Celeste Mercier

Though the Hunt-Lenox Globe is one of only two known relics of the Age of Discovery to bear this landmark medieval phrase, there are myriad examples of maps on which stretches of sea or far-off edges of civilization are marked with ominous serpentine bodies and frightful imagined creatures. To the people of the early 16th century, the ocean itself was hostile in its unknowability, as were forests, darkness, plague and eclipses.

The Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery appear to be contrasting periods; however, their timelines overlapped considerably. While some turned to ships and remote lands, others turned to Christianity and didacticism. To the latter, “here be dragons” was a warning. To the former, a challenge. The unknown simultaneously paralyzes and captivates—these opposing forces remain with us.

What the people of the medieval period lacked in information, they compensated for with religion. Today, what we lack in religion, we compensate for with information.

The sheer vastness of our knowledge has made the explorer obsolete, as the kinds of discoveries once available to a man equipped with a ship and a royal charter now appear to be chiefly confined to the realm of science.

Finding true mystery today requires an expedition of its own. The domains that medieval cartographers could only fantasize about have been cataloged in nearly every conceivable way. One need only type some words, slide one’s mouse and find oneself on a crowded Miami coastline (“Here be Floridians”) or looking down upon the center of the Amazon rainforest.

The Information Age is accompanied by innumerable gains—longer life expectancies, global interconnectedness, GPS, revolutionary advances in healthcare and instant access to breathtakingly expansive intelligence. We have slain those distant dragons with the physics, biology and paleontological evidence that forbids their very existence.

Still, the element of the unknown that knowledge cannot seem to eradicate is part of what drives discovery forward: fear. We continue to shudder at uncertainty, potentially more so than when little was certain. Having knowledge of so much reaffirms the idea that we have the capacity and the right to know everything. We pursue these gaps voraciously. “Just look it up,” we recite with a stunning degree of blasé assuredness, for why wouldn’t there be an answer? Why shouldn’t we be able to find it?

“Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed,” Jon Krakauer writes in “Into Thin Air,” his account of the 1996 summiting expedition that took the lives of eight of his fellow climbers. Before Everest was an international sporting destination, it was Sagarmatha to the Nepalese and Chomolungma to the Tibetans, a divine, impassable home of the gods (“Sagarmatha,” meaning “peak of heaven,” a realm that humanity has historically not been above attempting to ascend to (see: Genesis 11). I digress). The hostility of her peaks discouraged human intrusion—so naturally, humans intruded. Now nearly 14,000 times.

And yet, is there not a certain arrogance in claiming that Everest is “known” simply because we’ve traversed its slopes and reached its summit?

The ideology that “Into Thin Air” foregrounds (and a major theme of Krakauer’s oeuvre) is the hubris of a humanity that so often believes it has mastered, mapped and managed nature into compliance—and so, need no longer defer to it. Our ability to understand nature has been confounded with an ability to transcend it. Without recognizing the formidability of what lies ahead, the impulse to explore becomes recklessness.

There are some unknowns that have certainly not disappeared. We have just become prone to underestimating them.

On a recent phone call with my grandfather, I asked whether there was anywhere he’d been thinking about traveling. He asked me why he would need to go anywhere when he had a computer in front of him.

“But it’s not the same,” I replied reflexively.

Why not? There are images, simulations, histories, descriptions of destinations and apps for ordering all manner of global cuisine. What does the “being there” offer that the World Wide Web cannot? What was it like to live in an age in which distant, expansive horizons could feasibly contain fantastic creatures? If they’d known what those horizons held, would they have sailed for them anyway?

I believe the answer is yes. Civilization craves a frontier. And despite our continued efforts, we still have one.

Recognizing the endurance of mystery need not be an admission of defeat. Relentless questioning is often, and has historically been, how we discover what is most worth knowing.

Perhaps medieval cartographers knew that the promise of dragons would draw courageous men to seek out lands they’d only begun to guess the shapes of. Perhaps the understanding was just too tempting after all.