“And the next day, around lunchtime, everyone went ‘Fuck this, I’ll go for lunch.’ Patrick retrieves a piece of equipment from the deepest point on earth, and it’s just me, going, ‘Yay, congratulations, Patrick.’ No one seemed to notice how big a deal it is that they had already made this normal—even though it’s not. It’s the equivalent of having a daily flight to the moon.”
Something about journeying to the deep ocean seems so much more terrifying than space. Perhaps it’s that one cannot “fall” home whenever one wants to, when you are already at the bottom of the sea?
That’s hardly rational though. After all, if anything goes wrong in the ocean, your buddies can just pull you up. If something goes wrong in space you drift into oblivion. If you are tethered in space and the safety rope breaks its game over. Just as if one was deep in the ocean without positive buoyancy.
And then space itself is all fun and games when in orbit around Earth. If, when facing the planet, you are feeling existentially terrified by there being simultaneously nothing and half of all of the Universe behind you then you can just turn around and have the safety of Earth at your back, at least.
But go deeper into space and that feeling of safety is gone forever. The same universal nothingness and everything-ness is in all directions. Space psychiatrists of the future may recommend we install permanent curtains to deal with this. Only those forced to work outside need experience the terror of the void.
At least you can see past the end of your nose in space. In the deep ocean it’s truly pitch black. Until the squids come.
Actually, you can "fall home" in the ocean. I have no idea what procedures exist in missions that go to extreme depths like these, but if you are a recreational diver (who is not allowed to go below 30m) and you have an emergency down there, the last resort is to get rid of all your additional weights* as fast as possible so that you get pushed to the surface with zero effort.
Of course, you need to deal with fast changes in pressure during the short journey towards the surface (protect your eardrums, lungs etc) and you may get decompression sickness depending on the dive time and avg depth at the moment of emergency, but hey, at least you're alive to deal with all those problems!
*: Generally, a scuba diver takes additional weights to counter the positive buoyancy effect of wetsuits, fat etc. These are mounted on belts or similar accessories that are designed to be very easy to get rid of in case of emergency.
> so that you get pushed to the surface with zero effort
This is not always true.
Your buoyancy decreases as you go deeper (and have more water above you, causing more downward pressure).
At a depth of 30 meters (100 feet), the pressure is 4 atmospheres, 4 times that of sea level.
Furthermore, not everyone is positively buoyant. The less fat one has, especially if not wearing diving suit, the more likely staying afloat/level to become harder.
As the depth increases, lungs and all bodily cavities shrink, further adding to one's density.
So, at 30 meters, it is actually quite a struggle to swim back up, even more so if you've lost your fins.
As for weights, I used to work out and exercise daily. During that time, I also dived few times a week spanning various sea conditions throughout the year and never have once taken weights as I was already negative.
Fast forward 2 years to today, I put on 15kg (33 lbs) and I need 10kg weight to enjoy my dive. But on the upside, I'd probably skyrocket to the surface if needed, lol :D
> Your buoyancy decreases as you go deeper (and have more water above you, causing more downward pressure).
This statement is wrong on many levels. I'll try to correct just one part:
Your buoyancy must NOT decrease as you go deeper. That's one of the fundamental rules you need to follow if you want to dive more than once :) If you don't watch your depth and take necessary steps to maintain neutral buoyancy, you'd sink like a stone (or rise like a balloon). Nobody wants that.
What you mean is: you need more air in you buoyancy compensator (BC) to maintain neutral buoyancy (= keep your volume constant) as you go deeper.
If you don't take weights, you need to inflate your bc to lift you. In an emergency, you generally don't have time to swim up anyway.
All that said, I was just trying to point out that it was possible to "fall home" from underwater, assuming you are within the limits of your equipment.
A buoyancy compensator, filled with a fixed quantity (not volume) of air, does decrease in volume as you descend and the pressure increases. You'd sink faster and faster if you did not add air as required. Therefore, you must actively manage a BCD!
On the way up, the opposite happens. The quantity of air in your buoyancy compensator has an increasing volume of air as you rise and the pressure decreases, providing you with increasing buoyancy. Uncontrolled, this would rocket you towards the surface. Therefore, you must actively manage a BCD!
Lungs do not change in volume in SCUBA as they do when free (breath hold) diving, because your regulator is allowing you to constantly breathe air which is at the same pressure as the water around you.
When free diving, you carry weights to be neutrally buoyant at around 30 feet. Above the neutral buoyancy depth, you float towards the surface, and must swim down to descend. Below the neutral buoyancy depth, you become negatively buoyant, sink increasingly quickly, and must swim up to ascend. This is also important to be aware of; you don't want to strap weights to yourself that you can't drop: You may think you're capable of swimming up against your negative buoyancy, but if you only test at 10 feet under you may not be capable when you get deeper!
>(and have more water above you, causing more downward pressure).
But also higher pressure pushing you upwards too! Buoyant force is equal to weight of displaced fluid, and so is independent of depth. (edit: given same fluid and temperature) (edit2: and well, buoyant force will be slightly stronger because fluid will be more compressed at the bottom)
No, higher pressure does not push you upwards. That's all about buoyancy and a liter of water weighs just as much at the bottom of the ocean as it does at the surface. That higher pressure works on all sides of your body which means it cancels out.
I reckon that water under high pressure does have a somewhat higher density. However water is pretty much the textbook example of an incompressible fluid so the difference will probably be rather small.
Edit: Found a direct quote on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Compressib...:
>The low compressibility of water means that even in the deep oceans at 4 km depth, where pressures are 40 MPa, there is only a 1.8% decrease in volume.[40]
Water is tremendously stable, cheap and commonly available, that's exactly why it - and nowadays oil - was used since time immemorial as a working fluid to transfer force from one place to another. In essence the limiting factor is the burst strength of the tubing.
Yes, I just wanted to correct OP statement that "and have more water above you, causing more downward pressure" by pointing that increasing pressure exerts force on bottom side, so in effect it cancels out increasing pressure pushing at top, and so buoyant force is constant. (with added trivia about minuscule changes due to fluid compressibility)
> Furthermore, not everyone is positively buoyant. The less fat one has, especially if not wearing diving suit, the more likely staying afloat/level to become harder.
I'm not sure if it is just me, but I could not understand this at all. Do you mind rephrasing it? Which type of person has a harder time stating afloat?
Fat can naturally float on water due to its density being less than that of water.
The more fat one has, the less overall average density becomes, making it harder to sink. I have a close friend who is very overwheight and she can practically sit upright floating. I must admit I'd usually envy her when I struggled staying afloat while she enjoye a cool refreshment like it were her couch :)
So in short, less fat, more muscle mass, more bone mass harder to stay afloat.
Also the diving suite (which is made from a foam-like material) and some of the hallow diving gear make it harder to sink, hence the need for weights.
At the depths we're talking about that would not be possible: "Decompression from these depths takes approximately one day per 100 feet of seawater plus a day. A dive to 650 feet would take approximately eight days of decompression."
This is why saturation divers spend significant amounts of time in a pressure vessel after a period of diving to decompress.
The article is very light on technicalities but as far as I can tell, this expedition is WAY outside the sat territory. Sat divers do perform "seawalk"s during their missions, so they do need to perform the necessary steps to adjust to pressure changes.
This can't be the case here, they were inside their submarines the whole time.
To me, the deep ocean with the pressures involved is much more deadly than the vacuum of space. Sure, you'd die in both situations but the ocean would just crush your in a second while space is not as violent but still quite deadly.
Space is also open and visibility is great while in the depths there is no light and you can see only a few meters in any directions. Space also does not have "monsters" in it :).
All you need to do in space to avoid dying in vacuum if your pressure vessel fails is wear a pressure suit. If your pressure vessel fails in the deep ocean the only upside is you'll probably never even be aware of it happening.
Plus you need cooling or heating, you need to be able to breath, you are exposed to a lot more radiation than is healthy for you. All of those are deadly, but not as sudden as being crushed to death in an instant like you would at the bottom of the ocean.
> Something about journeying to the deep ocean seems so much more terrifying than space.
> At least you can see past the end of your nose in space. In the deep ocean it’s truly pitch black.
Yup, I think it's the darkness and short distance visibility that makes for thalassophobia in most cases, at least it is for me. It scares me when I cannot see the ground, even when I know that it's only a few meters deep. However, I can stand on the top of a building and look down without any fear. BTW, I recommend r/thalassophobia.
True, when you stand at a cliff and look down, you feel the urge to step forward, my theory as a climber is:
Your eyes tell you it's flat so you can step forward...but your sense of balance tell's you something different..brain is confused, you never have that feeling when your IN the wall.
We had astronauts who had to interrupt an EVA because they had a water leak in their suit and it was pooling in their helmet. That thought absolutely terrifies me. You have plenty of air, it's just that there is a silly blob of few centiliters of water around your nose, and you can't wave it away because your helmet is in the way.
I get freaked out in underwater segments in 3D video games. IIRC Quake had some underwater levels and they totally freaked me out. Same with Metroid Prime even though they were small. The latest as Subnautica VR. I couldn't even play period. Just too terrifying for some reason. I jumped in the water, swam down a little and then was like "Nope!".
I've thought maybe it's that things can come from below where as generally that doesn't happen on the ground. It could also be the reverb-y sounds. I have no idea. I love the ocean and swimming so ...
Is it actually possible to de-orbit without over-heating?
If you come in at some super shallow angle you'd think you could do it, but at some point one ends up going from an orbit to a trajectory, at which point unless your air resistance can throttle your air speed below some value, you'll always over-heat?
Bleeding off 8km/second (5miles/second) all the way to zero movement - just by moving through the atmosphere... doing that without heating just seems impossible.
Yes. Look up space diving. There have been old Popular Science (Popular Mechanics?) articles on it and speculation in the space community about a new sport if/when a space tether is possible.
Kathy Sullivan is my heroine. Her first spacewalk was one of the most dangerous spacewalks ever attempted, as they tried to demonstrate the Orbital Refueling System (ORS) capability of the Space Shuttle.
It would work as follows, an astronaut would manually capture a satellite with the help of the Shuttle's arm, and then they would move it into the bay where they would refuel it with a hypergolic mixture that included hydrazine. At the time, the odds for a fatal interaction with the hydrazine were rated low, but in retrospect, this manoeuvre was extremely dangerous and incredibly unwise.
The details of the experiment involved them doing an EVA and then servicing the satellite and hooking it up with the fuel source, before retreating to the shuttle to let the hypergolics flow. It is needless to say that a mistake would have been costly. AFAICT, the project was never attempted again and was cancelled after the loss of Challenger.
The Five Deeps Expedition technology [1] includes a two-man submersible, three unmanned sea floor landers, and the support vessel.
The EYOS Expeditions blog post [2] is the press release from which the NPR piece is based.
The technical challenges are due to the pressure at depth and communication through water. The manned submersible seems to be a requirement until better autonomous vehicles are programmed. I keep thinking that these machines should be liquid filled, like the gamer PCs immersed in mineral oil for cooling, to avoid the pressure issues.
I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.
> I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.
Well, but men and women want to be there.
This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration - wouldn't it be better/easier/cheaper if it was all done by autonomous robots? The answers are also similar: we don't have the necessary tech, we likely won't have it without intermediate missions involving humans, even in robotic missions there will be a benefit of having humans near the mission site (in case of space: light lag), and media coverage is actually a good thing, because both fields are starved for funding.
> This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration...
Indeed it is the exact same argument and it has been made more eloquently by much greater men than I. Freeman Dyson made the argument in a talk he gave at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics titled "Living Through Four Revolutions"[1]. He discusses the International Space Station (ISS) starting at about the 7:15 mark and he adds the following quip:
> [The Russians] are very proud of the space station and for good reasons. They believe that human activities in space are an end in itself, essentially as an international sporting event. They don't sell it under false pretences as a scientific program.
I wish ocean exploration was seen as sexy as space exploration. We have so much to learn from our oceans. It seems strange to me that we'd rather go to a desert planet than understand the place where life possibly began and that drives many of Earth's systems.
Certain type of humans have been exploring since beginning of times, thinking of the vikings, but also the colonial times. But also the early tribes that moved over the whole world. Seems to be a an innate trait for some people, to go out and explore. But human curiosity seems to need to be tickled by potential and that potential seems infinitely greater in space then in the oceans.
Isn't she the first woman ever to dive to the deepest point of the oceans? Shouldn't that be the more interesting factoid than she also happened to be the first US woman to have done a space walk?
> All told, EYOS Expeditions said that just seven people had reached the point before Sullivan, all of whom were men.
So she is both the first female spacewalker AND the first female Challenger Deep diver. That is really remarkable, talk about opening doors and being a role model.
Part of Michael Lewis’s book, _The Fifth Risk_, features Kathy Sullivan and her life story. The focus of her story in the book is mostly about her work for NOAA, in the context of Trump’s administration, but gives a fun overview of her path to becoming an astronaut, too. Overall, a fast read and a generally inspiring view into the scientific and engineering work done by many people and various departments of the US government.
Is she also the first person to both walk in space (or just go to space) and also dive to the deepest point in the ocean? Or are there men or people from other countries that have done the same thing?
Nice story but it feels distracting. She wasn't the pilot, she didn't build the boat. What's the story being told? That women can reach everything if men make it possible?
>All told, EYOS Expeditions said that just seven people had reached the point before Sullivan, all of whom were men.
So most likely none of the other seven was an astronaut. This makes Sullivan the first person to walk space and reach the deepest point of the ocean. The story is that one person was in space and at the deepest point, not that a woman was there, too.
With that perspective, what does she have to say? The article doesn't let her speak, besides a short quote that is shorter than the tweet of the piloting man. If that voyage is an achievement to be taken as guidance, why is there no interview? They can send a picture so they can exchange questions and answers.
I think the point is the poetry of the contrast, the two extremes. The fact that she was the first woman in space is what makes her notable, not the fact that she was the first woman to be in both space and the bottom of the ocean. If it was "some astronaut," that would be weird. Which astronaut? You could say her name, but most people aren't going to know her by name. So you say the first woman to walk in space. She apparently was also the first woman to reach Challenger Deep. The fact that she reached two opposite extremes, but with obvious unifying similarities, is interesting. The fact that she was also the first woman to do both of those thing in isolation is also interesting. The story is interesting.
Wait two seconds, is she the first person to both go to space and reach that depth in the ocean, or is she the first woman to do it?
Based on the title it lead me to think that a man had done that before her and the achievement she accomplished here was being the first US woman to do both. Otherwise the article would had said said person and world record without qualifying the achievement by gender and nationality.
The article does not specify if any of the other 7 people who also reached the depth had been in space, so with the comments in here I am now more unsure what the achievement actually is.
> If it was "some astronaut," that would be weird
If it was the first astronaut to be in both places then its not weird at all. First astronaut that explore both extreme environments is an interesting achievement. I would read that story.
It is obviously not the case that women are equal in our society. Additionally, then, my town shouldn't have a big placard that says "home of Olympic gold medalist [some person]" since obviously being from my town is equal to being from the one over. But we do typically care about these sorts of things, and we care about the oldest person to be president, the youngest, the first gay, Catholic, whatever, black president. We care about coincidences, streaks, and firsts of all manner and no one has to point out that that it doesn't matter "X will be the first foreign-born CEO" or whatever it is. To assert that being a woman specifically is not notable feels like it just serves to downplay people's accomplishments when those accomplishments are made by women.
The fact that people are discussing it, and so agitated by the use of the word "woman" shows, if anything, that they aren't equal and there is still much work to be done.
Articles like this enforce that inequality. I'm 100% for equal rights, equal opportunity and equal recognition, unlike you, or the people that write articles like this. The use of the word "woman" implicitly means "this has been done by men before". And in that case people like you find it remarkable simply because it was done by a woman, which is enforcing inequality. If you want equality, change the title to "US woman becomes first person to walk in space and dive to deepest part of the ocean". That's (arguably) notable and doesn't imply that I'm congratulating her because she did it despite being a woman.
Until and unless society truly has equal rights/opportunity/recognition, it behooves us to fete those who do the very hard things, with an extra helping of overcoming institutional/societal barriers due to their inherent characteristics.
It gives hope to those who fear that those barriers are so large as to be insurmountable and without which many of those would choose not to try.
Saying we don't have equal rights is a serious claim and one that would need backing up.
As for equal opportunity and recognition, I would say it's often skewed in favour of women right now. A woman can find a job in tech quite easily because, for some reason, companies want to hire women. That's not equality. Recognition is also higher for women. Women don't have to be first or best to get recognised, they just have to be the first or best woman. There's no such thing as "first man". It's often repeated that the first programmer was a woman. OK, so who was the first male programmer? Nobody knows or cares.
While I think there's value in recognising the first woman to do something notable, I sort of agree that it would be preferable to describe her as the first person here. Same applies to the US in my head. It's an absolute achievement, not one that needs qualification.
One of my favorite lines from the article:
“And the next day, around lunchtime, everyone went ‘Fuck this, I’ll go for lunch.’ Patrick retrieves a piece of equipment from the deepest point on earth, and it’s just me, going, ‘Yay, congratulations, Patrick.’ No one seemed to notice how big a deal it is that they had already made this normal—even though it’s not. It’s the equivalent of having a daily flight to the moon.”