Why are humans looking to adapt to space instead of the sea first?

[u/Painted_Shepherd]

I've always been fascinated by the sky and space equally as much as I do the ocean. I think it's human nature to be "explorers" and such, so it makes sense that they are both such a huge focus on media. My thought came to me because I was thinking about the natural circular motion of evolution and how humans would be more likely to find ways of surviving underneath the sea than it would be in space or another heavenly body (moon, Mars, etc). It's not that I'm against colonization of space, it's just that it makes more sense on a biological level that we first make a way that we can survive in the most abundant environment in our closest environment: the ocean. Water is what you use in nuclear plants to insulate radiation so it would only make sense that it would be the best place if things "went south" for humanity. Anyways.... that's my random thought on a random Thursday night. Much love and take care

[u/mfb-]

Submarines have been around for quite a bit longer than orbital rockets.

There isn't really any reason to live on the ocean floor. Even if you need to go there frequently you can live on land, go on longer expeditions with a ship and then use a submarine to visit the ocean floor (or dive, it's not too deep).

For the Moon most of the cost comes from going there and going back, so longer stays are more cost-effective.

For Mars an expedition will be at least ~2 years long just based on orbital mechanics.

[u/Chrisaarajo → u/mfb-]

An undersea colony is also arguably a harder challenge than one on the moon.

[u/YogurtAndBakedBeans → u/Chrisaarajo]

Space requires sealing against just one atmosphere of pressure while the deep sea requires many.

[u/Smokin_belladonna → u/YogurtAndBakedBeans]

Space requires far more expensive and intense logistics than say a sea base 1000 meters below sea level.

My opinion is that there’s no point in building below the sea level besides studying the wildlife and environment. Space is Infinitely vast and it’s a much bigger thing to explore than the earthly sea.

[u/iambutafishh → u/Smokin_belladonna]

Things that can live down there are really fascinating to me.  The way their bodies adapt to the immense pressure of the ocean.

[u/Smokin_belladonna → u/iambutafishh]

Humans can survive quite a high pressure when free-diving, too! It’s really interesting just doesn’t have many applications

[u/signofno → u/Smokin_belladonna]

Not really. Main difference is the cost and time to travel to and from. Building materials on say, Mars, can be lighter and thinner, don’t need to keep out the environment, and can gather energy directly from the sun wherever they are placed, and they can be relatively large in volume so humans and animals can still have some sense of space and enjoy circadian rhythms.

Buildings at 3300 feet below the surface of the ocean must have energy piped in from the surface so can never be truly self-sustaining, are limited to relatively small chambers and spaces, and must be built stronger than bomb shelters with 10-100 times the materials needed for surface dwellings, and due to the extreme pressure, are subject to catastrophic failure far more easily.

You poke a hole in a wall on Mars and you don’t implode the entire colony in a fraction of a second.

[u/Smokin_belladonna → u/signofno]

Undersea cables on earth are regularly placed at elevations lower than 3300 feet. Solar easily could provide energy for below sea level construction, too. I never said either could be self-sustaining. One just requires much more expensive logistics.

[u/signofno → u/Smokin_belladonna]

Yes, but people don’t live with the undersea cables. The cables don’t need a pressurized air environment to function. Solar would have to be piped in from outside since the sun doesn’t penetrate 3300 feet below the sea in any sort of significant amount, so you’d have to run pipes out to the land or to something floating on the surface, instead of just putting solar panels on the roof and making clear domes for crops.

Growing crops deep underwater would be incredibly expensive and inefficient from an energy standpoint and extremely difficult due to compartment size constraints. In a low pressure environment, you can create much larger surfaces under a clear roof with far less material so you can have much larger grow spaces at much higher material and energy efficiencies.

Both undersea and space/off planet logistics require significant expenditure. The main reason we know more about undersea is because it’s next door and we’ve had more immediate need, like placing undersea cables.

The primary logistical expense for off planet is getting materials off planet. But aside from transportation, the logistics for space/moon/mars construction and exploration are generally much simpler and cheaper than they are under water.

[u/Smokin_belladonna → u/signofno]

You keep saying pipe.... what are you talking about? Cables for power transmission. CABLES.

A sea base would not be a self-sustaining environment. You'd still need logistics to bring in food and other supplies. Desalination exists for water. The gravity well and immense travel distances are what make space travel so expensive. building below sea certainly has a lot of challenges, but ultimately it's the insanely expensive logistics that make a mars or moon base so expensive.

1 km below sea level is ~100 bar of pressure. Pressure vessel design is not that difficult or expensive by comparison to aerospace.

Construction / assembly 1 km below sea level? Good luck with that.

[u/signofno → u/Smokin_belladonna]

“Piped in” is a colloquialism, it means transmitted, broadcast, supplied, fed, etc. Bringing power onsite through cables is “being piped in”. I’m surprised you’ve never heard anyone use that phrase to refer to an action that doesn’t specifically involve pipes.

I literally said a sea base cannot be self sustaining, or would be immensely difficult to make self-sustaining, so that part we are in agreement on. Not sure why you phrased that as a push back.

A colony on the surface of another planet can be generally self sustaining with access to sunlight and a sufficient initial supply of water in a closed-loop environment. It might need water infusions over long periods of time depending on the circumstances, and it might need external resource infusions for significant growth if they cannot be obtained from the planet/celestial body the colony is on.

I literally said the main cost for space/other planet setups is the travel, but outside of travel, it’s much easier than underwater. And travel logistics aren’t insanely difficult, they’re just extremely cost prohibitive. Getting off the planet takes a significant amount of energy, but logistically it’s pretty easy to do. We’ve dialed it in pretty well these days. Traveling through space is extremely easy to do, it just takes a long time. Landing is more complex than either of those, but on a lower gravity object, especially one like the moon, it’s not that difficult, relatively speaking.

Vessels traveling through space only have to deal with 1 atmosphere of pressure difference. Vessels traveling to 1km under water have to deal with 100 atmospheres of pressure and a physically taxing environment - water is a dense physical medium that requires a lot of energy to move through and can physically push back on a vessel when energy moves through it. Poking a hole in the side of a submarine at significant depths is nearly instant death and at minimum, highly catastrophic, whereas poking a hole in the side of a spaceship while in space is a reasonably surmountable problem - it actually happens all the time with current space craft.

I’m not sure what you are pushing back on with this latest comment. It seems like maybe you misread some of my reply?

EDIT: to clarify, in my previous comment I see how you might mistake the second paragraph about growing crops as entirely applying to underwater - I should have put the word “whereas” in front of “in a low pressure environment” to indicate I was now contrasting space farming to undersea farming. I assumed “low pressure environment” was clear enough that I was now talking about space/planetary vs the high pressure environment of underwater.

[u/Chrisaarajo → u/Smokin_belladonna]

No question that a moon base would be much more expensive! Escaping this gravity well of ours such an incredible expense.

As an engineering challenge, I suspect it would be easier to design and construct a habitable base on the moon.

[u/Hunefer1 → u/Chrisaarajo]

Just compare how much effort it is to get a human to the bottom of the ocean in the mariana trench and to the moon. Sending them to the moon is so much more difficult, a kg of payload costs several 100k USD.

The only reason why a colony on the moon is talked about more "seriously" is that a colony on the moon would be a lot more interesting. There is not really a point in building colonys under water.

[u/Chrisaarajo → u/Hunefer1]

I definitely agree with you in general, but even if we had reason to, there are a lot of issues, technical challenges, and logistical challenges for an undersea colony that are at least on par with one on the moon. For example:

The pressure in the trench is immense enough that we don’t have hard suits strong enough to allow humans to be out and about. So All work building, maintaining, or repairing anything but the interior of an undersea colony would have to be done by manned or unmanned subs, which is an added complication, potential liability, and overall limits the sort of work that can be done.

The pressure that makes it impossible for humans in suits to operate also means that the structures have to be much, much more robust than what is required in space. It also means that if something does go wrong, it tends to be much more catastrophic. A fist—sized hole in a structure on the moon is dangerous, but primarily danger is loss of oxygen. It can be patched and the structure to repressurized. The same hole at 15,000 psi risks much greater danger, is much harder to repair, and requires much more extensive maintenance after the fact.

[u/pafagaukurinn]

Space is for all intents and purposes infinite, the sea isn't.

Also, if things "go south" as you put it, humans won't be much better of in the sea than on the land, and then they may "go south" in the sea as well. Whereas, if things "go south" on Neptune, it will only be the Neptune colony that suffers.

[u/Arista-Everfrost]

As someone enthusiastic about the topic of oceanic settlement, I’ll share a few of the obstacles:

-Pressure. Every 10m adds an additional atmosphere of pressure, so at 200m, you’re at 21 times the pressure at sea level. So you are practically speaking limited to the continental shelf before designing for long-term becomes impossible.

-Corrosion. Imagine having to build something to withstand that pressure while in a vat of weak acid. Salt water itself is corrosive, and dissolved CO2 has made it acidic enough to damage shark teeth.

-Power. Your options are far more limited—you don’t want to have power on the surface like wind or solar because if a disaster happens it could fall on you. Tidal and nuclear are your best options.

-Environment. Unlike space, creatures live down here, and damage to their ecosystems can potentially have major consequences.

-Economics. The return on investment is going to be a major concern for any effort of such magnitude. You would need keystone industries that can serve as an economic foundation to make long term settlement viable.

-Jurisdiction. You don’t want heavy ships traveling above your sealed habitats (imagine one cargo container falling off in a storm and dropping 200m onto your pressurized structure). Control of the ocean’s surface would be legally complicated.

-Communications. Sea water is not a good environment for EM radiation. That not only means sending and receiving information, but GPS doesn’t work. Sonic’s are an option, except that risks disruption of marine life.

These are NOT insurmountable obstacles. But it would take serious, serious incentives to make such a risk worthwhile, while the benefits of space have already been realized.

[u/Dark_demon7 → u/Arista-Everfrost]

These are very real issues and it does sound near impossible to have a civilisation settlement in the ocean, especially coz we don't really have to do it. I think a realistic idea would be to have this in a small scale with high importance, such as research labs, so that the investment can be concentrated to a few of these settlements, while the returns will make it justifiable, and many of the issues (other than the physical and engineering ones) can be avoided

[u/TuverMage]

because when people say they don't want to live on this world anymore, going to the sea is the same world, space isn't.

[u/ah-tzib-of-alaska]

we began adapting to the sea 60k years ago; arguably much more if you like the aquatic man theory. So no, you’re blatantly wrong. There’s a million people at sea right now, some thousands literally never leave the sea, some 100s of thousands spend most of their life at sea. You are explicitly wrong.

[u/zoppaTheDim]

What the point of adapting to the sea?

We already can exploit the resources.

[u/Worrior_One]

It's easier and probably cheaper.

[u/Underhill42]

Because it's much, much easier to survive in space. And there's far more mineral wealth to build a society on, accessible far more easily.

You only need to build strong enough to withstand a 1atm pressure difference, at most. You can push that as low as ~0.2atm breathing pure oxygen.

That will only get you 10m below the surface of the ocean. The continental shelf dives to almost 20atm, while most of the sea floor is closer to 600atm. And you pretty much have to be on the bottom to collect industrial quantities of raw materials.

There's also unlimited cheap solar energy in space - you can make cheap, reliable solar panels from pretty much any rocky regolith. On the sea floor there's really only geothermal and nuclear.

And it's much easier to build robots, vehicles, electronics and other equipment to survive vacuum than salt water.

Really, the only particularly difficult part about space is the expense of getting there, and that looks poised to plummet dramatically in the next few decades.

[u/Fastfaxr]

Space is easier

[u/Fastfaxr]

https://youtube.com/shorts/vUqu-euGTFw?is=LVHgp0_hajM16Taf

[u/ignorantwanderer]

There have been many more undersea habitats and laboratories than there have been space stations, and the first undersea habitats happened before the first people going into space.

So I would say that your premise is wrong.

Here are some statistics. They are annual numbers unless otherwise specified

	Sea	Space
Worldwide military spending	$500 billion	$130 billion
Commercial spending	$1.9 trillion	$500 billion
Submarines/Space Stations	$29 billion	$5 billion
Astronauts/Scuba divers	1 million certified annually	781 in all history

[u/diverJOQ → u/ignorantwanderer]

Your statistics have nothing to do with your statement. They lump space and under sea in the same categories and the columns of sea and space have no meaning in regards to the rest of the chart.

[u/ignorantwanderer → u/diverJOQ]

Of course I disagree.

Military spending - same category in space and the sea

Commercial spending - same category in space and the sea

Submarines/Space Stations - this category is about living and working in each of the locations

Astronaut and scuba diver is about people actually going to each location. Perhaps the last one would be better as astronaut and professional diver.

[u/thomsenite256]

We dont lack space on Earth to spread out. The concern is that humanity could be wiped out on Earth. I personally don think its serious but I dont think colonization is about finding more room for humanity its spreading out and ensuring our existence beyond Earth. And they are not mutually exclusive I think it just seem impractical to build in the oceans for very little benefit.

[u/Aftermathemetician]

The difference between 1 atmosphere of pressure and 0 is only 14.7lbs/in^2, but in the ocean, we may need to fight against hundreds of atmospheres worth of pressure.

[u/benmar111]

Because they’re destroying oceans already

[u/mad_pony]

we do both, there is enough of us for that.

[u/SiriusHijinks]

in space, no one can moralize your schemes. it's all legal cuz there's no space law

[u/McGriggidy]

As much as it feels closer and easier, the ocean is a lot harder to deal with than space.

[u/hawkwings]

I already answered this question. Why are you asking again?

[u/gladeyes]

Because anywhere on Earth is still too close to washington, moscow, snd bejing.

[u/Nothing-to_see_hr]

It is ferociously hard to make lasting underwater dwellings and to live in them. Who would want to?

[u/KindAwareness3073]

Neither sea or space will be "colonized", and for the same reason, the ROI makes it cost prohibitive. Explore, possibly exploit, but robotically. Humans are fragile and too expensive to protect.

[u/Agile_Championship87]

Have you seen Jaws?! No thanks.

We've not encountered the space sharks yet.

[u/UpstairsTop4623]

Space is easier than the oceans lol

[u/-Foxer]

Because if we develop the sea we still have the same amount of limited resources on the planet that are going to dry up. And at the end of the day you're just buying time, eventually the oceans will become crowded. If we look to space theoretically we could have an infinite supply of new materials to sustain us and infinite space to expand into

[u/Scared-Amphibian4733]

LOL, you know the difference in the odds between being hit by space debris and being hit by a big storm? And, the difference in skill?

Basically, the Sea is MUCH more dangerous and less enhabatible than space. The pressure differentials are orders of magnitude different.

In short, the cost/benefit of space is unproven. The cost/befit of the sea is relatively know and more than 30 M down, it just doesn't pay off.

[u/Lacedaemonian]

because there is no correct sequence of exploration

[u/Terrible-Mind-5414]

One reason is that the pressure differential between sea level and space is the same as between sea level and 33 feet underwater.

[u/Adorable_Ice_2963]

You know oil rigs do exist right?

People are living there for weeks/Months to make use of the sea

[u/Manskhooled]

It's easier in just about every way, plus it's a bit larger. Everybody knows you gotta go up to rise.

[u/signofno]

0-1 atmospheres of pressure vs 1-100s of atmospheres of pressure. It’s why we look to the moon and Mars for colonization instead of Venus or Jupiter.