LA: What do you think we can learn about ourselves as we study the ocean more?
LT: When I’m in Florida and I’m diving these 3,000-year-old sites, like we’re finding markers of, of our own future and what’s going on with Florida right now, or we’re looking for shipwrecks and we’re finding kind of the ancient history of sail down on the ocean. And so I felt like it was more like, when we were mapping the ocean, we were really telling stories about ourselves.
And then were was also so much that was linked up in the future about where we’re going on this planet in mapping the seafloor, you know, figuring out where tsunamis are going to happen, or how sea level rise is going to impact us or how climate change is going to play out, where we’re going to get deep sea metals, whether mining is going to happen. Like there’s, there’s the past and the future sort of all bound up in that, and then, at the same time, there’s also this huge mystery about where we all came from.
So even though people think of the seafloor as this very dark, very deep, very scary place, probably the least human place that you could imagine on Earth, I saw a lot of humanity in it.
LA: One thing we haven’t talked about so far is what can be produced from the bottom of the ocean. In recent years, this has been leading to new cosmetic products and even medical breakthroughs, but is there a risk of commercial exploitation when it comes to these discoveries?
LT: That’s a big question in, um, uh, international ocean treaties that are going on right now, like whether companies are going to be able to patent all this new biological information that we get from deep sea creatures that we haven’t discovered yet. So, for instance, one of the most profitable drugs of all time, like an HIV drug, came from a sea sponge that was taken from Florida in the 1980s. And so the idea is that there could be a lot of cures, there could be a lot of just kind of unrealized potential in the animals that we have yet to discover, or that we have discovered, but we haven’t really figured out what we could do with their genetic information.
And so we’re at this like tricky time where we’re figuring out what to do with a lot of that information as new sea creatures are coming in, and there’s, there’s sort of big fights about it, and that’s probably why you’re encountering some of that, that caginess. But I think where things are at right now, and this is an argument that often comes up with deep sea mining, is that if we sort of like destroy the bottom of the seafloor, if we sort of rip up and destroy the habitat of a lot of these creatures that we haven’t discovered yet, that we could be sort of destroying our own medicine chest.
So for the big, you know, pandemics that happen in the future, we should preserve those spaces, because we actually might find the cure for a lot of those, those pandemics that are coming down the road [laughs].
LA: Laura, this was fantastic. I was so gripped by your stories and [laughing] really felt like I sort of went down to the bottom of the ocean with you, so thank you so much.
Next week, we mark Valentine’s Day with the return of our Listener Dispatches, from a fling on a business trip in Toronto to an IRL example of that overused buzzword revenge travel in the Caribbean to trying to outdo an ex and not finding it particularly cathartic. It’s a fun one.
I’m Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus and Nick Pitman. The show is mixed by Amal Lal. Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer.
