Today in Technology History
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May 29
Humans first stepped upon the highest point on Earth's surface, the summit of Mount Everest, exactly fifty years ago.
Two members of a British expedition to Everest, Edmund Percival Hillary (a New Zealand beekeeper) and Tenzing Norgay (a Sherpa from Nepal), reached the peak on the morning of May 29, 1953.
One commentator recently compared the conquest of Mt. Everest to the 1969 Apollo mission that first put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon:
"Hillary's last step up had been huge -- the symbolic foot upon the throat of planet Earth by its ruling inhabitants. Armstrong's step upon the Moon was rather more the footprint of technology, the same sort of extraordinary advance that has allowed so many hundreds of adventurers to scale Everest in recent years, so that now the upper reaches actually have a litter problem."
In other words, the achievement of Hillary and Norgay was true heroism, while the achievement of Armstrong and Aldrin owed more to ingenuity and technology than to heroism.
That's an interesting argument, but we don't buy it. In fact, Hillary and Norgay couldn't have beaten Everest without technology, including a vast array of mountaineering gear. What's more, the Everest team and the astronauts shared a reliance on one vital kind of technology: bottled oxygen. And like the astronauts, the climbers brought technology -- a camera -- to document their historic deed.
Humans are technological creatures, so technology naturally plays a part in our heroic moments. It's too simplistic to say that technology detracts from human heroism; in fact, our heroic aspirations are intimately shaped by the tools we have available to us. So three cheers for the heroism of the climbers who beat Everest -- and for the technology that helped them do it.
Related links:
Click here to listen to the commentary quoted above.
It's true that there are tons of trash on Mt. Everest, although the garbage situation has improved recently.
If technology actually diminished heroism, then Hillary and Norgay wouldn't be heroes, since they wouldn't have made it to the top of Everest without compressed oxygen. The mountaineers who first climbed Everest without oxygen, in 1978, would be far more heroic.
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