2825 An Ocean in the Sky

Archive Note

The following interview appeared in the year 2825 in the exclusive supplement Inner Circle of Heliotrop, at the time the largest lifestyle magazine of the inner solar system. It documents the opening of MARINE (Massive Aquatic Rotating Installation for Natural Ecosystems) and thus the beginning of an eventful history that was to span half a millennium.

The 2820s, the Roaring Twenties, were a prosperous and optimistic era. After nearly two centuries of uninterrupted growth, fortunes had accumulated in the solar system for which there were scarcely any adequate words. Contemporaries spoke of zillionaires and occasionally, half in mockery and half in reverence, of Olympians: that small class whose means had compounded over half a millennium, surpassing by a thousandfold the largest fortunes of the early space age and by a millionfold those of an ordinary billionaire. For an Olympian, a private gigaton cylinder habitat was no more than a yacht had been for the tech billionaires at the turn of the third millennium: just an expensive hobby.

Arjun Bhattacharya belonged to the old guard of the Olympians, a clone family in its third generation after four hundred years. Rumor has it that the origins of the family fortune date back to the Mabesi Crisis of the late 24th century, a founding legend to which no Bhattacharya has ever commented.

What follows is the conversation in its original wording:

Interview

I am sitting with Arjun Bhattacharya III in an observation bubble ten meters below the water surface of his spectacular shark habitat. I feel as though suspended in a droplet that someone dropped into the sea and forgot. We are drifting in an inverted ocean. Above us the water surface arches upward in a gentle curve, loses itself in the turquoise haze, and returns on the other side several kilometers away. Below us the water falls away into a deep blue void, streaked with sluggish filaments of current. A school of mackerel glides past the bubble, closely followed by a silvery shadow that almost looks like a fish. Though, by now I know how to spot the drones. An artificial remora on its way to its host.

Bhattacharya sits across from me in an old-fashioned leather armchair that he had installed in the bubble specifically for the occasion, looking like someone who is just about to be served a glass of wine in the parlor. Bhattacharya is 121 years old and still in his original body. With a twinkle in his eye he remarks: "Just a few cloned spare parts, otherwise consistent epigenetics." His hair is white, his skin wrinkled, but his eyes are as curious as those of a child seeing an aquarium for the first time.

With the inauguration of MARINE (the Massive Aquatic Rotating Installation for Natural Ecosystems) the eccentric trillionaire has unveiled the largest aquarium in human history. The saltwater aquarium is, at least in its basic configuration, a classic O'Neill cylinder: two kilometers in diameter, six kilometers in length. Unlike the residential habitats of the Earth-Moon system, however, this cylinder does not serve as a home for hundreds of thousands of people, but for a diverse array of marine creatures, including species that were until now considered impossible to keep.

"The construction of this habitat was the logical next step in my hobby of aquaristics. I wanted to prove that it is indeed possible to keep great white sharks permanently in conditions suited to their nature. Even if the effort, admittedly, goes beyond the scope of the usual residential habitats," Bhattacharya says at the outset of our conversation.

The greatest problem in conventional shark husbandry, he explains, is the shape and size of the tank. Historically, large sharks, those ordinarily found in the open ocean, often died, according to Bhattacharya, quite simply of sleep deprivation.

"Picture it this way: these animals depend, to no small degree, on their gills being continuously perfused by oxygen-rich water. Accordingly, a shark can never truly stop swimming, not even in sleep. It enters a kind of vegetative glide that must last for a certain time if the animal is to reach what would most closely correspond to our deep-sleep phase. If, after only a few minutes or even seconds, the creature runs into some wall, it perishes in agony. In a rotating cylinder, by contrast, the shark can swim for as long as it likes in the same direction. The only real challenge was the water depth."

Indeed, the O'Neill cylinders previously put into service had never been filled with such vast quantities of water, let alone saltwater. The water level in the deep zones produces a forty-meter water column resting upon a sand layer three to seven meters thick. I ask about the structural consequences of such a volume of water.

"The hull is the most expensive part of the installation. An O'Neill cylinder with a continuous forty-meter water column imposes structural demands roughly four times higher than a conventional habitat with an atmosphere and a ground layer several meters thick. It begins with the tensile strength of the rings and ends at the bearings of the rotational coupling. Every cubic meter of seawater weighs a ton, and we have more than a billion. We had to adapt technologies from orbital construction that were originally developed for large spacecraft."

Within the habitat, an artificial rock formation rises up to eleven meters above the waterline. I ask whether his habitat ought not, strictly speaking, to be classified as an aquaterrarium or paludarium.

"No, I don't think so. This small elevation does not come even close to the proportions of a modest emergent section in an aquascape, at least not in relation to the overall size. The emergent part is neither planted nor inhabited by land animals. It is the resting place of a sea lion colony, which serves as live prey for the great predators in the aquarium."

I press further on the population dynamics. A thousand adult great whites consume a considerable biomass per week. The dimensions of the animal stock are indeed extraordinary: a thousand sharks, a hundred thousand seals and sea lions, along with countless other marine inhabitants ranging from plankton to dolphins. How does one keep a prey population stable over the long term without actively breeding it?

"A safe zone for the sea lions stabilizes the population. The rocky island you saw is exactly that: a refuge. The animals quickly learn where the line between safe and unsafe lies, and they bear their young on the island. The sharks take only those that venture too far out. On balance, the reproductive rate of the sea lions is high enough to provide, over the long term, a biomass that sustains the shark population. This is not my invention. It is the principle that has governed the relationship between seals and sharks in the terrestrial oceans for millions of years. I have merely adjusted the geography."

The feeding of the animals and the filtration of the vast volume of water are designed to be self-regulating. I ask how this is supposed to function in a closed system of this magnitude.

"It makes no sense to set up additional food-production zones within this habitat, which would in turn require attention. The habitat is a functioning system in its entirety and requires no feeding, no external filtration, no further measures. What matters is that, in a project for truly large fish, one must not forget to begin on a small scale. What made this project possible at all were its self-regulating decomposition chains. From bacteria and fungi, through phyto- and zooplankton, corals and jellyfish, to small fish: the entire spectrum of the food chain is represented in the habitat. Before all of this had settled into stability across the whole system, seventeen years had passed in the case of my aquarium, before we could finally introduce the apex predators, in this case a thousand juvenile to adult great whites. The starter culture, incidentally, was nothing particularly sophisticated. It took a great deal of what most people would probably call 'dirt'."

Another technical question imposes itself: how is such a volume of water illuminated? In ordinary residential habitats, three light strips ensure that the opposite inner side is adequately bright.

"For a residential habitat, that is the most sensible method, but in an aquarium, illumination through the water would be disruptive. Instead of three strips we therefore have a central light column running along the axis of rotation. It is fed passively from solar cells on the outer hull; there is no artificial energy input. The day–night cycle is twenty-four hours, and the light source shifts its color temperature and intensity over the course of the day just as the sun does on the surface of the Earth. Morning and evening glow included."

The mention of the solar cells on the outer hull brings me to a question I had thus far held back: where exactly is MARINE, in fact? My journey here had taken unusually long for a habitat that is classed, in the broadest sense, as Earth-proximate, and the navigation displays of the shuttle had indicated an orbital designation I had not seen before.

"MARINE lies in a near-Earth heliocentric orbit. More precisely, on a quasi-satellite trajectory. Strictly speaking, we do not orbit the Earth but the Sun — on a path that runs parallel to Earth's orbit over long periods. From the perspective of a terrestrial observer, the habitat swings in an annual loop back and forth relative to the Earth, never coming very close to it and never moving very far away. This has operational advantages: no eclipse within Earth's shadow and no dense traffic as at the Lagrange points. The catch is that the resonance does not remain stable entirely on its own. The other planets, Venus and Jupiter above all, and over the long term the Sun itself, perturb the orbit. Left entirely to itself, MARINE would drift out of resonance within a few centuries and depart onto its own heliocentric path. We therefore need active station-keeping. Not much, just a few brief maneuvers per year."

Bhattacharya points upward and slightly to the side. Through the curved surface of the water, at some distance, a section of the cylinder hull becomes visible in which no light is reflected. A dark breach in the world.

"This is my favorite section. We made it from transparent Crystoplast rather than the usual active technology. We did not want field walls here, but solid, durable windows."

He says it with a mixture of pride and a quiet defiance, as though he had had to push this decision through against resistance.

"Most habitat architects told me that Crystoplast was too fragile, too expensive, structurally indefensible. But field walls have maintenance intervals. Field walls fail. I wanted something that would let people look out through this window a thousand years from now, without first having to check whether the power supply happens to be working."

A shadow detaches itself from the diffuse turquoise of the distance and rapidly grows larger. Too rapidly. A great white, fully grown, perhaps five meters, is heading straight for the observation bubble. It opens its jaws and reveals an infinity of sharp teeth. I flinch, for the bubble is so immersive that it feels as though no barrier were there at all. I lean back as if that might help. A reflex. But just before the bubble, the shark veers away. A single flowing motion, in which tail fin and body work so synchronously that one cannot perceive them as separate actions. Then it shoots past us, so close that I fancy I can see the structure of its skin. The shark sets course for a spot in front of the rocky island.

It is heading for a sea lion that had strayed too far into deep water during the sea lion feeding. The sea lion notices the shark only at the last moment, turns in a half-roll, paddles desperately back toward the rock. The shark gains ground. The water between them grows narrower. I unconsciously hold my breath. Then the sea lion reaches the ledge and heaves itself out of the water with one last, almost comical effort. The shark passes close beneath it, makes a wide arc, and vanishes once more into the blue. A narrow escape. This time.

Bhattacharya did not move a bit. He sits in his leather armchair, hands on the armrests, watching the shark as if he had just observed a cat stretching. The silence between us lasts a few seconds. Then he briefly smiles.

"They are admirable creatures, aren't they? That economy of movement. That resolve. In the typical zoo you only get a caricature of the actual animal. Here you see it as it is."

MARINE is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It is a pure passion project without commercial intent. On the contrary, no return on investment is to be expected, even though Bhattacharya, as one would expect of him, markets the project in the media with great professionalism.

"You don't seriously believe that I could, even approximately, recoup the construction costs within my lifetime through broadcasts from the habitat, do you? The research conducted there is an end in itself, and not commercially motivated in any case."

More than three thousand drones swim in the aquarium, modeled in appearance and movement patterns on the remora which attach themselves to large fish in Earth's oceans. These can remain in the sharks' vicinity at all times without affecting their behavior, and deliver striking footage of the majestic predators.

"I hope that these recordings may help to kindle my passion for these animals in others as well, and to remind humanity once more that sharks are not bloodthirsty beasts but interesting and admirable creatures with an aesthetic all their own, primeval and distinctive," Bhattacharya concludes.

By now, night has fallen in the habitat. The central light column has been dimmed to a deep, almost violet twilight. Our observation bubble drifts slowly back toward the visitor center. On the way we pass once more by the transparent floor section, his Crystoplast window. Outside lies open space. MARINE happens to be favorably placed along its annual loop: Earth is a full disk, barely the size of a hand, but bright enough to shine in through the windows. And down there a sleeping shark drifts in its slow descent, motionless but for the rhythmic opening of its gills.

Lit by the pale blue glow of Earth, the shark appears to float against the starfield of space.