In 2025, People Will Try Living in This Underwater Habitat

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ocean-engineering

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

52 56 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

User23• 2 years ago

“I chose… Rapture!”

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

People will do anything except upzone and institute a land value tax, huh

potato3732842• 2 years ago

The way your comment just assumes your way is the right way does very accurately capture the problem though perhaps not in the way you intended.

Edit: and before I get strawmanned I feel I should mention that I say this as someone who has "fire up the guillotines" level hate for zoning.

squigz• 2 years ago

Or read an article!

petesergeant2• 2 years ago

These projects deeply, deeply capture my imagination for some reason, although I suspect that life on or in them would likely be pretty miserable. I am a little skeptical that people will be in this thing by 2025 if so far all they have is 3d-renders though. Same company that bought the condemned FLIP ship

unsnap_biceps• 2 years ago

Joseph Dituri recently finished a 100 day stint underwater[1]. It's described as "It's basically like a really small RV" and "One of the things that has surprised me the most is how much I miss the sun"

Honestly, I think it's like most things, some people would love it, some will hate it, and a bunch will be able to tolerate it well enough.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/meet-...

petesergeant2• 2 years ago

I guess depth is going to make a big difference too. I've eaten at an underwater restaurant[0] before that was shallow enough that it was bright and sunny (while still being very much underwater), and I could see that working well.

0: https://www.conradmaldives.com/dine/ithaa-undersea-restauran...

henning• 2 years ago

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

SV_BubbleTime4• 2 years ago

“No.” Says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor."

more_corn• 2 years ago

Just stay out of pod six. Those guys are jerks.

Unbeliever69• 2 years ago

Rust Underwater Labs

awinter-py• 2 years ago

dustin hoffman's best horror movie took place in this habitat

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

I was thinking of Peter Watts' Starfish series, myself - equally horrifying, if not more so.

paulcole• 2 years ago

You can also say that dustin hoffman’s worst horror movie took place in this habitat

greesil• 2 years ago

Sealab 2025?

jutworks• 2 years ago

One can hope

tw8345• 2 years ago

I dont know why they would choose 200m deep, its pretty dark at that depth and not super interesting. Why not park it somewhere near a reef at 30-50M, dive in dive out experience for tourists, good vac options, good lighting and easy to work on.

Think of it like your first subnautica base.

richardw• 2 years ago

It’s a cap, not a target. Up to 200m, initially only up to 100m. It’s also for scientists, so the benefits are that you don’t have to keep returning to the surface. The whole idea is to reduce the cost and interruption to the work the scientists want to do. At 50m you can get to the surface fairly easily. 200m much harder.

crooked-v• 2 years ago

It's for people who already work at that depth.

ethbr12• 2 years ago

For the very fact that there isn't as much sustained exploration closer to 200m.

60m+ imposes a lot of requirements that limit the types of folks who can dive. (Unless they're also cross-trained tech divers)

db48x2• 2 years ago

They should do it somewhere shallow first, next to a large city surrounded by water where the land values are high. Requiring a boat for access would make it less feasible, so perhaps just a stairway and/or an elevator at the water’s edge instead. Put it just deep enough that it’s not visually distracting to passers–by, and shallow enough that the residents can still see the sun through skylights.

The renders with tropical ocean life right outside the windows are a fantasy; most of the sea bottom is undifferentiated mud.

Of course you could just build a marina and let people live in houseboats. You’d get the same population density with fewer of the problems and lower costs.

SV_BubbleTime4• 2 years ago

They should do it somewhere shallow first,

Does no one remember “Bioshpere”?

It didn’t go well; and it was in the desert.

lmm• 2 years ago

It went pretty well. A small amount of extra oxygen needed once during the 2-year period. Ecosystems that shifted in unexpected ways but did not collapse. 100% sealed and self-sustaining is going to be very hard, but 98% is much easier and good enough for many purposes.

madhadron2• 2 years ago

Biosphere II is worth a visit. They're still running it as a non-isolated research station. The original had several very specific problems (trees need wind to form strong roots, fresh concrete absorbs a lot of oxygen, their crops besides sweet potatos had serious soil nutrient problems, which meant they spent almost all their time desperately subsistence farming). Based on what they did we could run a Biosphere III today pretty well, which means I would call the Biosphere II experiment successful.

ooterness2• 2 years ago

We should give that another go. Unless humanity can build and operate BioSphere 3 as an unqualified success, we are nowhere near ready for a settlement on Mars.

db48x2• 2 years ago

Biosphere was an attempt at a sealed ecosystem. It's not at all comparable to a building designed as living quarters for people who come and go as they please.

Animats3• 2 years ago

They should do it somewhere shallow first

That's what they are doing. They use a flooded quarry as a test "sea".

andrewflnr2• 2 years ago

Are you thinking this is going to replace residential housing? They're designing these as research bases.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

This is kind of what I feel about McMurdo Station. Why put it so far away? Put it near a Vail resort. Lots of snow. Same with the ISS. Kind of useless that far away. Treehouses are so much cheaper.

madhadron2• 2 years ago

I think the difference between this and Jacques Cousteau's ConShelf in the 1960's and the saturation diving habitats used today is the depth and duration? Cousteau's group spent weeks at 10m and the saturation diving habitats are meant for living in for a few days at a time until your shift is over.

They do not explain anywhere why you would want to live at 200m, where it's dark and boring and you sound squeaky all the time. Living at 10m I totally get, especially in somewhere like the Red Sea.

grnnja• 2 years ago

They explain in the first paragraph that it's for scientists.

There, the ocean-exploration organization Deep has embarked on a multiyear quest to enable scientists to live on the seafloor at depths up to 200 meters for weeks, months, and possibly even years.

pzo2• 2 years ago

They do not explain anywhere why you would want to live at 200m

If for the sake of preserving humanity (a backup plan) this project seems easier to pull off than SpaceX mission to mars at least in the next 20 years. We already have hundred such underwater habitats called nuclear submarine that can accomodate 100+ people.

Many animals survived previous asteroid impact even though dinosaurs didn't - it actually made space of us humans. But you probably want to have such habitat deeper than 10m to survive tsunami.

bruce5113• 2 years ago

I don't think this really qualifies as a backup survival option.

Power, food, and transport are provided from the surface. So any event that resulted in an extinction of the species would end the habitats, perhaps a month or two later.

Power is the key limiting factor. All the power is derived from the surface, and would likely be damaged or destroyed. Food would be the next factor - yes in some cases there might be local food sources (fish) but that would exhaust quickly as well.

Not to mention air...

solalf• 2 years ago

They do explain why they want to live at 200m.

As per the article:

With current diving at 150 to 200 meters, you can only get 10 minutes of work completed, followed by 6 hours of decompression. With our underwater habitats we’ll be able to do seven years’ worth of work in 30 days with shorter decompression time. More than 90 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity lives within 200 meters’ depth and at the shorelines, and we only know about 20 percent of it.

0_____02• 2 years ago

And with fewer pressurization cycles I imagine the risk of being accidentally extruded à la Byford Dolphin is reduced?

xyst• 2 years ago

Logistics of getting clean water, electricity, reliable internet, and food is going to be literal hell. Then there's managing fecal matter and other waste management.

0_____02• 2 years ago

? Just put the poop outside. That's how it works in most oceangoing anythings, assuming you're not in port.

Animats3• 2 years ago

As with humans in space, the real question is, why send humans to do a robot's job? Most work involving undersea cables and wells uses remotely operated vehicles, not human divers.

andrewflnr2• 2 years ago

Robots are still very clumsy. I've seen videos of researchers taking minutes to do basic tasks like "yank on a lanyard attached to the ROV" using a robot arm. Oil and gas companies use a lot of robots but they still employ divers.

ghssds• 2 years ago

Humanity expanded for the last ten thousand years but now all the easy places to expand to are full, making Earth into a prison some people dream of escaping. Sending robots won't help.

Animats3• 2 years ago

The easy places to expand to are emptying out.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Un...

AdrienPoupa• 2 years ago

I just read one of the linked articles about saturation divers, it was absolutely fascinating https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-a-saturation-d...

traeregan• 2 years ago

I’m surprised to see no mention of the other Aquarius Reef Base in Key Largo, which I’ve had the pleasure of visiting (from the outside only, freediving) in person: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquarius_Reef_Base

codelikeawolf• 2 years ago

I immediately thought of that Futurama episode where Fry was looking for an apartment:

https://youtu.be/t69yuxD-iBU?si=Bm84ggtpIWwY0M3f

If you like dank, fuhgettaboutit!

In 2025, People Will Try Living in This Underwater Habitat

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