Speaker 1: Good morning, James. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I am doing great? How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Absolutely fantastic. And I'm so proud of you for doing
this book. And the reason why is because I'm one
of those people that has always been about the water,
and so when I see all this jump going on
up in space, it's like, no, no, no, go to
the ocean. There is something there in the ocean that
we are totally missing here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. I tend to
think my colleagues and the ocean sciences do some of
the most exciting work, and they're having literally adventures at
sea every day, and the story just feels like it's
not being told. So yeah, I agree with you.
Speaker 1: Is it because we don't make it cool? And yet
your book has all of a sudden inside my childlike
heart is going, oh my god, look at these things.
Speaker 2: You know, I personally I struggled early in my career
was did I want to go to the space route?
Did I want to go the ocean route? And uh?
And they're both. They're both exciting, right, I mean, I
love space And you know, if someone told me tomorrow
I could be an astronaut, I would drop everything go
do that, right, I would be it would be the
opportunity of a lifetime. But the ocean turns out to
be actually a lot more important to us in an
immediate sense and a lot less understood. But I think that,
you know, these opportunities for a scientist to contribute or
a technologist to contribute are really much greater in the
ocean environment. And that's another sort of piece of the decision, right.
So so for me, it's a place where you can
really have you can really have impact.
Speaker 1: Well, you make that very clear when you talk about
the ocean has force as well as habit I never
even thought about that and it's effect on us up
here on land.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Yeah, we have that chapter which is the
ocean in your kitchen, uh, And it is so true, right,
you know, we are, I mean, we've always been connected
to the ocean as a species, right, and and it's
been sort of a route for discovery and exploration for us.
You know, we went over it to you know, find
find new lands. We've depended on it for a sustenance.
So so this whole story of exploration of the Earth
and the universe are really kind of timeless. Endeavors. But
for us, you know, the exciting thing now is that
the ocean environment is becoming far more accessible as these
new technologies, these new robotic systems are being developed, and
so we're sort of entering this new stage of ocean
discovery where this really this hidden planet, most of this
planet that we live on, which is which is sort
of beyond our senses, is suddenly being revealed. And it's
it's going to be a very exciting time, particularly for
the younger generation of ocean scientists and marine technologists and
all of the people we work in the ocean environment
as this all becomes revealed.
Speaker 1: See, I'm very excited about the fact that AI technology
is now beneath the surface of the ocean, and to me,
I want that AI technology to start asking questions because
it's going to lead us into areas that we haven't
been to yet or we've been afraid to touch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think this really sort of highlights
one of the places where AI is a lot more
powerful than our previous tools. So, you know, historically, if
you build an autonomous system, you put it in an environment,
and of course for us, the ocean is opaque to
radio ways, right so we can't operate our underwater vehicles
like an aerial drone, you know, kind of joysticking them
around and watching the video coming back from them. If
they're untethered, they're on their own and they've got to
be able to take care of it themselves. And one
of the things that one of the challenges you have
is you would really like to discover new things, but
at the same time, you don't know how to tell
the robot what's new, right, So how do you tell it, Oh,
go there and discover something new. You're very you know, classically,
you're very good at describing, at detecting things when we
could describe them well. And AI is actually beginning to
open new methods of sort of classifying and understanding the
environment that the robots in and telling what is new
and unique and what and what is kind of old
and boring and it's already seen it seven times, right,
and so that lets you So one of my colleagues
calls this Curious Robots Yogi with whole and I think
this idea that we can make robots that actually are
a little explorers themselves and come back to us and say, hey,
look I found this. I never saw one like that before. Wow,
and the scientist. So that's that's kind of the direction
we're going.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with James Bellingham coming
up next. How are marine robots shaping our future? We're
back with James Bellingham. I've had this vision of everything
that's beneath the surface of the ocean looking like perseverance
up there on Mars, which then leads me to this question,
are you seeing anything under that water that would remind
you of the surface of Mars, because you know it's
all about water up there, and and really are we
looking at an ocean floor up there?
Speaker 2: Hmm, wow, Wow, that's a that is a great question. Yeah,
you know, I have to admit you know also, uh,
I'm very fond of the Southwest in our country, right
And it's also you do feel you're in something very
ancient when when you're when you're in that part of
the country, you know that one of the things about
the underwater environment is uh, is it's dark, uh and
it's and the ocean is actually opaque to a lot
of our senses. So I think I think the answer
is the answer is yes, there are these very dramatic
underwater features you know, for example, I spend a lot
of time out of Monterey and the Monterey Canyon is
just it's like a canyon the size of the Grand Canyon,
but you can't see it, you know, if you're up
on the oat on a boat above it, you don't
even know it's there. And so it's not until you
put these underwater systems down and you begin to map
them that they slowly become revealed and you realize, yes,
there's large cliffs, and not only that, but in the
ocean environment, a lot of these systems are far more
dynamic than we thought. So I remember when I started,
I ran the engineering department in a Mbari for many
years and when I started, there was one of my
colleagues there, a fellow Charlie Paula, said well, I want
to put this instrumentation down in the canyon because I
know every once in a while of their landslides, and
I want an underwater landslide. And it is part of
what we need to understand. And there's a bunch of reasons,
including generating tsunami slide. This is something we should care about.
But I can tell you there was a lot of
pushback because I was a, ah, you know these things.
You know, we're going to have to have equipment out
there for years, maybe decades before something interesting happens. We
ended up putting that equipment out there, and I think
it was within a month and a half it all
got trashed by an underwater landslide and uh and uh
it was it was like, wow, you know, I guess
maybe this is a little more active than we thought. Wow,
And we put some more equipment out out there and
it got trashed. By the way, trash is a good thing,
right in this case, because because it's telling us we're
in the right place to catch this activity. Uh. And
and so then you begin to start asking questions of
what caused it. Is there some clue, you know, the
decurrence change. Was there something that we could hear on
a hydrophone. Was it a particularly high tide? Uh? Is
there some Is there something that would give us insight
as to what would trigger these underwater these underwater collapses.
It turns out these underwater collapses, by the way, generate
some of the biggest scenamise, So wow, well you actually
really do care about them, because these locally generated events
can generate just enormous walls of water moving into the land,
destroying everything in their path. So so you really do
you really do care about these things, not only just
from a scientific sense, but we're living next to the ocean.
It's one of the hazards we run and something we'd
like to be able to predict or at least provide
warnings on shore to people should they happen.
Speaker 1: I think my fascination with all of this is based
one hundred percent on growing up in Billings, Montana, with
the Palisades of the Yellowstone, which they call the Rims,
and they in all my life, they they told me
that that was the the ancient works of an ocean.
And so and I think that's my number one reason
why all of this stuff fascinates me, because I wish
I could have seen the Yellowstone Valley underwater, you know,
just like an ocean. Whereas I mean, today we get
to see these oceans, but how long do we get
to see these oceans?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a This is also a very interesting question,
right because because there's no question we are we are
we are changing the ocean. We're changing the ocean in
multiple ways. I mean, we're we're fishing down certain fish,
species change. We're changing where the fish are and actually
where some whether some of them even exist in certain areas.
And we know that if we fish them down too much,
they just don't bounce back, right, So that's that's a
that's a real concern. And of course the combon impacts
on the ocean are significant as well. Uh, we know
the ocean is becoming more acidic, and as it becomes
more acidic, that affects coral reefs and it stresses fish
because acidity, right, I mean think of when you exercise,
what do you do, you generate you know, acid in
your muscles. So it's it's one of the signatures of
respiratory distress really, and so there's questions there about how
that will affect fishy fishery fisheries and and where the
animals can actually survive. So these are these are very
real and important questions, right because they kind of go
to the question of what kind of ocean are we
leaving our children? And of course the ocean is the
center of even though it's out of sight, right, it
is the majority of our planet. If you're an alien
coming to Earth and you are coming from the direction
of the Pacific, when you looked at Earth, all you
would see is this big blue ball. There would be
little bits and pieces of Earth in it, but basically
it would be planet Ocean. As Sylviet Earl likes to say,
we should call it planet Ocean, not planet Earth.
Speaker 1: You got to come back to this show, dude. I
love your attitude. I love where you're growing with this,
and I know that the next generation Alpha as well
as Beta are going to just love this book and
they're they're going to learn from it, and I hope
they invest their life into it.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, me too. Yeah, thank you. I really, I
really hope this inspires inspires people and gets them to
well I hope. I actually, what I really hope is
they get some of my colleagues to tell their stories too,
because there's a lot of great sea stories out there.
Speaker 1: Wow, will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, thank you. It was a real pleasure of
being with you.