Depths of Humanity
The Next Era of Ocean Exploration
🪐 The Final Frontier
The submersible Hermes plunges into the abyss near Wake Atoll, thrusters on low speed. The darkness is interrupted only by a row of spotlights mounted on Hermes’s shell. Two miles above, a team stares at a dozen screens, watching as the machine completes its mission of mapping the seafloor. The operation is near flawless; the data is immaculate. The ocean here no longer needs immediate human presence.
Nearly 4,500 miles west, off the island of Koh Tao, Cleo exhales through her scuba regulator. Her bubbles race to the surface, defying 20 meters of water pressure. Ahead, the HTMS Sattakut emerges. Cleo swims to the hull and can almost hear its history. With a click of her flashlight, she fins through a doorway, lightly disturbing a layer of silt. This isn’t just observation. This is being there in a way no machine will ever understand.
Two ocean futures are colliding. One future favors efficiency, safety, and automation. The other is all about exploration, wonder, and feeling.
Far from a debate about technology, this is about the motivations of underwater activity. Will machines dominate tomorrow’s oceans, or will humans maintain a robust toehold?
➗ The Great Divide
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) handle the majority of deep-sea tasks that are considered too dangerous or impractical for human divers. Operated by research institutions like NOAA Ocean Exploration and industrial teams, the machines excel at precision work—inspecting pipelines, mapping wrecks, and collecting samples.
Yet for all their capabilities, ROVs have limitations. They follow dictated paths and record only what their sensors are designed to detect. These patterns appear to be consistent with research in certain contexts where diver in situ observations outperformed ROVs in species counts, and they align with NOAA’s guidance that divers remain vital for assessing subtle indicators of coral health and fish behaviors.
Meanwhile, another movement is thriving. Citizen science initiatives like Project Baseline train volunteer divers to document ecological changes in ways machines can’t do. Free from programming, these divers find invasive species hiding in reef crevices, notice physical changes in locations over time, and discover artifacts covered in silt. Their work complements ROV data with something harder to quantify: instinctual observations of humans in a given environment.
Though the divide is certainly technological, it’s also deeply philosophical. Industrial and military applications of underwater activity increasingly prefer robotic systems for reasons of safety and cost efficiency. Explorers and scientists, however, continue to call for human presence in the ocean, both for what they can do and for what they might unexpectedly notice. Where ROVs are adept at answering predefined questions, humans stumble upon ones we didn’t think to ask.
The challenge facing us is how to balance the approach of deploying machines while securing opportunities for humans to engage directly with the ocean.
💊 The Matrix
The diverging approaches illustrate fundamentally different ways of valuing underwater activity. To visualize in greater detail where human divers, ROVs, and hybrids each excel, we can map them across three dimensions: purpose, investment, and control. The resulting framework uncovers fault lines where underwater activity’s future may be decided.
Along the x-axis lies purpose. It spans from purely functional tasks (e.g.. pipeline maintenance) to acutely experiential endeavors (e.g., creep cave exploration). The y-axis represents investment, ranging from low-cost free diving to multimillion-dollar robotic systems. Control, from individual adventurers to institutional operations, is depicted on the z-axis. This framework illuminates why certain technologies thrive in some contexts while humans hold irreplaceable roles in others.
Industrial ROV operations (e.g., oil rig inspections and deep-sea cable repairs) congregate in the area where high investment, functional purpose, and institutional control intersect. At the other end of the matrix is a cluster of recreational and technical diving (together, “sport diving”) activities—comparatively low cost, recreational purpose, and individual control. Between these groups are a range of scientific research initiatives that, to varying degrees, blends robots and other digital technologies with human experience. Observed in its entirety, the matrix shows both where we are and towards where different approaches are moving. Implicit in this observation are possible tensions that may arise over time.
🔍 Tensions in Modern Exploration
Tasks that have historically been performed by saturation divers such as underwater welding and construction are increasingly being substituted with machines that work faster, cheaper, and without the physiological limits of the human body at depth. Yet this replacement model loses validity in sport and scientific contexts. Some research has found that diver observations of reef systems, much like Project Baseline findings, have been more successful in identifying species and their counts compared to ROVs.
The SAMR model (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition), originally developed to categorize how technology transforms education, can be equally useful when applied to underwater exploration. The model offers a progression from Substituting a technology for what was once analog without changing functionality (a PDF replacing a paper handout, for example) all the way to Redefining what tasks are even possible (such as VR headsets allowing us to travel through space and time). While ROVs at least Modify tasks in industrial diving contexts by offering new ways of completing tasks, sport diving overwhelmingly prefers Augmentation—dive computers that enhance safety, rebreathers that extend dive time, etc.—without removing the human element. In fact, attempts at full redefinition like VR dive experiences, haven’t gained support within the dive community. Removing too much human engagement in sport diving also removes its meaning.
🛣️ Diverging or Converging Paths?
Based on what the matrix illustrates, we can imagine two plausible futures. In one, underwater activity diverges completely into two camps: institution-led operations become fully automated while sport diving evolves into a luxury hobby or specialized scientific tool. In the other, convergence of the matrix’s current extremes. Early examples already exist, like citizen science programs that combine sport diving with data collection, archaeological teams using ROVs to identify sites before deploying human divers, and diver propulsion vehicles that reduce human effort underwater.
The key variable determining which future will be more likely is cost. If personal technologies become cheaper and more widely available, convergence seems likely. If institutional innovation continues its rapid development, the two-camp future could arise.
Three considerations could help balance the options:
Recognizing that different underwater activities call for different solutions.
Maintaining training paths that allow humans to continue engaging directly with marine environments.
Investing in technologies that Augment or Modify rather than Substitute human abilities in the water.
Rather than choosing between humans and robots, the future of underwater activity may be intentionally deploying each where they contribute most while preserving the unexplainable value of human presence in the least explored parts of our planet.
