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If you take away the unusual nature of what I do, it's really not complicated and the motivations behind it are the same as everybody's. I want people to live well. With the current trajectory of first world resource utilization, I don't think we can if we continue to rely on
the third or so of this planet that's most easily accessible to us, just because it's not underwater. But underwater land has preindustrial resource density. Everything we needed to live the good life for centuries came from the metals, wood, oils & other resources of that 30%
while the remaining two thirds that's underwater has been left relatively untouched except for oil and fishing. How this doesn't set off alarm bells in everybody's heads is a mystery to me. That's many more centuries of good living yet to be had, & it can be done responsibly.
We can't properly expand our societies into space yet & when we can it will still be a money pit for a century or more before it starts paying for itself. The ocean isn't like that, it can pay for itself immediately. The technology needed has existed for more than half a century
Uniquely since it's an environment with low available oxygen we can't use combustion engines or other typical polluting equipment. Everything is battery electric, neither putting anything into the environment which wasn't already there, nor removing anything from it
Likewise all of the planned developments of oceanic resources, from mining dead hydrothermal vents to harnessing the uninterrupted gulf stream currents for reliable clean energy do not put more trash into the ocean nor remove anything life critical from it.
Everybody's solution to the economy is to find new ways to subdivide the dwindling share of existing wealth. Nobody's talking about deliberately creating more of it. More good jobs with hazard pay, more resources coming into the economy from the sea, so more people can live well.
The simplest solution to employment shortages is to find new lucrative activities to employ people for. It can be difficult/dangerous, so long as revenue ultimately exceeds expenses. The math works out for many productive offshore activities, so they're starting to happen.
There's legitimate environmental concerns like when most offshore fish farms used inedible fish based feeds, but they're going sustainable now using seaweed based fish feeds cultivated from kelp that grows in the fish droppings under the floating enclosures, semi closed loop
We're getting really good at doing this kind of stuff without the thoughtless damage to the environment we considered an acceptable externality of business in prior decades. We can utilize the ocean, become wealthier, healthier and happier, without sacrificing it's health
The legal necessities of doing so will and probably ought to include removing plastics and otherwise undoing already incurred environmental damages, but there's so much to be gained from it that there's almost no amount of caveats that change the equation. I get this intuitively
But realized as I grew from a boy into a man that shit wasn't happening as quickly as expected & identified one of many culprits was that nobody really thought about the ocean as land covered in water or what that land could do for us, they just see the water. The best I could do
to wake regular people up to this enormous untapped potential, within my meager means, was to recreate in miniature examples of the same technology which had already been in use since 1963, just because it's a spectacle and gets you thinking about what's possible in that space
What I want to happen with the ocean is largely already happening, the rate constrained mainly by red tape and investor skepticism, but there are a lot of guys doing cooler stuff than me like Lloyd Godson, attracting attention to all of this stuff, making it "real" for people
It's really weird but I guess an inescapable facet of human nature that most will pay no mind to untold trillions in potential wealth and responsible development of resources for the improvement of everyone's quality of life until there's a spectacle to focus on & retweet
I like doing something people find cute, amusing and interesting but I would hope the takeaway is that humanity has not yet painted itself into a corner, we're sitting on centuries worth of untapped resources that can be responsibly developed, so a good future is still possible.
