You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Recent Underwater Habitat Showcase: Progetto Abissi (Project Abyss)
Aside from military applications where funding is essentially covered, surely there must be some commercial ways of funding this kind of project?
Is there something valuable in the silt on the bottom that requires human intervention to extract in a useful way? Is there algae that requires deep ocean placement? I wouldn't think so, on that last one, but I'm no expert.
Maybe there are some unique minerals or harvestable goods around deep ocean lava vents?
Regardless, its clear there needs to be a compelling financial incentive for future underwater projects to move forward. Aside from the one-off Navy or university studies.
Put a neo nazi, a black panther, a transwoman, a Scientologist, a wahabi Muslim, and an evangelical Christian in this thing for a month and film it:
I'd watch that, whoo-hoo! At least for an episode or two. Let the sparks fly.
Indeed, and there's already robots to harvest those metals:
They need to be controlled by humans over long, thin fiber optic cables though. Radio doesn't go very far through sea water unless it's ELF which is too low bandwidth for almost any application other than morse code.
The Chinese government is solving this by building an underwater habitat from which human technicians can control the robots far below, despite the violent surface weather of the south China sea which makes operating out of a boat that loiters overhead unsafe: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-07/china-pushes-plan-for-oceanic-space-station-in-south-china-sea