[atemerev]

The CIA has invented an entire fake scientific field to cover this: manganese nodules deep sea mining (it is actually not commercially sustainable). More than that, they have posted hundreds of peer reviewed (and completely fake) papers to convince Russians that it is a feasible idea, so they launched their own deep sea mining programs (completely abandoned after the nature of the operation leaked).

[Boothroid]

I remember reading about undersea manganese mining in an illustrated science book when I was a kid! It even had pictures of the mining craft.

[brandur]

To be fair, it doesn't look like this was entirely fiction. Here's what Wiki has to say on the subject [1]:

> Interest in the potential exploitation of polymetallic nodules generated a great deal of activity among prospective mining consortia in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost half a billion dollars was invested in identifying potential deposits and in research and development of technology for mining and processing nodules.

And in a few cases they actually succeeded in extracting some metals:

> In the late-seventies, two of the international joint ventures succeeded in collecting several hundred ton quantities of manganese nodules from the abyssal plains (18,000 feet, 5.5 km + depth) of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Significant quantities of nickel (the primary target) as well as copper and cobalt were subsequently extracted from this "ore" using both pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical methods.

A lot of R&D money was sunk into this before it even had a hope of commercially viable (and it still isn't to this day), but it wasn't a hoax either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule#Proposed_Mini...

[atemerev]

Exactly. All part of the hoax!

[jbapple]

> they have posted hundreds of peer reviewed (and completely fake) papers

Were the authors that were listed on these papers CIA employees with a fake cover job, or just completely made-up names?

[6stringmerc]

Hah, ghost-writing peer reviewed papers for yourself on the CIA payroll? Clever.

[nonbel]

>"they have posted hundreds of peer reviewed (and completely fake) papers"

Source?

[oren_thrall]

I guess the key difference is totalitarianism. Totalitarian governments are so all-consuming, and the deceptions that sort of society uses are just profoundly different, because of the way such a deception must be approached.

With everything stemming from one big organization, the question is never if the government did it, but which government agents are the ranking officials responsible, and what are they up to?

When you have a non-totalitarian government, where officials are lesser celebrities if at all, and maybe such a government that acts as a referee for the rest of its citizens, the way it behaves gets weirder, and less predictable.