[dbish]

I’ve always wanted to start a company that builds automated underwater swarms of “probes” that just search and return info and carry out small exploration tasks but over long amounts of time and space.

Do it right and you can send the first underwater explorers to Europa.

Hard to find the right way to monetize in the early stages though. SpaceX had a variety of options.

[defrost]

> Hard to find the right way to monetize in the early stages though.

Fugro got a tonne of money for sidescan surveys of large areas north of this Diamantina fracture zone up to the equator .. looking for traces of the lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

  The search for the missing aircraft became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before a novel analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had travelled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean.

  After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

[8note]

somehow Ive always thought fugro was a person and not a company

[defrost]

They're relatively big players in geodesy with fleets of ships, aircraft, land vehicles gathering all manner of multi channel and spectral data at, above, and below surface level (for all the surfaces, geodetic, gravitational, magnetic, Mean Sea, etc).

They tie in with the majors that build and deploy infrastructure for oil, gas, mineral exploration and exploitation.

[theendisney]

Sounds good.

Make several modular probes and give them fancy names.

Have various support classes like signal relay, charge stations, camera cleaning, resque etc

Sell rent lease the vehicles to customers who get to pilot them in vr.

Create a simulator where one can explore some already explored areas with the probes projected in real time. Create a market for map chunks.

I think it will make one hell of a game.

Roberts Space Industries Legatus bundle costs $48,000 USD and you only get pixels.

If you can have your own exploration submarine without having to deal with all the boring logistcs yourself people will gladly pay many times that and hire other players to do ingame jobs like keeping the signal alive.

If you can build the mothership with investors and crowdsourcing then maintain it with subscription fees and insurance policies it would be hilarious even before anyone finds anything interesting.

[irishcoffee]

I actually work in this space. The difficulties of long-running underwater probes should not be discounted. Comms bandwidth without a tether is… quite slow. Dealing with even the tiniest drops of water inside the system is… a real problem. Salt water is also quite a problem. Deploy and retrieve is a real problem.

I won’t say I think outer space is easier, but the problem space is very different.

[jcgrillo]

> Salt water is also quite a problem

As a boat owner, I have had quite a time with salt water issues. Anything with an electrical current going through it exposed to salt and water is subject to serious, rapid corrosion. What you might imagine is "stainless" steel will, in fact, rust (unless correctly passivated and treated). The galvanic scale is not to be trifled with :). I can only imagine it gets exponentially worse the further below the surface you go.

[toast0]

> I won’t say I think outer space is easier, but the problem space is very different.

You didn't even mention pressure. Space is only 1 atm off of sea level. 100 meters below the surface is 10 atm more than at sea level ... all sorts of cool stuff you might want to explore is way deeper than that.

Less of a problem for robots than people, but still a problem.

[irishcoffee]

There are a lot of tricks to deal with pressure, related to filling electronic “bottles” with 1 atm of pressure via nonconductive fluid. You are correct though, pressure is also a phenomenon that has to be accounted for or you’re gonna have a bad time.

[dbish]

The comms problems are exactly what makes it interesting to me, since autonomy is fully required really.

[rcxdude]

AUVs are a thing, but it's a very expensive area to be in, and there's a lot of challenges, especially the extremely high degree of autonomy you need in a much less predictable environment. Maybe recent advances in AI could move the needle there.

[dbish]

Yep. The AI advances and pushing for much more autonomy are why I think there’s something new possible here.

[Avicebron]

Well if you ever find a monetization path this is what I wanted to do for years. I don't know where Schmidt landed in the court of public opinion but I appreciate that the Schmidt Ocean Institute is a thing. I just wish these things didn't reek of billionaire vanity.

[defrost]

The zone this whale necropolis has been found within is named after the Australian Navy hydrographic, meteorological and oceanographic research vessel that first coarsely mapped this deepest part of the Indian ocean in 1960, during my father's time of service onboard.

Mind you, if you go the service path you might end up scrubbing toilets or close sampling atomic bomb sites ... so your mileage (and lifespan) may vary.

[Avicebron]

Alas my skill set is probably better utilized designing and building the underwater research drones.