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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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