And with that said, while I'm relatively pro deep sea mining, we simply don't know enough about deep marine ecosystems to balance risks. Every societal action

And with that said, while I'm relatively pro deep sea mining, we simply don't know enough about deep marine ecosystems to balance risks. Every societal action has environmental impacts. You can't avoid them, and your existence in a technological society comes with a ton of deliberate environmental harm. What's important is to properly balance society's needs with the fundamental harm that our society's existence causes. Deep sea mining _could_ be a good way of doing that. But we can't balance impact when we have so little information about the ecosystems at risk here. We just don't know enough. Marine science as a whole is very expensive, but desperately needs continued funding and is critical for a variety of reasons. It's often said, but we really do know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the surface of our own planet. We have to keep funding ocean science for a huge variety of reasons.