The history of Man is filled with the achievements of scientists, adventurers and visionaries. We remember some of them with ease.
On 20th July 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Man stepped onto the surface of an alien planet for the first time. Since that day, we visited the moon 5 more times, leaving the footprints of 12 men in the lunar dust for future generations to find again.
Image: hismajestyfavourite
On 29th May 1953, two men set foot on the highest point on Earth - the summit of Everest. Since that day over 3,000 others have followed, along with at least one helicopter...
A date that fewer remember is 23rd January 1960. On this day two men, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, boarded the bathyscape Trieste and descended to the deepest point in our planet's oceans, the Challenger Deep. At nearly 11,000 meters, the pressure of the water at the bottom of Challenger is some 1,100 times than at the surface. To survive at this depth, the crew of Trieste sat inside a steel sphere with walls over 12cm thick and breathed recycled air.
Image: Thomas J Abercrombie (National Geographic Society), NOAA
The descent took nearly 5 hours. Due to a crack in the single tiny window, Piccard and Walsh spent a bare 20 minutes at the bottom before rising back to the surface, but not before they witnessed complex life in this hostile environment. They represent the first and last men to ever visit the deepest part of our oceans. As Dr Walsh himself has pointed out, more people have stood on the moon than have explored the Challenger Deep.
Even more remarkable is that this was achieved without the complex electronics, computing power or geeky gadgetry that we would nowadays take for granted.
Many voices can be heard arguing for a new manned space-flight programme to push our understanding of the universe (I agree), but there are still a few final frontiers in our own back yard that we could visit...
