Comment by sradman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sradman | Hacker News Reader

The Five Deeps Expedition technology [1] includes a two-man submersible, three unmanned sea floor landers, and the support vessel.

The EYOS Expeditions blog post [2] is the press release from which the NPR piece is based.

The technical challenges are due to the pressure at depth and communication through water. The manned submersible seems to be a requirement until better autonomous vehicles are programmed. I keep thinking that these machines should be liquid filled, like the gamer PCs immersed in mineral oil for cooling, to avoid the pressure issues.

I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.

[1] https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/

[2] https://www.eyos-expeditions.com/kathy-sullivan-becomes-firs...

> I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.

Well, but men and women want to be there.

This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration - wouldn't it be better/easier/cheaper if it was all done by autonomous robots? The answers are also similar: we don't have the necessary tech, we likely won't have it without intermediate missions involving humans, even in robotic missions there will be a benefit of having humans near the mission site (in case of space: light lag), and media coverage is actually a good thing, because both fields are starved for funding.

> This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration...

Indeed it is the exact same argument and it has been made more eloquently by much greater men than I. Freeman Dyson made the argument in a talk he gave at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics titled "Living Through Four Revolutions"[1]. He discusses the International Space Station (ISS) starting at about the 7:15 mark and he adds the following quip:

> [The Russians] are very proud of the space station and for good reasons. They believe that human activities in space are an end in itself, essentially as an international sporting event. They don't sell it under false pretences as a scientific program.

[1] https://perimeterinstitute.ca/videos/living-through-four-rev...

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