[K-Women Talk] How to Survive on the Edge of a Thousand-Foot Cliff

In 2010, an explosion occurred on the oil drilling rig 'Deepwater Horizon' operated by the oil major British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the rig to sink. It was the worst oil spill disaster in the history of the oil industry. Over 760 million liters of oil were released into the sea from the Macondo oil field due to this accident. This amount was 18 times greater than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. A roughly Hawaii-sized oil slick formed in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil removal team managed to clean up 260 million liters of oil using traditional methods, but it was insufficient. Excluding the 300 million liters that naturally evaporated, about 200 million liters of oil were polluting the sea and adjacent coastlines, threatening the ecosystem.

James Cameron, an ocean explorer and Academy Award-winning film director, upon learning of this incident, sent an email to Pete Diamandis, chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, the world's largest venture foundation. He proposed creating a competition to find ideas for rapid disaster response. Since traditional methods alone could not remove the oil, the idea was to offer a large prize to seek innovative ideas in a short period. The Google Eric Schmidt Foundation supported the initiative with $1.4 million, and the Oil Cleanup Challenge began.

As soon as the Oil Cleanup Challenge was announced, 350 teams from around the world applied instantly. The results were remarkable. The first-place winner was a startup unrelated to the oil industry, breaking the previous maximum oil recovery record by 400%. Although the team called Botel did not place in the top three, they surprised the competition organizers. These novices, far from the oil cleanup business, formed their team at a tattoo shop in Las Vegas. The person who designed the technology was a tattoo artist who heard about the contest on the radio, and a customer who listened to the radio with him supported the project costs. The team built a scaled-down model in a bathtub to experiment with their idea and applied their technology for the first time in the competition. The result? They achieved a cleanup rate twice as high as the existing methods.

This story is featured in Pete Diamandis's book The Bold. It truly exemplifies the saying 'Insaeng Dochuh Yusangsu' (人生到處有上手), which means 'Everywhere in life, there are experts.' This phrase is also the subtitle of Volume 6 of My Cultural Heritage Exploration written by former Cultural Heritage Administration head Professor Yu Hong-jun.

Beyond global warming, the planet is experiencing global heating, breaking average temperature records every year, and unprecedented climate disasters are striking all over the world. The global economy is sinking, and wars have broken out. The war between Ukraine and Russia remains unresolved. The world is shocked by the violent conflict between Israel and Hamas, which killed 2,500 people in just six days. In short, we are living in an era where compasses do not work, walking on a thousand-foot cliff shrouded in fog.

To succeed in a test with no answers, elites who have found the right answers must first ask and ask again what the solutions are, how other countries handle it, who is good at it, and where they are. So much so that even the Bible teaches this: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you."

Lee Mi-kyung, CEO of the Environmental Foundation

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.