I was decently prepared for my work trip to Iceland, but I should have rehearsed what to say if someone offered me psychedelic drugs. When the moment arrived, I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, because I was touched that these strangers were handing me chocolate from a filmy plastic bag.

Tempting, but I needed to stay clearheaded. A simple “no, thank you” ended up doing the trick, although it left me with a sense that I was not entirely prepared for what was coming next.

I had traveled to a speck of a fishing village for the Iceland Eclipse festival, a lineup of cosmically minded lectures and D.J. sets held on a disc golf course three hours north of Reykjavik. But an hour before the headliner — two glorious minutes of darkness, advertised by the stars themselves — it was cloudy.

Then the clouds started to produce rain. People who had come from Florida and Switzerland and Cape Town, and who had spent thousands of dollars on tickets and yurt rentals, were huddled under umbrellas while squinting at the sky. It looked like one very big paint swatch for the color gray.

Had it all been for nothing? Would these weary travelers get to see the eclipse at all?

On its website, the festival billed itself as a “five-day immersive experience for visionaries, artists and eclipse seekers together at the intersection of space, music, exploration and wellness.” It seemed like a yoga retreat with breaks to discuss blockchain technology, or a fraternal twin of Burning Man that was taking a semester abroad.

On top of all that, the festival grounds were smack-dab in the path of a total solar eclipse. That’s the one where the moon passes in front of the sun and the birds go berserk, not the one where the moon gets dim and reddish. My agenda for the trip was to experience totality, sure, but also to stare at the sky with a bunch of other people and wonder what was going on, both down here on Earth and beyond it.

Yet all of these people were convening a giant party in the darkness, intent on appreciating slivers of sunshine. “I think we’ve collected the most optimistic group of people in the world,” Mitch Morales, an organizer of the festival, said during its opening ceremony.

I wondered what they could they teach us about seeking the light.

High Vibrational Fun Time

The Snaefellsnes Peninsula sticks out from Iceland’s western coast in the shape of a carrot that was peeled during a bumpy bus ride. When I arrived in mid-August, there were 16 hours of sunlight each day. A handsome glacier loomed in the distance, keeping watch over lava fields and clutches of lichen. Arctic terns made lazy circles in the sky. It looked like a cross between Yosemite and Mars.

The festival had attracted around 4,200 people who seemed to share an openness to New Age thinking and a degree of financial flexibility. Tickets cost $888 for entry-level participants and $1,444 for V.I.P.s whom festival organizers referred to as “celestial voyagers.” Lodging was extra. I slept in a spacious beige canvas yurt that cost $1,000 for the week.

There were start-up founders and astrologers and eye surgeons and bartenders and literal astronauts. There were Silicon Valley-types in performance synthetics and Icelanders wearing shorts. During a set called “high vibrational fun time abundance of comedy,” the comedian Brent Pella joked that most people in the audience had crystals but no health insurance. In response, a man stood up and waved his hunk of quartz back and forth as if it were a lighter at a Coldplay concert.

The festivalgoers ranged in age from toddler to retiree. In a dining area that served meat pies and spirulina oat milk lattes, I asked what had brought them there. Some people said the community of rave culture, others the natural beauty of the area. Benziger Bensam, 36, a physician in New York, was drawn in by educational programming about deep-brain stimulation devices for people with neurological disorders.

Sure, parts of the festival seemed like “hoodoo-voodoo stuff,” Bensam said. But he was conscious that the medical establishment had a history of writing off new ideas only to take them more seriously later. “Being a physician, you have to be optimistic,” he said. “Positivity manifests. There’s lots of research on that, too.”

Each day this group split into factions to check out panels with such intriguing titles as “Sex in Outer Space: Seeding Humanity’s Future Beyond Earth.” Several dozen people attended a lecture about Iceland’s marine history by Gunnar Ólafsson, a bearded fisherman from even farther north.

In another tent, a wellness coach named Christian Van Camp spoke about his off-grid property in Guatemala and his enthusiasm for raw milk. One audience member raised a hand to ask how Van Camp felt about vaccines. “God made us without vaccinations, I’ll leave it at that,” he responded. Multiple speakers discussed psychedelics, although the festival technically had a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal substances. At an afternoon session, a woman wearing elf ears made mournful whale noises while projecting space imagery onto the walls of a geodesic dome.

Presence Is the Future

Each night, people danced to acts with names like Exos and AWARË. The mood was generous. When a man dropped his LED juggling balls in the grass, several people rushed to help him pick them up. When I complimented a different man on the plastic capybara clipped to the brim of his baseball cap, he told me I could take it home.

Even surrounded by such stunning natural beauty, many conversations found their way back to tech. People made small talk about which model of Oura ring they had or gazed up at the cosmos wearing Meta glasses. A booth in the V.I.P. section encouraged festivalgoers to buy a different $200 ring that would buzz throughout the day for reasons having to do with mindfulness. “Presence is the future,” its banner read.

It was hard to gauge how much of the spirit of the festival might translate back to real life. Is a kind of vacation from reality the only way to feel optimistic these days? Or were the people here reimagining what that reality might look like?

Everyone had a vision that they argued would make the world better, and quite a few seemed to involve artificial intelligence.

An education strategist named Rohan Roberts said that A.I. would not wipe out human writing, just as the calculator did not end math. “The real crisis is educators looking at A.I. as a cheating machine rather than one of the greatest intelligence amplifiers the world has ever seen,” he said.

Listening intently was Josh Whiton, whom I recognized from another session as the founder of MakeSoil, a nonprofit that puts composters in touch with people in their neighborhood who are looking to get rid of food scraps. He said that artificial intelligence allowed him to run the organization with one other person rather than a team of 10.

I wondered if Whiton ever felt dissonance between the goals of his work and the environmental costs of A.I. He responded that paper manufacturing, golf courses and industrial agriculture use more water than data centers do. “If you ask somebody what uses a lot of water, they have no idea, except for data centers,” he said.

All human enterprise requires resources, he continued. Did the technology’s downsides really mean we had to ignore its capacity for positive change?

“Just because some people are going to be fools with it and be evil with it doesn’t mean I’m not going to use it to do good,” he said.

To the Moon

On the third day of the festival, after the eclipse, I sat down with its organizers to chat about their goals, which included throwing an epic party and lifting the consciousness of the planet.

The festival was the brainchild of Mitch Morales, a 41-year-old Texan who ran the Euphoria Music Festival in Austin in the 2010s. He settled onto a distressed black couch in front of a rapidly cooling cheese pizza. He wore a flannel and a baseball cap that read “Seen a UFO?”

Covid gave Morales a dispiriting glimpse of a world without in-person socialization, he said, so he decided to organize an event that coincided with the eclipse visible from Texas in 2024. Soon after, he was on a plane to Europe, scouting locations for this year.

“You could do a party in Ibiza, you could try to find a little cool cove in Mallorca, you could go to the Spanish mountains,” said Morales, who speaks more slowly and quietly than you might expect of someone who throws parties for a living — an enlightened version of the festival bro.

He understood that the world was feeling kind of grim. “We are in for interesting and probably difficult times,” he said. “The world is going to be changing at a rate that we are going to find difficult to manage. I think that the type of people that are gathered here that are resilient, that are optimistic, are the people that can change the world in a positive way.”

His production company, IMXP, is already working on a festival for the solar eclipse next year in Luxor, Egypt. (Tickets begin at $999.) His ambitions reach even higher. By 2033, give or take a few years, his team hopes to host an eclipse festival of some kind on the moon.

“Timelines and budgets are tough,” said Ari Eisenstat, 38, the program director of IMXP and an instructor in human spaceflight at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was either extremely enthusiastic or extremely caffeinated, maybe both. “We would love to be a part of bringing the best of humanity to the stars.”

The festival on our mother planet was not going flawlessly. In a central WhatsApp group, people complained that there were insufficient charging stations or that they could not find anywhere to wash their hands with soap near the porta-potties.

Malena Bishop, a 57-year-old accountant from Naples, Fla., paid $5,000 with a friend for a “premium glamping” setup that promised power and basic furniture. They arrived to an electricity-free tent with two mattresses on the floor. Bishop left after two days.

Several festivalgoers were concerned about nests of Arctic tern chicks in the grass next to their tents. One woman interrupted the festival’s opening ceremony to demand that its organizers explain why the terns’ habitat had been “mowed over to create this campsite.”

When we spoke, Morales said that no new areas of grass had been mowed for the festival’s purposes, and that his team had consulted with local experts on how to safely coexist with the tern colony. As for the other hiccups, Morales was hopeful that future festivals would run more smoothly with the help of A.I.

“We’re building a platform that is basically analyzing everything that is happening here and helping us make better decisions moving forward,” he said. What exactly was it analyzing, I asked: the WhatsApp chat?

“Yeah, it’s ingesting a lot of the public and internal team comms just to be able to understand what things were happening, what were the delays, how were things solved,” he said. He expects the model to serve as a “co-pilot” for future festivals.

Seeking Totality

It was nearly eclipse o’clock. But despite the clouds and the rain, people were pretty upbeat.

A man sitting cross-legged told me that it did not matter what the sky looked like, because his plan for the eclipse was to meditate with his eyes closed.

A ceremony began onstage that an M.C. described as “meditation meets prayer meets light orchestra.” Some combination of drumming and atmospheric pressure systems came through just in time. Suddenly the clouds thinned and everyone could see a luminous fingernail clipping in the sky that turned out to be the sun. Then it vanished. In the two minutes of darkness that followed, people cried, meditated, howled like wolves and took pictures on their phones.

I stood with Christina Moorshead, a 49-year-old nightclub owner from Victoria, British Columbia. We had been chatting about some of the issues with the festival — the brouhaha over the terns, the fact that her camper parking pass cost $600. But once darkness fell, her tone changed.

“It makes me realize that my problems with my business don’t matter, the problems with my love life don’t matter,” she said. “The only thing that matters right now is the immediacy of the moment.”

Late that night, I stared up at the fabric of my yurt, bone-tired but unable to sleep. All week I had been surrounded by certainty that the world we were heading toward was the right one. Yet I had spent the week interrupting people’s moments of wonder with tedious questions about the energy consumption of A.I. or the feasibility of holding a festival on the moon. My skepticism always seemed to kill the mood.

I just wanted to feel what these people felt. I closed my eyes and told myself that everything was going to be OK: that A.I. would usher in an era of flourishing, that humanity wouldn’t wreck space the way we’ve wrecked so much else. After a few minutes, I realized that my cheeks were wet beneath the eye mask I wore to trick myself into thinking it was dark out. It all sounded so beautiful, and I wanted so badly for it to be true.