My understanding is that deep-sea nodules produce oxygen by a process similar to electrolysis, where they generate currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.
Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?
Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.
It's still quite controversial whether or not they produce oxygen that way. It's been hypothesized, but I wouldn't consider it a consensus or settled. There are also microbes that can produce oxygen without light, so there are other mechanisms to explain "dark oxygen" in deep sea ecosystems.
With that said, the simple truth of it is that we know next to nothing about these ecosystems and really can't accurately estimate impacts. They're quite possibly significant, but we just don't have much info to go off of and studies like this are sorely needed.
These are not the plans of sane people. They are the plans of capital / technology, which if you’re familiar with Nick Land’s work, operates as an independent entity with its own goals in mind. It does not value the planet in any capacity.
Profits must be pursued & we can always just regrow marine life after AGI gives us infinite knowledge of everything (which is going to happen any day now).
Given the current governance structure of mining in international waters with poor countries incentives to sell their rights and look the other way, and past history of early mining practices, the obvious answer is no. We already know there are ecosystems of creatures evolved to survive on detritus of dead animals floating down there and colonies of living things no one would have imagined prior to discovery. One of the most promising sources for mining, modules of metal in vast fields provide opportunities for life to thrive but that won’t come up in a start up’s cost analysis, they can just bury the data, do it and ask for forgiveness later so to speak.
For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible. We don’t know what this will do. We don’t really need it. No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
I work in subsea cables and the companies that develop this type of tooling also work in this field, on a purely technical level it’s super cool technology and operationally very very interesting - the riser for nodule collection and how you pump / suck something from 4km down to the surface is wildly cool.
> For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible.
I honestly think this is the reason that asteroid mining should be the future for resource acquisition - not because it's cheaper or easier or anything like that, but because there's so much of it floating around out there and nobody will complain.
> we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible
This is easy to say in theory. It's harder if you have a population that wants rising material living standards. (Increasing living standards in middle-income economies is vastly more energy and material intensive than at the upper or lower ends of the scale.)
If you have a population that want rising material living standards, that's easy too. Any increase in living standards should be balanced against a concomitant decrease in population. Resource usage (meaning pollution, waste, energy production) stays steady or even goes down.
Apparently population control is anathema to most people though, so the unrelenting environmental rape continues unabated.
> Apparently population control is anathema to most people
Well yeah that too, but first and foremost when a population shrinks it leads to a demographic crisis. The government actively attempts to prevent that.
But also the issues you point to aren't inherently due to population. Most of our activities don't need to impact the environment to the extent that they currently do. We just cut corners to save money on a massive scale.
That seems to happen naturally, just with a lot of lag in the system. Declining birth rates can be seen in almost all modernised societies that have had a strong middle class.
Dredging is immoral - so incredibly destructive to the ecosystem. Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit? It's bad enough that so much of our farming is still based on tilling.
I don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices. It's not as if nodules are hard to discriminate. Sure, there would be some interesting engineering challenges to operating equipment at scale in that environment, but it's undergrad-engineering-club-level, not rocket science...
> Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit?
Isn't this how we harvest cranberries?
> don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices
The nodules may facilitate some weird deep-sea electrolysis that lets these ecosystems respire. Removing the nodules delicately is better than dredging. But it may still be a death sentence.
I've posted this before here. The science is screaming that these ecosystems cannot recover on any meaningful timescale because these modules form over millions of years and produce the only oxygen available in the depths of the ocean where they're located. It would be like clear cutting a forest and it growing back over the course of millions of years. It's an insane thing to do, and we as a society we're showing we have no care for anything but ourselves in this moment in time. We're choosing to permanently destroy the last best preserved ecosystems on this planet essentially for good.
those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it?
seriously, this doesn't seem like a useful argument, regardless of whether true. the fact that humans have committed ecocide in the past doesn't seem like a reason to continue...
It's not. It's a comforting lie to justify inaction. You see it a lot when people justify not voting or civically engaging.
To be clear, I am doing jack shit about deep-sea mining. But that's a choice I'm making and I own it, even if it makes me uncomfortable. (And there are plenty of cases where that discomfort drives folks into action, however minor.)
I didn't read it as a justification for inaction but rather a reality check. The tone of the parent seemed to imply that the current situation is somehow unusual or unexpected.
The difference between "he's gone mad" which seems to imply that an urgent response is warranted versus "unsurprisingly, his long standing madness continues".
Deepsea beds also change with volcanism, seismic events, whale carcass deposition and maybe more. Wouldn't studying those events inform the question? Without introducing more destruction.
In fact, estimating the frequency of those 'natural' events, and knowing the current density of deep-sea organisms, aren't we capable of calculating the answer using statistics?
We simply don't have the sensing capability to do more than sporadic sampling of the ocean floor environment in a small number of geographically constrained locales. The ocean is huge and ocean floor sensing is expensive.
My understanding from working with scientists that study this kind of thing is that the default hypothesis was that the ocean floor was relatively static and changed slowly. The last couple decades of research has largely refuted that hypothesis, as sensing evidence consistently suggests a much more dynamic environment.
AFAIK, we do not have a model that explains the rate and diversity of environmental change observed on the ocean floor in these limited experiments. This makes it a really important open question in science, since things like climate change almost certainly strongly interact with these dynamics. Unfortunately no one expects us to have enough data to even attempt a credible hypothesis for a couple decades. The ocean is simply too big.
People underestimate how little we know about the subsurface ocean. For climate science it is probably the single biggest question. We can't build a useful model without filling that gap.
One potentially positive externality of deep-sea mining is that it may significantly increase the amount of data available.
When I see a discussion that amounts to whether we should enforce some rule of international behavior, I find it useful to ask "would you go to war over this?"
If not, maybe you're being more performative than genuine.
What about advocating without any coercion? What about sanctions and other diplomatic measures? Surely there are goals that aren't worth going to war over that are nonetheless worthwhile to pursue to some more limited extent.
I have followed this off and on. For those wondering, TMC [1] is one of the primary companies on the forefront of this. Similarly, the main body in charge of regulation here is the International Seabed Authority [2].
I'll be honest, I don't know how I feel about it. TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining. (at least that is my take on their position) There is truth in the idea that picking the least bad solution is the responsible thing to do. We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it? The problem is the unknowns. Effectively, I believe, they are arguing that the unknown dangers are still better than the known damage we do with traditional mining. The sea is a big place after all. Of course they are clearly biased in their thinking since the potential profits here are just staggering so staying objective with hundreds of billions of dollars staring at you is very hard.
A major change in the arguments about impact came with the study that showed the potential for oxygen generation by the nodules being mined. This so called 'dark oxygen' [3] could be a major part of the ecosystem at those depths. Oxygen is really scarce so anything that produces it is likely crucial. I personally don't have a background anywhere close to that required to critique the science around this but it looks interesting and is definitely worth following up on.
The chemistry of these nodules is also interesting but the bottom line is that once they are mined they won't come back. They take a long, long time to form. Like 2-5 mm per million years [4] slow.
Up until the dark oxygen research the main concern was the plume that mining created and what effects it would create on the ecosystem as a whole [5]. There were, and still are, a lot of unknowns about how big it could be, how long it will stick around and the impacts it could have.
Basically, there are a lot of ecosystem unknowns here so weighing the potential impact to the ecosystem from this vs the real, and devastating, impacts from mining on land is a very hard thing.
> TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining.
I would feel better about this argument if we could point to a specific land based mine operation that was shut down in favor of seabed mining, but of course that won't happen and we'll just allow companies to destroy both.
This is utterly ridiculous. When has the last time been when we humans did a process in an ecosystem at industrial scale and it _didn't_ make life worse for the local co-op players? We don't know _how_ it will mess things up, but we know that it _will_ mess things up.
> We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it?
We don't have to keep mining, yes our lifestyle is incompatible with reducing mining output. But why is our lifestyle - or modernity in a more general sense - taken as non-negotiable? The trolley problem has a solution, stop the train.
It all depends on how you phrase the question. If you mention only improved living standards and not how these are going to be implemented, well, you get the point.
This seems to imply that this is the only path to increase standards of living (at least temporarily).
It seems more to be a path to greater profits for the mining operations because they can privatize the profits and subsidize the costs. There's ongoing research in increasing the efficiency of resource extraction and it's the path we should be pursuing rather than strip mining the ocean floor.
> seems to imply that this is the only path to increase standards of living
Didn’t mean to imply that. It absolutely doesn’t. But for middle-income countries, it’s harder to pitch waiting for more-efficient extraction on land when there are riches on the sea floor.
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology [1], a series which "chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars," years ago.
The first book, Red Mars, contains a debate between the reds, led by a scientist arguing for preserving Mars, and, basically, everyone else, who want to terraform and settle it. The reds are, throughout the book and frankly the series, a collection of extremists. They won't compromise. They blow cool stuff up. They're borderline terrorists, only outdone in the second book (Green Mars) by the Earth corporations that want to fuck up terraforming to maintain control. The only thing I remember being more annoying than the reds in Red Mars were the pages-long descriptions of the fucking escarpments and other geology.
Aside: I love Hemingway and get bored with Steinbeck. Reflecting on this, again years later, I realised they both do the same thing: expand on the banal. For Hemingway, the scenes I most love involve food and drink. Steinbeck, on the other hand, zooms in on the California landscape. I grew up in California, in part–it may be too familiar.
Anyway, the last book in Robinson's series, Blue Mars, is set after terraforming is done. It should be a celebration. And yet, I can't remember any significant plot points. (There was a cool low-g race.) I didn't even realise how boring and immemorable it was until well after I'd read it.
And then it hit me. It's boring because it's Steinbeck. The escarpments are gone. The burning sunrises near the polar ice caps. Gone. The boring stuff from Red Mars? I remember it. The visuals are vivid. They were tedious to digest. But they stuck and they're beautiful. By Blue Mars, however, the setting became ordinary. The idea–doing normal things on Mars–is novel. But the thing itself is not. Robinson turned Mars into a Steinbeck setting.
As I said, I read the trilogy years ago. Then, I lived in New York. I was a technological maximalist. Now, I live in Wyoming and would describe myself as a conditional optimist.
We have the tools to make a better future. But we have a tendency to be thoughtless with new tools. One of the most tragic ways we do that is by succeeding in developing and deploying technologies (autonomous deep-sea submersibles are cool!) that, in the end, homogenise the places, people and things that motivated us to reach out in the start.
You are absolutely bonkers. This post and the rationale behind it are beyond insane.
We do not understand these ecosystems beyond their extreme fragility and low entropy conditions. This is an incredibly destructive and expensive manner of resource extraction that destroys the seabed. Why would anyone sane ever support this beyond, I don't know, someone who also thinks that clearcutting the amazon is a good idea? What kind of vested interest do you have in this blighted technology?
P.S. - deep sea mining as a whole will help us explore, discover, and understand our Oceans at a much higher level. It already has, hence the 'dark oxygen' type claims never even thought of before.
The deep sea miners have zero interest in exploration, discovery, and understanding of our Oceans at a much higher level.
The moment research they funded to the end goal of mining suggested there might be an eco system under threat Gerard Barron and the The Metals Company reversed course and took a scorched earth approach to their own researchers.
Given there are companies on the verge of starting pilot projects, it’s definitely before, civilization collapse looks like maybe possible but not within the lifetime of middle aged folks and older who make up majority of voters.
My understanding is that deep-sea nodules produce oxygen by a process similar to electrolysis, where they generate currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.
Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?
Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.
It's still quite controversial whether or not they produce oxygen that way. It's been hypothesized, but I wouldn't consider it a consensus or settled. There are also microbes that can produce oxygen without light, so there are other mechanisms to explain "dark oxygen" in deep sea ecosystems.
With that said, the simple truth of it is that we know next to nothing about these ecosystems and really can't accurately estimate impacts. They're quite possibly significant, but we just don't have much info to go off of and studies like this are sorely needed.
These are not the plans of sane people. They are the plans of capital / technology, which if you’re familiar with Nick Land’s work, operates as an independent entity with its own goals in mind. It does not value the planet in any capacity.
Profits must be pursued & we can always just regrow marine life after AGI gives us infinite knowledge of everything (which is going to happen any day now).
The world may be ending, but for a short while we generated so much value for shareholders!
Given the current governance structure of mining in international waters with poor countries incentives to sell their rights and look the other way, and past history of early mining practices, the obvious answer is no. We already know there are ecosystems of creatures evolved to survive on detritus of dead animals floating down there and colonies of living things no one would have imagined prior to discovery. One of the most promising sources for mining, modules of metal in vast fields provide opportunities for life to thrive but that won’t come up in a start up’s cost analysis, they can just bury the data, do it and ask for forgiveness later so to speak.
For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible. We don’t know what this will do. We don’t really need it. No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
I work in subsea cables and the companies that develop this type of tooling also work in this field, on a purely technical level it’s super cool technology and operationally very very interesting - the riser for nodule collection and how you pump / suck something from 4km down to the surface is wildly cool.
> For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible.
I honestly think this is the reason that asteroid mining should be the future for resource acquisition - not because it's cheaper or easier or anything like that, but because there's so much of it floating around out there and nobody will complain.
It just feels untenable at the moment. How many decades away would it be?
> we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible
This is easy to say in theory. It's harder if you have a population that wants rising material living standards. (Increasing living standards in middle-income economies is vastly more energy and material intensive than at the upper or lower ends of the scale.)
I mean mining currently available resources more responsibly. I do not think we need modules to meet demand?
If you have a population that want rising material living standards, that's easy too. Any increase in living standards should be balanced against a concomitant decrease in population. Resource usage (meaning pollution, waste, energy production) stays steady or even goes down.
Apparently population control is anathema to most people though, so the unrelenting environmental rape continues unabated.
> Apparently population control is anathema to most people
Well yeah that too, but first and foremost when a population shrinks it leads to a demographic crisis. The government actively attempts to prevent that.
But also the issues you point to aren't inherently due to population. Most of our activities don't need to impact the environment to the extent that they currently do. We just cut corners to save money on a massive scale.
That seems to happen naturally, just with a lot of lag in the system. Declining birth rates can be seen in almost all modernised societies that have had a strong middle class.
> No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
They do it in international waters because no one would consent in their own seabed.
It’s really the perfect example of libertarianism. When no one is considering the externalities, nothing matters except profit.
Dredging is immoral - so incredibly destructive to the ecosystem. Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit? It's bad enough that so much of our farming is still based on tilling.
I don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices. It's not as if nodules are hard to discriminate. Sure, there would be some interesting engineering challenges to operating equipment at scale in that environment, but it's undergrad-engineering-club-level, not rocket science...
> Do you harvest apples by bulldozing the orchard and sifting out the fruit?
Isn't this how we harvest cranberries?
> don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices
The nodules may facilitate some weird deep-sea electrolysis that lets these ecosystems respire. Removing the nodules delicately is better than dredging. But it may still be a death sentence.
>Isn't this how we harvest cranberries?
Nope. They have harvesting equipment that leaves the plants.
Peanuts maybe?
I've posted this before here. The science is screaming that these ecosystems cannot recover on any meaningful timescale because these modules form over millions of years and produce the only oxygen available in the depths of the ocean where they're located. It would be like clear cutting a forest and it growing back over the course of millions of years. It's an insane thing to do, and we as a society we're showing we have no care for anything but ourselves in this moment in time. We're choosing to permanently destroy the last best preserved ecosystems on this planet essentially for good.
> we're showing we have no care for anything but ourselves in this moment in time
This is very consistent with the whole history of our species, and I don't think there ever was a moment in time when this was any different
those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it?
seriously, this doesn't seem like a useful argument, regardless of whether true. the fact that humans have committed ecocide in the past doesn't seem like a reason to continue...
> this doesn't seem like a useful argument
It's not. It's a comforting lie to justify inaction. You see it a lot when people justify not voting or civically engaging.
To be clear, I am doing jack shit about deep-sea mining. But that's a choice I'm making and I own it, even if it makes me uncomfortable. (And there are plenty of cases where that discomfort drives folks into action, however minor.)
I didn't read it as a justification for inaction but rather a reality check. The tone of the parent seemed to imply that the current situation is somehow unusual or unexpected.
The difference between "he's gone mad" which seems to imply that an urgent response is warranted versus "unsurprisingly, his long standing madness continues".
It's genetic, you can't change the character of an exploitative predator by just wishing for it.
It is inconsistent with our history but feel free to lie about it.
> It would be like clear cutting a forest and it growing back over the course of millions of years
It’s closer to filling a rainforest with a nitrogen atmosphere. You’re literally removing the ecosystem’s means to respire.
Deepsea beds also change with volcanism, seismic events, whale carcass deposition and maybe more. Wouldn't studying those events inform the question? Without introducing more destruction.
In fact, estimating the frequency of those 'natural' events, and knowing the current density of deep-sea organisms, aren't we capable of calculating the answer using statistics?
We simply don't have the sensing capability to do more than sporadic sampling of the ocean floor environment in a small number of geographically constrained locales. The ocean is huge and ocean floor sensing is expensive.
My understanding from working with scientists that study this kind of thing is that the default hypothesis was that the ocean floor was relatively static and changed slowly. The last couple decades of research has largely refuted that hypothesis, as sensing evidence consistently suggests a much more dynamic environment.
AFAIK, we do not have a model that explains the rate and diversity of environmental change observed on the ocean floor in these limited experiments. This makes it a really important open question in science, since things like climate change almost certainly strongly interact with these dynamics. Unfortunately no one expects us to have enough data to even attempt a credible hypothesis for a couple decades. The ocean is simply too big.
People underestimate how little we know about the subsurface ocean. For climate science it is probably the single biggest question. We can't build a useful model without filling that gap.
One potentially positive externality of deep-sea mining is that it may significantly increase the amount of data available.
When I see a discussion that amounts to whether we should enforce some rule of international behavior, I find it useful to ask "would you go to war over this?"
If not, maybe you're being more performative than genuine.
What about advocating without any coercion? What about sanctions and other diplomatic measures? Surely there are goals that aren't worth going to war over that are nonetheless worthwhile to pursue to some more limited extent.
>> If not, maybe you're being more performative than genuine.
Or maybe your 'useful' way of looking at things isn't actually all that useful. Not all roads need to lead to war.
Spoiler: No, they dont. They never do. Reports will say "yeah, probably" and in 10-40 years will change to "oooh well they didnt".
I have followed this off and on. For those wondering, TMC [1] is one of the primary companies on the forefront of this. Similarly, the main body in charge of regulation here is the International Seabed Authority [2].
I'll be honest, I don't know how I feel about it. TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining. (at least that is my take on their position) There is truth in the idea that picking the least bad solution is the responsible thing to do. We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it? The problem is the unknowns. Effectively, I believe, they are arguing that the unknown dangers are still better than the known damage we do with traditional mining. The sea is a big place after all. Of course they are clearly biased in their thinking since the potential profits here are just staggering so staying objective with hundreds of billions of dollars staring at you is very hard.
A major change in the arguments about impact came with the study that showed the potential for oxygen generation by the nodules being mined. This so called 'dark oxygen' [3] could be a major part of the ecosystem at those depths. Oxygen is really scarce so anything that produces it is likely crucial. I personally don't have a background anywhere close to that required to critique the science around this but it looks interesting and is definitely worth following up on.
The chemistry of these nodules is also interesting but the bottom line is that once they are mined they won't come back. They take a long, long time to form. Like 2-5 mm per million years [4] slow.
Up until the dark oxygen research the main concern was the plume that mining created and what effects it would create on the ecosystem as a whole [5]. There were, and still are, a lot of unknowns about how big it could be, how long it will stick around and the impacts it could have.
Basically, there are a lot of ecosystem unknowns here so weighing the potential impact to the ecosystem from this vs the real, and devastating, impacts from mining on land is a very hard thing.
[1] https://metals.co/ [2] https://isa.org.jm/ [3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discove... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule [5] https://phys.org/news/2025-03-deep-sea-sediment-plumes.html
> TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining.
I would feel better about this argument if we could point to a specific land based mine operation that was shut down in favor of seabed mining, but of course that won't happen and we'll just allow companies to destroy both.
> the main body in charge of regulation here is the International Seabed Authority
Everything I've seen about the ISA is it's a committee designed to be a roadblock to regulation.
This is utterly ridiculous. When has the last time been when we humans did a process in an ecosystem at industrial scale and it _didn't_ make life worse for the local co-op players? We don't know _how_ it will mess things up, but we know that it _will_ mess things up.
> We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it?
We don't have to keep mining, yes our lifestyle is incompatible with reducing mining output. But why is our lifestyle - or modernity in a more general sense - taken as non-negotiable? The trolley problem has a solution, stop the train.
Everybody is against this, yet somehow it still happens.
Democracy ... yeah right.
> Everybody is against this
Source? The evidence suggests living standards matter to voters way more than deep-sea shenanigans.
It all depends on how you phrase the question. If you mention only improved living standards and not how these are going to be implemented, well, you get the point.
Better standard of living until we run out of oxygen and all die of asphyxiation maybe
This seems to imply that this is the only path to increase standards of living (at least temporarily).
It seems more to be a path to greater profits for the mining operations because they can privatize the profits and subsidize the costs. There's ongoing research in increasing the efficiency of resource extraction and it's the path we should be pursuing rather than strip mining the ocean floor.
> seems to imply that this is the only path to increase standards of living
Didn’t mean to imply that. It absolutely doesn’t. But for middle-income countries, it’s harder to pitch waiting for more-efficient extraction on land when there are riches on the sea floor.
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology [1], a series which "chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars," years ago.
The first book, Red Mars, contains a debate between the reds, led by a scientist arguing for preserving Mars, and, basically, everyone else, who want to terraform and settle it. The reds are, throughout the book and frankly the series, a collection of extremists. They won't compromise. They blow cool stuff up. They're borderline terrorists, only outdone in the second book (Green Mars) by the Earth corporations that want to fuck up terraforming to maintain control. The only thing I remember being more annoying than the reds in Red Mars were the pages-long descriptions of the fucking escarpments and other geology.
Aside: I love Hemingway and get bored with Steinbeck. Reflecting on this, again years later, I realised they both do the same thing: expand on the banal. For Hemingway, the scenes I most love involve food and drink. Steinbeck, on the other hand, zooms in on the California landscape. I grew up in California, in part–it may be too familiar.
Anyway, the last book in Robinson's series, Blue Mars, is set after terraforming is done. It should be a celebration. And yet, I can't remember any significant plot points. (There was a cool low-g race.) I didn't even realise how boring and immemorable it was until well after I'd read it.
And then it hit me. It's boring because it's Steinbeck. The escarpments are gone. The burning sunrises near the polar ice caps. Gone. The boring stuff from Red Mars? I remember it. The visuals are vivid. They were tedious to digest. But they stuck and they're beautiful. By Blue Mars, however, the setting became ordinary. The idea–doing normal things on Mars–is novel. But the thing itself is not. Robinson turned Mars into a Steinbeck setting.
As I said, I read the trilogy years ago. Then, I lived in New York. I was a technological maximalist. Now, I live in Wyoming and would describe myself as a conditional optimist.
We have the tools to make a better future. But we have a tendency to be thoughtless with new tools. One of the most tragic ways we do that is by succeeding in developing and deploying technologies (autonomous deep-sea submersibles are cool!) that, in the end, homogenise the places, people and things that motivated us to reach out in the start.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
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You are absolutely bonkers. This post and the rationale behind it are beyond insane.
We do not understand these ecosystems beyond their extreme fragility and low entropy conditions. This is an incredibly destructive and expensive manner of resource extraction that destroys the seabed. Why would anyone sane ever support this beyond, I don't know, someone who also thinks that clearcutting the amazon is a good idea? What kind of vested interest do you have in this blighted technology?
I can’t think of a better way to undermine your credibility than opening in all caps and ending with zero sources.
Might just be satire.
Might just be Gerard Barron in midnight K-hole.
P.S. - deep sea mining as a whole will help us explore, discover, and understand our Oceans at a much higher level. It already has, hence the 'dark oxygen' type claims never even thought of before.
The deep sea miners have zero interest in exploration, discovery, and understanding of our Oceans at a much higher level.
The moment research they funded to the end goal of mining suggested there might be an eco system under threat Gerard Barron and the The Metals Company reversed course and took a scorched earth approach to their own researchers.
~ https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/7717/
Before or after human civilization collapses?
Given there are companies on the verge of starting pilot projects, it’s definitely before, civilization collapse looks like maybe possible but not within the lifetime of middle aged folks and older who make up majority of voters.
> Before or after human civilization collapses?
I've seen political nihilism. But discarding concern and responsibilty for the environment like this is a gift to the mining companies.
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