"Children of the Ocean Seas

CHAPTER I

A HOME ON THE ROLLING DEEP

(The Seabased Society)
And I have loved thee, Ocean!
and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror --'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane as I do here.
Lord Byron

Let us begin with a conceit. Imagine a drop of rain falling at the very center of the Continental Divide. Just before it reaches the ground a puff of air carries it to the Eastern slope. As it strikes the ground it dislodges a small stone which tumbles down the face of a cliff landing in a rivulet which winds its way down the mountain side joining with other freshets of water until the rivulets become streams and the streams become a river which leads to a bay which leads to a semi-enclosed sea which opens into the world ocean. Let us follow this stone, soon to be a pebble, as it makes its way to the coastal zone, the continental shelf, the abyss. Let us, similarly, follow the drop of water on its journey to the sea.

If we intercept the stone at the beginning of its journey we shall have no trouble for we can mark it with a radioactive tag that scintillates throughout its journey. Scientists and engineers will then tell us how to locate a coordinate system at the center of gravity of the pebble so that, as a function of time, we can track the location of the center of this co-ordinate system on maps of the region. We need not be concerned should the stone be abraded or rounded with time and become a pebble during the course of its journey for the coordinate system will shift ever so slightly. Its relocation can for all intents and purposes be neglected. We can now relate the rotation, nutation, wobble, translation. position, abrasion, chemical modification, coloration and resource potential of this bit of solid matter to the physical characteristics of the environment to which it is exposed.

True enough, each pebble will have its own story but, on the average, each will tumble down the mountain side, be washed by rain and transported by rivulets until it is picked up by the rushing waters of some rocky mountain stream of the Eastern slope. Gravity, supplemented by hydraulic force will be the primary mechanism that tumbles the pebble down rocky gorges until it comes to rest in some quiescent pool. There it lies until the force of rushing water from a mountain storm or a sudden thaw lifts it from the stream bed and carries it down to more steadily flowing rivers - the Arkansas, the North Platte, the Rio Grande, the Powder. These rivers in turn will find their way to the Gulf or to the great meandering muddy Missouri and finally to that mother of waters the Mississippi. Here the pebble, now reduced to the size of a large grain of sand will, on occasion be trapped in the center of an oxbow meander in the river. Here it may lie for a decade or more until some great spring flood cuts a path across the oxbow scouring through previously deposited banks, reestablishing the movement of the sediment in an endless march to the bayous and the deltas of the Gulf. All this we can follow with ease, in a deterministic manner, fully explainable by the laws of gravity and the hydrodynamic pressures of flowing water.

But what of our drop of water?

From the very moment of contact our water drop has splashed into a myriad of components. The scientist who catches the drop for a moment will find little value in identifying its center of gravity or tagging its component molecules with a nuclear tag. As soon as it is released the drop loses its identity. Evanescent and mercurial the drop vanishes and its individual molecules go their separate ways. Some will become water vapor and return to the atmosphere, some will seep into the soil and form part of the water table, some will be taken up by plants to be joined with carbon and hydrogen and phosphorus and nitrogen to form the molecules of life, some will, like the pebble, find their way into the mountain streams. Some molecules of water vapor will rejoin the mountain as falling snow, or rejoin the river as melt from the snow pack. Thus the notion that we can follow the drop of water as we follow the journey of the pebble is truly a conceit that bears little relation to reality and provides little basis for analogy. When earth oriented mortals adopt such a conceit as valid metaphor it becomes a deceit which induces human kind to; drown when they could breathe, to sink when they could swim, to spill oil when they could capture it, to be buffeted by the free surface when safety resides a few feet below and to regard the worlds most benign, supportive and loving environment as the cruel sea.

Scientists, called hydrodynamicists, who grapple with the problems of tracking the elusive drop soon learn to stand in one location and watch the water flow by. Employing a co-ordinate system that is fixed in space one can watch the residual molecules of water from many raindrops pass by and one can describe the average behavior of this water as though it were a homogenous continuous media as it enters and leaves the coordinate system. One can stand on the bank of a stream or a river and watch the behavior of water as it enters and leaves that cross section of a defined channel. Most of all, one can watch a floating object or suspended pebble enter and leave the cross section with its memory of past history dictated by gravity and flowing water. It leaves with a new set of directions and anticipations for its future. The mathematical language which describes the movement of solid objects is thus completely different from the mathematical language that describes the behavior of water. In an object oriented, earth oriented society, hydrodynamicists, aerodynamicists and meteorologists are rare creatures, lonely and misunderstood.

Other scientist called oceanographers grapple with other physical properties of the ocean. Of course many hydrodynamicists are oceanographers but very few oceanographers are so abstruse and so divorced from the metaphors and understandings of solid earth as to deserve the title hydrodynamicist. These scientists also discover that the physical properties of the watery world are as different from the physical properties of the land as we might expect to find in a distant and yet unknown planet that has that property that we call 'life'. We yearn for the existence of that unknown planet and our space directed society spends billions in an elusive search for that mythical 'erewhon'. Our earth bound fantasy is that an examination of some unique and different form of life and living will yield an understanding of our own. We need not fantasize for we have that unknown planet surrounding us and enveloping us on every oceanic shore. Yet our explorations of the sea are minimal, and our understanding of this watery planet and life in its unbounded sea are at best metaphorical.

Is this not surprising, for we are the evolutionary development of creatures who lived entirely in the ocean and each of us spent the first nine months of our twentieth century life fully submerged in an amniotic bath breathing fluids as our ancestors did millions of years ago. We do perceive that the world of water is different from the world of the earth, but our perception is asymmetrical. We all regard it as a miracle to "walk on water" but most would regard it an oxymoron construct to "swim on land". Why this asymmetry?

Perhaps we can gain understanding by the deconstruction of another conceit. Let us deconstruct the notion that all humans are land mammals whose evolution from the sea is so remote that reminders of this historical past are at best vestigial. let us postulate instead that there are two species of humans as land mammals and humans as marine mammals. How can we identify these two species? Readers of this text will soon learn that the author will adopt the methods and modalities of any science, religion or dogma which will provide insight. Thus we shall identify these two species as a logical positivist would identify, through the use of operational definition. On this basis one need only ask a human whether he or she feels safer, more comfortable and/or more at home living in a habitat on the solid earth or living in the marine environment. We have identified these marine creatures as "Children of the Ocean". Many or the students in this seminar qualify an many do not but but we will not associate positive of negative value judgements with respect to these fine specimens of humanity, but we shall soon see that "Children of th Ocean" do indeed possess all of the physical and psychological characteristics that we associate with marine mammals and we shall also see that they are fully justified by the physical characteristics of the ocean to regard it as a safer and more beneficent world than that of the land and far more conducive to survival of the individual and the species.

Of a certainty all humans spend the first nine months of existence as marine mammals. Immersed in an amniotic fluid that has the salinity characteristics of sea water of millions of years ago, the embryonic lungs, oral and nasal cavities are flooded and oxygen is carried into the blood stream through the umbilical chord of the mother. This blood also collects the carbon dioxide generated by the infants metabolism and it is carried back to the mother for human dialysis. Many modern mothers are now choosing birth immersed in a warm bath of Ringers solution (isotonic with blood) or other fluid as the safest environment in which to dewater the lung without displacement of the surfactant fluid and thus transfer life support from the umbilical to the breathing of air. This is the process by which all most marine mammals give birth and, of course, marine mammals are air breathers and cannot remain submerged for periods of time which are long compared with timely needs for oxygen supply or carbon dioxide removal.

At birth the aided infant can easily keep its head above water and if intermittently immersed during the waking hours will be able to swim at the age of two to three months. Thus adaptation to life as a marine mammal is virtually instantaneous. Compare this with the long process that is required for adaptation to living on land. It takes about a year before the infant learns how to toddle and more years before the child can run and jump and climb with fear of injury. During this period of time most land oriented parents must maintain continuous watch over the infant. For many, if not most, their worst fear is that of drowning in the pool. But that is because the have deprogrammed their infant with respect to swimming. As we shall later learn parents in neolithic times (a few thousand years B.C) would place a vine tether on their infants and drop them into the water for safekeeping. Were they irrational?

Were it modern times they would have at least protected their infant from automotive vehicles. Indeed more people are killed driving to the beach than die by drowning in the water. But there are more fundamental hazards on land which must be avoided. it is very difficult to sustain fire in the water, one cannot fall in the water, one can fall from a great height into the water without harm but on land a fall from trivial heights can produce permanent injury or death. One cannot be exposed to freezing temperatures or suffer frost bite in the water, nor can one be sunburned or suffer heat stroke. True enough unprotected immersion in cold water can induce hypothermia in short time, but that is equally true for the human who ventures into sub-zero cold in the winter without protective clothing.

The advantages of adapting to a water environment vice a land environment are legion and are perhaps best understood if we ask what the world would be like if the human mammal had never left the sea. Let us then reconstruct the human with the assumption that he/she had never evolved out of the sea and that the high technology society that we enjoy today had been developed within the ocean planet. Let us further imagine that this society is now prepared to explore and exploit the land as we are now preparing to explore and exploit the ocean.

It takes little imagination to envision that this society would have a Messiah who could swim on land. It takes a bit more to recognize that the wheel would have been an invention of modern times and would have been of little use except as a curiosity to primitive peoples. Why not the wheel? The wheel was invented to move large objects with minimal friction. In the world of water, how absurd. A child can move an ocean liner in the water as long as it floats above the bottom. Without an anchor, structures as large as the World Trade Center will be carried by the smallest wind or current and could, in theory, wander across the face of the globe. Other differences will immediately spring to the readers mind but this construct is best examined in a more structured manner.

Before we examine this unique spectrum of constructs we should first ask if we can bionically reconstruct the earth oriented human to be a creature that can survive as a free swimmer in the deepest parts of the sea. The answer is surprisingly simple. We need only flood the lungs and oral and nasal cavities with an oxygen rich saline fluid which has the salinity characteristics of blood. We are now left with a creature that is, like most marine animals, free flooded. That is, the entire body now has the characteristic of an assemblage of membranes and fluids incapable of sustaining substantial pressure differences within its envelope and at all times being exposed internally and externally to the ambient pressure of the sea. The electrochemical thermodynamic machine that is the human is fully preserved. The body fluids and electrolytes permit the full operation of the neural system, the brain, the sensory functions and the neuro-motor system scarcely distinguishable from its operation in the earths atmosphere. As long as oxygen is pumped into the fluids filling the lungs this vital oxidizer which burns the fuels of life will sustain the thermodynamic machine. This human will be able to swim in the ocean and make great excursions in depth without fear of fatal accidents called bends or air embolisms. We know this to be true for the scientists at Duke University have carried out successful experiments with mice and men that, in their totality, demonstrate this capability.

True enough this magical and virtually unbelievable capability will limited in duration to about one half hour due to the inability of the body to eliminate the carbon dioxide product of internal combustion This will be true unless the blood is shunted to and through an external CO2 dialysis machine. Such a submersible bionic adjunct is on the drawing boards but we will leave these speculations to the cyberpunk literature of "brave new worlds". For our part these appreciations of the oceanic capabilities of the deconstructed earth mortal permit us to reconstruct our hypothetical sea adapted creature.

Let us now explore this in terms of the modifications that would be required to permit us to return to the sea. The changes are small. The primary essential modification would be the redevelopment of a gill. We know where it would be located for vestigial indications of a gill appear in the early stages of development of the human embryo. We should also recognize that our blood and other body fluids have salinity characteristics which matched the ocean salinity of millions of years ago. Our reconstructed creature would have obviously adapted to the biochemistry of the current oceanic biosphere.

Other changes would be less significant. Legs as we know them would have useless features but would be adequate. Toes would be as useless to the underwater denizen as they are to us but, as we know. it would be nice to have flipper like feet. Arms would be of limited use for propulsion, but, as the lobster has shown us, arms and hands with claw like capabilities would be very useful. Eyes, ears, mouths, vocal folds, though flooded, would be very useful, but we could easily get rid of that aesthetically ungainly appendage, the protruding nose.

A few of the immediate advantages which accrue to the free-flooded human are freedom from those dread hazards which we associate with deep sea diving, air embolism and the bends. When the lungs and tissues of an underwater creature are filled with gas then depth changes must be made slowly and with care to give time for the gases to decompress and to escape without rupturing vital tissues. But experiments with freely flooded mice have shown that rapid changes in depth over many thousand feet can take place with great rapidity and without physiological effect.

There are many human hazards of the land that are not experienced in the sea. One cannot stumble or fall in the water column. Oh what problems we land creatures have with walking and running and stumbling and falling. Our infants require three years or so before they master the skills of jumping and running and walking but the skill of swimming comes with birth and can be retained by reinforcement at the age of three months. The most moderate of injuries to the legs and feet will impair our ability to walk and severe injury will confine the human to crutches or the wheel chair for a lifetime. All that is needed for swimming is an arm or a leg or something which can pass as a flipper.

Coupled with the absence of ambulatory hazard is a new found mobility. As neutrally buoyant creatures, underwater humans will easily occupy the full oceanic space. Swimming speeds will indeed be less than walking or running speeds but slight adjustments in density will permit the inhabitants to effortlessly rise or sink many thousands of feet in the full water column. Three dimensional space is their habitat and they will most likely have a psychological aversion to solid boundaries, the seabed, the ocean surface, or shallow water. Are these not the ocean boundaries to which the land lubber foolishly clings?.

Will there be speech? Of course, but the nature of human communication will be dramatically altered by the difference between the physics of sound in the air and the water. It may not be the dramatic difference in the velocity of the sound but in the large difference in the transmission characteristics of vocal production at different frequencies. In the water high frequency sounds have much information content but do not travel very far. Low frequency sounds travel long distances. Will there be two languages, a high frequency language for conversation and socialization and crisis management and a low frequency language for communication between societies and long range warning of impending danger?. The reception of sound will not be dissimilar to auditory reception in air except for the greater distortion of the signal with distance. Direction finding will require the underwater creatures to have ears with large pinnas as the difference in time of arrival of the direct sound and the reflection of the ear lobe matches the synapse response times required for this sophisticated neurological process.

Touch, taste, smell. No problem except for the dominance of salt. Sight? A world apart. Six hundred feet below the surface of the sea photons are virtually non existent. Even at the surface the ocean is optically opaque for distances greater than 100 feet or so. Will these underwater creatures be blind? Hardly, for there is bio luminescence in the deep and the need for sensitive sight when the world is dark is much greater than for a world that is brilliantly lit.

And what of creature comfort, is the ocean really cold and dark. Dark, yes but the ocean is quite isothermal with minimum temperatures above freezing at about 4o Celsius and maximum temperatures of about 27o Celsius. Oh what problems we land creatures have with freezing in wind chills of minus 50o Celsius or with sunburn and sunstroke and heat prostration. It is true, as you will say, that the naked human cannot long survive in arctic water but it is equally true that the naked human cannot survive the winter in the streets of Minneapolis. Our underwater denizens will, of course, have wet suits with all the modesty and style of Cardin or Gucci and no rational human will swim below the tropic's thermal layer or in the northern climes without proper attire. What a joy to be mobile in one's environment in comfort and style every season of the year.

Yes, there are predators. But is the Great White Shark more fearsome or more ubiquitous than the Man eating tiger? Is the sting of the Scorpion fish more venomous than the sting of the Scorpion? Is the jelly fish more fearsome than the wasp or the bee? Is anything in the ocean environment as fearsome as the drunken driver in a motor car?

What about the hazards of nature? We all think of the violence of storms at sea but few realize that some sixty to one hundred feet below the effects of the free surface are negligible. The underwater society will stay away from the free surface whenever the wind and the waves are high, avoiding the fury of the hurricane or the cyclone or tornado. The fierce tsunami which inundates the land is unknown in the deep ocean for there the effects of the wave are distributed over the full depth of the water column and the free surface changes its level imperceptibly. The ocean is decoupled from earthquake, the ocean quenches the volcanoes lava flow, the undersea knows not fire or lightning or arcs or flames.

Our underwater cousins will have a very different view of electricity. We land based creatures recoil at the lethality of the air water electricity interface. But to fully submerged fully wetted ocean creatures electric shock is virtually unknown. Since ocean water is salty it is highly conducting. As a result it is virtually impossible to build a voltage gradient in the sea that is lethal. Navies have learned to their grief that they cannot protect their ships from underwater terrorists by inserting highly charged electrodes in the water. Underwater welders have learned to their relief that, fully submerged they are invulnerable to shock. This is so even when the flow of electricity causes sparks to jump between their teeth when they open their mouth. The major health admonition is to keep the mouth shut or lose the fillings in the teeth.

With this modicum of understanding of the physical differences between the water world and the world of earth and sky can we venture a guess as to the state of technology? We may well ask Whether electricity would be a servant to these shock proof people. Assuredly but in a very different mode for they would be aware of electro-chemical effects in daily life. The deposition of manganese nodules and manganese crusts, the migration of minerals and metals, electrochemical processes in the extraction of calcium carbonate from the water as biological organisms manufacture their shells. Ion movement is everywhere. Batteries and thermionic devices would have been invented long before generators. Underwater structures of every conceivable size and description would be constructed by electro chemical deposition of calcium carbonate on filament matrices. Metals themselves would be extracted by electrochemical processes and copper as a conductor would be an early arrival on the technology scene.

Buoyancy propulsion would be the primary means of transport. Vehicles shaped like underwater gliders (but with very stubby wings) would employ a fuel like hydrazine to generate a non polluting gas at depth which would make the vehicle buoyant and it would streak for the surface at sixty knots. Nearing the surface it would vent the gas and now glide down to depth. No more efficient propulsion system has been invented for the land, why would it not be the mode of the day in the ocean? Other vehicles resembling underwater dirigibles would be employed for cargo transport. The propeller would probably have been invented. Of course the rocket which leaves the water and travels through the air would be the mode for really high speed delivery over distance, bypassing an inconceivable invention, the airplane.

Throughout the ages acoustics would have been the means o communication and it is highly unlikely that electromagnetic communication would have developed. This form of communication does not penetrate water and would require a transducer and cable to become available to the underwater citizenry. Why would any society use electromagnetics for communication when they could use light. Our underwater society would of necessity preceded and precluded electromagnetics with lasers and fibre optics. The information capabilities of coherent light are so far superior to electromagnetics that soon this earth bound world will replace its satellites with fibre optic light transmission in cables on land and sea. Soon truly high speed computers will employ a laser memory chip with memories orders of magnitude greater than our fastest electron devices.

Need we go on, for this is an introduction intending to convey the idea that the watery planet is a very different place than the earthly planet. All of the functions of humans and society can be carried out in each place, but the manner and means by which they will be conducted will, in the long run be dramatically different. Oceanic music, art and poetry is, and will be different than that of produced by the pipes of Pan. Oceanic Law and Commerce will be dramatically different from Land Law and Commerce. Ocean Engineering and oceanic physics bear little relationship to their land counterparts. Animal husbandry and fish farming bear little resemblance to each other. The mariner is a different breed of human than the teamster. The sailor is unlike the soldier and both are different from the amphibious marine.

Humans have yet to fully comprehend these differences. Ever and again societies are organized in terms of the land and its technologies and ever and again these societies turn to the watery world for survival. As they awkwardly adapt the sea punishes them for their ignorance, even as it rewards them as they learn the maritime arts. We shall trace this evolution from the dawn of Society to a projection of the 21st century. We shall trace it in terms of the physiology, psychology, and anthropology of the human animal. We shall trace it in terms of the law, technology, and politics of the human animal. We shall project it in terms of new technology and the readaptation of the human as a marine mammal, and we shall wear the mantle of historian and prophet with an understanding that the world of earth and sky is a world, perhaps a universe, apart from the world of water.