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I was talking to a friend recently about how little of the sea we had explored, and he wondered out loud why it seems like people tend to take a bigger interest
by mwill 14y ago
I was talking to a friend recently about how little of the sea we had explored, and he wondered out loud why it seems like people tend to take a bigger interest in space than deep sea exploration.
I joked that it's because the sea is goddam scary and we're less likely to find things with tentacles in space.
But it's still a good question. Space exploration gets a lot more love from entertainment, pop culture, and news outlets.
- noonespecial 14y agoIts easy. To explore space, all you need is a ship that can withstand pressures between 0 and 1 atmosphere. The ocean, on the other hand... That said, spacecraft seem to get lousy fuel economy compared to submersibles.
- Someone 14y agoThe start may be expensive, but currently Pioneer 10 moves at over 10 km/s on about 100W of power. That is over 360,000 km on a kWh, and that mostly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly) is not spent for propulsion.
- gehsty 14y agoI work in the subsea industry and when our ship has planned downtime we're allowed to go do marine research, basically just looking at the marine life that grows on and around structures at >1000m. So it does happen. Just on a very small scale!
- DanBC 14y agoI'm amazed that someone with FU Money hasn't funded some kind of underwater equipment to be bolted onto ships like yours, and a website to collate that data and any other data that people want to contribute. A bunch of data isn't science, but it's a start. I guess it's a problem that most submarines are military vessels - they could collect lots of data but releasing that data is tricky.
- gehsty 14y agoI tend to work in Oil and Gas, on the subsea installation side of things, the Oil Company doesn't like to advertise the position of subsea assets so I guess making data on them freely available is out of the question. I think the research project we worked on was call Serpent, it might be worth a google.. Also to record subsea date you dont need a manned submarine, ROVs are used day in day out and now AUVs are used more often.
- eshvk 14y agoJames Cameron did that exactly. [1] 1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deepest-returns-science-sub/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james...
- andrewflnr 14y agoWe need better deep-sea scifi, something a bit more plausible than Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones.