What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

What is hard to communicate to the rest of the world is that what we are doing on the mountain is not a stunt or a suicide mission. The lack of clothing, the altitude, and the pace are actually part of an experiment to understand one of the most pressing questions in the modern world today: Has dependence on technology made us weak? Just about every person I know, from the skeptical journalist in Colorado to the US Army scientist to the guide by my side, envelops themselves in a cocoon of technology that keeps them safe, warm, and helps them endure the natural variations of our planet. In the past six million years of human evolution our ancestors mounted expeditions across frozen mountains and parched deserts with only a whisper of technology to aid them. While they might not have aimed to get up this particular mountain, they surely crossed the Alps and the Himalayas, navigated oceans, and populated the New World. What power did they have that we have lost? More important, is it possible to get it back? The underlying hypothesis of this expedition is that when humans outsource comfort and endurance they inadvertently make their bodies weaker, and that simply reintroducing some common environmental stresses to their daily routines can bring back some of that evolutionary vigor. Every person in this line of wobbling headlamps is potentially putting their life on the line to test the theory. We also know that along with the act of conditioning ourselves over time, there’s a...