A Mysterious Donor Is Funding an Effort to Build a ‘Permanent Human Settlement’ Underwater

Not long ago, a guy named Stockton Rush was getting rich by taking wealthy clients underwater in his “experimental” submarine. Rush’s company, Oceangate, made its money by courting wealthy clients and taking them on trips to the undersea site of the Titanic’s wreckage. Rush’s role in the business ended when he and several paying customers were killed by his own submarine, which imploded—potentially due to structural deficiencies in its hull.

The Oceangate disaster cast a pall over the underwater tourism industry which, prior to the deadly debacle, was relatively unknown to most Americans. However, there are many private sector undersea projects still barreling forward and one of them is called DEEP.

DEEP’s primary goal is to establish a permanent undersea colony for the purposes of scientific research and exploration. The effort has sought to distance itself substantially from companies like Oceangate, which has been accused of skirting regulations and cutting corners in its effort to chase profits and save money. By contrast, DEEP is currently working with an international accreditation agency, Det Norske Veritas (DNV), to ensure that its vehicles and underwater structures follow established and robust safety regulations. Instead of focusing on tourism, the organization says its primary goal is to create an aquatic base from which humans can enhance their understanding of the ocean.

Mike Shackleford, DEEP’s chief operating officer, recently told The Guardian: “The goal is to live in the ocean, forever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world.”

The technological innovations necessary to accomplish that ambitious feat involve the creation of new submarines (which the company refers to as) and a network of undersea bases (which it refers to as “sentinels”). DEEP has its own website, where you can see a fairly open and transparent account of its various engineering processes and difficulties. The company currently has a base of operations in Gloucestershire, a western county in Britain near the Welsh border. There, the company has its own 80-metre-deep lake where it can test its submersible vehicles and build out its vision for aquatic civilization. The base also has a “training school,” where participating scientists can undergo education about how to live and work in underwater environments.

The Guardian reports that DEEP also has a mysterious, deep-pocketed donor. The outlet writes that the installation is “funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will ‘increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity’” The outlet adds that DEEP’s leadership team “remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the £100m being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow) but also about the investor’s identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.”

The Guardian, which recently took a trip to DEEP’s Gloucestershire base, reports on some of the sights and sounds at the unique location, including a mock-up structure designed to mimic the company’s “sentinel” underwater base:

“Standing outside the full-size underwater house gives an instant idea of the incredible scale of the undertaking. The main recreational area is a six-metre diameter hemisphere, and the porthole windows mean that when the real thing is submerged there will be an inescapable feeling of being surrounded by the ocean and its inhabitants.”

The world’s wealthiest people are currently using their extreme wealth to fund extreme initiatives, whether it’s Elon Musk’s alleged dream of colonizing Mars or Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to build a digital world where you can buy stuff while wearing a weird helmet on your head (the “metaverse”). Colonizing the ocean would appear to have substantially more benefits than either of those two previously mentioned endeavors but, as with any huge undertaking, it will need to be an effort where safe, efficient exploration is the goal, not profit.