Garrett Reisman could be mankind’s answer to Spongebob, with the pair having both lived at the bottom of the ocean.
Now, the engineer and former NASA astronaut has opened up about life on the seabed and his terrifying encounter with a huge underwater creature ‘the size of a cow’.
Garrett Reisman opened up about life on the seabed (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
Yes, the only logical reason for anyone to live under the sea is in the name of science, unless you’re a talking mermaid who’s mates with a talking lobster.
Anyway, let’s get into Reisman’s experience – and if we can learn anything from it, it’s that thalassophobia, the fear of the ocean, is very understandable as we have no clue what’s moving underneath us.
The 56-year-old American was invited onto The Joe Rogan Experience and dived straight into his time 60ft underwater in a submarine-like home on the seabed off the coast of Key Largo, in southern Florida.
Reisman explained how, if he needed to go use the toilet, he had to swim to a gazebo and pull his trunks down to go number two – but the problem with that is that the fish get ‘accustomed to it’.
Reisman spoke about his terrifying encounter with an underwater beast as he nipped out to use the loo (Youtube/Joe Rogan Podcast)
“So they go there knowing that you’re gonna poop?” asked Joe Rogan.
“As soon as you drop in the water at night it’s like the dinner bell going off, because this is feeding time,” replied Reisman.
He then went into his scariest experience – which just so happened to be when he was visiting the underwater bogs.
He went on: “You’re in the pitch-black Atlantic Ocean 60ft down, no scuba tank at night at with the sound of the ocean lapping against the dome, and you’re looking down at this endless black, you know, just a black void.
“You’re thinking about every single scary ocean movie like Jaws, you know The Meg, or whatever,The Abyss – all those scary movies, right, and you think about all those things that could be down there – it can’t help but go through your head so it’s kind of freaky.
The goliath grouper can reach up to 8ft tall and weigh 455kg (Getty stock)
“Then you finish and you put your mask back on, and I took a big breath, and I went down, and I opened my eyes in my mask in the darkness with my flashlight and I saw like right in front of me, this huge eyeball like about the size of a saucer.”
Reisman continued: “This big staring, unblinking right at me and I freaked I just tore off.”
The former astronaut rushed back to his underwater home and surfaced screaming. His crew rushed over to him, thinking he was bit by a shark, and he explained. So what on earth was it, if it wasn’t a shark?
He added: “I’m like ‘giant f***ing fish!’… it was a Goliath Grouper.”
The huge fish can reach up to 455kg, which is about as heavy as a grand piano, and be up to 8ft tall.
Yeah, you couldn’t get me to live underwater if you paid me £1 million.Featured Image Credit: Youtube/Joe Rogan Podcast
Topics: Environment, Science, Space
Joe Yates
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Published 20:21 11 Jul 2024 GMT+1
Astronaut who spent 178 days in space reveals the man-made structure he saw that made him realise the big ‘lie’
The NASA astronaut has opened up about his ‘sobering realisation’
Former NASA space cadet Ronald Garan didn’t just float around in space for 178 days to find out that the earth isn’t flat.
Rather, he experienced the ‘sobering realisation’ that us humans are all ‘living a lie’.
The 62-year-old had an uninterrupted view of planet earth and what he discovered was not on the cards.
Having flown 71 million miles in 2,842 orbits throughout his career at NASA, Ronald has surely felt the ‘overview effect’ more than once.
NASA astronaut Ron Garan had quite the awakening while up in space (ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
The term is coined by scientists as the feeling of ‘unexpected and overwhelming emotion’ astronauts get when taking a look at earth from space.
Now, when the former NASA astronaut was onboard the International Space Station, he spotted a long line of lights stretching across Asia.
He then realised it was a man-made structure of the border between India and Pakistan.
In a TED talk from 2016, he said: “Initially, I wrote this off as a strange reflection of moonlight on a river.
“I was very intrigued. It turns out that this was not a natural reflection at all.
“I’ve always said that you can’t see borders from space, apparently I was wrong.
“The earth, when viewed from space, almost always looks beautiful and peaceful.
“But was this an example of man made changed to the landscape that was clearly visible from space.”
Ronald has flown 71 million miles in 2,842 orbits throughout his career at NASA. (Erika Goldring/Getty Images)
And in a 2022 interview with Big Think, Ronald opened up on why he thinks that humans are ‘living a lie’ and our general outlook on day-to-day life is backwards.
He explained: “When I looked out the window of the International Space Station, I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them.
“And I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere.
“In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realisation that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive.
“I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life.
He admits that the earth looks ‘beautiful and peaceful’ from space. (Getty Stock Images)
“I didn’t see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it’s obvious from the vantage point of space that we’re living a lie.”
He insisted we need to focus on more important issues like the climate crisis, instead of the economy.
“It’s obvious from the vantage point of space that we’re living a lie,” Garan added.
“We need to move from thinking economy, society, planet to planet, society, economy. That’s when we’re going to continue our evolutionary process.
“There’s this light bulb that pops up where they realise how interconnected and interdependent we all are.
“We’re not going to have peace on Earth until we recognise the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”Featured Image Credit: Erika Goldring/Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images
Topics: NASA, Space, Global Warming, Environment
Anish Vij
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Published 18:47 9 Aug 2024 GMT+1
Scientists made chilling discovery after finally reaching the bottom of the Red Sea
Next time you take a dip, make sure you stay on the surface
The Red Sea has a chilling secret which has only just been discovered by the scientists studying the bottom.
The Sea, which is located between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, is home to a fruitful and fascinating ecosystem.
Based in Egypt, it’s home to an incredibly busy shipping lane, with the traffic going through the Suez Canal.
It’s a beautiful location, and is named aptly because it comes from the seasonal red blooms of algae, which change the water from its blue-green hue to a red.
However, if you dive deeper, it’s not quite the same.
This is what people realised when scientists managed to find ‘death pools‘ at the bottom of the sea.
The Red Sea is teeming with marine life, but not everywhere, not right at the bottom. (Getty Stock Photo)
The reason they are called that is because they’re devoid of oxygen.
This means that any animal which is unlucky enough to venture nearby is stunned and killed by the pools.
But anything which is stunned but not killed will soon be picked off by predators, which lurk nearby to ‘feed on the unlucky’.
That’s a scary thought.
Make sure you don’t swim too deep down there, folks.
Otherwise you’ll be fish food.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing inside the ‘death pools’, which are home to ‘extremophile microbes’ that can survive down there where little else can.
Studying the death pools can help us understand how life on Earth began, and even the potential for life on other planets.
Sam Purkis, professor and chair of the Department of Marine Geosciences at the University of Miami, said: “Our current understanding is that life originated on Earth in the deep sea, almost certainly in anoxic — without oxygen — conditions.
“Studying this community hence allows a glimpse into the sort of conditions where life first appeared on our planet, and might guide the search for life on other ‘water worlds’ in our solar system and beyond.”
The fact that the usual animals found at the bottom of the sea – such as burrowing shrimp, worms and mollusks – can’t survive in the pools mean that they remain unusually pristine.
Beneath that sea lie pools of absolute death which kill all by the most minuscule microbes and lay undisturbed by the world above. Spooky. (Getty Stock Photo)
“Ordinarily, these animals bioturbate or churn up the seabed, disturbing the sediments that accumulate there,” Purkis said.
“Not so with the brine pools. Here, any sedimentary layers that settle to the bed of the brine pool remain exquisitely intact.”
This means researchers were also able to use their findings to help learn more about tsunamis and earthquakes.
The newfound brine pools ‘represent an unbroken record of past rainfall in the region, stretching back more than 1,000 years, plus records of earthquakes and tsunami’.
Their findings suggest that in the past 1,000 years, major floods from serious rain occur about once every 25 years, and tsunamis [take place] about once every 100 years’.
Imagine that, down at the bottom of the Red Sea are pools largely untouched by the world above, tranquil and lethal in equal measure.
Additional words by Anish Vij.Featured Image Credit: Getty stock photo/YouTube/Ocean X
Topics: World News, Weird, Science
Britt Jones
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Published 16:48 22 Oct 2024 GMT+1
Man who lived deep in the woods for more than 50 years revealed the thing that made living off grid worth it
He decided he wanted to ‘live it myself’
A man who spent decades of his life living off the grid in the woods spoke about what made it all worth it.
Many people have had the desire to pack it all in and go live somewhere that feels disconnected from the trials and tribulations of the larger world.
One man who really did do that was Joe Hollis, who bought some land in the woods in North Carolina and spent the rest of his life building it into his own self-sufficient garden.
He was visited by YouTuber Peter Santenello, who he taught all about his life and his reasons for getting away from it all and living off the grid.
Joe Hollis spent decades living in the woods supporting himself by growing his own food (YouTube/Peter Santenello)
Originally from Detroit, Joe ended up joining the Peace Corps and spent three years living in Borneo and after returning to the US, found it a ‘culture shock’ to go back and see ‘this glut of stuff’.
He mulled over furthering his studies for a few years, but eventually decided he ‘didn’t really want to study’, adding: “I just wanted to live it myself.”
Learning about the land in North Carolina thanks to a hippy commune he’d lived next to in Detroit, they moved down but Hollis said ‘like most hippy communes it lasted a couple of years and kind of imploded’.
However, he stayed around and ultimately built his own home and farm out in the woods where he would live for the rest of his life.
He had his home and garden, and people would come and live in his garden and help him grow it. (YouTube/Peter Santenello)
Over the time, he built shelters for others to come and stay with him, and said he hoped that his farm could eventually grow into a little village of about eight people caring for it.
“When I talk about this stuff people’s first thought is all the stuff they’re gonna have to give up,” Joe said of the lifestyle off the grid.
“Whereas what I want to focus on is all the stuff you’re gonna get, all the positive stuff.”
He went on to say that his idea was ‘to transfer my needs from civilisation’ and go ‘back to fulfilling my needs from a direct relationship with the planet, with god’.
Having spent decades living out in the woods, Joe sadly died shortly after he appeared in the YouTuber’s video.Play
A GoFundMe set up to raise funds to help repair damage done by a fire to Joe’s home carried the sad news in November 2023 that he had been ‘diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer’ a couple of months previously and had gone into hospice care.
His Mountain Gardens website recorded that Joe died three days after that update on 9 November.
In a more recent GoFundMe, which you can donate to here, organisers explained that Mountain Gardens had been hit by Hurricane Helene and while all the buildings besides one tool shed were ‘miraculously spared’, a landslide hit the main garden and the paths around the place were damaged.Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Peter Santenello
Topics: Community, US News, YouTube, Environment
Joe Harker
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Updated 20:06 26 Jul 2024 GMT+1Published 20:07 26 Jul 2024 GMT+1
Everything that happens to the human body in space as two astronauts left stranded for 7 weeks
There are a few health issues that can arise after being in space for a long period
I’m sure it’s not a thought you’d ever have to worry about, I’m sure.
But for NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore, 61, and Sunita Williams, 58, it’s their reality at the moment.
The two are currently stranded on the International Space Station (ISS), after Boeing’s Starliner capsule ran into a number of technical issues.
The pair have been onboard the ISS since they launched from Florida, US, on 6 June.
Sent up by the Starliner, the astronauts docked and were meant to carry out a test mission that would last over a week until running into problems, as the Starliner’s faulty thrusters and a number of helium leaks brought concerns over safety.
What happens to the body in Space
Credit: YouTube/ESA
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The astronauts are waiting for news from travel giants Boeing and NASA to conjure a solution to the issue, but engineers are still lost on what the problem is.
So until that is determined, the astronauts are stuck up there, orbiting the Earth.
NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said that there is no set return date just yet, explaining: “We don’t have a major announcement today relative to a return date.
“We’re making great progress, but we’re just not quite ready to do that.
“Our focus today…is to return Butch and Suni on Starliner. I think we’re starting to close in on those final pieces of the fight rationale to make sure we can come home safely and that’s our primary focus right now.
“We’ll come home when we’re ready.”
But after such a long amount of time in space, what happens to the body?
The astronauts are currently stuck in space. (MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO/AFP via Getty Images)
Well, according to the Lead of Life Sciences at the European Space Agency, Angelique Van Ombergen, a few things happen.
Calling space a ‘hostile environment’ for the body, Van Ombergen explains in a YouTube short: “When astronauts spend several months in space, they can lose up to 20% of their muscle mass, and also their bone density decreases.
“Since the whole body is exposed to microgravity, the heart doesn’t need to pump around as much blood as it used to on Earth and the cardiovascular system deteriorates,” she revealed.
Van Ombergen said that in their first few days in space, astronauts can experience ‘acute motion sickness’, while over time, radiation from the Sun could cause DNA damage.
Being stuck in the ISS could have some detrimental effects for the astronauts. (Getty Stock Photo)
This could increase the risk of cancer and could even cause cardiovascular degeneration.
It can also have an impact on the astronaut’s mental health, as the health expert added: “Being confined in a small space, far away from family and friends, can also have a negative impact on human psychology.”
She concludes by saying that the ISS gives them a great opportunity to study and better understand the effects of spaceflight on the human body and how to improve the experience and treat it when they’re back on Earth.