Another question if you'll allow?

Which polar explorerer would you be most keen to talk to if time travel were possible?

(Apologies if you have already been asked this before)

Oh this is SUCH a good question, thank you! I've got two answers for this: David Brainard (Greely) and Peter Freuchen.

David Brainard was really the glue that held the entire Greely expedition together there at the end. Without his ability to maintain some level of order as the guy responsible for doling out rations to a bunch of starving-to-death men, the death toll would likely have been much higher. I also want to know why he didn't report Henry's blatant theft earlier. If we're going by time travel mechanics, I doubt he would answer me, but I need to know. Did he not want to rock the metaphorical boat? Did he genuinely think it could've been someone other than Henry? I need to spend some quality time with the journals to see if I can find any answers.

'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. If Nietzsche's analysis of debt is helpful to us, then, it is because it reveals that when we start from the assumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calculation, that buying and selling are the basis of human society — then, yes, once we begin to think about our relationship with the cosmos, we will necessarily conceive of it in terms of debt."