[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_People:_A_Year_in_the_Ta...
While Herzog certainly made it more popular, he lost a lot of accuracy by forcing it to tell the story he wanted it to tell. It certainly shook my faith in Herzog as a documentarian. He's a good artist, but you shouldn't trust him when it comes to facts.
The full original by Dmitri Vasyukov (Дмитрий Васюков) is available in four parts (one for each season) on Youtube. Here's the first quarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttItxwzgbUs
Totally different but Little Dieter Needs to Fly is one of my favorites
When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.
If you go onto an island or some mountain range or some other type of isolated pocket of the world, you may be surprised to find that life exists there. But there is only one way in which this is possible: at some point in time, some living thing had to abandon its old world with little regard for its personal survival.
When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a long period of time.
Life pushes boundaries and explores new environments. It has to start from something. Clearly some amount of mania is a requisite for success in the long term in order to overcome reason in the short term.
I'd say that that's mostly because the man in question is rational. They strategize, they collect resources, and they do whatever they can to make sure they can return. The penguin can't do that. It doesn't have a goal in mind, or any way to sustain itself while it wanders. It just goes.
The base on the actual South Pole, far on the interior of the continent, isn't McMurdo where much of that documentary was filmed, it is Amundsen-Scott, and it's named for two teams of explorers who first reached that pole in the same summer, Amundsen (whose team reached it first and returned alive) and Scott (whose team was second and all died)
Scott's plan was crap. To a considerable extent that view is hindsight, but even at the time Scott must have known Amundsen's plan was better. Certainly by the time they reached the Pole and found that they'd been beaten to it, he will have been sure. By that time he was in extreme danger, slowly starving and with a long trek back to any permanent shelter - it would have taken excellent luck (which he didn't get) to make it home alive, and in any case he'd been beaten to the pole.
Seems to me you've described how lone adventuring animals are not the source of dispersion to remote areas.
The will to power is not mere survival or dominance over others; at its apex it is the drive to impose one’s own meaning on existence, even when that meaning is written in self-destruction.
It is like Empedocles and the volcano.
Empedocles does not leap to escape mortality; he leaps to overreach it, to force the cosmos to acknowledge his claim, even if the price is erasure.
The penguin would rather perish as itself than endure as something lesser.
(On HN there's often a story from one site one day, and a few days later the same story reported by a different news site..)
I suspect it was something like that.
> It’s a decade since the film officially premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, and it remains one of Herzog’s finest achievements.
So it would seem the article is nearly a decade old.
History of the meme and resurgence in the last month:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/penguin-walking-toward-mounta...
Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.
That's presumably why the comment said "when [collective they] finally get lucky", not "when [individual they] inevitably get lucky".
A certain percentage of your species having genes encouraging risky/stupid behavior is likely somewhat useful.
Mother Nature doesn't give a shit, that's worth remembering. For the scenarios where two species in an arms race wipe each other out aren't somehow more or less desirable than other outcomes, it's just a thing which happened. Meh.
Most badass penguins don't make it. Being the badass penguin isn't a sensible life goal. The altar of time demands the blood sacrifice of nearly all the badass penguins before progress and change is allowed. Occasionally, though, they win, and new species are born. The exceptions end up forking the timeline, and provide a backdrop of meaning to the sacrifice of all those who came (or went?) before.
The thing I love most is the fact that you can project anything on to the penguin, from extreme heroism, to villainy, to meaninglessness, or even profound cosmic purpose. I'd love to know what the evolutionary psychology / behavior is that actually causes it, though.
New species are usually formed gradually while introducing their mutations to the population until they eventually break off as a group. But more commonly there’s usually a geographic barrier that separates an existing group and they gradually just drift apart from each other.
Usually! But not always.
Every once in a while, one probably makes it to another colony many miles away, and helps prevent inbreeding as a result.
Or runs into a similar weirdo somewhere in between.
So this penguin knew its time was up and didn’t want to mess up the colony with its dead body.
We interpret the behaviour through our lenses and experiences.
The universe really does not care, in a “badass” way. Major league not caring.
It’s our interpretation that something is “badass” mainly because our species has pretty much negatively affected most parts of the environment.
It’s us that are “badass” and don’t “get it” when it comes to nature and the environment.
As someone else points out, there is no such thing as a nihilist penguin, it’s purely us putting a label on behaviour that we - once again - don’t understand.
