Slashdot Mirror
Remembering Sealab
An anonymous reader writes "'Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,' says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to 'bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.' In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America's aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn't help that the public didn't understand the challenges of saturation diving; in a comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program."
Arguably, deep-ish ocean has most of the same things going against it that space does, but with the additional(advantage or disadvantage depends on your opinion) that there is a much 'smoother' gradient between terrestrial work and deep-ocean work than there is between land and space.
With a mixture of robots and things on strings, you can exploit much of the economically interesting stuff below the water surface without any long term human habitation. Where that isn't possible(certain construction projects related to drilling, some salvage work, having a fleet of nuclear submarines ready to get their second-strike on with extreme prejudice...) you do, indeed, find people. Generally very expensive ones; but available if you are suitably motivated.
The cost of entry starts at nearly zero, pick up a fishing line at your nearest sporting goods shop, and just keeps going up, more or less smoothly(but very, very fast at the high end) for how deep you want to go and how long you want to go there. That's the kicker: For any cool undersea scheme, you can probably cook up a scheme with 90% of the benefits at much lower cost just by not going as deep or by not staying there as long. It doesn't help that many of the technologies you would need to live successfully underwater could be applied more easily and more pleasantly to existing untapped options.
Want to live on seafood and algae, in a hamster-habitube, in a hostile environment where you can't drink the water? No problem, we have loads of coastal desert where you can desalinate to your heart's content, and won't even have to breath trimix all the time!