The following is an email from James Cameron to Don Walsh, co-pilot of the bathyscaphe Trieste , following Cameron’s successful 8,000-meter dive to the bottom of the New Britain Trench. Don Walsh will be joining the expedition in Guam, prior to Cameron’s dive to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

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Imagine a place where every single inch of your skin is under eight tons of weight. That’s not some planet in a galaxy far, far away: it’s the bottom of the bottom of the ocean. At its deepest point the Mariana trench is 36,000 feet (11,000m) deep, and water pushes from all sides with 16,000 psi (pounds per square inch) — over 1000 atmospheres. That spot, called the Challenger Deep, is where James Cameron plans to be traveling very soon. His secretively constructed submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, is designed to test the limits of the oceans and allow him to see, record, and bring samples back from its most remote region.

I can't wait to see the results on IMAX.

If we don't get an IMAX film, we might nevertheless get some needed attention to the Trench, which has repeatedly been proposed as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. The idea was "Nothing can live down there, can it?" Of course, life was found there in abundance. The fact that Bush declared the area of the trench to be one of the new ocean sanctuaries has not entirely killed that idea, despite the optimism in Why the Mariana Trench didn’t wind up a nuclear waste dump.

For one I am psyched to find out what is down there. While others think of going to the moon or to Mars there are parts of our planet that we have no clue about. The deep sea is one of those. There are expeditions to little known regions of our planet that are finding new and incredible species that heretofore we have known nothing about. It is a big blue marble, and we have no idea what secrets it holds. How about we check it out before we got to out of space?

There's seven billion of us, I think there's enough folks to do both.....but it would be nice if everybody was fed and not shooting at each other before we got going on this stuff.......

I'm just sayin'.

(and I had no intention of this being a political thread. So much for intentions)

But isn't Cameron's expedition privately funded? If so, they should be able to explore what they want to, at their own risk. Same with space exploration.

I'm a life-long (50 years) space geek. And I can remember reading with fascination about the Trieste.

And maybe all can be done at once, but before then something has to reign in the current day robber barons so there's money for it and not so much for purchasing governments for evil purposes.