Original subtitles

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.