Using the Programme Guide of the World
Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki Finland in August 2017 (to which I will
be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I will jump off, jump on,
rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf
copy of the Programme Guide. The link is provided below…
Under Pressure:
Exploring Oceans Beyond Earth – We're finding liquid water everywhere in the
solar system. What will it take for humanity to explore
and/or colonize those vast new oceans?
William Ledbetter:
2016 Nebula Award, edits for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, runs the Jim Baen
Memorial Short Story Award contest (Baen Books, the National Space Society)
Pat MacEwen: anthropologist/author,
several short stories in F&SF
Laurel Anne Hill: authored
The Engine Woman’s Light, one other novel
Too bad James L. Cambias
wasn’t part of this panel. His novel, A DARKLING SEA, takes place under the ice
surfaced ocean of the alien world, Illmatar. It’s more complex than that, but
his aliens and their entirely fire-less biotech society and culture are fascinating.
Jupiter’s moon,
Europa figures in several science fiction stories ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter%27s_moons_in_fiction),
more than one dealing with life in the waters under the ice.
There’s ice under
the surfaces of Mars and Venus as well: http://theconversation.com/water-water-everywhere-in-our-solar-system-but-what-does-that-mean-for-life-76315
Certainly we will
explore those places when time and technology are right, but I think this session
was looking beyond that. We’ve established that there’s water elsewhere than on
the home world. So? Who cares? We need water on Earth – but even though the
surface is 71% water, we can only “use” a fraction of that. Roughly three
percent of that water is “usably freshwater” and of that, most of it is frozen
or underground.
Vast swaths of the
surface are completely uninhabited by Humans. We laud and magnify ourselves for
having “conquered Earth” as well as chide ourselves for “destroying the oceans”…
But we can easily
walk on only 29% of the surface, and of that, 57% is uninhabitable…so, Humans
live on just sixteen percent of the Earth’s surface. Seems that “conquered” is
a somewhat relative term. Here the discussion looked at “what it will take for
humanity to explore and/or colonize those vast new oceans”. Yet we haven’t even
colonized our own oceans. We avoid them typically. There are Humans who have
never had any encounter with an ocean at all, and the ones who say that they
have might have gone swimming in one or flown over one. Even those who live “on”
the ocean might have little to do with the water itself. As I live in the
land-locked center of North America, I have no idea how many people in Los
Angeles actually “use” or have “conquered” the Pacific.
Certainly people
HAVE done things with the ocean, interacting with it intimately – my daughter
spent time on New Zealand as an exchange student learning about Maori art; most
everyone reading this has seen the kid’s movie, “Moana”. Many of us have “been
to Hawaii”.
But can we say in
any real sense that Humans have “conquered the oceans”? Do we really live
there, or do we just USE the oceans? We certainly like to dump stuff there: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast/june14/mw126-garbagepatch.html,
in particular, insoluble plastic.
Some people claim
that living on the oceans is “impossible” or “unlikely”, but the fact is that
we have created artificial islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_islands,
we just haven’t made them very large, the largest owned near Dubai in the United
Arab Emirates. Japan has created the most artificial islands, and Holland has
been doing it for two thousand years. The ancient Egyptians also made islands.
But our ability to
push back oceans and to really, truly inhabit them is entirely unrealized on this
planet. There are no undersea cities – a peculiar dream of mine – but there are
some who think they might be possible: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2016/westminster-academics-predict-underwater-cities-downloadable-food-and-3d-printed-houses-by-2116.
Science fiction (sort of in some of the cases noted) has had a stab at it: https://io9.gizmodo.com/5560901/the-11-greatest-underwater-cities-of-science-fiction
None of the
sources mentioned SEAQUEST DSV, and while there were no cities under the
surface of the ocean, there were colonies and (at least in its first season), a
serious attempt at writing the stories. In this future, the bottom of the ocean
is the only place left where there are exploitable natural resources and Humans
need to be there to utilize them.
The upshot of this
is that while I wish I could have been there, I think we’d best make some
advances in “conquering” our own oceans before we try and make a go at
conquering other oceans…
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