This is a refreshed op-ed from its original publication in 2017; to expand on context related to modern and future subsea habitation as we reflect on the historical significance of the Sealab Program on its 60th anniversary.

Call it one of those quirky fateful twists – as I started up my truck this morning [January 6, 2017), the local radio was airing an interview with Frank Carini from EcoRI News (my favorite environmental watchdog) which was tackling the controversial subject of overpopulation. I haven’t written about this in some time, so figured that in the spirit of those fearful of what forthcoming environmental policy might look like, this would be as good a time as any to dive deep into the subject.

At the surface – at face value – overpopulation is very real. Those of us who have been around for a quarter to a half a century have felt the pressure everyday – just think about something as simple as traffic. It is very obvious that there is more traffic today than there was even 10 years ago, and this has added to personal anxiety and stress, as well as stress on our infrastructure, social behaviors, technological development, and environment.

According to Frank’s morning report, by 2050, the world population will be at 9 BILLION people. Today, we’re around 7 billion (as of 2017; today we’re around 8 billion – eek). Rewind to 1950, Planet Earth supported just 2.5 billion people. So, in just one century, we’re looking at the likelihood of greater than a 4-fold increase in human population. It doesn’t take rocket science to understand that this means 4 times the competition for basic human needs – food, water, shelter, and therefore 4 times the responsibility as a human race to account for this both for our own survival, and in a responsible manner that accounts for the natural resources that sustain us each and every day. The unfortunate reality may be that Planet Earth can’t sustain this type of population growth – carrying capacity for any given environment is a real thing. This very topic has been addressed by many scholars, summarized nicely by Livescience here: http://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-support.html. All things point to a tipping point around the 10 billion mark – that isn’t too far away and will occur within many of our lifetimes.

So, what will happen? Well to use the fruit fly experiment analogy – once the population reaches its maximum sustainable level given the resources available within the closed system (Earth), a die-off will occur. This would be a humanitarian disaster, and nothing we want to think about. But, we HAVE TO think about this. I’m not advocating doomsday conspiracy theory adoption, but I am advocating that world leaders take a serious look at this and arrive at a cohesive and singular direction to carry humanity forward. In fact, a similar situation may be what has brought humanity to Earth to begin with…a panspermia if you will, or seeding of life here, to save a failed state elsewhere.

Lots of great overpopulation reads from Amazon.com

While it doesn’t take rocket science to see the problem, it will indeed take rocket science to solve the problem. Here on Earth, my personal opinion is that we’ve already failed from the perspective of adequate forward-thinking to implement the massive infrastructure enhancements required to sustain the 2050 population when coupled with the environmental changes we are seeing all around us – many of which are human induced. We [the people] can’t even get it together to project highway needs only a couple of years out – again, think about your morning commute anxiety. Who botched up that one?!? We need to think BIG, with massive changes and shifts in behavior if we are to engineer an Earth that can carry 10 billion people – if it’s even possible.

Food, water, shelter – and transportation – need to be addressed in a massive way. With the latter, transportation, it may be that our brainiac abilities to telecommute become more popular and we can sit around like blobs and think our way through the day. There is evidence of this if you look at the stats for just how much time we spend staring at our smart phones. So, that leaves the bottom rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – food, water, shelter – requiring acute attention. Scarily, these are the foundations of survival.

Food may become nourishment goop in a bag, fresh water may be harvested from the air (or sea), and shelter may just continue to build up. That’s the lazy man’s approach to survival of the fittest and will only prolong the inevitable problem. If, and when, Earth goes bust we may need to leave. It’s a sad reality, but also may be part of this epoch-old journey that humanity has been on to find a new idealism in the universe.

So, let’s figure we make the leap to Mars. That is the shortest leap, and we’ve had robotic scouting trips underway to take the first look. To take a human settlement leap requires technology that is only at its infancy here on Earth, and that is artificial life support [to breathe]. Food, water, and shelter can be limped through, but strip the air we breathe, and frankly, we’re screwed. To take Mars seriously, it needs a breathable atmosphere – terra forming should have been jumpstart years ago such that our arrival would be to a new Garden of Eden so to speak.

Many of these big issues can be acutely appreciated by divers – a diver can appreciate that we willingly remove the atmosphere taken for granted here on terra firma, and rely on its supply and management via an artificial means. Today’s diving state of the art – the rebreather, places an added element of atmospheric management responsibility on the diver, and it is this very technology that needs to be advanced to take us to Mars, or beyond, in a meaningful and permanent way. Rebreathers, at a grandiose scale, are exactly what sustain us here on land – the gift of photosynthesis hard at work.  It is deeply, deeply concerning that atmospheric management is not the number one priority for us as a civilization, evidenced by the gross imbalances we’ve created with industrial carbon emissions and destroying those environments that sequester carbon – oceans and rainforests. We can’t have it both ways which is the very premise of consumerism – to take. We need a far better balance with the planet all round – it only benefits us.

So, what better way to prepare for our giant leap towards human sustainability be it here or elsewhere [for better or worse] than to embrace advancements in diving. Diving has been a rather isolated field for centuries but if embraced as an academic field of study to make the advancements that need to be made, prioritizing a new life in the sea creates the ideal proxy to prepare us for that giant leap to Mars, and beyond.

Now, how to do that is an important subject for debate. As we reflect on now 60 years since the US Navy’s Sealab program, it’s important to recognize that the program’s success was in establishing how humans can adapt to pressure, and traverse to and from saturated states. As it has evolved, saturation diving (living and working while exposed to pressure) is most safely conducted from surface-based vessels. This is inarguably the most logical and safest means to perform under extreme pressures, and unlikely to regress to subsea stations that expose occupants to pressure in any broad capacity. That said, when we travel to space, very similar techniques are used to traverse spaces of pressure and vacuum, though these are at very minor pressure deltas – just a few pounds of pressure which is not much different that a transition to/from a shallow swimming pool. Traversing extreme pressure changes has already proven to require protecting the human from pressure and the myriad of technological hazards that are created when trying to adapt to it. By removing the effects of pressure on our physiology – we can travel virtually anywhere, and this has shown relevance with the gain in popularity of personal 1ATA submersible vehicles.

So, do we need a sea station to help combat our overpopulation nation? Well, it’s a compelling dream, though doesn’t solve any meaningful problems related to resource deficiencies to support 10+ billion people. Even at 1ATA, isolated from pressure, the added complexity of such an operation far exceeds what might be extracted from a city beneath the sea – it’s just not sustainable, and takes more than it can give.

From that perspective, the best thing we can do is preserve and protect the ocean by leaving it alone. Explore it to its fullest as we have been using incrementally improved technologies and techniques to search for answers that may help us live more sustainably all round and use these moments to inspire additional curiosity. But – shift to an aquatic species that is not adapted to pressure and requires huge expense to mitigate exposure risks? At the present time I think not… humanity must first get its $#!t together in a big way.

Well, better get going…sitting here like a blob at my computer isn’t helping much. Off to the shop, to the sea, and beyond!

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