How to Survive a Homemade Submarine, Part 3 👽

This is a true story...

I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
--Stephen Hawking

Read Part 1 and Part 2

In the history of the homo sapien species, we are within an elite group: the rare few humans to have ever ventured this deep into the ocean without becoming fish bait.

(For now, I remind myself).

While military submarines have deeper diving capabilities, they lack the large portholes of Karl’s tourism-based submarine for obvious reasons: each rivet and seam in a porthole is a point of potential pressure implosion. The closest engineering analogue is the design of space crafts for space exploration. The extraordinary pressures and near-freezing temperatures outside the submarine leave absolutely no room for error.

(And this spacecraft is homemade, I remind myself).

Due to this extreme risk, the overwhelming majority of deep-sea exploration is handled by Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles. Humans rarely risk life and limb to penetrate the sea’s nether regions. Out of those who do, few are in the position to directly observe, explore, and interact with the deep-sea environment. In this sense, we belong to a select group second only to the NASA astronauts themselves in terms of exploring hostile, otherworldly environments.

(And here you, I remind myself, in a powered-off submarine waiting for a prehistoric shark attack).

While NASA’s finest have yet to detect any evidence of extraterrestrial life, within just the last few hours I have personally encountered dozens of deep-sea denizens that defy our traditional definitions of terrestrial life. Lingering in this limitless darkness, I have time to reminisce on the curious collection of creatures we passed as we plummeted towards our current predicament:

The alien tendrils of the brittle stars engaged in a wormy embrace on deep-sea corals, their arms extending out to capture floating detritus from the water column...

The gardens of sea lilies adorning the building-sized boulders of fossilized coral, their Dr. Moreau-esque combination of a flower-shaped head slapped upon a centipede's body dangling against the darkness...

The ribbon-like undulations of a jellynose fish drifting vertically above the endless expanse of sandy plains, its stubby snout sniffing for concealed crustacean prey...

The freakishly grumpy faces of anglerfish peering up from their perches in the sand, shuffling around on their squat legs to avoid the glare from the submarine's lights...

The three-storey tangle of tentacles towering beneath the delicate hydrogen-filled bells of a monstrous siphonophore, the remnants of hapless fish trapped by its toxic trawling being dragged along towards their digestive demise...

And of course the giant isopod: living nightmare fuel that I can still hear crunching through the hogshead just a few feet in front of me in the darkness...

Only one quarter-mile beneath the waves (technically “walking distance” by human standards) lies a world beyond human comprehension. At a mere fifteen hundred feet underwater, we are scarcely scratching the ocean’s upper layer. The average depth of the ocean is over 12,000 feet deep -- a distance greater than all but 180 mountains in the Continental US. The ocean’s deepest point is Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam at a mind-boggling 36,070 feet, a depth nearly equivalent to stacking Mount Everest and Mount Kosciuszko (Australia's tallest peak) atop each other!

Only three humans in history have ever personally visited the Neptunic netherworld at the bottom of Challenger Deep -- nine fewer than have walked on the moon! Yet even within their brief visits to this forsaken realm, they witnessed life. Existing in forms fantastical to our narrowly defined preconceptions of life, they witnessed various species of pale pink crustaceans, translucent burrowing sea cucumbers, and a preponderance of filament-emitting macro-protists, all thriving at pressures a thousand-fold of those we experience on the surface.

It is at this moment that I realize I absolutely do believe in aliens. We’ve just been searching in the wrong places.

After all, herein lies a realm which so few humans even realize exists -- yet we relentlessly ravage it with reckless impunity.

This undiscovered world which canvases over seventy percent of our planet is littered with the remnants of human ignorance. I recall the sand swept plain of Golden Crinoids living amongst Coca-Cola bottles we passed during our descent. The once-pristine plain of the abyssal sea is now littered with the ammo shells of the Soda Wars, each a dropping on capitalistic decadence descending to devastate the world below. Among the masses of man-made litter existed creatures never to see man’s face, yet condemned to oblivion by mankind’s obliviousness.

I have been waiting in this damp darkness for an uncomfortably long time now. Deprived of vision, my mind manifests a paranoid hyper-awareness of my other senses as if amplified under a microscope. The faint respiration of my fellow aquanauts is juxtaposed against the even fainter crunches of swine skull being slowly digested by the giant isopods. Each breath is a sharp rasp of wasted of vital oxygen. Each shiver is a waste of precious warmth. Each second briefly coexists with eternity.

Suddenly, I am looking at a singular chain of Christmas lights slowly cascading one light at a time. Every mysterious glowing dot somehow contains both all colors and none simultaneously, for in the absence of all light each lingering phosphorescent ember encompasses the entire sum of its luminous potential. It appears almost as an apparition, drifting against the endless expanse a mere meter from my face. Seconds later, it is joined by a handful of clones in my periphery, each transmitting their own Morse Code of glowing chemicals suspended against the infinite night.

Soon, our entire visual field is illuminated by the ghostly strands dancing in the dark. String of Pearls: tiny shrimp-like crustaceans which use bioluminescent chemicals to peacock their presence to potential partners. We are witnessing the abyss’s nightly orgy as millions of microscopic organisms mate in an explosion of light. As my eyes adjust, I can almost discern the sparkling profile of the pig’s head as the giant isopod continues its surface-supplied supper. My vision is slowly swallowed inside a kaleidoscope of star-spangled surreality.

Suddenly, the submarine sharply lurches towards starboard, shocking me from my internal reverie. The sub’s shell screeches with the sound of Satan scratching his fingernails down the universe’s chalkboard. Our viewport explodes in a violent fury of phosphorescent fireworks.

"Karl, there's something freakin' huge outside!" I scream over the chaos...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Read Part 1 and Part 2

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Photographs courtesy of Lia Barrett, Karl Stanley, and @thescubageek

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