For as Much as We Know About the World, There Are Still Dark Spots on the Map | Hacker News Reader

For as Much as We Know About the World, There Are Still Dark Spots on the Map

atlasobscura.com

121 pointsThevet59 comments

I've done some reasonably in-depth (hah) oceanographic GIS work.

we know _nothing_ about the oceans. Even the things one would think are pretty easy are known at very, very coarse granularity. "what shape is the ocean floor? what's it made of? how deep is the sediment here?" are questions that, for the vast majority of the ocean, we have answers for at a resolution of about one data point per square mile or worse, and that survey data is decades old.

The last "proper", "get on a boat for 6 months and count animals" surveys of marine mammal populations in some high risk areas of the ocean (like the gulf of mexico) are almost 40 years old for some species.

etc.

Yet many argue that we are overfishing and depleting our ocean's fish? What evidence can those individuals use to prove this is true if our knowledge of the oceans are as limited as you say they are?

By looking at how much fish is caught? It's pretty easy to measure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#/media/File:Surexp...

Surveying the presence or absence of fish is an activity for which a strong economic incentive exists. It's somewhat different than things like sediment depth, etc. which the gp comment mentioned. That stuff will have been mapped to the extent necessary for military operations and determining the viability of offshore drilling.

That could be because fish are moving into other areas or learn to avoid the nets. Fishing yields can't be the only source of data.

How do you think they do the surveys in the first place? ;) They use nets.

Modern factory fishing fleets use sonar and track movements of fish populations over vast areas. It's highly unlikely fish have learned to evade sonar, or nets.

You can simply ask fisherman about what is going on with their catch. People tend to side with scientific data, that can be outdated or wrong, rather than asking simple man about their own experiences.

We need to learn to ask "regular people", to make big scientific projects like this to work.

Right because i’m sure the fisherman doesn’t have any bias when he or she answers the survey questions. Including the wholly unscientific opinions of “regular people” is not a solution that will lead to better scientific understanding.

edit s/real/regular

Using data from regular people as a PART of such a research would help tremendously in my opinion. People do not need to know why this data is gathered when answering it.

I would be surprised if our current measurements of fishing and fish populations did not involve data from fisherman.

Not sure why your comment is getting downvoted so much. It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. There may be a good answer for how we can know our fishing impact with so little data, but it's obviously not something you can easily intuit.

> There may be a good answer for how we can know our fishing impact with so little data

We know it experientially, based on how external factors in previous overfishing have played out. When nearly every aspect of technology should enable more/better fishing, but instead quality and quantity go down per unit of work, the problem is overfishing creating a lack of supply.

When fisheries collapse, the effects are glaringly obvious, and local economies tend to collapse with them. There are numerous modern examples if you care to google it.

Knowledge of the ocean, the bottom, and what is in it, is very different from knowledge of commercial fish populations. Records of catch go way back and the methods for inferring population are good enough. There is also an archaeological record of what coastal people ate thousands of years ago and these provide evidence of changes in fish populations over hundreds of years.

c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

If only we funded science with half of the vigor we do even something as pathetic as Juicero...

Edit: for perspective, Juicero raised and blew over $100mil on the promise of something you can get from a salad, while the yearly operating budget for the wildly successful Cassini mission was $60mil.

Because people funding these companies are out for themselves, not the greater good. They don't care if some new device or app is going to change the world. They only care if it will make them rich. That's the problem. There isn't enough philanthropic venture capitalists.

To be fair, pre-launch development for Cassini was over $1B [0]. There was a massive upfront investment in the mission.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Object...

Or 1/9th of a Theranos, amortized over 13 years of discovery rather than flushed down a toilet.

Keep in mind diminishing returns: http://www.nature.com/news/irreproducible-biology-research-c...

I wouldn't say that's a problem of diminishing returns. It's a matter of research funding being massively biased toward new ideas and not making old ideas more solid.

If only there were terrorists, oil, or illegal immigrants at the bottom of the deep ocean.. then we'd know much more about it than we do today.

There's tons of oil under the ocean. See deep sea drilling and oil platforms.

and indeed the oil and gas industry is doing most of the bathymetric survey work these days.

they aren’t telling anyone else what it is, though.

Isn't easier to tell marine population and diversity though testing the water sample DNA characteristics[1]? This as allows for much better (accurate) data as well as ease of collection, no?

[1]http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/15/dna-detectives-abl...

Curious what kind of legal things you could face if you wanted to just release drones that ran on their own. Surfaced to transmit data, went back down... not sure how strong they'd have to be to go deep.

This reminds me of a line from "Bill Nye the Science Guy" from when I was younger. Here's what my fuzzy memory recalls:

We know more about the moon than our oceans. Getting to the moon is easy, all you need is a few billion dollars, a rocket pointed at space, and a space suit to keep you pressurized.

In the ocean you have to deal with such unimaginable crushing pressures that push the limits of human engineering. Whats insane is that there is life there! There is so much left in the ocean to explore because humans have not been able to get there yet.

The pressure difference between 1 atm and the moon is exactly 1 atm. It's less than the difference between the inside and outside of most car tires.

The pressure difference between 1 atm and the bottom of the ocean is hundreds of atm, and the deepest spots can go over 1000 atm.

Put this way, it's easy to see why the ocean is so much tougher.

Luckily, the ocean is much closer than the moon, and the same gravity that is responsible for the tyranny of the rocket equation actually helps you get to the bottom. We've been to both places: the moon with Apollo landers, and the bottom of the Mariana Trench with bathyscaphes. I hope we'll keep returning to learn more about both. Of course, this will be much easier with robots that don't need to stay at 1 atm.

Not sure the robots help that much (apart from not dying when things go wrong).

As you said in some parts pressure is 1000atm, if we can pressurise the robots to 50atm that still leaves 950atm to deal with, I'm curious what happens to electronics at 100atm, 500atm and 1000atm. I'd imagine some components wouldn't handle that very well.

Of course robots have other huge advantages, duration (no messy waste problems, no need for oxygen/carbon dioxide handling systems, no need for (as much) heating) I guess.

It's a lot cheaper to keep a robot than a human operating at that pressure.

It is much easier to keep electronics working down there when empty space is filled with liquid instead of pressurised gas (usually nitrogen). It is not the pressure, but pressure difference, that matters and liquids are not as compressible as gas is.

Edit: just adding a note that I have worked with submarine electronics[1] for a while and can say we even do not know much about what is happening near the shore, not to even talk about the unexploredness of oceans. Quite a lot of HW/SW in use by scientists is far from modern. We need more initiatives like the Ocean Discovery XPRIZE[2] to bring attention to the field.

[1] http://www.flydogmarine.com

[2] https://oceandiscovery.xprize.org

>I'm curious what happens to electronics at 100atm, 500atm and 1000atm.

On ROVs and the like, electronics modules are frequently immersed in mineral oil.

As you implied, getting to the bottom of the ocean is about as difficult as getting to the moon, and involves many of the same challenges.

> It's less than the difference between the inside and outside of most car tires

There are tires that are inflated with < 1 atm?

It's easy to build a solid container with < 1 atm inside. But I don't think such a container will fit the definition of a pneumatic tire. Any flexible container with < 1 atm inside will collapse until the pressure inside reaches equilibrium with the air outside. It will collapse further if there's a heavy load on top of it, or maybe less if it's a run-flat tire with rigid structures inside.

Perhaps if you were on top of a very tall mountain or, even better, another planet, you could get away with filling your tires with less than < 1 atm and still have them functional.

The prompt was talking about pressure between the inside and outside of the tire. If that's slightly under 1atm you have a perfectly normal but overly soft tire. People actually use pressures that low for rock crawling.

(For reference a typical car tire is just over 2atm relative, 3atm absolute)

> The pressure difference between 1 atm and the moon is exactly 1 atm. It's less than the difference between the inside and outside of most car tires.

I forget the moon has a hint of an atmosphere. [1] The pressure is 3×10^−15. I wonder when, if ever, you'd need to take that into account.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_the_Moon

The oceans are also a fr....ing big area to explore even if you send probes down

Did you just edit "freaking"?

I was hoping it was an edit of "fracking."

I was tempted to leave out the "r" though.

damit bob

Copied from a previous response to the same quote:

There are approximately 3x10^28 molecules of water per cubic meter (assuming pure water, which is obviously not the case).

A third of the way to the moon, there are approximately 7x10^6 molecules of hydrogen per cubic meter[0].

From high earth orbit (assume 60k km), it's about 300k km to the moon.

The average depth of the ocean is about 3.5km.

For simplification, let's assume that a molecule of water and a molecule of hydrogen have the same density (which they don't)

From high earth orbit, in a straight line to the moon, there would be about 2x10^12 hydrogen molecules in the way.

From the ocean surface to the average depth, there would be about 1x10^32 water molecules in the way.

Not getting into the optical properties of water vs hydrogen, or the fact that the math is much different for a probe orbiting the moon, there's just more "stuff" between the ocean surface and the ocean floor, and a satellite and the moon.

[0] - http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/facts.html

LOL I recognize that. It was a reply to me.

For reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15338480

This reminds me of that Futurama joke where the spaceship is dragged underwater by a large fish on unbreakable tether:

[Ships Cockpit. The room is glowing red and a klaxon beeps. Leela watches the depth gauge.]

LEELA

Depth at 45 hundred feet, 48 hundred, 50 hundred! 5000 feet!

FARNSWORTH

Dear Lord, that's over 150 atmospheres of pressure.

FRY

How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?

FARNSWORTH

Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.

The obvious emphasis of the maps is on the vastness of oceans and how much remains unknown, but I would stress also surprising is how little we know about the biodiversity of land. The 'remoteness from cities' map highlights places based on how few humans live there, but many of these areas (dense tropical forests) are home to the majority of species on the planet. We are barely now starting to see some consensus on estimates for how many species of land-dwelling arthropods there even are (several million). We know nothing or next to nothing about the vast majority of these. This is pretty amazing to me.

I'm a little disappointed that this article makes such a big claim but actually states in the last map that all land is discovered. First of all I don't think it's true. At least some spots will be visited so infrequently or only by a disconnected tribe of people that it's basically unexplored. And second the whole discussion doesn't make sense if all land is discovered. Of course there are undiscovered pieces of water (maybe including small islands) somewhere. For lack of importance they don't count though.

It doesn't say that all land is discovered. It only shows data about oceans; it's called "Unknown Oceans" and shows data from the Census of Marine Life.

This is a deceptive title. The maps presented are interesting, and the article touches on related points of where infrastructure is located, and where people live, but aside from noting that parts of the deep ocean have not been mapped in detail, this article does not show that any "dark spots" exist on the map.

There are actual black smudges on a map that represent, based on the map's key, unexplored areas. So both literally and figuratively, this article shows "dark spots" existing on a map.

The areas near "uncontacted peoples" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples) are pretty dark. We have satellite images (in many cases of nothing but trees/jungle), but we know little of the facts on the ground.

I would agree. Outside of the deep Amazon and oceans, there's not much that hasn't been covered.

I find myself wishing there was more contrast between 24hrs and the days scale on the remoteness chart. The scale goes up pretty quickly from 2 days to 10 days and it's really hard to tell what would be more than 24hrs of travel time. I say this because I was looking at the chart thinking anything dark was 10 days which was weird that certain parts in Australia would be 10 days when, next to them, was just hours but it turns out the darkness is just present for lower numbers.

May it EVER be so...!

Not what I was expecting. I was hoping for a dark spot on the map that might harbor an island with dinosaurs still roaming. Sad.

maybe there are sea dinosaurs :) don't give up hope!

We found them in the 30s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth

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