![]() ![]() Other options bubbled up and then faded away. Patrick Lahey, the ever accommodating CEO of Triton Submarines, tried to take me on a test dive in the Bahamas that never materialized. Watching the remotely operated vehicle Hercules scour the Santa Barbara Basin was the closest I came to exploring the sea floor myself. Or they might serve as good test subjects to send into space on a long galactic journey. Those life forms might just look like the alien life we could find on distant planets. This bathtub shape creates a stagnant deep-sea environment that is perfect for sampling and studying life forms that can survive under high pressure and with little to no oxygen or sunlight. Immediately off the coast of Santa Barbara, the sea floor plunges 500 metres (1,640 feet) to a flat-basin bottom before it rises again to the Channel Islands. NASA had funded the expedition thanks to a series of deep dives looking for extreme life forms. ![]() In 2021, I took a cruise on the exploration vehicle Nautilus up the California coast. Marine scientists have learned to hitch their research to outer space to boost funding, and NASA has done the same, expanding and promoting its earth science research as the environmental movement has grown and pushed for public money to be put to use on this planet. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, there’s a whole department devoted to exploring the overlaps between life at the bottom of the sea and on other “ocean worlds”: moons with water, such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. The two fields also share the hunt for extreme life that thrives in severe conditions found in the deep sea and on faraway planets. Of course, everyone would be better served by less flashy ambitions, such as a sustainable future here on planet Earth. But the spacefaring entrepreneur Elon Musk-at one point the richest man in the world, whose car company, Tesla, paid zero federal income tax in 2021-dreams of a day when the masses can afford a trip to Mars. For now, the clients for deep-sea and space travel are other ultrarich patrons or government agencies, such as NASA contracting SpaceX to carry astronauts to the ISS. But after decades of neoliberal capitalism, hobbled government agencies, and the wealthiest people and corporations paying little to no tax, the richest people in the world can now launch private exploration companies that rival the US government’s. Until recently, that meant the highest achievers in the military and scientific worlds. Only the elite can afford to pay for such activities, so the fields share another overlap in terms of who gets to do the exploring. ![]()
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