When you are sitting in a pressurized platform at the bottom of the ocean, you are psychologically vulnerable. I’m not talking some continental shelf here; I’m not even talking the “regular” incredibly black depths of the deep sea. I’m talking a tin can at the bottom of a trench, I’m talking the crushing doom of a rift. You might as well be in outer space for all the good it’ll do you. The claustrophobia, the dark, the sheer weight of miles of water on top of you…it is enough to make you crazy. It is just a very traumatic situation for a human being to be in, by its very nature.
Or not “nature”—sitting at the bottom of the sea is unnatural. If you are a nihilistic civilization in the bleak dystopian world of Peter Watts’ Rifters Trilogy, the solution to the problem is almost impossibly grim: just select “pre-adapted” individuals for your crew. “Pre-adapted” being a euphemism for…abuse survivors. Take them, give them cybernetic and biological adaptations for deep sea survival, and send them down. There is no way that can go wrong, right?
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