This is a titanium semisphere in a clean welding facility. It is part of the construction of the sort of sphere required to handle the pressures of deep sea exploration. There have been, to date, according to open sources, only about a half dozen watercraft capable of diving below 20,000 feet. It's a rather astonishing fact considering how much of 'the planet' mankind has supposedly spoiled.
I got a chance to play volleyball on the beach yesterday evening and having been away from my hometown for 8 weeks, I was a bit overwhelmed by the opportunity to sit and stare at the ocean for a while. As I sat, I was singly impressed by the utter perfection of the horizon line, how flat it seems, how crisply it differentiated the pale blue sky from the deep green sea. A thought crossed my mind about the limits of mankind. If God wanted man to fly, some said, he would have given us wings. If God had not wanted us to fly, replied the engineer, he would have made gravity way stronger.
God does not want us to chop off half the moon and throw it at Mars. God does not want us to breathe chlorine instead of oxygen. But God might not mind us drinking the oceans dry. But could we do that? Every time I see commercials about the preciousness of water I merely think that water is uneconomical, not scarce. The oceans are there for the draining, if only we had the tools. Nobody is building them - nobody is even thinking about building them, that we know.
It has been years since I've last seen anything about the Cousteaus and decades since I last heard tell of Alvin, grandson of the Trieste bathyscaphe. There has been a bit of drama around this or that Russian sub drowning in the Barents, a sea we never heard of before and thought nothing of since. But there isn't much imagination over here about the depths of the ocean, not really.
So it occurs to me that those depths might very well be the safest places to store this or that on the planet. I wouldn't suggest nuclear waste or anything of that nature, but if you really wanted to put something away for a while, it wouldn't be too difficult to put it inside a cast-iron ball and drop it into the Atlantic, or the North Sea for that matter. You might know exactly where it is - hide it in plain sight, but it would take quite an effort to get it back. Dropping things into the deep is rather like a very cool and cheap one-way algorithm.
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