You're in a city 10,000 fathoms beneath the sea.
It's quite beautiful.
Living under the sea
isn't just Hollywood fantasy.
Requesting landing clearance, over.
Can we build an underwater city? Sure.
Whether we build them
to survive overpopulation or catastrophic climate change,
or to help scientists learn more about our planet.
It stands to reason
that we must push the boundaries
of ocean exploration so that we can bring back solutions.
The deep sea could teach us about our own origins
and if we can learn about how life originated here,
we might be able to learn something
about how life may have originated elsewhere.
We already know more
about the surface of the moon than the depths of our oceans.
In comparison to going to the moon
living underwater is not that complicated.
While our relationship with the ocean started
tens of thousands of years ago,
the technology that enabled humans to explore underwater
is relatively recent.
In 1943, a French Naval officer called Jacques Cousteau
invented the Aqualung, the precursor to scuba.
In his 1964 film "World Without Sun"
he explored the sea in his two-man submarine,
the Diving Saucer.
He'd park it in a garage,
which was part of his subaquatic village.
These men are the first oceanauts.
They are going to live down here for a month.
His team spent 30 days beneath the waves.
These sunken houses permit us to escape
many limitations of diving.
More habitats followed,
built by amateur enthusiasts as well as serious players,
such as the U.S. Navy and NASA.
The sea was the next frontier to be explored,
and there was interest from beyond the scientific community.
President Kennedy wrote to the U.S. Senate in 1961:
Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity.
Our very survival may hinge on it.
In the 1950s and '60s, that particular time period,
there's a historical context there
that makes underwater living particularly desirable.
So there are military applications,
and this is the birth of the offshore oil industry
and various underwater construction projects.
And then you also have a third reason,
which has perhaps less of an incentive,
and that's that marine biology is starting to develop.
What indeed are the limits
on flesh and blood beneath the waves?
Were people looking at the physiological effects
on the body, as opposed to say the scientific work
that could be done from those depths?
So one of the problems in underwater habitats
is that you have to change the gas mixture
that can be breathed safely at depth.
If you just breathe normal air that we breathe here,
or if you breathe pure oxygen,
it becomes toxic or you get nitrogen narcosis.
So they had to combine different types of gas
to breathe at pressure,
and they were breathing helium mixtures
and nitrogen mixtures,
which is why when you watch videos with these aquanauts,
they always have that high helium voice.
Ca va?
The seas remain largely unexplored
because of the limits of the human body.
We can only dive for a few hours.
Every breath of compressed air at depth
requires decompression after,
be it in a chamber,
or by slowly rising back up to the surface.
Without it, divers can develop decompression sickness,
also known as the bends, where nitrogen in your bloodstream
begins to bubble, damaging blood vessels
and blocking blood flow.
It's potentially lethal.
So living in an underwater habitat,
like Cousteau's aquanauts, the body stays saturated
with inert gases, enabling them to dive
and work without decompression.
If man need not return
to the surface periodically,
taking a long time to decompress
those potentially fatal bubbles within his body,
he can be infinitely more productive down below.
But one of the problems is that as soon as you have
your breathing, you're living in a helium atmosphere,
it is not very good for temperature control at all,
and if you're living in the ocean,
you can imagine it's quite cold.
So one of the problems that they had to figure out
how to adapt to is that the divers are constantly cold,
they're freezing in this helium atmosphere.
And then the other problem is that once you're staying
at depth for prolonged periods,
so unlike a submarine where you can go up,
purge the air, and go back down,
you have to develop some sort of air circulation system
that is purging CO2 constantly.
And that only really works well
if you can keep the humidity down.
If you're living in a metal container under the ocean,
it's difficult to keep the humidity down.
So controlling all of these atmospheric conditions
was one of the really big hurdles
for making it safe for people to live at depth.
A lot of these habitats came and went
in the '60s and '70s.
Can you give us some sense of the historical context?
In the 1960s and the 1970s,
this is when the space race is going on.
So there was this analog between the exploration
of inner space, the oceans and outer space
and already in the U.S., people in government,
at NASA and in the Navy were looking ahead
to future space exploration missions
and thinking that here underwater,
we have a perfect analog example
where we can already study how crews are gonna behave
in isolation in a small space,
over long periods of time.
So the Cold War is a really important context
for understanding this as well.
And the Russians were going into space
and there were a few Soviet habitats
but they never seemed like a viable,
real competition to the Americans.
So underwater competition between the Americans
and the Soviets played out with nuclear submarines
but not underwater habitats.
Nobody was colonizing the sea floor.
I think the technology was proven in the 1960s and '70s
but there were other reasons that it wasn't that useful
or proved to not be something that was necessary to do
for a long period of time.
The technology developed that allowed divers
to compress on shipboard instead, instead of at depth.
It will take two and one half hours
for their bodies to be equal to the same pressure
they will experience on the ocean floor.
So you could be compressed in a compression chamber
in a ship, then lowered in a capsule
while still under pressure,
exit the capsule, work on the oil head rig,
get back in the capsule and remain pressurized
at the surface.
And that technology did develop
out of all of these experiments with underwater habitats
but it sort of took the underwater habitats
out of the equation.
Scientists still see value in spending time under the sea.
What sort of questions are they trying to answer?
My wife is a marine microbiologist,
who's actually here if you want
to ask her questions about this.
Yeah, that'd be great.
All right.
Hi.
I am a marine microbiologist,
mostly focusing on hydrothermal vents,
and I've been doing that for a while now.
And my advisor, my PhD advisor was the one
who first suggested that the origin of life
may have been at hydrothermal events.
Yeah. That's one of humanity's big questions, I guess.
So, you know, do you think those answers
could be at the bottom of the sea?
We like to think so.
The original idea basically was that hydrothermal vents
were kind of like a natural laboratory
because they're dominated by gradients.
So in the middle of a chimney, it's really hot,
it's water that can be up to 400 degrees Celsius,
and then two feet away,
the water's like two degrees Celsius, right?
So in between you have every temperature
you could possibly want for all kinds of reactions.
They're very hard to study
because they're at the bottom of the ocean,
thousands of meters deep,
and we can only really take samples
when we can get a ship out there.
If you had the opportunity to spend,
say a month underwater next to one of these vents,
from a scientific angle, would that be helpful?
Yeah, so there's, there's two answers there.
One is we do use submarines, so I have been there.
I've been in Alvin down to these vents
and being there in person is amazing
because you get a much better sense
of what the environment looks like
in a three-dimensional way.
Just being in that space I just felt like I had a much
better sense of what these habitats really look like
and how connected they are and whether microbes
and ingredients could flow from one vent to the next.
The thing that I would really value
whether I was present or not is just being able
to look at these things longitudinally over time.
Understanding how the microbes adapt over time
is something we really haven't addressed yet
and is something I'm working on right now
to try to understand better.
So I think there's a lot of value in that.
Now, whether I would need to be physically present
for that period of time is another question,
because I like bathrooms
and I like having food and sunlight, so maybe not.
We enjoy the adventure of going down there, but in the end,
we do want to sleep in a soft bed that's not cold and damp
at the end of the day.
The underwater habitats of the 20th century
have mostly been retired.
A couple still remain serving scientists,
but a focus on space exploration
and the rise of robotic technology has decreased the need
for humans to live beneath the waves.
But could there be a resurgence?
Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques and an aquanaut,
explorer and conservationist in his own right,
spent 31 days underwater in 2014.
Can you give me a sense of the science
that can be achieved when you're underwater
for extended periods of time?
My team and I were able to execute
over three years' worth of equivalent science,
as opposed to being based from a ship above.
And that has a lot to do with the access
to the bottom world.
By being able to be based out of an underwater habitat,
it's a very unique platform, it's a very unique tool.
In the case of being saturated,
we could dive 10 to 12 hours, each of us, per day
to take advantage of that and to be able to do
much, much more research in a workday than you can
from the surface.
Additionally, as a human being,
being right on the ocean's final frontier,
you're able to do things that simply are not
as easily accessible from an ROV or an AUV or a submersible,
but there's still a human factor that needs to be integrated
into these kinds of exercises.
And with Mission 31,
we were able to use all sorts of laboratory equipment
that normally are relegated to a laboratory on land
and bring them back down to the bottom of the sea.
Fabien, you're raising money
for a new underwater habitat called Proteus.
How's it different from the ones before
and why do we need it now?
With Proteus, we're talking about a space
that is about ten times the size of Aquarius
and a team that will be twice the size
of any previous team deployed underwater,
so about a dozen people.
And with that, we'll be testing the physiological
and psychological parameters within which it's conducive
to deploy people for long periods of time underwater,
not days or weeks, which has been done many times before,
but weeks, months, and maybe even longer.
I anticipate a platform like Proteus
being able to offer us a lot more
of that advanced technology onsite on the final frontier
at the bottom of the sea,
so that our team can do all of that research right there
in real time.
And in the case of things like viral pandemics,
to be able to take those chemical compositions
of those sets of samples right there on site
and analyze them and hopefully replicate them
to accelerate that research process,
rather than having to send that sample to the surface,
have it potentially get corrupted
and get sent halfway around the world to sit in a freezer
or a locker for months, if not years,
before it gets analyzed.
There's a small group of crazy people like myself
that really believe in this
and I think that the scientific community as well
is really excited.