DailyDirt: Getting To The Bottom Of It All
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
If you're a billionaire, what better way to spend your pocket change than to explore the deepest parts of the ocean? Deep sea diving is almost like being an astronaut, but you're more likely to find strange new lifeforms that no one has ever seen before. And so far, more people have been to the moon than to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But that bit of trivia will likely change in the next few years.- James Cameron has been down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and back -- filming a documentary for National Geographic. Are privately funded scientific efforts going to be a trend (like 3D movies)? [url]
- Sir Richard Branson has created Virgin Oceanic to explore the Earth's oceans. And it's not an April Fools joke like Virgin Volcanic. [url]
- Jeff Bezos has a privately funded team of deep-sea explorers, and they found discarded Apollo 11 rocket engines at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Bezos plans to bring at least one of these NASA artifacts of space exploration back to dry land. [url]
- To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
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Filed Under: apollo, billionaires, deep sea, exploration, james cameron, jeff bezos, mariana trench, oceans, richard branson, science
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Crowdsourced scientific efforts are also a possibility, but for big things like getting to the bottom of the ocean, getting an obscenely rich person involved seems like it would be easier. And, unlike 3D movies, major scientific projects are worth seeing.
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Re: science trends...
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Inspiring
Glad to see people pouring their money into something worthwhile, rather than just using it to get richer.
Science generates a need for jobs, a need for smarts, and a need for adventurous people. Best economic stimulus I can think of
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Re: Inspiring
The (not) "being rich" part should stop you... making scientific discoveries is becoming more and more a hobbyist realm -- as long as you aren't trying to discover the bottom of the ocean, interplanetary space or fundamental particle physics... :P
Try Foldit at home?
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The linked article states that the engines are still the property of NASA. Considering that NASA (as far as I know) never went looking for them, or attempted to recover them, wouldn't that make them abandoned property? Not only that, one could argue that by dropping them in the ocean, NASA was discarding them.
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