This evening I watched a couple episodes of the BBC production
Blue Planet: Seas of Life. It got me to thinking that the
science fiction fantasists have it all wrong: it’s not the rest of
the Solar System which beckons us (for the moment), but rather the other
three quarters of our own planet. There are vast expanses under the
seas which are currently of no use to us: we should tame them beneath
man’s hand before we think of heading to the stars.
Indeed, it makes a good deal of sense to look at the oceans before we
look to the sky. The one can be preparation for the other—but one
is not at the wrong end of a gravity well. Both environments require
sealed habitats (although underwater the condition is rather the
opposite of a vacuum); both are hostile to man (although the sea
actively attacks while space is simply indifferent); both require
three-dimensional thinking. The sea makes a great deal more economic
sense: it is full of life, and certainly if the best minds of the next
several centuries turned their thoughts in that direction we could
figure out how to farm and ranch the place.
The colonisation of the oceans would of course take millennia. We
worry about over-population when on the other side of the shoreline
there’s more land than the entire settled area of this world.
Certainly, it would be a difficult endeavour: there are many strange
creatures there against which we have no weapons; there are many
scientific problems which would need to be solved regarding pressure,
workable habitats, industry and transportation. But those problems are
all much more solvable than those associated with space
travel.
And yet more men have ventured into space than have travelled to the
watery deeps.
