Beautiful, terrifying and unknowably vast, the world’s oceans are some of the planet’s least understood places. There are, to put it mildly, things down there that we don’t know about – and because it’s a fundamentally inhospitable place, exploration has been treacherous and slow. But Sean Wolpert, the president of Deep, not only wants to speed up our discovery of the oceans, he wants people to live down there, too.
“The thing I’m most excited about is finding something to increase the quality of people’s lives for the long run,” says Wolpert, who says that there could be missing keys to terrestrial problems lurking below the waves.
“It’s extremely likely that we will find the treatment for something like cancer in our oceans.
“If you think about sea sponges, for instance, they repel organisms trying to eat them through chemical processes to ensure their continuity and survival. So what can we learn from that process in terms of our own biological make-up?
“It’s a very exploratory ground for pharmaceuticals,” he says.
Deep – an ocean technology and exploration firm financed by private investors – launched in stealth in 2021, but now boasts 100 staff across the UK, the United States and Canada. They’re working on an underwater living space dubbed “Sentinel” that the company says will enable human beings to survive 656ft below the waves.