/sci/ - Science & Math

If you have the balls for it, you might consider saturation diving as a way to pay for your marine engineering education. Many employers will pay for your training, and you can make a fair chunk of change in just a few years. It is however a very dangerous line of work and accordingly the divers who stay with the job are of a certain type. Not daredevils in the reckless sense, but undisturbed by hanging in a frigid black abyss two thousand feet down for hours at a time, occasionally encountering benthic organisms and enduring multi-day decompression after each gig.

It's exciting in a way and I'm surprised there hasn't been a movie about it. But they do have a saying among saturation divers; "There are old ones, and there are bold ones, but there are no old, bold ones".

>>3662893

The procedure would be expensive. This isn't a solution to population growth because of the logistics and expense of modifying everyone who wants to live in the sea.

What this would be good for is making working in the sea safer and expanding what they're able to do by reducing the health impacts and increasing their operational capacity while down there.

See these guys? They work for hours at a time at depths that are occasionally near 1,000 feet. Over the span of a few years bone necrosis gives 20 year old divers the bone density of 80 year olds. That's another way in which the deep sea is analogous to space, prolonged habitation in either will destroy your bone density albeit by different means.

If we could figure out how marine mammals endure hyperbaric conditions without bone degradation....

Whales are specially adapted to dive much deeper than we can; Their lungs can safely collapse without injuring them, their ribs are interrupted by cartilige segments in key spots that permit their chest to contact without breaking bones, and they have the same blood adaptations dolphins do for retaining larger amounts of oxygen and releasing them more gradually.

Nothing, in principle, prevents us from 'borrowing' these genes. The sperm whale's maximum diving depth is 3281 feet. That's over 1,000 feet deeper than the deepest that commercial divers have been to. The shallowest known hydrothermal vent is at around 3,000 feet at the Solwara 1 site in Papau New Guinea, where Nautilus Minerals is using robots to extract precious metals. Imagine if they could put humans to work at that depth.

Deep sea saturation divers regularly expose themselves to pressures in excess of thirty atmospheres, hanging weightless in a cold, pitch black abyss emptier and lonelier than outer space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-N7zdhP3fg

Effects on the body resemble rapid aging. Saturation divers in their thirties typically exhibit bone density levels of 80 year olds. The money is good enough that many endure this over the short term in order to pay for school or other ambitions.

>>3239092

Yeah, the photic zone is for tourists. You want a deep space analogue, you head for the midnight zone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=490DxLQ4IRg