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The US needs a NASA for exploring the oceans.
NASA sold it. We all bought it. Space exploration promised us alien life, lucrative planetary mining, and fabulous lunar colonies. News flash, ladies and gents: Space is nearly empty. It's a sterile vacuum, filled mostly with the junk we put up there. We're throwing billions of dollars into the void and ignoring a rich frontier much closer to home: Earth's oceans. They're awash with unknown life, unclaimed territory, and immense natural resources. Perhaps the future of mankind isn't out in space but in our sea.
NASA has had its day. It's given us technological marvels from cell phones to SETI screensavers. But we're not mining the moon. We're not terraforming Mars. And we're certainly not finding any aliens. We've gotten completely off track: choosing to look for long-dead microbes 390 million miles away on Europa, while neglecting undiscovered life just miles off the coast of North America.
About 94 percent of life on Earth resides in the oceans. We've seen only about 2 percent of this vast ecosystem - the uppermost layer (home to fish, whales, scuba divers, and most known marine life). Beneath this warm lens lies a cold, dark, and life-rich realm of grand proportions. It's home to creatures as far removed from the sun and human biology as any alien imagined by science fiction.
We've seen some of these organisms clustering around midocean thermal vents - small undersea volcanoes that spew 400-degree water spiked with toxic chemicals. Thriving in total darkness, under 8,000 psi of ambient pressure, these organisms possess metabolic processes fundamentally different from ours. The ones we know about rely on chemosynthesis, using sulphides and other chemicals from Earth's core to convert seawater into food. That's about as alien as it gets.
The abundance of exotic biomass is a potential boon for the biotech industry. Thermal-vent microbes may help in the study of human genetics and the prevention of disease. But even if thermal vents aren't the future of biotech, there are plenty of other reasons to dive in. It's now suggested that many thermal vents are acting as alchemy labs, producing valuable concentrations of minerals like copper, iron, silver, and gold. There's every reason to believe that the ocean is a storehouse of minerals and even fuels. Mid-ocean thermal vents are just the beginning.
So the dream of recovering helium-3 fuel from the moon, 238,000 miles away, simply doesn't make sense. There are many moons' worth of valuable resources lying untouched under the seabed.
And what about those groovy lunar colonies? Nothing's happening there. We're taking a foolishly narrow view, pinning nearly all our hopes on space. We're racing to colonize the cosmos, and two-thirds of Earth has yet to be discovered. The other planets in our solar system are devoid of water, oxygen, or food - but the ocean is brimming with these resources. Everything we need for truly "extraterrestrial" colonies is right here. Who knows what we'll find.
Currently, the entire US scientific community shares a single, 12-year-old submersible named Alvin. With just one Alvin, long-range exploration is nearly impossible. Alvin doesn't even know where to go because we don't have a decent map. The latest ocean charts rely on satellites to detect the sea-level changes wrought by the gravitational pull of underlying topography. This gives us a crude sketch that's essentially useless without hands-on exploration. We can't begin to mine the sea's minerals or harvest DNA unless we go deep, with a fleet of sea exploration vessels. We need a national agency with the stated goal of exploring, mapping, and studying the oceans.
Japan is already there, having created the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, which secures rights to deep-sea minerals, territories, and potential food sources. Its Deep Star program has even taken an early lead in DNA recovery: It's already working with the biotech industry to develop pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, we're still combing the rain forests and wishing upon a star.
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