Professor living underwater for 100 days says it’s ‘a neat place to be’ | 24CA News
As It Happens6:20Professor residing underwater for 100 days says it is ‘a neat place to be’
Florida professor Joseph Ditiru spends his days doing analysis, instructing lessons, swimming — and making up names for the lobsters outdoors his window.
“There’s four total that I’ve named so far,” Ditiru instructed As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “There’s the Partridge Family that lives across the way. I haven’t given them individual names. Then there’s Fred.”
Ditiru would not dwell on a waterfront — although the seashore is fairly shut by. Rather, the University of South Florida biomedical engineer at present resides in an underwater habitat about seven metres beneath the ocean’s floor.
The roughly 2.4-by-four-metre abode is the Jules Verne Undersea Lodge on the Key Largo Undersea Park off the coast of Florida.
Anyone can e-book an in a single day keep for $1,125.00 US, however Ditiru is planning to dwell there full time for 100 days, as a part of the Neptune 100 analysis and schooling program. Friday was his tenth day.
When it wraps up in June, Ditiru may have the document for the longest time residing in an underwater habitat.
From his underwater digs, Ditiru teaches his on-line college lessons, hosts a sequence of visitor marine researchers, does science outreach with teams of visiting kids and conducts media interviews.
There are common meals deliveries. He retains up his train by doing push-ups and going for swims — or, technically, scuba dives, as he cannot go above water at some point of the undertaking.
The remainder of the time?
“I sit here and I watch the students swing by with scuba diving people, and fish swim by and lobsters hang out,” he mentioned. “It’s kind of a nice habitat. It’s climate controlled, and I get to do my research while I’m down here, so it’s a neat place to be.”
That analysis is essentially carried out on himself.
“Before I went underwater, I did a whole host of testing on myself. And then while I’m underwater, I continue to do that testing. That’s blood tests, urine, saliva — we’re testing every single known test known to man at this point,” he mentioned.
“As we do this, we’re continuing to see what happens to the body when we live on the water.”
The thought, he says, is to organize people for lengthy durations in restrictive, high-pressure — actually — environments.
“Everybody says, ‘We’re going to Mars, we’re going to Mars, we’re going to Mars.’ Well, not if we don’t work stuff out,” he mentioned. “I’m in an isolated, confined, extreme environment … and it’s very analogous to space travel.”
He’s additionally hopeful his analysis will pave the best way for extra individuals to dwell underwater for longer durations of time.
“Joe’s opinion? You should populate the ocean,” he mentioned. “I think this is the beginning of something beautiful. And hopefully, hopefully it goes forward and people start living in the sea.”
‘Everything that we’d like is on this planet’
Ditiru says he believes spending time underwater will assist humanity higher perceive our planet, its myriad of life types and its many untapped assets.
In reality, this entire journey began for him again in 2012, when he joined filmmaker James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger mission to the underside of the Mariana Trench — greater than 10,600 metres beneath sea degree.
While there, the workforce found a deepsea creature that incorporates a compound that has potential use in Alzheimer’s therapy.
It received Ditiru questioning: What different unknown treasures are lurking within the ocean’s depths?
“The honest truth is I believe that everything that we need is on this planet,” he mentioned. “We basically just need to go find it.”
But he says he is cognizant that by increasing into the ocean, people may injury marine environments worse than we have already got.
“You have to be an unobtrusive visitor, because that’s what you are. You’re just a visitor,” he mentioned.
After all, he says, that is the way you be taught.
“When you lay in the sand and just watch things, that’s when you actually see what’s going on. If you just swim by and kick up all the sand, you know, you’re never going to find out anything that’s going on.”
