“As I’m sitting in this cramped metal sphere peering through the window at a seldom-seen habitat, I feel an emptiness in my chest that breath can’t fill. This is the real Earth, the 71 percent silent majority. And this is how it looks – gelatious, cross-eyed, clumsy, glowing, flickering, cloaked in perpetual darkness and compressed by more than a thousand pounds per sqaure inch. The azure sphere we see from the space is only a veneer. Our planet isn’t really blue, it’s not filled with leaves of grass, clouds, color, and light. It’s black.”
Dispersed Resurrection
“It takes a long time to become ooze. First you need to be eaten, then excreted, then have another organism eat the excrement, then have yet another animal eat that organism that just ate that excrement, and so on. This cycle will repeat until all that’s left of you are a few million molecules spread out like constellation of stars across the world’s oceans. And you’ve still got a few thousand years to go before you become ooze. At some point along the way, one of those tiny bits of you will leave the food cycle and be pulled won to deeper water. During this descent, you’ll be surrounded by phytoplankton that will degrade you into even smaller bits. When these phytoplankton die off after a few days, the last little bit of whatever is left of you – some cluster of molecules – will drift off inside the microscopic skeletons. These will join trillions of other tiny skeletons in a never-ending snowstorm of detritus that floats down to deeper water. Most of these particles will be recycled by the time they reach ten thousand feed. Only a fraction of 1 percent will make it to the seafloor below twenty thousand feet, a depth so far and foreboding that scientists have named it the hadal zone, from the Greek word, Hades, or “hell”.