/sci/ - Science & Math

Here's an exterior photo.

Seems like a shame that all these 1970s era undersea labs are now rotting in storage, or in museums. They should be in the water where they belong. University marine studies programs could get a ton of use out of them.

>>2012998

>>You're attempting to claim the ocean like it was some big unknown. It is not.

It is. We've explored barely 10% of it.

>>It's measured in less than light years.

Ten light years of empty space is just as empty as one lightyear of empty space.

>>The whole of the ocean could be measured in less than 1% of the mass of the Kuiper Belt.

You're comparing a region rich with life to masses of cold, radiation blasted rock in total vacuum. Which is more worth exploring?

>>The power available from a fraction of the sun absolutely dwarfs all the power available in all the currents and depths of the ocean combined.

With current technology? I'd like to see the math.

>>Your quaint little example of "immortality" would not allow me to live in vacuum at extremely high or low temperatures with high background radiation in perpetual free fall.

Some of the research done aboard the Navy Sealab I, II and III vessels that was immediately put to use aboard Skylab was study into the range of different gas mixtures a human being can breathe at different pressures. Prior to that we were using pure oxygen, which resulted in horrendous disaster on one occasion, after which it was modified.

>>I'm talking of immortality that will allow me to dance about the rings of Saturn. The kind of immortality that will drive us like lightning bolts along the paths of information, instant understanding, and almost infallible memory.

To do any of that, you will need a place to stand. A place to sleep, and to eat, and to excrete waste. A place to study, to work, to play and to live in general. Because livable space is hard to come by in nature we must become proficient at creating it. We must learn to fashion human habitats in harsh climes that are self sufficient, and the ocean is the cheapest, most advantageous place to do this as we get the added benefit of being able to do other types of research while we're down there.

I'm not suggesting we cut space funding. If anything we should increase it. We maintain a vast fleet of essentially useless military vehicles built for conventional warfare of a sort unlikely to occur now that everyone's got the bomb, and scrapping most of that fleet would free up the funds needed to explore both space and the ocean with a renewed vigor not seen since the sixties.

>>1948363

>>Also what are the advantages of stationary seabases over highly mobile AUVs?

Saturation diving. Because of the gas mixtures used and the fact that there's no decompression required, human divers can stay out for up to 8 hours at a time on two tanks. Compare that to 30 minutes at the bottom, typical for surface dives, as the rest of the time is spend descending and slowly ascending.

The greatest discoveries in history were made because we had human beings living someplace fulltime, and while gathering samples, one of them happened to notice something unusual out of the corner of their eye, so they investigated.

Robots are efficient, but think of humans as incredible sophisticated, capable robots that simply need more support equipment. Sustaining them deep underwater is, as I've shown, not as much of a barrier as it used to be.

Here's a shot of one of the coolest historical science outposts, Tektite II. While not the largest (that honor goes to Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf III) it has a pretty unusual design.

>>1747662

>>you do realize that a lot of the unexplored regions of the seafloor are 1500+ meters deep, right? i personally work in 2660m waters off WA/OR.....we use a submersible or ROV to get our shit done. coastal zones or other areas that still have light are much better mapped/explored. it's the dark midwaters and abyssal zones that we don't know shit about. and honestly, if they're sinking these things below the zone where light penetrates.....gonna be hard to get people to volunteer. people will want a view, if nothing else.

Conshelf was build on the edge of a continental shelf (hence the name) and thus had the best of both worlds; natural daylight, and immediate access to much deeper regions with a gradual slope so that compression occurred at the appropriate rate as you progressed.

Habitats would ideally be built at various depths to study the species native to those pressures, and you could conceivably build one next to a trench as a home base for the mini-sub used to explore it.

Here's the Tektite 2, to my knowledge the largest undersea lab ever built as part of a US project.