An Anonymous Investor Is Spending Millions To Make Underwater Homes 66
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Down an easy-to-miss turnoff on the A48 just outside Chepstow on the Welsh border, the gentle rumble of trucks, cranes and people at work mixes with birdsong in what is an otherwise peaceful rural setting. It is a crisp and sunny winter morning when I visit and, at first glance, the site appears to be little more than prefab containers and a car park. Yet, behind the scenes a group of men and women with expertise in diving, marine biology, technology, finance, construction and manufacturing are building something extraordinary. They have come together with a single mission statement: to make humans aquatic. Their project is called Deep (not The Deep) and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation, which the project founders say will enable them to establish a "permanent human presence" under the sea from 2027.
So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will "increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity," according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the 100 million pounds being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor's identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.
[...] Mike Shackleford, Deep's chief operating officer, explains the thought process behind the project. "Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out. Space is tough to get to, but once you're up there, it's a relatively benign environment." The ocean is the opposite: it's fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you're down there, "basically, everything wants to kill you," he jokes. "Yet, just about every oceanographer I've met says, 'You'd be shocked at how little we know about the ocean,'" Shackleford tells me. "So somebody has got to take those first steps to try to build some of the technology that will allow us to go down and study the ocean in situ." The idea of Deep's sentinels is that, initially, people will be able to stay inside for up to 28 days at a time -- though the hope is that this could one day be extended to months ... and beyond. "The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world," says Shackleford.
So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will "increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity," according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the 100 million pounds being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor's identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.
[...] Mike Shackleford, Deep's chief operating officer, explains the thought process behind the project. "Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out. Space is tough to get to, but once you're up there, it's a relatively benign environment." The ocean is the opposite: it's fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you're down there, "basically, everything wants to kill you," he jokes. "Yet, just about every oceanographer I've met says, 'You'd be shocked at how little we know about the ocean,'" Shackleford tells me. "So somebody has got to take those first steps to try to build some of the technology that will allow us to go down and study the ocean in situ." The idea of Deep's sentinels is that, initially, people will be able to stay inside for up to 28 days at a time -- though the hope is that this could one day be extended to months ... and beyond. "The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world," says Shackleford.
Vertical houses (Score:3)
Multiple levels, different zones depending on the pressures of each zone.
Each pod would be 'air^H^H^H water-lock' sealed so you could swim out from each balcony to fish or harvest. I mean you'd have to like sashimi but it would be interesting to see what sort of aquaculture would develop by observing what one's sea-pets would eat at each level.
Re:Vertical houses (Score:4, Funny)
Makes more sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Makes more sense (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
Until we've used up every last square inch of the earth, there is no reason whatsoever to put people permanently on the moon or Mars. A raft floating in the ocean or a habitat at the north pole would be substantially safer, cheaper, and more pleasant than living in a box on Mars or a cave on the moon.
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We totally need to send people there for science. And just to say we did. But living there? I certainly wouldn't want to.
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We already have a good substitute for underwater living: being able to commute to the ocean and access its resources. There is no such substitute for celestial objects, because the commute time is too long or uses too much fuel. Earth is not limited by inability to build housing, but by resource limitations and conflicts with other humans.
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Until we've used up every last square inch of the earth, there is no reason whatsoever to put people permanently on the moon or Mars.
Why would you want to wait until it is an emergency? Only a few hundred million pounds is being used to construct this. That is not even a drop in the bucket for human activities. It is less wasteful and a smaller amount than we give every day to every oligarch to preen their egos.
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I think we have 1000+ years before we NEED to put people permanently on another world. By then maybe we'll have figured out how to make it feasible and pleasant.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll last 1000 years at our current trajectory.
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What coiuld possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
I wonder...
Re:What coiuld possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
Splicers ? Little Sisters ? Big Daddies ?
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Earthquakes come to mind.
Sounds cool, grand plan in a rock quarry..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sounds cool, grand plan in a rock quarry..... (Score:4, Informative)
a state-of-the-art facility that will feature accommodation units, a training school and a platform for mini submersibles to take people down to living spaces in the 80-metre deep (260ft) lake. No where close to having any living spaces in actual ocean...... I imagine they would face huge environmental hurdles to actually build in an ocean and where at ! Another pipe dream.....?
It's that building land has become so rare in Southern England that we're looking at the bottom of lakes.
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Could be a worthwhile effort. (Score:2)
Especially if you're a fan of sandy cheeks.
I want to know (Score:5, Funny)
...Does this "single anonymous private investor with deep pockets" have a white cat?
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...Does this "single anonymous private investor with deep pockets" have a white cat?
Jeff Bezos has given up all pretence and become the poundshop bond villain he has always looked like.
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No, but unless you like sharks, do be careful before stepping in the elevators to and from his office. He's quite an engineer though, he operates the world's second biggest oil tanker, after the Karl Marx of course.
Underwater? (Score:1)
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And who? Is it someone we already know (e.g., Dr. Evi or No) or a new crazy villain?
I've seen this movie (Score:2)
I believe the Megalodon kills everyone and only Jason Statham can save humanity.
Just to be clear (Score:5, Informative)
This does not seem to be about someone trying to turn the sea into prime real estate, as the headline might imply. It would have been more accurate to say "permanently manned underwater research stations" than "underwater homes". While people might indeed eventually live in these habitats for extended periods of time, it doesn't seem like likely that it will be more than a handful of people. I guess the headline comes from the sentence "The basic sentinel houses up to six people but the idea is that multiple sentinels could be attached to potentially form multi-nation, multi-purpose research stations (or perhaps, one day, an underwater village for ordinary people)." But that "perhaps, one day" is a long way from anything currently actually planned, and doesn't begin to delve into the cost and reasoning of potentially building such an underwater village.
When will this catch on (Score:2)
When the first thin sliced meat lovers pizza delivery has been confirmed, by one of the undersea scientists, people will come
On the Welsh border ? (Score:2)
I though this has happened:
https://www.thedailymash.co.uk... [thedailymash.co.uk]
Hm (Score:2)
Why not make low cost homes, like 300 sq. ft cabins basically and make them ultra-low cost available to anyone. The only catch is that it's outside the city. It would eliminate homelessness. We shouldn't have homeless people in 2025.
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Why outside the city?
"Let's eliminate homelessness by ensuring anyone can get a home as long as they can't get a job or have access to commerce" seems an odd solution to an artificial resources problem, and not one that's going to benefit anyone except, maybe, people who see homelessness purely in terms of "dirty people on the streets" and who don't think about or care why they're there or who else is actually affected by the scarcity of homes.
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You are the one who sees homeless as dirt and parasites instead of human beings. You offer no solution while tearing mine down.
has he been to the year 3000? (Score:2)
Not much had changed
A much loved scuba diving site was lost... (Score:4, Informative)
Until it was bought by Deep, this was a very popular scuba diving site, with lots of underwater attractions (boats, planes, military vehicles, etc.) and was one of the very few places in the country where you could dive to 80m (260ft for our US cousins).
The only think I won't miss about it is the shuttle-bus service down to the entry ramps. These were old minibuses with holes rusted through the floor and barely functioning brakes. Diving to 80m was probably safer than the bus ride.
This statement is utterly false (Score:5, Informative)
Space is tough to get to, but once you're up there, it's a relatively benign environment."
Nope. "Space" is out to kill you in a million different ways and everything you need to sustain your life is hard to get to, hard to extract and hard to transport. Ignorance like this speaks volumes about the delusional minds behind this project.
The ocean is the opposite: it's fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you're down there, "basically, everything wants to kill you," he jokes
False. Just utterly, completely, delusional. Where do they finds these twonks?
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Yes, Space is out to kill you, but once you've solved the problem of making it habitable and putting safeguards in place, it becomes a matter of simple maintenance.
Similarly, northern climates are out to kill you, they require adaptations like heating and shelter and blankets. These problems have been solved for millennia and you will find that humans today somehow manage in these conditions quite well and rarely die.
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it becomes a matter of simple maintenance.
Not even close. Whilst "space" contains everything, resources are typically far away, buried in gravity wells or moving at ridiculous speeds.
EVERYTHING you do requires delta-v - which isn't express delivered by pixies on demand. So you're working on a completely different cost/benefit scale than you would underwater. Everything you do in space is effectively a balancing act between getting stuff done and putting your life at risk to do it.
Bottom of the ocean is primarily a pressure/oxidation problem. These
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There are hard problems to be solved, and they're harder than air conditioning or blankets.
Once they're solved though, they're solved for everyone, forever.
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Obligatory Futurama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Sorry, but "the bottom of the ocean" IS out to kill you. You can't breathe the water, and the pressure is too high to survive. (I don't think that last part applies to this project, though, because IIUC it's in quite shallow water.) Also nearly everything there wants to eat you.
There ARE reasons we've made more progress in space travel than underwater. Of course, there are lots of unsolved problems.
BOTH are reasonable goals. But long-term goals, not goals for next year.
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Yeah, they're both hostile, just in different ways. Space has deadly radiation and no gravity. The ocean doesn't have those problems, but your structures have to deal with crushing pressure. Both environments are harsh on anything you build in them: the ocean from corrosive salt water and space from the constant stream of high energy particles.
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There's very little deadly ionizing radiation... under the sea.
Darling it's better
Down where it's wetter
Take it from me!
What are we achieving here? (Score:4, Interesting)
Welders on offshore oil rigs already live at depths much greater than that of this quarry, for weeks at a time. They spend days compressing before they submerge and then days decompressing on the way back up, so that dissolved gases don't literally boil out of their blood. It's unpleasant going in both directions. An informative, slightly comedic, review of the subject. [youtube.com] It seems like a miserable experience.
So what are they achieving here? From the article, it seems like the innovations are "make the habitat bigger" and "make the food better". But so long as it requires living in an environment with the atmospheric pressure of a bicycle tire, this is going to be limited to thrill seekers, and maybe some very niche research use cases. "Permanent human settlements" seems like a pipe dream.
Everything old is new again (Score:5, Insightful)
This was occasionally a big thing when I was a kid, and I'm past the half-century mark. There are a lot of problems with underwater living, especially in salt water.
You're essentially building a giant submarine made of complex shapes, that has to hold against water pressure for decades.
The deeper you go, the darker it gets, and you need to be deep enough to be about 2.5x deeper than the largest surface waves you anticipate or water movement is going to stress your environment into pieces if you don't build it like a nuclear bunker. But you also have to build it like that if you are dealing with pressure at depth.
If you're deep enough and you're matching the exterior pressure to make it easier to keep the walls holding out water, you make the inhabitants into prisoners. They will get the bends if they go grocery shopping without a long ascent/decompression period. A 30ft dive isn't a big deal, even if you're down for as long as a full standard scuba tank will last you, but after a couple of hours you start to have to worry about decompression and spending some time on the surface before going back down again to limit the nitrogen concentration in your blood. Try going to work in the morning after a good 8 hour sleep 60 feet under the surface and you'll end up in a barometric chamber with the bends.
On top of all that... the ocean typically isn't warm enough to keep you comfortable for long periods, and it conducts heat fairly well. So you're going to insulate the hell out of your interior living space. Or maybe you just open a window and let warm air in? Right... your air-tight house. You're going to need constant air movement and exchange with the surface so you don't drown in a pool of CO2.
It just seems like a lot of work to have a home under water when it'll be dark, damp, restrict your freedom of movement to the surface, and suffocate you if there's an extended power failure.
Does it sound like a good idea? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Does it sound like a good idea? (Score:4, Funny)
What do you imagine besides a leaky, run-down apartment with a huge window offering a great view on algae and mud?
Yes, but enough about Newport, we're talking about building underwater.
Better coverage (Score:2)
Doom-preppers (Score:3)
We don't have a permanent space station because zero-gravity is bad for living things and a lot of other reasons. Those same reasons apply to living under the ocean. The only reason for it, is staying cool and staying isolated: That will interest billionaire survivalists, nobody else.
And it was called... Rapture (Score:2)
How could nobody else have made this joke yet!! Come on Slashdot!
A bit pessimistic⦠(Score:2)
Almost nothing thatâ(TM)s this cool, this ambitious, and this expensive - comes to fruition. Just sayinâ(TM). Hope Iâ(TM)m wrong.
Obligatory (Score:2)
If you're lookin for me, you better check under the sea [youtu.be].
Humidity (Score:3, Informative)
This has been tried in the past, and one big problem for long term living is humidity. You are constanty damp. It is bad for health and everything you own.
see https://www.hillarys.co.uk/sta... [hillarys.co.uk]
And by "increase understanding of the ocean"... (Score:4, Interesting)
... they mean exploit the ocean. I can't see much use for scientists in this setup, and I doubt they're more than a cover story for the real customers - heavy industry like drilling, mining etc.
Your answer to everything (Score:2)
Living under the sea is your answer to everything....
"There will be no frustrations,
just tasty crustaceans,
under
the sea!"
999 (Score:3)
At least you won't have to worry about your house burning down. Or rather, you won't worry for very long.
Lack of sunlight (Score:2)
May as well live underground.
There is a reason we build above ground on land, for the most part. Humans need sunlight to live.
anonymous investor? (Score:2)
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I know some people will rejoice (Score:2)
When they find out you don't have to take a shower before heading out.
Food supply (Score:3)
We have that already. It's called Florida. (Score:2)
Just add sea level rise, thanks to the carbon emissions of countless anonymous millionaires...
Welcome to Rapture! (Score:2)
Just watch out for the Big Daddies.
(Obligatory Bioshock reference...)