Hey guys! What's up! I'm so excited to be here playing Subnautica:
Below Zero with you guys and with some amazing scientists.
I'm Cecilia D'Anastasio, I'm a writer with WIRED, I cover video games here.
We have some incredible guests today who will be experts on the topic of the bottom of the
ocean and everything that dwells there. Hi, Twitch. My name is Casey Machado.
I am a research engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and my job is to design and operate
robots to explore the most remote places in the ocean.
And hi Twitch. My name is Mike White. I am an expedition coordinator with NOAA Ocean
Exploration. We are coming to you live from the NOAA Ship
Okeanos Explorer in the control room where we're about to set sail tomorrow on our 2021
Technology Demonstration. I have a question for you guys.
So, for me personally, I can not think of a single scarier thing than the bottom of
the ocean because of lack of oxygen, constrained movement,
I mean, sharks! Oh my god, sharks! Terrifying. How do you get over all of those fears to
do science and to explore the ocean? Or were they just never fears for you?
I don't think I was ever, I grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, so I was always kind of
at least at the shore or on the ocean. For me, I've never really, I've never really
been too afraid of the ocean like in a grand scale.
I guess the scariest thing for me is when you're like on the ship at night, and you
walk out and there's absolutely nothing around you.
And it's just a very sort of humbling, small feeling.
But the scariest thing to me is if you go over the side of the ship, like for some crazy
reason, which I've never heard of happening. Right.
But there's always that visceral fear, like, no one would know you went over. You're just
going to be in the water. You know, I'm picking up what you're putting
down, Casey. Because I think about, a lot of what we do,
Cecilia, we're not sending humans down that deep.
I mean, of course that happens, right? I mean you talk about folks going to the Challenger
Deep, right? James Cameron, I think it was Dr. Kathy Sullivan, was it, wasn't she the
one who went down there? But, you know, you have folks that go down
there in human occupied vehicles. For most of the science that we do in deep
ocean exploration wise, in our office, we're actually using remotely operated vehicles.
Which means the pilots are sitting here in our wonderfully air-conditioned control room.
And we actually have fiber optic tether and electricity is flowing down to the vehicle
and that's actually streaming all of the data back on to the ship.
So, from a human standpoint, we're actually pretty removed from a lot of it.
And that's a benefit of a remotely operated vehicle or say an autonomous vehicle, right,
like the Orpheus lander. It doesn't put you in harms way at those depths.
And I also want to add that sharks aren't scary. They are wonderful creatures.
What?! Sharks aren't scary? Mucus is good? You are
turning my world upside down.