I wish Elon Musk was a bit smarter than he already is. The same thing goes for Jeff Bezos. And Richard Branson, too. Their obsession with outer space has them competing with one another to leave this planet for fun and profit. It is an extraordinary vanity project for those billionaires to indulge with their unimaginable wealth and power.
But I look first to Elon Musk, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. He has at least something more than his ego invested in outer space. One of his companies, SpaceX has made great innovations in rocketry and contracts with NASA to bring passengers and supplies to the International Space Station and back. His reusable rockets are a marvel to watch, and are have brought down the costs of reaching outer space. He has spearheaded innovation in the field of automobiles, too, delivering battery fueled cars powered by electric motors that are both practical and desirable. He (and his customers) have forced every other auto maker on Earth to begin building cars that do not use gasoline nor diesel fuel, but rather cleaner sources of power.
Musk’s innovations are changing the world. It is an intentional act by him. Read their company mission statement:
“Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Tesla was founded in 2003 by a group of engineers who wanted to prove that people didn't need to compromise to drive electric – that electric vehicles can be better, quicker and more fun to drive than gasoline cars.”
The transition to sustainable energy is a given in Tesla’s view, not an ideal or marketing goal. It is the future that we must embrace not only with cars and trucks, but with our whole means of living. Musk is very clear about this. All of transportation, all of manufacturing, all agriculture and housing must leave gas and coal and all petroleum energy behind before we do ourselves in because of the toxic effects of burning fossil fuels.
It is a grand vision, and by his own efforts, Musk has put muscle on the bone of his ideals. People love him, and people hate him, but no one ignores him. He is easily the most influential person on the planet.
Yet, his vision seems limited to what we all can see with our own eyes: The land, the sky above, and the waters over which we travel. Reaching for the stars is just the latest frontier of Manifest Density. It is the place beyond all the mountains that have been climbed, the jungles that have been explored, and the faraway islands that have been mapped and made familiar. It is as if there is no place left on Earth to discover.
So STOP! That is stupid. Our collective blind spot has got to be an artifact of our Western culture that always has us looking outward, to the future, and on to the next big thing. Just consider what Musk’s genius might offer if instead he were to look within.
Earth is often called a water planet. Over seventy percent of its surface is covered in water. It is the single thing that no life on earth can live without. But it may as well be outer space for all we know about what lies beneath its surface.
Traveling into outer space has been easier than travel to the ocean’s depths. Space is difficult to travel with its near vacuum and extremes of temperature. By contrast, the deep sea is under crushing pressures, is thick and viscous, devoid of light, very cold, and thus very difficult to travel. It has been easier to overcome engineering challenges of going into space than to travel the ocean floor. But the rewards the oceans offer easily outweigh what we can bring home from the heavens above.
The oceans offer us almost unlimited sources of food and energy, of mineral wealth and alien life not imagined. Our richest source of medicines will be the oceans. Researchers have harvested viruses from shallow ocean waters that attack bacteria. The virus are selective and virus have been found effective at destroying infectious bacteria that are resistant to all known antibiotics. In deeper waters, there are life forms living in the absence of sunlight and oxygen unlike any life imagined by science until their recent discovery. Surely their study will open up whole new areas of knowledge.
And here’s something that must surely appeal to the likes of Elon Musk. At the depths of the Abyss, some ten to twenty thousand feet deep, lay trillions of metallic nodules, or rocks, laying upon the ocean floor like so many golf balls on a driving range. These nodules have been called the cleanest path to electric vehicles. One company organizing to harvest these nodules describes them thusly:
“Polymetallic nodules, also called manganese nodules, contain four essential battery metals: cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese, in a single ore. Formed over millions of years by absorbing metals from seawater, these nodules lie unattached to the abyssal seafloor and are almost entirely composed of usable materials. Unlike land ores, they don’t contain toxic levels of heavy elements, and producing metals from nodules generates 99% less solid waste, with no toxic tailings.”
The Metals Company (https:metals.co/), formerly known as Deep Green, has spent the past decade developing technology to harvest these nodules with the least amount of disruption to the surrounding environment. You cannot just drop a bucket and drag it across the sea floor to collect them. Well, you could, but the damage you would do the ocean environment from the depths of the abyss all the way up to the surface waters would be catastrophic. The United Nations established the International Seabed Authority in 1994 which licensed the first exploration of seabeds for harvest of metallic nodules in 2011. Developing and deploying safe technology to harvest nodules at scale is a worthy challenge. On their FAQ page, the Metals Company states:
“… peer-reviewed research comparing the life-cycle climate change impacts of supplying 1 billion EVs with nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese shows that using nodules to produce these metals, rather than getting them from land-based resources, would reduce the associated climate change impacts by 90%.”
The Abyss is not a place for humans to work. But robots can withstand the immense weight of water that varies from the 200 to 600 times atmospheric pressure in which we live our lives. (Note: atmospheric pressure averages 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level. Five hundred atmospheres is thus 7,350 pounds per square inch.)
No one wants to live near a rare-earth mining operation on land. The toxic tailings it creates despoils water and land for centuries. Such mining operations leave the land uninhabitable. Upon the sea floor, a more benign and potentially productive mining can take place without toxic tailings. If the goal is sustainability, then the seas offer a pathway to that goal.
We have spent many centuries netting fish from ocean waters. Techniques have been used without regard to the ecology that provides the catch. Species of fish have been exploited near to extinction. Mass netting is taking a huge toll on incidental catch of animals including sea turtles, sharks and porpoise as well as leaving behind segments of netting that are entrapping whales. This is all due to greed and ignorance of the ocean environment. Feeble attempts to regulate our waters have begun but face immense hurdles. A “moonshot” program is needed to learn how to manage this resource belonging to all the people of earth.
Farming the sea must involve utilizing the entire water column, from plants and planktons on the surface to managing tiers of plants and sea animals at differing water depths all the way to the bottom where many of our favorite seafoods can be found. Managing these vertical farms requires more knowledge than we have today, but is well within our means to learn the necessary skills
Oceans are our window on Earth’s inner life. Mystics and counselors have for centuries advised us to look within ourselves to find a greater knowledge. The earth is our home and we are not apart from it. We are a microcosm of it. As we must become comfortable looking within to really know ourselves and to guide our interaction with the outside world, looking within the Earth will yield riches beyond measure to both our material wealth and our understanding life on this earth.