"VICTOR VESCOVO: Imagine yourself in a titanium sphere, one meter wide. The seat next to you is empty, and you are 35,000 feet below the ocean. The pressure outside is 16,000 pounds per square inch, which is equivalent to four automobiles on your fingernail. You've helped design and build the craft. You're piloting it. And this was me seven years ago in the Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench."
"It was indeed awe. So tonight what I'm gonna try and do is walk you through what I call the three corners of the great fortune. I've had to explore the deepest point in the ocean, the summit of Mount Everest, and going into space, and why those are doorways, at least for me, to awe and what it felt like to do that."
A titanium sphere one meter wide can carry a pilot 35,000 feet below the ocean, where pressure reaches 16,000 pounds per square inch. Below 6,000 meters photons cannot penetrate, creating a darkness darker than space and limiting visibility to about 30–40 meters through a small window. At the Challenger Deep an unexpected vertical wall rose like El Capitan in reverse, producing a quiet, breathtaking sensation described as awe. Extreme risk must be ignored to function, and the seafloor reveals life such as polychaete worms, sea cucumbers, and bacterial communities. Deep ocean, high mountains, and space act as doorways to powerful emotional responses when confronting vast, extreme environments.
Read at Big Think
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