Filmmaker James Cameron dives the real Abyss.

Many people who had earned that much wealth would be sunbathing on a island somewhere I bet. Cameron says he is developing this technology for future scientists and explorers.

There were some glitches in the historic solo dive however:

- he lost one thruster
- his sonar malfunctioned
- one of the six battery buses failed
- the battery failure also knocked out primary communications
- other minor glitches

He describes the situation as follows:

Sitting down there at 27000′, alone in the dark, with no comms, no contact whatsoever with the world so far above, and nothing but the ingenuity of the engineering to get me back… it’s simultaneously scary and exhilarating. It’s the precipice we put ourselves on by choice, to test ourselves and our machines.

He was never in any danger however, because of the "massive-redundancy" he said was built into the craft.

This source was from an email James Cameron sent to Don Walsh, one of the two pilots to make the first dive to the bottom 50 years ago.

deepseachallenge.com...

It looks like the Green Machine needs a little more work and testing before the big dive.

So he is racing Virgin Oceanic to the bottom? I can see both profiting heavily from these endeavors. Good for them, and I'll be thankful to see the footage. Science fiction to fact in 90 minutes, amazing.

reply to post by Drezden


id hardly call exploring one of the deepest areas of our planet as wastefull and hey look at it this way he did it with out taxpayers having to pay a dime so that makes me even happer that not only are we learning things we dont have to pay for them(as a nation)

Originally posted by KilrathiLG
reply to post by Drezden

 

id hardly call exploring one of the deepest areas of our planet as wastefull and hey look at it this way he did it with out taxpayers having to pay a dime so that makes me even happer that not only are we learning things we dont have to pay for them(as a nation)

Consumers, movie goers and merchandise buyers, will be paying and the gov will get their taxes. But that's how it should work.

They should send that lead actor of Avatar down there instead. And have first year engineering students design the submersible capsule!

Since when is James Cameron a nautical engineer? This is a bit strange that he's the one doing it. It makes sense that an actual scientist would do it...not a hollywood fiction director.

reply to post by Xterrain


He has the time,money and apparently desire to learn and explorer. Lucky bastard, like others have said some of the other Billionaires prefer to do things that don't benefit the rest of us. Luckily for us there is one guy with the time,money, and desire to push the envelope when it comes to exploring.

Originally posted by Xterrain
Since when is James Cameron a nautical engineer? This is a bit strange that he's the one doing it. It makes sense that an actual scientist would do it...not a hollywood fiction director.

Here I'm going to write why I came across this in the first place.
I have just watched the Abyss for the first time, good movie.

One thing stuck out to me and I don't know why but I googled it.
Breathable liquid, when I saw the rat it got me thinking ,what if, low and behold the tech is real, not only that but that rat was real and it was breathing real breathable liquid.

Also I'm not sure but did he make bioluminescent aliens before we even knew of bioluminescent creatures???

You say he a fiction director but he actually takes real ideas and theories and makes a fictional movie around them, I know a lot of directors do this but they don't tend to get it as right as he does. There's always a sense of "this is a possibility".


As for his dive, I don't know if he's done it yet, and I get the South Park "raising the bar" episode now. He really is trying to raise the bar of movie making, trying to get out of the realm crappy unrealistic movies and trying to make movies as real as possible.

All the luck to him.