A secret on the ocean floor
bbc.co.uk
A secret on the ocean floor
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#2In short: a almost romantic cold-war story of a mission to recover a sovier submarine triggers an interest of mining the deep ocean floor.
Not actual until the whole world is moving to an electrical future where raw materials such as copper, cobalt, zinc, etc are in shortage, or suspect of child work, thus an option of mine the ocean floor.
This has other drawbacks, such as destroying the ecology of the deep ocean floor, possibly wiping out species that we might not even know.
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#3I like how the eco footprint is compared to a graphical depiction of Prominent Hill mine in SA. I used to code telemetry on site there.
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#4I wonder, if USIC (US intelligence community) has used billionaires in the 1970s to cover up their secret operations, if they do it today?
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#5So those vents, the ones covered in crabs, worms and all the other living things, are going to be ground up into slurry? Didn't Monty Burns try something like this?
A mile down might seem far, but that's where sperm whales and elephant seals feed. This will come back to haunt us.
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#6It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to exploit their natural resources to rise up in the world. At first I was horrified by the mining technique being described here, and then the article got into all the United Nations protections and regulations surrounding this process.
It's encouraging to know the world will be monitoring this as it happens. Often forgotten about American history is how badly we had to destroy our own environment before we took action to make things better. Much of our country was turned into barren wasteland as all the trees were cut down for industry, and it took FDR deploying a literal army of tree-planters to bring the forests back. I think we are watching the same history repeat in China now as they deploy tree-planters along their growing deserts.
So we'll watch this new environmental front. We'll read stories about companies breaking the rules and listen to pundits decry government regulations that protect snails over jobs. Hopefully we'll strike a balance and survive long enough to make asteroid-mining profitable and maybe take all of this off-world where such environmental conflicts don't exist.
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#7It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to exploit their natural resources to rise up in the world. At first I was horrified by the mining technique being described here, and then the article got into all the United Nations protections and regulations surrounding this process. It's encouraging to know th…
I'm much less optimistic than you. The amount of willful cognitive dissonance on display here is staggering.
> “Where we’ll be operating, it’s cold and dark,” says one senior Nautilus executive. “There are no tuna there, they need entirely different conditions near the surface of the ocean.”
I expect nothing less from the mining executive to dismiss concerns that the ocean's ecosystems are directly connected.
> "For Michael Lodge, secretary general of the International Seabed Authority, a UN body set up to manage deep sea mining, there’s a clear case for pressing ahead. “Are we going to continue to develop huge mines that destroy villages, alter rivers, pollute water courses, take thousands of years to restore, remove whole mountains? You don’t have any of that with deep seabed mining.”"
But this one is from the UN body itself that you are talking about monitoring this. This man just finished saying "pollute water" in the previous sentence then proceeded with the claim that this doesn't occur with deep seabed mining? How can people claim this with a straight face?
I don't want to come off as naive. The article is very good at explaining the consumer needs driving this development. 8 billion people with smartphones and 4 billion electric cars does not scale.
On the other hand, there are also hundreds of millions of people that rely on fish for their protein. Are we willing to risk destroying our oceans to save our land?
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#8I wonder, if USIC (US intelligence community) has used billionaires in the 1970s to cover up their secret operations, if they do it today?
Like the removal of dependence on foreign oil thanks to solar power, and development of inexpensive large-payload space launch systems for national intelligence payloads?
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#9It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to exploit their natural resources to rise up in the world. At first I was horrified by the mining technique being described here, and then the article got into all the United Nations protections and regulations surrounding this process. It's encouraging to know th…
I'm much less optimistic than you. The amount of willful cognitive dissonance on display here is staggering. > “Where we’ll be operating, it’s cold and dark,” says one senior Nautilus executive. “There are no tuna there, they need entirely different conditions near the surface of the ocean.” I expect nothing less from the mining executive to dismiss concerns that the ocean's ecosystems are directly connected. > "For…
8e9 + 4e9 > 1e8. We know how this is going to go. /s
Re: A secret on the ocean floor
#10I wonder, if USIC (US intelligence community) has used billionaires in the 1970s to cover up their secret operations, if they do it today?
I would imagine this is very common. I also wonder if there are "billionaires" who aren't even actual billionaires, just CIA operatives with legends slowly built up around them through the years.