Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Sends shivers down one's spine, to think of the very notion of being folded into a very cramped space in an underwater submersible whose specifications must be such that it is capable of resisting water pressure a thousand times over the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.

People are very crushable, when an elephant, for example, sits on them. The elephant in this case, the extreme level of the Mariana Trench.

Of course at that extreme depth - 35,756 feet - the rays of the sun, let alone light of any kind does not penetrage; it is dark, pitch dark. Lights, of course on the submersible, can provide some opportunity to view what surrounds one in the trench.

For there is life down there, both aquatic plant life and creatures swimming about in those profound depths.

And this is where filmmaker James Cameron spent three hours of his time in a submersible he had specially built so he could dive within it about 11 kilometers deep in the Pacific Ocean. It is dark there and it is impressively cold, around the freezing mark.

Cameron plans to film in three-D down there, his journey to the depths of the world's warm ocean.
This is called the Deep-Sea Challenge project. There will shortly be another scheduled dive, this one by another adventurer-explorer, Richard Branson.

Cameron planned to return with scientific data and specimens. With that kind of financial expenditure, and for the furtherment of science, might it not have been a very good idea to send down a willing biologist, eager to uncover some of the mysteries of nature at that impossible depth, rather than a rank amateur?

If you have the celebrity and the wealth to proceed, and the ego to push you along, the very thought of surrendering yourself to the practical value of furthering science to that degree is, one supposes, irrelevant.