Savour the sea: Before we go to space, let’s explore the alien expanse we have right here on Earth

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Alexander Wooley is the director of partnerships and communications at AidData, and a former British Royal Navy officer.

Our imaginations, in recent years, have been trained on the stars above us. Images from the James Webb Space Telescope have stoked a range of feelings – wonder, curiosity, even gloom at our insignificance – as we stare farther into space than we ever have before.

Yet space has grown closer, too, in a way. As companies such as Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic offer the opportunity to experience space flight, it has unlocked a desire among many to be slingshot into space, even if the privilege requires vast sums. With the launch of NASA’s Artemis program, we’ve reignited the celestial ambitions of the 1960s with dreams of returning to the moon and later exploring Mars.

But there is an enormous, unexplored marvel right here on our home planet that we take for granted. And so, before space tourism becomes a thing, I’d like more people to take a slow boat across a big sea.

When we talk about “the world,” we mostly mean nations, humans and land masses. News coverage of severe weather events such as hurricanes or typhoons usually ends once storms head out to sea, and they only next draw attention when they approach another coastline. We’re focused on the problem of rising sea levels, but only insofar as the uninvited ocean threatens to enter our basements, or to drown seaside cities.

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Most of us order our goods on the internet, and think no further about what that requires. But most of us are also unaware that almost all global communications are possible thanks to undersea cables – not satellites – that stretch across ocean seabeds, a technology dating from the mid-19th century, meaning that you are still wired even when you think you’re wireless.

And those things you’re buying are made and distributed through the original world wide web: shipping lanes. The people who toil unconsidered on those container ships often come from the same poorer countries that make your stuff, too – systems we also don’t often think about.

Indeed, even though 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface is ocean, our interest usually ends at our meagre shores. Despite its size and ubiquity, most of us tend to think of the ocean only through the prism of the coast or the beach.

That vast body of water exists in our imagination as visual background or screen saver, a “happy place” we celebrate on social media that is limited by the physical extent of our shorebound vision.

We cling to the sides of ironically named “infinity pools” – these small glass and concrete tubs – which usually command a view over something much closer to infinity: the ocean.

This myopia affects our politics, too. At AidData, we run a massive online survey every couple of years in which we ask leaders in the world’s developing countries to rank the highest priorities for their country, aligned to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. In every wave of the survey, however, leaders have declared that conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources is the bottommost priority of the 17.

We have no reason to believe that the same wouldn’t be true for developed countries’ leaders. And indeed, ocean conservation and sustainability is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the least-funded of all the global goals, as measured by financing, investments and commitments from all national governments and international organizations.

This demands a perspective shift, one that can only happen by venturing into that saltwater frontier.

Viewed from shore, the ocean is a straight line on land, the horizon is a circle in every direction that you chase. It forces you to stop thinking in vectors; you navigate using the “great circle route” to get from place to place, and you steer by a circular compass.

The reality – that you are skimming the surface of a sphere – is made tangible. You see the mast and maybe the top of the superstructure of another ship peek above the horizon – nothing more – before it dips down again, silent, like the transit of a celestial object, or a rotating target at an old-time shooting gallery, or a passing, never-formed acquaintance. The emptiness fills your mind.

In that and other ways, space and the sea share a kinship. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an estimated 91 per cent of ocean species have yet to be classified, and more than 80 per cent of our ocean remains unmapped, unobserved and unexplored. Astronauts train in water; NASA uses oceans to simulate other worlds; and until just over a century ago, we were largely navigating the seas by the sun, the moon and the stars.

There is plenty that is downright alien about the sea, too. I’ve felt it myself: from the low stern of a ship, the hypnotic beckoning of the ship’s wake a few feet below, daring me to jump in; suddenly being surrounded, in the Sunda Strait in the middle of the night, by a seething mass of unidentified, otherworldly bioluminescence, which disappeared just an hour later; the optical illusion of seeing another ship appear to float well above the horizon, in broad daylight.

I’ve seen divers report finding a supermarket shopping cart at the bottom of the English Channel. Fishers have come alongside our ship, asking for help removing the large German mine caught in their nets, a lost vestige from one of the World Wars.

Once, in the 1980s, I remember sailors dragging aboard a large shark onto the deck in the Red Sea, and shooting it with one of the ship’s rifles; when the cooks cut it open, though, they found bullets – not only ours, but a round from a Lee-Enfield rifle, which was last in British service in the 1950s.

At sea, there’s no one to help you explain what you’ve just seen. You’re reduced to being as ignorantly awestruck as early humankind, staring up disoriented at an eclipse or passing comet.

On the ocean, human-made laws are flouted as much as natural ones. There are still stowaways and the plague of pirates (and while the tactics of both groups have changed over the centuries, the language hasn’t). These traditions persist because the ocean, in practice, remains ungoverned and authority is non-existent, so murky stuff happens that no one sees.

Just as there are no agreed-upon definitions of where space begins and our atmosphere ends, the seas have treaties and laws that are as distant and unenforceable as the statute in Skamania County in Washington State that declares that anyone who kills Bigfoot faces a US$1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

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The magnitude of sea and space share a spirit of defiance of our efforts to regulate them. During the COVID-19 crisis, some 400,000 seafarers were stranded on the ocean and not allowed ashore – literally “extraterrestrials.” You can’t breathe in space; you can’t drink saltwater. They are impractical, their massive scales surely unnecessary. Yet while we are drawn to space, oceans have mostly become inconveniences to be flown over quickly, when really they ought to be savoured.

How? It’s a challenge, but not impossible, to find a way to cross an ocean by boat. There are a few liners that still do so, such as the Queen Mary 2. But for a more authentic, immersive experience, I suggest trying one of the cargo ships that travel the world’s oceans, many of which offer a limited number of berths to passengers. There are even transatlantic yachts and tall ships that cross oceans.

Warships have a time-honoured practice of stopping to allow the crew to swim in water perhaps 15,000 feet deep. Ducking beneath the surface, I would see the entire underside of the hull of the ship, our spaceship, life-support system, suspended in the water. On board, the ship seemed massive, invulnerable; from this new viewpoint, it seemed small, buoyant against the odds. A similar realization that astronauts have looking back at our world, or the sense conveyed by William Anders’s photograph of Earth from Apollo 8.

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There is the awareness, in both alien environments, that if one thing goes wrong, it can be disaster. Help is not coming. You need to fix it. And strangely, this makes you feel more alive.

On a warship, you are surrounded by other souls, yet can somehow feel alone. On the darkened bridge at midnight somewhere in the Atlantic, I saw a green console light briefly illuminate as a veteran signaller hunched over the tactical radio; the light meant a message had gone out from the ship, unauthorized.

He confessed a long-standing tradition: that as one day turns into the next, naval signallers the world over relay and repeat the words “Sugar Coco Pops.” It seemed absurd, filling the lonely void with the name of a sugary breakfast cereal while breaking all radio silence protocols. But it was their way of connecting to comrades, of giving a sign of life through long-range “HF” radios, which give off waves that bounce off the ionosphere layer in the Earth’s atmosphere – the same patch flown to by the likes of Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

It’s great that the Webb Telescope allows us to “see” 500 million light-years away to the likes of the newly discovered Cartwheel galaxy. But for a lot less than NASA spent, or the sums that billionaires are charging millionaires to go to the edge of space for a few weightless minutes, you can spend days or weeks crossing an ocean – and there, you’ll gain the same sense of wonder, and a fuller appreciation of this place we call home.

Exploring space is nice. Understanding the oceans is an imperative for our future.

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