Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: Finding the Future, by Susan Marie Groppi

I'm certainly not an expert on either undersea or lunar exploration. My global point is that there are many scientific wonderlands that can inspire us, and we seem hooked on particular ones. But what the heck -- while we're riffing:

How far down is an excellent question, but the thing is that unlike with space exploration, undersea exploration scales gradually. You can go down as far as current science permits, and then a little farther.

The oxygen thing : first, you can run a pipe from the surface to the ocean bottom and pump air through it: that is much simpler than rocketing up oxygen in bottles across enormous distances. Second, you are surrounded by oxygen in water: electrolysis powered by geothermally generated electricity should be a trivial way to get oxygen. Oxygen and water are nice things for human beings to have.

Count fish, indeed; there is an enormous amount of science to be done down there -- finds in the ocean trenches have revolutionized our understanding of biology in recent decades. Things with fundamentally different biochemistry, as alien as life can be on Earth; not to mention geology, ecology, etc. Sure, you can do it remotely by robot, but then, you can do space science remotely by robot too.

Beyond geothermal energy, there are a lot of ways to generate power in the sea -- huge thermocouples, and wave power, being two.

I don't think the safety concerns are wholly analogous. Sure, much of the challenge would be about ways to deal with pressure (which could help spur the coming massive revolution in materials science, which started with buckyballs and high temperature superconductors and nanotubes). But for a host of other small problems and safety issues beyond getting crushed to death vs. asphyxiating in vacuum, it's awfully nice to be a few hours from our home ecosystem rather than days or months.

Sure, Aquaboy-style bubble cities are not an answer to overpopulation. But ocean issues are much more critical and pressing in terms of real-world problems for masses of people than space science. The behavior of the deep seas, especially with regard to carbon dioxide saturation, is critical with regard to global warming (aka the drowning of Venice and Bangladesh). The seas have enormous, mostly untapped potential to feed the world (and a quickly rising portion of world nutrition, I believe) -- but they are also being massively overfished; the current death spiral "tragedy of the commons" in ocean management may soon lead to ecocollapse and a huge crisis in food production (and I have this on the authority of The Economist, not a magazine known for its radical environmentalist politics). Coral reefs, which serve critical functions in the regulation of the world biosphere, are dying at a devastating rate. What would it take to learn how not merely to manage, but to heal the oceans? To seed new coral reefs, or simulate their effects?

I'm imagining not so much a bubble city at the bottom -- which would be not terribly efficient -- but, maybe, an enormous structure based on an existing oil rig, with a huge vertical superconducting thermocouple sunk into the ocean floor, plankton and coral farms, geological and oceanic and ecological research stations at the bottom and at various levels in between, and so on.

Interesting legal ramifications too, if you built a city on this EcoRig, powered and fed by the sea -- talk about offshore! What laws, other than international nautical ones, would it be governed by?

I don't really think this is likely to happen (not unless there's a "killer app" somewhere that makes it a moneymaking proposition to do something like this). But I don't see why a moonbase is a superior idea, other than that we're used to it.

I'm skeptical about the "astronomy, physics, pharmaceuticals, geriatrics, manufacturing and mining" benefits of a moonbase. The astronomy, physics, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing seems like they could be done in near-earth orbit just fine, mostly automated, with perhaps occasional human repairs when necessary - though it might be more cost-effective to just build lots of cheap self-assembling components, shoot them up there, remote them into each other and when one breaks, have it self-destruct and shoot another one up. We're realistically talking about only the bits that you need zero-gravity for. Mining is an old SF standby, but what possible ore (in this age of plummeting commodity prices) is worth schlepping across that distance? I think that's a fantasy. Same with geriatrics, if you're talking about actually moving old people to the moon - it's never going to be more than some tiny, superrich handful -- in which case it's really just another variant on the reality TV show idea.

I shouldn't say never. If there was some absolutely compelling reason to move a million people to the moon, I don't doubt we're capable of it as a species (though a million is still a drop in the bucket). But I don't believe it's ever going to make any economic sense. I don't see any mechanism by which it could become the kind of engine of wealth creation that computers, or the telephone, or airplanes, or railroads, or nanotech, or robotics, or genetic engineering, or transatlantic seafaring are. It strikes me more like those other SF ideas that sound neat -- hovercrafts, personal rocket packs -- but are never going to hit that exponential utility curve whereby falling prices drive and are driven by increasing (voluntary, not government-mandated) real usage.

We had hovercars, you know. They worked just fine. The last one was decomissioned recently, actually -- I think it did the British channel run. The chunnel killed it. A less romantic, less "Space-Age", less fanciful solution to the problem of getting from England to France. But a better one.

Benjamin Rosenbaum
-- Thursday, February 19, 2004 at 22:58:34 (EST)