If you wanted to take the name of this column literally, how far off the beaten track would you like to go? Instead of just thinking outrageous thoughts, would you choose the most difficult hiking path, full of danger and excitement, to ensure that you encounter as few humans as possible, making your perilous journey a self-exploration that no one but you can do? And if you were to do this, where on this planet would you find both solitude and unexperienced adventure? Under the sea, I would imagine. More unexplored than the space outside the Earth’s atmosphere, they say. Telescopes, from orbiting to radio, can look some over 13 billion years into the past at the Cosmic Microwave Background.
But the murky depths of the sea? Mysteries and monsters lurk. But actually, I do hope you won’t go there. Because the oceans are full of enough trash as it is.
Us humans decided at some point that since we had polluted enough of the land, it was time to send our garbage out to sea. We forgot that the planet is globular, and what goes around comes around. Thus the waters are full of rubbish which varies from discarded plastic bottles to microplastics consumed by sea creatures.
Some of which we eat. Which is possibly what we deserve, frankly. And as we know — or we should — as people explore deep into unseen lands on this planet, we leave behind portions of ourselves which are really disgusting.
The tallest land mountain is just full of human discards and debris as more and more sign.