How is it possible that this is the first orca birth in the wild that we've witnessed? Are they secretive when doing it?
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
218 points (99.5% liked)
science
22500 readers
192 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
They live in the ocean, we don't.
We've been looking at the ocean a whole lot, though.
I guess the oceans really really big. We haven’t seen great whites give birth either
That's because they lay eggs
That's what they want us to believe
The Great White Lie.
We've discovered more about outer space than our own waterways, TBF. By orders of magnitude, even.
We've discovered more about outer space than our own waterways, TBF. By orders of magnitude, even.
I'm not sure that's accurate. For instance, we see ocean whales all the time, we've never seen even one space whale. How can you explain that?
Yeah but tide goes out tide comes in, every day, never a miscommunication and you cant explain that
Duh. They're very shy.
No food in the upper atmosphere and all the way to space. I can guarantee we'd have space "whales" (overlords) if there were some kind of food up there (maybe just frozen spiders and bacteria). If life can adapt to pressures of 500atm, it can adapt to 0atm, gradually...if there'd be a food chain there to support it...but lower densities and/or residence times make minerals hard to come by...
Hah...maybe kessler syndrome will give the biosphere a way to reach space organically with a mineral substrate :3
All the more reason why we need to conquer the oceans with underwater bases waaaaaay before we try to conquer Mars. If we can't build an underwater base, we are completely and utterly hopeless towards the goal of living on any sort of space-bound entity.
I'm going to go ahead and say those are different goals.
Also, we've had underwater bases, we just haven't continued to man them, there just wasn't the will to continue funding it. Sealab
We could conquer the oceans, we just aren't interested enough. We could conquer space too, we just aren't interested enough. We are humans, the ultimate badasses of this galaxy; as soon as enough of us are in favor of doing something, i.e. willing to pay for something, we can do it. No exceptions.
OMG Sealab II (62m deep) was supplied by a mfing dolphin called Tuffy 🥲 the world needs more of this!
Edit: the lesson of sealab3 is that 100+m habitats are harder to build and maintain than the ISS, because the pressure difference is 10x larger.
Yeah, that's pretty great. I really want to believe that's 100% true and not an exaggeration in any way. Tuffy for the win.
You do realize the physical challenges inherent in both, and that the former environment is far more difficult than the latter to prepare for, yes? 😅
On Mars, you have no help. Nothing for at least a year. It's hard to even send a message. Going to the moon ain't shit compared to Mars. If you need supplies or repairs or people or even communication, the vastness of space is far far more apparent.
On Earth within an underwater base, if you need help from the surface, they are already up there. Almost instant speeds to get a message, and a few hours to a day to get at least something down to the base. Worse-case, you can gear up and swim up to the attached platform, and strategize there.
Without the experience of building and sustaining an underwater base, we die on Mars, if we can even get there in the first place.
That's a good post, and you're right about nearly all of it. I'm with you all the way until your conclusion.
Without the experience of building and sustaining an underwater base, we die on Mars, if we can even get there in the first place.
A few things, first, there's no doubt that we could have gotten there in the 60s we had the technology then, and we still do. But that's obviously not the hard part.
Second, no part of a sustained base in space requires a base underwater, they're a mostly different set of challenges. Honestly, I expect time will tell on this one (and pretty soon), the US and China are both racing to put a base on the moon, nobody to my knowledge, is planning a deep sea base.
And it's quite understood that the moon is a stepping stone, if you can find water there, that's the essential material needed to sustain life. But it's also exactly what you need to produce rocket fuel. If you create a spacecraft capable of getting to the moon, refuelling there would allow you to get to anywhere else in the solar system. So while an underwater base could teach some of these lessons, I expect that In practice, a moon base will teach us how to live everywhere else in space. Because not only is that closer to the goal, it's what we're actively doing.
You do realize that a lack of atmosphere (ie. vacuum) is essentially the opposite of being underwater, insofar as human survivability is concerned here, right?
Right?
Imagine being born into this world in the middle of the god damn ocean with an entourage of killer whales watching over you.
It's how badass killer whales are made!