You can't accuse the Bush White House of excessive imagination. The president's latest "vision" is a replay of a 40-year-old idea stolen from JFK: men (and women) heading for the moon and beyond by 2030. Real creativity would set that crew down in another place altogether: the deep ocean floor.
Although oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth, less than 5% of them have been mapped with the same degree of detail as Mars, and that was before the two most recent Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed. We have rarely ventured below 6,500 meters in the oceans, although they reach more than 11,000 meters deep. We know much less about the ocean floor and the deepest layers of the oceans than we know about either side of the moon. And yet, the potential payoffs are huge.
Pundits gush over the fact that space exploration has led to its share of new technology -- for instance, NASA says the coatings that allow space capsules to withstand the heat of reentry have been used in building better pots and pans, and the miniaturization demanded by the small quarters on space vehicles has advanced such fields as laparoscopic surgery. But deep-sea expeditions could yield similar and perhaps even greater benefits. In order to freely explore the oceans' deepest reaches, we must learn to construct submersibles that can handle extreme pressure, as much as 18,000 pounds per square inch. The resulting materials and techniques might help us design and construct homes that can withstand being buried in debris after an earthquake or a mudslide.
I hope you are not one of those Americans who hears NASA talking about life on Mars and imagines that we may find little green men who will ally themselves with us against the Chinese. The reference is merely to cells of organic material that may be present in the planet's dust and rock. In contrast, the deep oceans are packed with complex, mysterious, intriguing creatures. In fact, it is estimated that there might be up to 2 million marine life forms that are yet to be discovered. Whenever we venture deeper, we find new species such as lithistids, a rare kind of sponge present only in deep waters. Such discoveries are likely to reveal secrets of life on Earth and even make up for other species that are being lost due to human expansion on the surface.
