fire
for over a week

before anyone knew.

It was impossible to save.

There it was,
smoldering and dead.

It really changed my perspective

about everything
that I was doing.

It was a very painful reminder
that just because something

is incredibly old, does not mean
that it's immortal.

In South Africa,
a researcher I was speaking with

introduced me to something

that are collectively known
as the underground forests.

That area is very prone to fire,
and what these trees did

was basically migrate

the bulk of their structures
underground.

And that way, when the fires
inevitably come through,

it just singes the top
of the leaves off,

which they can easily reproduce.

And so I visited 1 that was
around 13,000 years old,

that's been around
since mastodons

and saber tooth tigers
when humans started farming.

However, a few years later,

I was informed that it
had been destroyed

when they decided
to change the traffic patterns

outside of the garden
and paved right over it.

It hit another note of the chord

of what it means
to be looking at time.

The whole point
of the project, really,

was to create a relationship

with timescales
that are far removed

from our normal
human experience,

and by doing so,
to create a relationship

with that time that's personal.

When you see something
that's alive, that's alive now,

that you can have
an interaction with

and has experienced 80,000 years
of the world's history

leading up to this moment
that you meet it,

and then on the other end
of the spectrum,

you have the click
of the shutter of a camera,

so a 60th of a second.

And then, somewhere
in between those two,

we somehow then
all come together

to share this moment.

And, to me, that's a way

to start looking at time
with a different perspective.

Even though we are part
of this giant continuum,

it's actually a reminder
to look at the small moments

that make up the fabric
of the time

that we all spend here.

One of the places where some

of the oldest Homo sapiens
fossils have been found

is the Rift Valley of Ethiopia.

Bones about 156,000 years old.

So I chose that
as my starting line

back in January of 2013,

and walked away
from that boneyard,

up the Rift Valley of Africa.

The Afar Region
where Paul started

requires every bit
of forethought

and planning to survive.

I'm grateful that I
was able to join Paul

seeing him
take the first few steps.

As we continue to know

each other,
our paths have, um...

They converge and diverge.

He has been trying
to understand the world

and who we are
through the soles of his feet.

The antidote to instant news
and abbreviated viewpoint.

In my case, my path has to move

through a level of abstraction
to pursue those questions.

For a period of time,
we knew each other

in the template
of a traditional marriage.

Though our practices
are vastly different,

what we share is appreciation

for slowing down
and seeing the invisible.

But I suppose one of the more
harrowing moments for me

uh, was when Paul was abducted
along the Sudan-Chad border

in 2006, and he went missing.

There's always
the element of risk

because Paul does not shy away
from challenging stories.

So you wonder, "Are you going
to see this person again

as they walk off
into the Afar desert?"

We were moving
in opposite directions now.

I saw horrible things

about how we treat each other
as human beings

in my career as a war reporter.

But walking has given me hope

about our generally
messed up species.

Walking creates bonds,
you get to know people.

You talk about your life
with each other.

It's a bridge
to that person's mind and heart,

to their cosmos.

On this journey, though,
across continents,

I hoped that things
were gonna be okay.

It was a physically demanding
starting line to the journey.

Temperatures were extreme.

The very first days
of the journey

were defined
by this harsh reality

of walking
through a drying landscape

where pastoral groups
were fighting each other

over shrinking pasture lands
and drying water holes.

So it became the war story
almost immediately.

And they were, in fact,
killing each other.

So we have actually walked
through the Rift Valley

along a very strange
snaking route

that if you took
like a satellite picture

would seem nonsensical
because there was no barrier,

but they were following

these invisible edges
of conflict zones

that most people couldn't see
that were invisible to the eye,

but were as real
as any trench works,

you know, on front lines
of any war.

And I remember
we had to kind of do

a silent camp one night
without fire,

so as not to be spotted
to get through a danger zone

before anybody noticed us.

Climate change,

it's a very difficult thing
to convey to people

because it appears
to be moving so slowly.

It's an incremental calamity.

But when you're walking,
you have no choice,

but to experience it
through your own body

in ways that reading
about it never will,

or looking at equations
never will,

or hearing politicians
lie about it never will.

And sure enough, after crossing
the Djibouti border,

we stumbled across men, women,
and children who didn't make it.

A couple days ago,
we found the bodies

of seven migrants in the desert.

They died of thirst,

trying to reach Saudi Arabia.

And they were
just one ridge line away

from reaching the Red Sea,

their watery finish line
to get out of the desert.

It's made my own journey
seem... frivolous.

So I'll just ask
the question again.

Okay.

Abdi Nasir, it took you
one week to walk here.

What did you...
Is the journey worth the danger?

Is the journey worth
going to Saudi Arabia

when people are dying?

I was stuck in the port
of Djibouti for six weeks,

because I couldn't convince
a commercial cargo ship

to take on a passenger,

with the risk of being attacked
by Somali Pirates.

There's been
a lot of murder out at sea.

Piracy is like a lottery

for poor people
that are starving,

and they're ready
to risk their lives, you know.

- They're desperate.
- Yeah.

Maybe I'll see you
in Saudi Arabia.

I should come to Ali

because I've been trying
for a month to get a boat,

and I can't find a boat,
so, Ali, I might need your help.

I wasn't getting a visa
to walk through Eritrea.

We've been waiting
on a visa for four months.

It wasn't coming through.

I'm a 56-year-old man,

and I don't have forever
to accomplish this.

It's unfortunate
because some of these countries

are just magnificent
in terms of cultural resources,

and they're important pieces

of the puzzle
of human migration.

Political borders have been
the biggest obstacle.

There's no question about it.

I've had to do
what our ancestors did

when they hit a glacier,
they had to walk around it.

We've always been grasping
for something beyond our reach.

The journey itself
makes us human.

I didn't have to travel
only to mountaintops.

The questions that we're asking,
understanding ourselves,

understanding the history
of the universe,

have become so difficult
to answer

that we require
massive experiments

all being done in some
very extreme locations

because of the sensitivity
that you need

to even begin
answering these questions.

Dark matter may be
the scaffolding of the universe.

We don't see it, but it's there.

It's what draws
visible matter into place.

But there's much more of it

than there is
of the visible matter.

It represents 85% of the matter
in the universe, we believe.

And we don't know what it is.

Dark matter will pass
right through an atom.

What are you going to build

that's going to actually capture
one of these particles?

You need about half a mile
of rock or more to shield you

from all the particle noise

that will create the same signal
on the surface.

Even after you've gone
half a mile underground,

humans are radioactive enough
that if you stand near one

of these detectors,
it could go off

as if a dark matter particle
had hit your detectors.

We know lead can shield us
from radioactivity,

but new lead itself
is radioactive.

What these physicists did
is they found some lead

that had been salvaged
from a ship

that had sank
off the coast of France

in the 18th century.

These are the kinds of lengths
that they've gone to,

to build a detector
that is completely shielded,

so that it can detect
this very, very tiny signal

of a dark matter particle.

Most theories suggest
that at very, very small scales,

the structure of space-time
is not completely smooth.

It might be frothy.

How would you find
such a structure?

Theory tells us
that neutrinos are particles

that will interact with
the structure of space-time.

Some of the earlier
neutrino detectors

were essentially
large tanks of water

that were lined
with photomultiplier tubes

put inside mines looking
for the flash of blue light

that happens when a neutrino
hits a water molecule.

And in order to have any chance
of detecting them,

you need larger
and larger volumes of water.

The Russians came up
with a really ingenious way

of addressing this problem.

Lake Baikal has 20%

of the world's
unfrozen freshwater.

It's tucked away
in a remote corner of Siberia,

deep enough to submerge
three Empire State Buildings

and not see a trace of them.

So they wait for the lake
to completely freeze over.

When the ice is about
a meter thick all across,

they use that ice as a platform,

send in divers and use
the lake itself as a detector.

They have about two months
in which they can do this work

before the ice starts cracking

and it becomes dangerous
to be on the ice.

Even to get to the experiment,
you have to ride over this ice

for about 40 kilometers,

scouting for zones of good ice
on which they can drive.

One of the challenges of doing
neutrino physics in a lake

is that for every neutrino,

there are about a billion
cosmic-ray muons

that also hit the water,

also creating the same kind
of blue light.

So one solution
is to go deep down,

so that you can use the water

as a shield
against the cosmic-ray muons.

But even at the depth
of about a kilometer,

the cosmic-ray muons
will outnumber by 1,000 to 1.

So the neutrino physicists
have come up

with a very ingenious solution.

It so happens
that cosmic-ray muons

cannot go through rock,
but neutrinos can.

So imagine now that you're
looking at neutrinos

that are coming from
the other side of the earth,

and hitting the bottom
of Lake Baikal.

So you're essentially using
the entire planet

as a shield against the noisy
cosmic-ray muons,

and you're creating
a zone of silence

just at the bottom
of Lake Baikal.

Out in the desert,
there was just no noise.

It was just my world of silence.

I have no clue
why I do these things.

Losing my eyesight,

I saw better within
than I ever saw before.

The real world was blurred,

so I went with seeing
from with inside.

That enabled me to run
for phenomenal distances.

One foot in front of another,
mile after mile.

During the night,
I had to keep moving.

I kept focused on the white line
that was on the road.

And that white line
always kept me focused

as to where I'm going...

until that moon started
to climb over the peak.

I arrived in Saudi Arabia
on a Syrian cargo ship

that was carrying 9,000 sheep
and 800 camels from Africa.

To be able to walk
through this part of the world

that has been so closed off
for centuries, actually,

was pretty remarkable.

What do you think
makes people so restless?

You know, my project
is about discovery.

It's about humankind's
natural impulse

to always look
over the next mountain,

cross the Bab el-Mandeb.

What's your philosophy,

your theory about why
we're that way?

I think it's mankind's nature.

And I think our Bab el-Mandeb
now is outer space.

We have walked two days

out of the vast
port city of Jeddah.

Ahead, the long austere
salt plains of the Hejaz coast,

a white ramp that leads
700 miles north to Jordan.

A strip of Saudi Arabia

not traversed
by an outside traveler on foot

since the days
of Lawrence of Arabia.

The photos I captured
of the Arabian Hajj trail system

may be the first ever taken

of those particular stretches
of the network,

at least since cars
began bumping down

old caravan trails
in the early 1940s.

And already, we are lost.

Modern day Saudi Arabia
has lost so much memory

beneath sleek highways,
parking lots, hotels, malls.

Saudi Arabia
is a more urbanized society

than the United States today.

Because they've had oil wealth,

they live in these
westernized bubbles.

Cars with rolled-up windows.

And herein lies a paradox.

As our species
becomes more successful,

more populous,

we fracture the world
into ever tighter panoramas,

into countries,

provinces,

neighborhoods,

houses,

private space.

In this way, a proportionally
larger share of the planet

becomes alien, exotic,
threatening, unknown.

In a sense, the car
has become a prosthetic

for a world that is no longer
human in scale.

On foot, I have reconnected
with fellow human beings

in ways I could never conceive

as a reporter crisscrossing maps
by jet and car.

Out walking,
I constantly meet people.

Mm, that's good.

I cannot ignore them
or drive by them.

I chat with strangers
5, 10, 20 times a day,

people unlike me,

who carry very different ideas
and universes

inside of their heads.

It's the opposite

of the echo chambers
of the internet.

It's the difference
between a tweet

that's exchanged
at the speed of electrons

and a heart to heart
that can change your life.

I'm not just talking about
walking across the world,

I'm listening my way across it.

In this way, walking
builds a home everywhere.

Scientists who have strapped
GPS devices

to the world's last
hunter-gatherers report

that the typical male forager
walks about seven miles a day,

like walking annually
from New York to Los Angeles.

This is roughly the distance
I'm covering year to year.

It's normal.

It's sitting down
that's actually insane.

We do way too much of it.

It makes us sick
with depression,

addiction,
and attention deficit disorders.

All motorized societies

classify walkers
as suspicious beings.

I personally
have encountered hundreds

cast up everywhere like flotsam,

escapees from the wrath

of nationalist mobs
in the cities.

They put me up
in their grubby tents.

More than half
were women and children.

I'm in a valley
called Wadi Natuf.

The first human beings
to ever stop walking

took up residence in a cave here
10,000 to 13,000 years ago.

They concocted
a world-changing idea, home.

No longer was all
movement worship.

Meaning, not to mention God,
began to assume a fixed address.

A Czech novelist,
Milan Kundera, once wrote,

"The struggle of man
against power

is the struggle of memory
against forgetting."

As we set out on this project,
the lives of 2.3 billion people,

a third
of the world's population,

are potentially linked
through electronic devices.

By the time this walk ends
in Tierra del Fuego,

that global connectivity
may very well be complete.

Wireless messages
are soaring above us,

crisscrossing the world
at the speed of light.

What impressions
will they leave behind

that resonate with human beings
50,000 years from now?

Will they be beautiful
or even worth a glance?

I find ancient petroglyphs

scattered throughout
the landscape.

I try to capture their facsimile
with a digital camera,

a tool whose only record,
electronic zeros and ones,

won't last even 20 years,
much less 20 centuries.

We are the ghosts.

So the oldest
living thing that we know of...

is some bacteria living
in the Siberian permafrost...

doing DNA repair below freezing,

meaning that it's not dormant.

It's been living
and growing there

below freezing
for half a million years.

So I made images of the bacteria
under the microscope,

and it turns out no one
had done that before.

There are stromatolite fossils
all over the world.

The stromatolites date back
to 3.5 billion years ago.

The stromatolites
actually did the job

of oxygenating our atmosphere.

It took 900 million years.

So I'd like to say, you know,

"The next time you take
a breath, thank a stromatolite."

The oldest colony is living
in Western Australia.

Astrobiologists have studied
this idea of bacteria

potentially having piggybacked
in on a meteorite

and landed on Earth somewhere,

and it turns out
there's a meteor impact site

right over the crest
of the beach

where I photographed
the stromatolites.

So I'm not saying that's
where life on Earth began,

but it's certainly really fun

to try to start
to puzzle that out.

I had an opportunity
to visit CERN

where fascinating questions

that would answer
so many things for us

are being explored.

What is the nature
of the universe?

Can we replicate the moments
after the Big Bang?

What happened
in the depths of time

that we wouldn't normally have
any relationship to otherwise?

The Large Hadron Collider
is where you get a sense

of how extreme
these detectors are.

When you actually enter
the caverns that house

the world's biggest machine...

the coldest thing
in the universe.

Colder than outer space.

At CERN, we built a machine

that's the size of a city,

recreating the kind
of high energy environment

that has not existed
in the universe

since a fraction of a trillionth
of a second after the Big Bang.

What we're looking for is the
genetic code of the universe.

This is a device

with 80 million channels
of electronics.

It uses one full year

of the planet's production
of helium to run.

Magnets have had to be developed

250,000 times the strength
of the Earth's magnetic field.

It's like a racetrack
spread out over 27 kilometers,

and you have particles

that are moving close
to the speed of light.

They're going around
11,000 times per second,

and they collide
in a very small space

finer than a human hair.

The equivalent
to firing knitting needles

from Europe and from America,

and having them collide head-on
midway over the Atlantic.

If you put enough energy
into a collision,

you can create particles
out of nothing.

We seem to need
17 particle types

to build a universe.

I was elected the leader
of the experiment

to search for the Higgs.

It has been called
the "God Particle"

because we require atoms.

Atoms are what builds
the structure

of everything we have,
including ourselves.

And without the Higgs,
there would be no atoms.

We're producing
200 million collisions a second.

This is huge.

And this
is a worldwide enterprise

to pick out the interesting one.

Down the hallway for me,

Tim Berners-Lee developed
the World Wide Web

for us to coordinate
all this information.

We built the LHC
as a collaboration

of 178 Institutes worldwide,
40 countries.

That's something
our civilization

may be known for, as one
of the key things we've done.

We keep extending
into new regions,

beyond our imagination.

Extra dimensions,
the fabric of space-time,

the production of black holes.

And if there's
no more accelerators built,

because the next ones

would need magnets
the size of the galaxy,

It often occurs to me
that the work we're doing now

may have to stand for millennia.

Who else is going to look back
to one trillionth of a second

after the Big Bang?

Believe it or not, I ended up
going into physics through art.

And that brought me back
into these questions

I've been asking
in the background of my life.

Where do we come from?

You know, what is this place
we're in?

What's driving the universe
to be as it is?

What we're trying to understand
is a timeless thing.

A hundred thousand years ago,

pigments were being made
for the purposes of art.

Forty thousand years or so ago,

we have the oldest
surviving artwork,

and it's this red dot painting.

That artwork it turns out

was made
by a Neanderthal artist.

To me, what that says

is art was important
to the human experience

even before we were fully human.

My mother
was a self-taught painter

of this region.

Because of the remoteness
of this area,

there was virtually
impossible television reception.

So if I wasn't outdoors riding
on my horse, I was drawing.

As I matured more with my work,

eventually, the actual depiction
of the landscape

began to fall away.

The process of drawing for me

is really about accessing
the edge of memory.

Some sort of preconscious

or unconscious knowledge
that we all share.

That if we can get out
of our own way,

we could access this place
and access what we know.

And it's this kind
of deep memory

that I find
is the inexhaustible reason

why I keep working.

This is a kind of memory

that I believe
has to exist in us

from the tiniest level
of being of who we are

and what we have evolved from.

And that's why stillness
is so important.

That, that deep, deep
recessed knowledge can surface.

Something is being accessed
that I can't know consciously,

and yet it's there.

If I don't dictate ahead of time
what the drawing is to be.

I do feel that the grasses
have memory,

that the soil has memory,
the air has memory.

The memory of water.

When you think
about the DNA we carry

and the heredity that we carry,

why can't we have
cellular memory?

That reverberation is going
all the way through.

The universe's first light

has in it the imprint
of primordial sound waves.

They essentially set
the universe ringing

with a fundamental frequency
and a whole bunch of harmonics.

And the imprint
of the primordial sound waves

can now be seen
in the way galaxies

and clusters of galaxies
are structured...

the cosmic microwave background.

So this is the cosmic
microwave background,

which is the earliest light
in the universe.

So 380,000 years
after the Big Bang,

this radiation was imprinted
on the sky.

And before that,
there was actually no light.

I realized my subjects

were getting
beyond geologic time

and into cosmic time.

And so, as I was starting

to wrap up
the oldest living things,

I knew that deep time
and deep space

were going to be
my next subjects.

The cosmic microwave mandala

combines a traditional
Tibetan-Buddhist sand mandala

with an image of the cosmic
microwave background.

Both are trying to make sense
of our place in the universe.

In Tibetan Buddhism,
there are a lot of correlations

between the human body
and the cosmos.

You try with the help
of the mandala

to realize
this interconnectedness.

It's also the depiction
of an inner cosmology.

You carry the cosmos within you.

The tantra sand mandala
is a 2,600-year-old design.

It took me over 25,
30 years practice.

I've been doing this
fighting for my country.

I'm not carrying
any weapons in my hand.

I'm simply carrying
a beautiful art

for the welfare
of all sentient beings.

When I first saw it,

this beautiful mountain
with the sun

breaking over behind me
and capturing the peak,

I said,
"Okay, sweetie, I see you.

I've been training
a long time to get here,

but it's still a long way to go.

I've got a lot of miles,
a lot of footsteps."

It's a little over 14,500 feet.

As I was approaching
the last mile on the climb,

I just savored every step.

It was almost a fantasy,

and I was afraid
to let go of it.

That was cumulatively
about a 200 mile run.

Eighty-four hours.

I'm awake for over four days.

I thought about
all these things,

and when I got to the top,
I was just crying.

I couldn't believe it,
I started to cry.

And I looked back
towards Badwater,

and I knew that I had gone up
that desert by myself,

as far as I could see.

But I didn't realize
my adventure was just starting.

I ran probably about
50 miles the next day.

There were all kinds of people

who wanted me,
television, radio,

and I didn't want
to talk to anybody.

It was a... It was a...

It was a personal thing.

My wife, Betty, was preparing
for a dinner party,

and I said, "Well, I'm
gonna go body surfing."

Next thing I knew, I was sucked

into the first of a series
of rogue waves.

Eventually, I was washed ashore,
and they were able to find me.

And at that point,
I was totally paralyzed.

It severed half my spinal cord.

I could visualize my wife
preparing for a dinner party

that would never take place.

It's still with me.

The therapist put me
in a wheelchair.

I said, "I'm gonna walk again."

Then she says,

"You'll be lucky if you walk
at all even with a walker."

I couldn't make anything go
on my stationary bicycle.

I couldn't hold anything
in my hand.

But my legs,

after repetitive efforts,
I was able to function,

but there's little
or no strength.

It was at...

It was at...

It was at that point I realized
that I've come a long way.

It was three days short
of one year earlier

that I was totally paralyzed.

I said, "Put me
on my stationary bicycle."

And I remember that I prayed.

And I rode that bike
for ten miles.

In January of 1978, I ran
the Paul Mason marathon.

Twenty-six and a quarter miles,
there was a fire station

just before the start
of each loop.

And I went in, I told the guys,
"I've lost all my fine motors.

If I fell, you'd have
to pick me up.

I couldn't get up.

And I could have bowel movement.
I have no control.

I'd like to leave clean clothes,
shoes, and everything,

and use your shower
that you use for the trucks

to clean up
before I start again."

And they said, "No problem."

I just took off everything,
messy as it was,

right in the shower.

When I came back, they
had cleaned the other stuff,

dried it, I put that on.

And then they...

They all ran along with me
to the finish line.

They gave me clean clothes,
they gave me dignity.

I guess it takes
really getting beat up

to realize how strong you are.

You know, I've lost
my external mobility,

but the internal mobility
expands just like the universe.

I've walked with many people

across the world so far.

The African proverb is

"If you want to walk quickly
or fast, you walk alone.

And if you want to walk far,
walk together."

By walking with a local person,

they allow me to see that
landscape through their eyes.

In Ethiopia, I was walking

with one of Ethiopia's
finest fossil finders.

With a desert guide in Djibouti
who was running for parliament

on a very strange clunky

kind of 1980s radio phone,
marshaling votes

as we were walking
through the desert.

I'm not too surprised
to say that he lost.

I've walked in Saudi Arabia
with Mohamad Banounah,

a special forces general
in the Saudi army,

who was a true life force.

A man who was a great raconteur,

who was a wealth
of Bedouin folk knowledge,

who was willing to walk
hundreds of kilometers

through the Hejaz desert

during some of the hottest part
of the year.

Cheerful,
full of off-color jokes.

Woo-hoo!

With an abdominal hernia,

a part of his gut
had actually come out

through his abdominal wall,
and he refused to tell me.

He kept it secret for weeks

and actually walked
about 250 miles

in this condition,
quietly wrapping up his abdomen

with a cloth in the mornings
before I woke up,

so he could take the pain.

Um, and when I finally stopped
the walk and medevaced him,

the doctor was amazed
that he was still alive.

And he is my Saudi Arabia.

In Turkey,

I met a young Kurdish
photographer, Murat Yazar,

who expressed an interest

in walking with me
for nine days.

Murat so loved the walk
that he ended up walking with me

all the way across Turkey
for seven months.

And then didn't even stop
at the Turkish border,

but continued walking
through Georgia with me.

I stand back from my own project
and watch in awe

as my walking partners
become the driving force,

rediscovering their
own home on foot.

I partnered
with Kazakh wolf hunters,

joined by an archaeologist
creating petroglyphs

on the landscape
across Kazakhstan.

For Kazakhs, separated from
their ancestral nomadic ways,

as a way of not forgetting.

A mounted archer taller
than three football fields.

A stylized camel

stretching nearly a quarter-mile
from nose to tail,

and two other gigantic motifs
borrowed from local history.

When Google Earth updates

its satellite imagery
of Central Asia,

you'll be able to appraise
Astafyev's artwork from orbit.

A melon seller
from far western Uzbekistan

decided to join the walk,

and he was also
a forced migrant.

A man who was so poor

that he'd been forced
dozens of times

to go work illegally
in Kazakhstan

as a construction laborer,

and had the scars on his body

from Kazakh police beatings
to prove it.

And Tolik was almost
a folkloric figure.

His attitude to life
was totally unflappable.

Whether we were being arrested
and detained more than 30 times,

whether the donkeys would escape
into the Kyzylkum Desert,

whether our water was stolen
and we were without water

in the middle of the desert,

he was this calm, steady,
inspiring person

who would have been dismissed
as kind of a street-side vendor

if you had driven
by him in a car.

The idea is to gather them all.

I don't know how I'm going
to do it, but I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna find somebody
to pay for their air tickets

to gather hundreds
of these people

to whom the walk belongs,
as much to them as to me,

in Tierra del Fuego,
at the finish line,

and then have us all
walk together

for the last day down
to the Antarctic Sea.

Because, in truth,
this isn't only my journey,

it's yours, too.

If you go far back enough
in your family tree,

some ancestor walked
the trails that I'm following.

We're all walking together
into the 21st century.

Paul's walk comes at a time

when our ability to connect
has been increasingly replaced

by interactions with our screens
and our devices,

when we have so many reasons
to be strangers to one another.

I knew that many, many lives
would be touched by his walk

and that many
would be touching him.

To be a walker on a planet

conquered by suspicion, flags,

the incessant babble
of television,

I'm often asked about safety.

Israeli soldiers
fired rubber bullets at me

as I zigzagged
through the West Bank.

A militia of village guards

nearly shot me
from behind a tree

while walking through Turkey.

And to date,
the police in ten countries

have detained me 84 times
for, well, suspicious walking.

Still, as a member

of one of the most
disempowered minorities

in our motorized age,

a pedestrian,

I can assert with confidence
that, by and large,

our shared planet
is not a dangerous place.

In the Arab world,

I learned to scale
human compassion by the pound.

Daily invitations to meals
and tea had the effect

of lightening my rucksack

in Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
and the West Bank.

And in the Caucuses,

the Georgians
did Christian charity proud.

During my 42-day trek through
their mountainous nation,

I was kindly invited
into private homes every night.

In Western Kazakhstan,
my cargo horse foundered.

A local nomad transported
a healthy replacement

from his own herd
more than 100 miles away.

In Uzbekistan, a police state
where I was detained 37 times,

villagers sometimes
did turn me away.

"I'm sorry," they'd whisper,

"I don't want trouble
with the KGB."

Often, they looked
acutely embarrassed,

their fear clearly at war

with their own thwarted
neighborliness.

They sent out children

with fresh baked bread
as I walked away.

All the Abrahamic faiths espouse
compassion towards wayfarers.

"Love the foreigner as yourself

for you were foreigners
in Egypt,"

says the book of Leviticus.

As I now point my boot tips
towards India and China,

I'll doubtless find
similar resonances

in Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Confucianism.

When I talk to school kids,
which I do pretty frequently,

I use these positive
interactions to remind them

to not be afraid.

Because I think in today's day
and age, when we're inundated

with a tsunami
of anxiety-causing news

about the Other dumped
on your head every day,

the weird aftereffect of the
information age explosion

is a recurrence of tribalism.

The walk has provided
a through line

that is connected,

not from mountaintop
to mountaintop,

but from person to person.

I'm not walking to "somewhere."

I would not be sitting here
talking to you

from Southern Pakistan

if I didn't get this help
of thousands of people,

almost all of them strangers,

who have no warrant
to help me at all.

I have to remind people

don't let digital overload
strike fear into them,

a paralyzing fear
that would immobilize them

from going out
into the larger world

and exploring places
and experiences

beyond their immediate horizon.

This whole place,

this chaotic, heartbreaking,
maddening,

beautiful, ecstatic place
is yours.

It belongs to you,
it's home, all of it.

I was born
in suburban California,

but raised in semi-rural Mexico.

Like many children
who straddle borders,

I learned to pour my loyalty
into relationships, not places.

I'm making for Tierra del Fuego,
the last continental horizon.

I'm not walking
toward the exotic Other.

I'm walking
toward a better part of myself,

these people.