Before Lost, before Game of Thrones, before Westworld, there was another TV show that ruled the day. A TV show that was either underrated or underwhelming depending on your point of view. And truth be told, it was probably a little bit of both. But that won’t stop me from holding SeaQuest DSV near and dear to my heart until the day I die.
Admittedly, some of the storylines were a little bit wonky. Like the entire season spent on an alien planet. And I didn’t always love the casting. Michael Ironside was atrocious. But that didn’t detract from the overall greatness that the show possessed. Still to this day there are several episodes that have stuck around in my subconscious, floating around in the deep recesses of my mind like Darwin on an underwater recovery mission.
Sadly, we don’t have talking dolphins or underwater cities yet but we may soon have one piece of technology that would seem right at home in the fictional world that Roy Schneider and Jonathan Brandis once inhabited: a way to breathe underwater for hours at a time.
This amazing new device is known as Amphibio and it comes to us from Jun Kamei, a student at the Royal College of Art in London. Or at least a prototype does.
According to I Fucking Love Science, “Kamei’s nifty little device uses a specially designed porous, hydrophobic material that replenishes oxygen in the water and releases carbon dioxide. It is inspired by water-diving insects that create their own little scuba diving set by creating a protective bubble of air around their body thanks to their water repellent skin.
The technology is easily 3D-printable too, which will be great for when we need them en masse. These ‘gills’ could replace heavy and cumbersome scuba equipment, making it more akin to free diving but for longer. This could have immediate applications for underwater rescue scenarios – the 12 boys rescued by divers from a flooded cave in Thailand, for example, where it took weeks to work out how to get the boys and the vital breathing equipment through those narrow tunnels.”
Or for a climate changed induced future where we’re all living in underwater cities. A future, once imagined by SeaQuest DSV, that now seems rather more like destiny than fiction. Now if only we could do something about that talking Dolphin tech.
Is Amphibio the Greatest Idea Ever?
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