Humans could soon live underwater, in these deep sea habitats

We're in a submarine at the Deep Campus, the company on a mission to get people to live underwater

for months at a time, by the end of this decade, in one of these habitats

We'll take you underwater in a submarine to see where the habitats will first be tested

then we'll go inside Sentinel, one of the two habitats Deep is currently developing

and explore the history of the technology as well as what it could mean for the future of deep sea

exploration. This small lake is actually an old limestone quarry near Bristol in the UK

which naturally filled in with water. The limestone filters and clears the water

making it easy to see beneath the surface. However, once you dive in, it gets pretty dark

pretty quickly. As light disappears, so do a lot of primary colors, which is why our faces look like

this. We submerged to the lake's deepest point, which is 80 meters. It's not much, but the

environment this far down is so devoid of light that it resembles the ocean floor, a perfect spot

for the company to test its deep sea habitats. It's controlled water, so absent lightning you

can use this year-round. Without this we would have to rely on going to the open ocean and to a

harbor. But when you have serious sea states and high waves, they'll say, no dive day. So we want

to be in control of that product development timeline. So this is where we do a lot of that

work. Though deep scientists and divers submerged regularly, practicing diving around the lake's

floor and collecting objects there, underwater habitat testing is the future plan. At the moment

the company first habitat called Sentinel still sits on dry land So in our kind of primary layout that we often describe You have the great hall here You have your staircase that comes up and you have a dry lab So you have different lab equipment that coming through here so as you kind of did your work out in the water you bring it back you can go through some sampling sequencing whatever it might be

You always have connectivity to your colleagues in the bricks and mortar, so we'd have a Starlink communications buoy that would be connected at the surface, and again, allow you to kind of collaborate

You can do your zoom and kind of share these findings. And then in that setup, you'd be walking down a hallway here and you'd have

accommodations, so single bunks on each side. And that's important. Soundproof rooms, because everyone needs their private time

The history of deep sea habitats can be traced back to the 1960s and Captain

Jacques Cousteau's pioneering project Continental Shelf Station, or Con Shelf. In 1962, he designed the first continental shelf station called Con Shelf 1, a cabin

with compressed air where two divers lived 35 feet deep for 69 hours

And though technology has changed a lot in the 60 years since, Kusta's work has made

projects like DEEP possible in the first place. But when you look at those, whilst they were a massive leap in terms of humans' capabilities

to operate and have a permanent presence subsea, they were quite limited

The last habitat that was built was in 1986. That's a long time ago. I like to think that humans have gotten a bit smarter

when it comes to engineering, a bit better with technology. If you look at how deep habitats are built

you'll see exactly how far the technology has come. The key element is that they're modular

Think like Legos. So when you see the renderings you see these giant apertures two meters wide in diameter Those are also the connected points In situ which means that when it deployed beneath the surface of the ocean you can reconfigure that top deck

You can turn it into a lab, a communications hub, a meeting room

whatever you'd like to do. The habitats are also 3D printed. Conventional manufacturing techniques are subtractive

You take a large block of metal and you break it down. Energy intensive, very wasteful

With additive manufacturing, you're building it up. Importantly as well, is you're able to go and work with novel shapes

That's allowed us to unlock this unique shape of Sentinel. To 3D print their habitats, Deep use a team of six robots, or a HEX bot

And while usually 3D printing robots will be fixed in one place, the HEX bot moves around

Which, Sean says, makes the manufacturing process more flexible. Sentinel is meant to be the ocean's version of the International Space Station

allowing scientists to do all their fieldwork underwater. There's a ton of science that gets unlocked once we're able to live undersea

Things like restoration efforts, coral restoration, especially if you're thinking about deeper types of coral restoration projects

other types of species restoration in areas where different species have been decimated

because of changes to the ocean. And so now thinking about being able to process samples

And being able to see that sample in situ, like in that environment that it's meant to be in

instead of looking at the sample after you brought it up from being under pressure

and there's a long period of time before it gets to the place where it needs to be yzed, is really exciting

And I think it's going to really open up our eyes to how humans are responding to that environment in real time

And then also some of the changes or some of the different signatures that are associated with those animals or different species that live subsea The ocean covers nearly 70 of Earth surface Yet humans have only explored a tiny fraction of it

And a study from early 2025 suggests that humans actually have come to know as little as 0.001

of the ocean floor. Besides the technological restrictions the deep is trying to overcome

the company says its work is also about getting the next generation excited about the ocean

So you go back to the 60s and 70s, you had both interspace, which is what we call the ocean

and outer space, both on the ascendancy in terms of that innovation, that access and really kind of bringing technology to the forefront

and human exploration and drive was there. Then you saw a few decades where they both kind of calmed down

But then around 2000, again, November 2000, when the International Space Station went up

You start to see space kind of go up on the ascendancy. You haven't seen a pickup in investment so much in the ocean

And we could do so in terms of bringing that cohort, the K-12 up to the university level

to want to study marine science, to want to study marine engineering, to want to explore

We have this fascination with getting off of our planet, yet we have this alien world here

We really want to open up this ability to live undersea to everyone, right

not just to researchers, not just to, you know, explorers or folks that are working in the military

or commercial diving industry. We want other people to be able to experience that and understand what that environment looks like

and really become attached to it and have that human consciousness that's associated with the ocean

Would you live in one of those habitats? And do you think access to the deep ocean should be democratized

Let us know in the comments. Yeah