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Comment by swordswinger12 | Hacker News Reader

Don't be so sure - the first pictures of a live giant squid are only around a decade old. The ocean is deep and dark.

Very true. Apparently we've only explored 5%, leaving 95% for a giant something to be living. It would be a sad day to realize there is nothing left to be discovered. Even at an older age I still find it fascinating and exciting to think there is something unknown, mystical and possibly magical in this world.

[1]http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html

I was talking to a friend recently about how little of the sea we had explored, and he wondered out loud why it seems like people tend to take a bigger interest in space than deep sea exploration.

I joked that it's because the sea is goddam scary and we're less likely to find things with tentacles in space.

But it's still a good question. Space exploration gets a lot more love from entertainment, pop culture, and news outlets.

Its easy. To explore space, all you need is a ship that can withstand pressures between 0 and 1 atmosphere. The ocean, on the other hand...

That said, spacecraft seem to get lousy fuel economy compared to submersibles.

The start may be expensive, but currently Pioneer 10 moves at over 10 km/s on about 100W of power. That is over 360,000 km on a kWh, and that mostly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly) is not spent for propulsion.

I work in the subsea industry and when our ship has planned downtime we're allowed to go do marine research, basically just looking at the marine life that grows on and around structures at >1000m. So it does happen. Just on a very small scale!

I'm amazed that someone with FU Money hasn't funded some kind of underwater equipment to be bolted onto ships like yours, and a website to collate that data and any other data that people want to contribute.

A bunch of data isn't science, but it's a start.

I guess it's a problem that most submarines are military vessels - they could collect lots of data but releasing that data is tricky.

James Cameron did that exactly. [1]

1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james...

I tend to work in Oil and Gas, on the subsea installation side of things, the Oil Company doesn't like to advertise the position of subsea assets so I guess making data on them freely available is out of the question. I think the research project we worked on was call Serpent, it might be worth a google..

Also to record subsea date you dont need a manned submarine, ROVs are used day in day out and now AUVs are used more often.

We need better deep-sea scifi, something a bit more plausible than Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones.

Well, there's always more space to discover.

imagine the mysterious compression waves we'll find out there :)

Gravity waves?

Maybe. Plus waves so strange that we haven't invented a word for them yet. Space is big and weird; we'll never be bored!

I will bet it is neither mystical nor magical down there.

It's also rather starved of energy sources - not the ideal environment for large organisms.

I'm sure there are hundreds or even thousands of bizarre and interesting species to be discovered, but the likelihood that any of them will be impressively large is very slim.

Huh? Actually it's actually the reverse - deep sea creatures that we have discovered so far have a tendancy to be larger than their shallow-sea counterparts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-sea_gigantism

Very interesting - so having a large body may actually save energy via the increasing mass-to-surface ratio, and of course it's much easier to keep a large body mobile underwater thean on land.

So there is hope for finding some Great Old Ones after all!

Hmm....any chance this is mere misdirection by our future live giant squid overlords? (jk)

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