Scientists studying space and scientists studying the ocean face surprisingly similar problems. Both are trying to understand places that are dark, freezing, superheated or under crushing pressure, where humans cannot survive without special equipment.

Both send machines instead of people. And both are hunting for the same big question: what kind of life, if any, can survive somewhere this extreme?

Extreme pressure: Venus’s surface pressure is about 90 times Earth’s: the same crushing force as sitting 900 metres deep in our own ocean. It’s strong enough that Soviet Venera landers survived for up to about two hours before being crushed; deep-sea vehicles at the Mariana Trench face even higher pressure, over 1,000 times what we feel on land.

No sunlight: Interstellar space is dark except for scattered starlight; the ocean’s “midnight zone”, below 1,000 metres, never sees a single ray of sunlight, ever.

Strange landscapes: Mars has the tallest volcano in the Solar System, called Olympus Mons.

It is about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest. The ocean floor has its own version: the Mid-Ocean Ridge, a volcanic mountain range that stretches 65,000 km, longer than any mountain range on land.

Hidden worlds: Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, are both thought to hide entire liquid oceans under kilometres of ice.

Earth has its own hidden world too, where whole ecosystems live thousands of metres down in the deep ocean, buried under water so cold and dark that we can’t reach them without special vehicles.

Life without sunlight: Scientists look for life in Martian rock or under the ice on Europa. But we don’t have to leave Earth to see what that kind of life might look like — hydrothermal vents run entirely on chemosynthesis, not sunlight, and they’re the closest real example we’ve got.

Sound as a tool: Space is a vacuum, so sound just doesn’t travel there — total silence.

The ocean is the opposite. Sound moves through water so well that whale calls can travel thousands of kilometres, and scientists rely on sonar as one of their go-to tools for mapping the seafloor.

How little we’ve mapped: Mars has been mapped far more extensively than the ocean floor. Orbiters such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey have photographed and studied large parts of the planet, while rovers such as Curiosity and Perseverance have explored parts of its surface up close.

The ocean floor is still much less explored. As of 2026, the Seabed 2030 Project has mapped less than 29 per cent of the world’s seafloor to modern standards.

Is space really more explored than the ocean?

Not really — we’ve only sent robots to a few places in the Solar System, and no human has been past the Moon.

Exploring the deep ocean is also a challenge. Building a vehicle that can survive the enormous pressure at those depths is extremely difficult and expensive, and only a few vehicles in the world can reach the deepest parts of the ocean.

But space still gets far more funding and attention than the ocean does, even though the ocean is closer, cheaper to study and matters more directly for things like climate, food and medicine.

It’s just never had its own “space race” moment.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 22nd, 2026