Probing the Limits of Human Endurance

The human body is both an amazingly resilient and an amazingly fragile organism. It evolved in the warm, watery tropical regions of the Earth, and then ventured North and South into colder, harsher climates. To make this journey, humans had to innovate new strategies to adapt — harnessing fire, designing warm clothing, building snug houses.

“You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.

And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.”

— from “Frozen Alive,” an article for Outside magazine and also the first chapter of my book, Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance.

Based on Last Breath, this talk weaves together stories of adventurers who have gone too far, along with an exploration of the science of the human body as it undergoes hypothermia, heat stroke, dehydration, attack by venomous creature, etc. I’ve given variations on this talk many times. Some years ago, I was commissioned by a medical association to give a talk to a Russian icebreaker full of 100 ER docs on a cruise to Antarctica. Concerned the ER docs might know much of the material due to their own training, I built the talk around a “quiz show” format challenging them to answer 10 multiple choice questions on a medical subject I was sure they knew very little about, but I did — scurvy.