On one of the 1934 dives off Bermuda, as the bathysphere reached a record depth of three thousand feet, William Beebe recorded his impressions:
Before we begin to ascend, I had to stop making notes of my own, so numb were my fingers from the cold steel of the window sill, and to change from my cushion to the metal floor, was like shifting to a cake of ice. Of the blackness of the water I have already written too much … Whenever I sink below the last ray of light, similes poor in upon me … The only place comparable to these marvelous nether regions, must surely be naked space itself, out far beyond atmosphere, between the stars, where sunlight has no grip upon the dust and rubbish of planetary air, where the blackness of space, the shining planets, comets, suns and stars must really be closely akin to the world of life as it appears to the eyes of an awed human being, in the open ocean, one half mile down.
First we sent people like Beebe down in little bathyspheres to look into the blackness of the abyss, but after we realized that such a practice was labour intensive, expensive, and possibly life threatening, we switched over to robots. The parallel between the exploration of outer space and the exploration of inner space is unavoidable: the first space explorers landed on the moon in 1969; after several more manned spaceflights (some of which ended in horrendous human disasters), the emphasis shifted to vehicles that required humans to design and launch them, not to accompany them into the dark and dangerous airlessness of space. We have now mapped the moon and landed unmanned spacecraft on
Mars. The twin voyager spacecraft, launched in the summer of 1977, and now heading out of the solar system, have come close enough to Jupitar, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, to give us a startling look at these outer planets, and incidentally to learn that Europa, one of Jupiter’s Moons, is covered by ice, a situation that indicates the presence of water, a fundamentally necessity for life as we know it. The Voyager space probes provide us with images of unfamiliar worlds, but so far, no signs of life. In contrast the oceanic probes have revealed an abundance of life forms and lifestyles heretofore unexpected in the depths and vastness of the sea. What was once mare incognita – the unknown ocean – is beginning to surrender some of its closely guarded submarine secrets. Through the application of curiosity, necessity, science, and technology, the unknowns of the marine world are becoming known.
Before we begin to ascend, I had to stop making notes of my own, so numb were my fingers from the cold steel of the window sill, and to change from my cushion to the metal floor, was like shifting to a cake of ice. Of the blackness of the water I have already written too much … Whenever I sink below the last ray of light, similes poor in upon me … The only place comparable to these marvelous nether regions, must surely be naked space itself, out far beyond atmosphere, between the stars, where sunlight has no grip upon the dust and rubbish of planetary air, where the blackness of space, the shining planets, comets, suns and stars must really be closely akin to the world of life as it appears to the eyes of an awed human being, in the open ocean, one half mile down.
First we sent people like Beebe down in little bathyspheres to look into the blackness of the abyss, but after we realized that such a practice was labour intensive, expensive, and possibly life threatening, we switched over to robots. The parallel between the exploration of outer space and the exploration of inner space is unavoidable: the first space explorers landed on the moon in 1969; after several more manned spaceflights (some of which ended in horrendous human disasters), the emphasis shifted to vehicles that required humans to design and launch them, not to accompany them into the dark and dangerous airlessness of space. We have now mapped the moon and landed unmanned spacecraft on
Mars. The twin voyager spacecraft, launched in the summer of 1977, and now heading out of the solar system, have come close enough to Jupitar, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, to give us a startling look at these outer planets, and incidentally to learn that Europa, one of Jupiter’s Moons, is covered by ice, a situation that indicates the presence of water, a fundamentally necessity for life as we know it. The Voyager space probes provide us with images of unfamiliar worlds, but so far, no signs of life. In contrast the oceanic probes have revealed an abundance of life forms and lifestyles heretofore unexpected in the depths and vastness of the sea. What was once mare incognita – the unknown ocean – is beginning to surrender some of its closely guarded submarine secrets. Through the application of curiosity, necessity, science, and technology, the unknowns of the marine world are becoming known.