The Explorer Gene

Because we wanted to make sure we would never give up. If you burn the bridges behind, you can never withdraw, only move ahead,” Piccard says. He didn’t even have a pilot’s licence.

Dick Rutan, the pilot of Voyager: ‘The only way to fail is to quit’ – and we’re not going to quit. Even if we have to ditch in mid-Atlantic, we go for it.”

concentrated, much more efficient. And suddenly you feel you are much more alive… That changed my life completely, my way of understanding human beings.”

another potential state for human beings, a state where you are much more conscious, much more aware, than in normal life. It’s the first time that I understood that in normal life, most people, even me, we are living on autopilot, we are doing the things automatically, because we are trained to do it, we are thinking the same as usual. Suddenly, you are out of the state of lethargy; suddenly, you are facing some risk, facing a situation that is out of your routine, so you are suddenly aware and much more

Extreme adventure, the real one, is not for showing off in public, nor is it an escape from reality or a wish, whether conscious or not, to get high on adrenaline… It is a life-sized mirror, and the opportunity to discover some new inner resources. Adventure is the breaking point when we realise that we can no longer be satisfied with reproducing automatically what we learned, that this won’t do anymore.”
Verstraeten wanted to

immediate conclusion: ocean trenches are not safe places for dumping radioactive wastes, since their water does not stay put,” TIME concluded. Indeed, with the discovery of the fish, the US abandoned its plans to dump nuclear waste in the trenches – a

Jacques later said. “An unbeatable record, absolute. No one will ever go deeper, without digging into the earth.” Piccard and Walsh sat there, silent.

floor fascinates me. I think that I can make out the figure of father dancing on it. I realise something. We are at the bottom of the deepest trench on the planet. Thanks to the genius of Auguste Piccard.”

Indifferent to the 180,000 tonnes of pressure clamped onto her metal sphere, the Trieste balanced herself delicately on the few pounds of guide rope that lay on the bottom, making token claim, in the name of science and humanity, to the ultimate depths in all our oceans

According to Walsh, “If you’re scared, you don’t belong there, You’re on your game, you’ve done everything you can to reduce the unknowns, you’ve practised emergency procedures over and over. That’s what we did.”