This is very consistent with the whole history of our species, and I don't think there ever was a moment in time when this was any different
seriously, this doesn't seem like a useful argument, regardless of whether true. the fact that humans have committed ecocide in the past doesn't seem like a reason to continue...
It's not. It's a comforting lie to justify inaction. You see it a lot when people justify not voting or civically engaging.
To be clear, I am doing jack shit about deep-sea mining. But that's a choice I'm making and I own it, even if it makes me uncomfortable. (And there are plenty of cases where that discomfort drives folks into action, however minor.)
The difference between "he's gone mad" which seems to imply that an urgent response is warranted versus "unsurprisingly, his long standing madness continues".
It’s closer to filling a rainforest with a nitrogen atmosphere. You’re literally removing the ecosystem’s means to respire.
I've seen political nihilism. But discarding concern and responsibilty for the environment like this is a gift to the mining companies.
I work in subsea cables and the companies that develop this type of tooling also work in this field, on a purely technical level it’s super cool technology and operationally very very interesting - the riser for nodule collection and how you pump / suck something from 4km down to the surface is wildly cool.
This is easy to say in theory. It's harder if you have a population that wants rising material living standards. (Increasing living standards in middle-income economies is vastly more energy and material intensive than at the upper or lower ends of the scale.)
Apparently population control is anathema to most people though, so the unrelenting environmental rape continues unabated.
Well yeah that too, but first and foremost when a population shrinks it leads to a demographic crisis. The government actively attempts to prevent that.
But also the issues you point to aren't inherently due to population. Most of our activities don't need to impact the environment to the extent that they currently do. We just cut corners to save money on a massive scale.
I honestly think this is the reason that asteroid mining should be the future for resource acquisition - not because it's cheaper or easier or anything like that, but because there's so much of it floating around out there and nobody will complain.
They do it in international waters because no one would consent in their own seabed.
It’s really the perfect example of libertarianism. When no one is considering the externalities, nothing matters except profit.
I'll be honest, I don't know how I feel about it. TMC has taken the position that it is potentially better to destroy seabed ecosystems than land based ones with strip mining. (at least that is my take on their position) There is truth in the idea that picking the least bad solution is the responsible thing to do. We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it? The problem is the unknowns. Effectively, I believe, they are arguing that the unknown dangers are still better than the known damage we do with traditional mining. The sea is a big place after all. Of course they are clearly biased in their thinking since the potential profits here are just staggering so staying objective with hundreds of billions of dollars staring at you is very hard.
A major change in the arguments about impact came with the study that showed the potential for oxygen generation by the nodules being mined. This so called 'dark oxygen' [3] could be a major part of the ecosystem at those depths. Oxygen is really scarce so anything that produces it is likely crucial. I personally don't have a background anywhere close to that required to critique the science around this but it looks interesting and is definitely worth following up on.
The chemistry of these nodules is also interesting but the bottom line is that once they are mined they won't come back. They take a long, long time to form. Like 2-5 mm per million years [4] slow.
Up until the dark oxygen research the main concern was the plume that mining created and what effects it would create on the ecosystem as a whole [5]. There were, and still are, a lot of unknowns about how big it could be, how long it will stick around and the impacts it could have.
Basically, there are a lot of ecosystem unknowns here so weighing the potential impact to the ecosystem from this vs the real, and devastating, impacts from mining on land is a very hard thing.
[1] https://metals.co/ [2] https://isa.org.jm/ [3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discove... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule [5] https://phys.org/news/2025-03-deep-sea-sediment-plumes.html
Everything I've seen about the ISA is it's a committee designed to be a roadblock to regulation.
I would feel better about this argument if we could point to a specific land based mine operation that was shut down in favor of seabed mining, but of course that won't happen and we'll just allow companies to destroy both.
> We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it?
We don't have to keep mining, yes our lifestyle is incompatible with reducing mining output. But why is our lifestyle - or modernity in a more general sense - taken as non-negotiable? The trolley problem has a solution, stop the train.
The first book, Red Mars, contains a debate between the reds, led by a scientist arguing for preserving Mars, and, basically, everyone else, who want to terraform and settle it. The reds are, throughout the book and frankly the series, a collection of extremists. They won't compromise. They blow cool stuff up. They're borderline terrorists, only outdone in the second book (Green Mars) by the Earth corporations that want to fuck up terraforming to maintain control. The only thing I remember being more annoying than the reds in Red Mars were the pages-long descriptions of the fucking escarpments and other geology.
Aside: I love Hemingway and get bored with Steinbeck. Reflecting on this, again years later, I realised they both do the same thing: expand on the banal. For Hemingway, the scenes I most love involve food and drink. Steinbeck, on the other hand, zooms in on the California landscape. I grew up in California, in part–it may be too familiar.
Anyway, the last book in Robinson's series, Blue Mars, is set after terraforming is done. It should be a celebration. And yet, I can't remember any significant plot points. (There was a cool low-g race.) I didn't even realise how boring and immemorable it was until well after I'd read it.
And then it hit me. It's boring because it's Steinbeck. The escarpments are gone. The burning sunrises near the polar ice caps. Gone. The boring stuff from Red Mars? I remember it. The visuals are vivid. They were tedious to digest. But they stuck and they're beautiful. By Blue Mars, however, the setting became ordinary. The idea–doing normal things on Mars–is novel. But the thing itself is not. Robinson turned Mars into a Steinbeck setting.
As I said, I read the trilogy years ago. Then, I lived in New York. I was a technological maximalist. Now, I live in Wyoming and would describe myself as a conditional optimist.
We have the tools to make a better future. But we have a tendency to be thoughtless with new tools. One of the most tragic ways we do that is by succeeding in developing and deploying technologies (autonomous deep-sea submersibles are cool!) that, in the end, homogenise the places, people and things that motivated us to reach out in the start.
The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.
Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?
Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.
With that said, the simple truth of it is that we know next to nothing about these ecosystems and really can't accurately estimate impacts. They're quite possibly significant, but we just don't have much info to go off of and studies like this are sorely needed.
I don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices. It's not as if nodules are hard to discriminate. Sure, there would be some interesting engineering challenges to operating equipment at scale in that environment, but it's undergrad-engineering-club-level, not rocket science...
Isn't this how we harvest cranberries?
> don't really understand why nodule gathering isn't already done - just with some kind of robotic fingers or aimed suction devices
The nodules may facilitate some weird deep-sea electrolysis that lets these ecosystems respire. Removing the nodules delicately is better than dredging. But it may still be a death sentence.
Nope. They have harvesting equipment that leaves the plants.
Peanuts maybe?
Democracy ... yeah right.
Source? The evidence suggests living standards matter to voters way more than deep-sea shenanigans.
It seems more to be a path to greater profits for the mining operations because they can privatize the profits and subsidize the costs. There's ongoing research in increasing the efficiency of resource extraction and it's the path we should be pursuing rather than strip mining the ocean floor.
Didn’t mean to imply that. It absolutely doesn’t. But for middle-income countries, it’s harder to pitch waiting for more-efficient extraction on land when there are riches on the sea floor.
If not, maybe you're being more performative than genuine.
Or maybe your 'useful' way of looking at things isn't actually all that useful. Not all roads need to lead to war.
JoeAltmaier•1d ago
In fact, estimating the frequency of those 'natural' events, and knowing the current density of deep-sea organisms, aren't we capable of calculating the answer using statistics?
jandrewrogers•1d ago
My understanding from working with scientists that study this kind of thing is that the default hypothesis was that the ocean floor was relatively static and changed slowly. The last couple decades of research has largely refuted that hypothesis, as sensing evidence consistently suggests a much more dynamic environment.
AFAIK, we do not have a model that explains the rate and diversity of environmental change observed on the ocean floor in these limited experiments. This makes it a really important open question in science, since things like climate change almost certainly strongly interact with these dynamics. Unfortunately no one expects us to have enough data to even attempt a credible hypothesis for a couple decades. The ocean is simply too big.
People underestimate how little we know about the subsurface ocean. For climate science it is probably the single biggest question. We can't build a useful model without filling that gap.
One potentially positive externality of deep-sea mining is that it may significantly increase the amount of data available.