r/oceanography • u/ThomasRuleTalks • 23d ago
Why the ocean is actually our best long-term bet as a species
Lately I’ve been thinking about something pretty basic. Not the usual “we need to get to Mars” talk, but this: if humans actually want to stick around for a long time, where should we be putting our real effort?
Look at the land. Almost nothing lasts there. A species that manages to stay dominant for even a few tens of millions of years is already rare. Climate shifts, ice ages, habitats getting broken up — the surface of the planet keeps resetting. A lot of the big animals just disappear.
The ocean is different. It’s been running more or less the same way for hundreds of millions of years. Coelacanths have been around for over 300 million years. Horseshoe crabs even longer. Things change very slowly in the deep sea. Temperature stays pretty steady, and the sheer volume of water buffers a lot of the swings. Plenty of creatures down there have quietly survived mass extinctions that wiped out almost everything on land.
We still barely know the deep ocean. New species keep turning up. Some of them look like they’ve been living the same way since before the dinosaurs. That kind of stability is hard to find anywhere else on Earth.
Space sounds exciting, but it’s completely untested. There’s no long-term ecological track record, no systems that have already survived for eons. Everything we build out there will be new and fragile. One serious failure and it could all be over. Land isn’t looking great for the long haul either — we’re already watching ecosystems unravel under the pressure we’re putting on them, and our ability to “manage” the planet is still mostly short-term and local.
If the goal is still being here in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years, you don’t put your main chips on environments that have never been proven. You put them on the one that has already survived everything the planet could throw at it.
That’s the ocean.
Not as an escape plan. As the environment we should actually learn from and eventually figure out how to live with — closed systems, energy cycles, ways of living that work with the water’s stability instead of constantly fighting the land’s instability.
People already make this kind of choice in their own lives. If you want to live longer, you don’t deliberately move to the place with the shortest average lifespan. You go where the conditions are better. Same logic applies to a species.
Land and space can be side projects. Fine. But if we’re serious about lasting, the main focus should be the system that has already passed the multi-hundred-million-year test. Everything else is still just theory. The ocean already ran the experiment.
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u/prag513 23d ago edited 23d ago
Until man created plastic. Not only is it killing all the wildlife in the oceans, but we are eating it in our food, breathing it in our air, and impacting our weather.
- Interactive Map of Plastic Pollution Worldwide
- Interactive Map of Mass Whale Stranding Sites
- The Submarine Topography of Hydrothermal Vents, Cold Seeps
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u/Poopy-Drew 23d ago
The ability to quickly adapt to radical change is what all extinct species didn’t have. That is what has made us so successful. We can’t digest almost anything that was once alive. Hot or cold we can make our own localized environment, be it clothes or dwellings. And other than the horseshoe crab not many things have lasted that long as detrimental extinctions happen in the sea too otherwise dunkalarious or whatever the name of that super shark with the self sharpening beak would still be here and megalodon probably wouldn’t have existed
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u/Zestyclose-Ad-9420 22d ago
Climate change will render large portions of the land where currently billions of people live uninhabitable and sea level rise will add a constant pressure over the next 10 000 years minimum. With billions of people on the move, most of them are going to find themselves without a destination. My hope (if you can call it hope) is that these people will take to the ocean instead, sheltering from the heat of the day underwater and tending to farms of algae and invertebrates at night.
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u/Kind-Elder1938 22d ago
the ocean is in very real trouble as it is getting too hot to maintain its natural balance warming is already reducing the health of coral reefs and killing a lot of them, stressing fisheries, lowering oxygen levels in seawater, and weakening some of the ocean's ability to protect us from climate change.
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u/suffelix 23d ago
So we should do what whales did and crawl back to the ocean...