Abstract :
It is quite a blow to man´s pride to admit that he will never be able to encounter the environment of more than half of this home planet´s crust with anywhere near the intimacy with which he will some day experience outer space or even the crust of other planets. The oceanic abyss, lying from two to four miles below sea level, accounts for more than 50 per cent of the crustal area of the earth, and the hydrostatic pressure of up to 10 000 psi encountered at these depths creates a far more hostile environment than does the nearly perfect vacuum of outer space. Even if some day the hope generated by the wet lung experiments performed in the last few years on dogs gels into a capability that would permit man´s body to be exposed directly to these extreme hydrostatic pressures, the seemingly mundane problem of maintaining body heat in the near-freezing deep ocean environment would be orders of magnitude more difficult than in the near absolute zero temperatures of outer space. At these high pressures, the efficient cellular insulation materials, which are available in a profusion of types, are ineffective, and the normally simple matter of interposing a thermal barrier between the human body and the surrounding water becomes a formidable problem.
