From the inaccessible to the unfathomable. Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, Jacques Piccard and Donald Walsh . A New Zealander, a Nepali, a Swiss and an American. Hillary and Tenzing were the first humans to set foot on Earth's highest point: Mount Everest (nearly 9,000 meters). It was May 29, 1953. Piccard and Walsh were also the first to access, on January 23, 1960, in the bathyscaphe 'Trieste', the lowest: the Mariana Trench (in round numbers, 11,000 meters).

From the thin air of perpetual snow to the colossal pressure of the blind depths, and although it was already the second half of the 20th century, these men pioneered a mixture of sporting feat, scientific milestone and adventurous challenge. Everest has since been conquered many times by mountaineers and desecrated by ... Sundays. Only one other person has descended into the Pit since then, in 2012: the filmmaker James Cameron ('Titanic'). Of those four pioneers, only Walsh, an engineer and oceanographer, an officer in the US Navy, a former submarine commander, lives. He is 88 years old.

A phenomenon bordering on massification has made Everest a kind of theme park, undermining its legend. The technological improvement in the complete equipment necessary to confront with effort but without heroism the escalation has democratized access to the giant. And the business and government organization of a tourist activity has contributed to making such promiscuity between man and mountain possible. Only the existence of a certain risk quota has prevented any expedition from degenerating into an excursion.

Everest and the Mariana Trench have a supreme load of planetary representation. The first is in the Himalayas, the most upright mountain range on Earth. The Trench, in the Pacific, the largest ocean on the Globe. Therefore, it is not a question of maximum isolated geographical elements in inferior or reduced systems. From the highest to the deepest, they are the double and opposite culminating expression of the grandeur of a Nature that we enjoy as a dominant species and suffer as a threatened species.

They suppose two borders. One open to the infinity of the universe; the other, closed to the limits of the abyss. Although foreign in their immutability to human contingencies, they belong to us because we have given them a name and attributed rank. With our existence we attest to theirs.

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

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