[vlovich123]

As I understand it very very likely to cause dead zones. Ignoring the role these nodules play, the way I understand the mining works is it has huge combines crawling the ocean floor and kicking up huge plumes of dust to extract out the nodules. This:

A) kills all marine life that might be present on the ocean floor which is a huge disruption to a fragile ecosystem where everything is even more tightly interconnected

B) disorients and kills marine life in large area through the massive dust clouds that get created by the combined kicking up that dust

The problem with putting the onus on those concerned with this activity is it’s completely backwards. The risk is great enough that we don’t want profit driven activity going full steam to try to manifest those risks first and try to deal with consequences later. There is reasonable concern that this will cause huge disruptions to the ecosystem even before we get to the potential that these modules are why there’s oxygen down there to begin with.

[BurningFrog]

Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

That means that killing that life in an area has very little effect of the rest of the ocean eco system.

The mining is a one time event, and once it's completed in an area, life will return, and that eco system will be as it was.

I live in a city. Building it destroyed some wilderness to give half a million people somewhere to live. I think that was a very good thing.

[vlovich123]

> Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

You are making such a confident definitive statement about a part of our earth that is less accessible than outer space. Absence of evidence is decidedly not an evidence of absence here. We barely understand anything about the ocean floor and the deep ocean around it. We should not be going full steam with industrialization until we have a better grasp of how things work there. This is a once way gate where on the other end of it could be the consequential equivalent of just having a nuclear war.

Think about it this way - until recently people believed there was no oxygen in the deep ocean. That’s clearly not true. And they thought there was no life but if I recall correctly there actually is or at least is a good reason to believe there might be and reason to believe it’s critical in the overall cycle supporting all the other life that lives in the deep ocean.

[sepositus]

> I live in a city. Building it destroyed some wilderness to give half a million people somewhere to live. I think that was a very good thing.

This is likely going to be the point of disagreement. Depending on where someone falls in the spectrum, their beliefs can range anywhere from humans are bad and should die to protecting and growing human life at all costs.

[no_wizard]

Not to mention, you could build up instead of out and get more or less the same results with less disruption to natural ecosystems

[BurningFrog]

True. And to me, as a human, the "humans are bad" crowd are an enemy and need to be fought and defeated.

[__MatrixMan__]

Mostly that crowd is just concerned with humans' tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot when we don't understand something.

There used to be this place called the "fertile crescent" where humans grew a lot of food. But they didn't understand how certain irrigation techniques caused salt to build up in the soil, so they accidentally turned it into a desert.

We don't understand this oxygen source in the deep ocean. It seems likely that we're, again, about to shoot ourselves in the foot.

The belief is not that humans are evil, it's that humans are unskilled in dangerous ways and that it's worth slowing down to cultivating those skills before we cause unnecessary harm to ourselves.

[sepositus]

This is more or less my view. However, when I say the "humans are bad" group, I mean the people basing their decisions purely on emotion or virtue and who are usually incapable of coming up with such a nuanced view. The same goes for the other extreme.

[antonvs]

Humans aren’t bad in moderation. But 8 billion of us, and growing, consuming ever more resources, are pretty objectively bad.

[anigbrowl]

So you think certain humans are bad.

[JadeNB]

> Very little life exists at the ocean floor, since there are very few life sustaining resources there.

I think that this isn't true even in light of our current known science; but our understanding of what "life sustaining resources" are is something that can only grow with time—certainly we've often found in the past life in places that we thought were utterly inhospitable to it—and so we cannot meaningfully say that little life exists for this reason. And it can be dangerous to sacrifice life even when we think we understand it very well, unless we are sure that we completely understand its role in the ecosystem, or, rather, how its removal from one part of the ecosystem will affect our part of the ecosystem—which we (almost?) definitely don't.

[BurningFrog]

We've explored the deep ocean. Far from every spot, but enough to know the big picture. There is some life there but not much. Because there is very little resources to sustain life. It's pretty much just whatever scraps fall down from near the surface.

Now, of course mining the sea floor will disrupt the local eco systems. It might take decades or longer for those to heal. To me that's fine in the big picture.

A big exception is underwater volcanoes, which have enormously vibrant eco systems, and may even be where life on Earth originated. This is because the volcanoes supply tons of heat energy and minerals. No one is thinking of mining those.

Either way, this video is quite informative, and doesn't even fully agree with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFaWgAXax1Q&ab_channel=60Min...

[vlovich123]

> We've explored the deep ocean. Far from every spot, but enough to know the big picture. There is some life there but not much. Because there is very little resources to sustain life. It's pretty much just whatever scraps fall down from near the surface.

26.1% of the ocean floor is mapped. By comparison, 100% of the Moon surface and 99% of the Mars surface is mapped. Less than 5% of the ocean has actually been seen by humans. I don't know what makes you think we have enough to know the big picture, but to me that seems like a very small portion. And certainly not enough to really understand the lifecycle that's going on down there.

[BurningFrog]

You're technically right, of course.

And one example of your point is when people first took a look at underwater volcanoes a few decades ago and found worlds of life no one had even imagined.

Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

So I'll claim that anywhere we'd mine we'd have a very good view of what life would be affected how. There could still be a Martian UFO base on the ocean floor 20 miles away, of course, but that wouldn't be affected.

[vlovich123]

> Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

And if they discover life you're thinking they'll stop the mining? Or will your next argument be "Oh but actually that's not a lot of life" or "it's OK if that life dies out".

This is a very wise quote that applies to relying on good faith actions:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

From another commentor:

> 1. There is a lot of animal life in the deep ocean where these modules are present and absent where they are not

So it's pretty clear if anything that today we already know these nodules are likely relevant to deep ocean life in some way we don't fully understand yet.