What Is Ocean Exploration and Why Is It Important?

Have you ever wondered what animals are hidden deep in the ocean? There could be animals larger than entire school buildings, although we will not know that until we decide to look deeper. We have explored space more than we have our own ocean. We have been looking into space since 1957. The problem is we’ve spent so much time thinking about space that we haven’t even taken into consideration what may be inside of our own ocean. We have only discovered about 5% of our ocean, however; we have already been to the moon. Our ocean is significantly more important to our lifestyles than space exploration is. We have organisms in our ocean that could help much more than space organisms, the ocean can help control the climate, and even with those things, we only have a rough outline of our ocean floor. 

The organisms we can discover in our ocean could help us more than the organisms we may find in space. Each time we inspect farther and deeper into the ocean we find brand new organisms. These organisms can help us combat diseases. There are currently animals in the ocean that help us fight illnesses such as the ray fish that helps fight developing blindness, helps circulate blood, and is rumored to cure chickenpox. The animals in our ocean help feed a large majority of the world and provide us with a large number of nutrients. If we are able to find new species of animals within the ocean we will have an even larger group of available nutrients. As we are exploring deeper into the ocean it will help create more jobs. People nearby the ocean would be able to help investigate and assist with the tasks at hand. It is easier to have people help here on Earth than to send people up into space to help. Organisms in the ocean could help cure diseases, create jobs, and much more. 

Looking further into the ocean could help us fight global warming and lower the temperature of our planet. If we learn to protect and restore our ocean habitats including seagrass, salt marshes, mangroves, and the food webs associated with them, we could sequester carbon dioxide about 4 times more than terrestrial forests are able to. We just need to put the effort in to help fix those problems. If we just put some effort into the exploration, we would be helping to fix our world and create a better environment for future generations. 

Offshore wind energy could supply 7,000 terawatt-hours per year of clean energy. It also has the potential to exceed that amount. That is almost double the amount of electricity used by the United States in the year 2014. If we just find a way to channel that energy, we would have an ample amount of clean energy in our country and others. We could potentially fix climate change in a positive way, why would we not put in the effort to do so? If we have the opportunity, which we do, we should take it. 

It is unsettling to know that we do not even have a proper or a detailed outline of our ocean. We have been around for a considerable amount of time and we have put more interest in other planets than our own. Roughly 90% of our ocean has yet to be explored. We do not have an idea of what our ocean floors may look like. We have no idea what could be at the bottom of our ocean. That seems unsettling. The charts for the aquatic world are taken in 3-mile chunks, you miss substantial amounts of details in 3 miles. We need to know what every mile consists of, we cannot miss that much information. There needs to be an outline of our ocean floors taken, in more detail than just 3-mile chunks, so we have an idea of which places are most important to visit first. We would know where it would be easier to discover, what places have the most interesting landmarks to look into, and places that animals may be hiding under.

However, some people believe that space exploration is more important than our ocean. People may believe that we would find new and important organisms in space. They think that we will not find a multitude of new organisms in the ocean and that if we do they will not be notably significant. While this may be true, we have a longer period of time that we will be able to think about space. We do not have that time for the ocean. As global warming occurs we do not know how long our planet will last as well as how long the animals will be able to live. Our world is rapidly changing, and if we really want to create a positive impact we need to know what we can save on our planet while we are still here. If we are able to find new species in the ocean that we could potentially help keep alive, why would we not want to? Even if we did not find new animals, we would find some sort of new plant or new information that will help us in the future. 

People may believe that space has more for us to observe because it is larger. That is true, but we have only looked at a small amount of our ocean so if we would just focus on the task at hand rather than two at once, we could finish this project and then focus on space. We would be able to finish them both faster if we could give it our full attention. We cannot give both our full attention at the same time, so we should either evenly split up between the two or only focus on one at a time. 

People may think that space exploration is more important and needs to be done right away. Which is true for both our ocean and space. We could easily balance the two out. We need to create a balanced budget for each of the two projects. We could create a balanced budget that fits the need of each of the projects and allows us to properly finish the tasks. The right budget, tools, and the amount of manpower are all we need. This is a time where compromisation would work prominently well. We could efficiently have both exploration projects done hypothetically in the future, and both could help us a great deal. Ocean exploration just needs to be done faster than space because of how rapidly our planet is changing. 

Both space and ocean exploration is important. Our ocean should just come first because of how our planet continues to change as time goes on. The ocean can help us with future medicine and disease control, climate control, and find new information about animals and plants within our oceans.