A cindered planet
By 
The story of the implosion of the Titan reminded me of another story: the death of Dudley Wolfe and the three Sherpas who tried to save him, at a high camp on K2 in 1939.
Wolfe was a fabulously wealthy socialite — he was one of three inheritors of what was said to be the largest fortune in New England — who loved things like yacht and motorboat racing, and who had a complicated and somewhat endearing romantic life (He was basically Jay Gatsby without the fake back story). Wolfe also had a passion for mountain climbing, and was, despite his markedly stocky build, quite good at it, at least at an amateur level.
Thus it was that one of the world’s leading mountain climbers at the time, a German-American maniac named Fritz Wiessner, invited Wolfe to join, and largely finance, an expedition to K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. K2 is a much more daunting climb than the much more famous Mt. Everest — it was summited only once before 1975 — and the idea that Wolfe could reach the summit of the peak was basically insane.
Wiessner, however, was both supremely talented and supremely obsessed, and came within just a few hundred feet of the summit on the 1939 summit attempt that Wolfe did not survive.
Throughout the expedition Wolfe and Alice wrote each other loving letters. At Srinigar, at the start of the expedition proper, Wolfe was dismayed to find out that Wiessner had not taken his advice to bring two-way radios. On the march in to K2 base camp, Wolfe coped as well as anyone else and started off strongly when it came to climbing the mountain. However, above Camp II he was noticeably slow and was criticised for that by some of his colleagues. Wiessner favoured him over the other team members because he was less complaining and had good endurance. Wolfe did not take any sort of lead, however, and merely plodded up to each camp after it had been established by other climbers. In this way he got further up the mountain than any of the Americans except Wiessner.[28][29]
No one had bottled oxygen and, by Camp VIII at 25,300 feet (7,700 m) on July 14, Wolfe could get no higher. He waited there for seven days while Wiessner and Pasang Dawa Lama made their failed summit bid. Then, descending with the others to Camp VII at 24,700 feet (7,500 m) Wolfe waited another seven days under appalling conditions while his two companions went down further to get help. As they reached each camp, they found nobody there and any equipment had been removed, so they went on down until they arrived at base camp.[30][31] On July 29, during one of three attempts at rescue, three Sherpas managed to climb up to Wolfe and might conceivably have rescued him. However, he was in a terrible mental state and refused to go down, asking them to return the next day. After that, the Sherpas themselves also died on the mountain.[32][33]
In the months and years following, there were strong recriminations over whether Wiessner had abandoned Wolfe or had done his best to rescue him, why the expedition had been an organisational failure, why Wolfe had been allowed to climb so high (and why he had been allowed on the expedition at all), and whether the Sherpas should have been allowed to try to rescue him. Wolfe’s brother, Clifford Warren Smith, considered taking legal action, but eventually decided to drop the case.[34][35]
In 2002, skeletal remains were found on the Godwin-Austen Glacier at the foot of K2. Close by were vintage pieces of mountaineering equipment and a leather mitten marked “Wolfe”. By inscribing an ancient dinner plate from amongst the debris with Wolfe’s name, a plaque was made for the nearby Gilkey Memorial,[note 8] which at that time had the names of 52 other climbers who had died on K2.[37][33]
An interesting little detail about the names of the world’s two highest mountains: The British, to their credit, insisted on giving the peaks they surveyed in the Himalaya whatever local name the peak had. The two exceptions to this rule are Mt. Everest, which was named after the original leader of the surveying effort, and K2. K2 was given that name because it was the second mountain surveyed in that region of the Karakoram, and it turned out it was so remote — the peak was and is not visible from any permanent human settlement — that it had no local name.
This wonderful passage from the Italian climber Fosco Mariani captures the odd aptness of its name:
It is just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has the nakedness of the world before the first man—or of the cindered planet after the last.
“Man does not seek pleasure: Only the Englishman does.”
Nietzsche on the founder of utilitarian philosophy, Jeremy Bentham.