Saturday 27 June 2015

Back in the Sea


I managed my first sea dive of the year yesterday. I say "dive"; we managed about 3.5m of depth, and the viz was as shown in the photo!

Still, 'tis good to have some saltwater on my gear. Also, we were at St Mary's Island, and whilst the seals didn't get too close, they did pop their heads up to see who the strangers were. All in all, it was way more fun than being at work.

Saturday 20 June 2015

Got My Pills

Things are better since my last post. I have successfully obtained my pills, meaning that the floor is now where I expect it to be. Losing your sense of balance is a side-direction of sudden SSRI-drug withdrawal. It is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

Happily, my prescription was where I expected it to be, at the chemist's. In the past, neither the chemist nor the doctor has known who is supposed to have it, so I traipse backwards and forwards (unsteadily) until I find it, or have an argument with the receptionist. It's always fun trying to convince someone you are not selling your pills on the black market or OD-ing on them, when "GIVE ME MY ****ING DRUGS!" is written all over your wavering face.

Anyway, the magic happy pills are back in the medicine chest, I'm back in the sea, and all is well with the world.

Saturday 13 June 2015

This Week, Then

So, on the negative side, I pulled press desk duty the day after three violent incidents happened on the same day. I had to deal with two sets of unexpected cock-ups with three big projects, and I failed to pick up my prescription for the happy pills. Joy of joys, the prescription is now sitting inside a pharmacy that is closed until Monday and I ran out on Wednesday, meaning that I'm spending the weekend chemically impaired and not reliably able to judge where the floor is. (Yes, misfortunes caused my your own incompetence are the worst.)

On the plus side, I finally managed to do this....




... so at least I have a free cappuchino to console my woes.

I am not entirely sure that the universe is playing fair.

Sunday 7 June 2015

The Terror of Space

I was reading this article on people signing up for the Mars One expedition; a one-way trip to Mars. I cannot imagine anything much more terrifying.

The article describes the selection process for people wanting to take part. I do wonder if any part of it (yeah, you know this is coming) involved asking "Have you done any scuba diving?"

I don't often talk about the scary aspect of diving. Most other divers don't. We know it is there, and if it bothered us, we wouldn't do it. Talking about to non-divers gives the wrong impression, and can put people off. And by "wrong impression", I don't mean I'm pretending something dangerous is safe. Scuba diving is in a similar risk category to jumping into half a ton of metal and barrelling down a narrow asphalt strip at 70mph. Actually, if you check out this infographic (worth it just for the hilarious illustrations), it may well be safer than being in a car. 

The scary aspect of diving is one that it took me a while to grasp. Possibly all those people who reacted to my tales of diving with "Ohmigod, I could NEVER do that" grasped it faster than I did. From my point of view, I know where I'm going, I assess if it's safe and if my buddy and I can get to where we want to go and back with the air supply we've got. And if we can do all those things, then off we swim, breathing happily through our regulators with 12m of water over our heads.

And all that is fine, up until the proverbial hits the fan, and you suddenly realise with absolute clarity that you are in an alien environment where, to quote one of my favourite blogs on diving, "A single breath of the ambient atmosphere can, kind reader, fucking kill you".

I have never had a catastrophic experience when diving, but I had one very nasty experience when I over-breathed my regulator about 25m down in the Farne Islands (meaning I was breathing very heavily and too fast, and the regulator was struggling to deliver gas at the rate I was demanding it - gas thickens slightly at depth, which is why all divers are advised to breathe deep and slow). I felt like I was suffocating. More scary than that, I could feel myself starting to panic. Panic is the number one killer of divers. There are few more potentially panic-inducing situations than being surrounded by water, with 25m of it above your head, and not being able to breathe the air that is the only thing keeping you alive.

Fortunately for me, my dive training took over. I realised what was happening, and took the appropriate action; ascending slowly until the pressure lowered slightly, my breathing rate dropped as the surface got slightly nearer, the regulator began delivering the gas more easily, and I calmed down and carried on with the dive. But for a few seconds, I suddenly understood why panicking divers rocket up to the surface and rip all their dive gear off their faces. If willpower alone could cause humans to teleport, I would have been out of the water and on the boat in two seconds.

The only thing that kept me calm was the knowledge that it was within my power to end this situation. I knew that if I really couldn't carry on the dive, I could end it, ascend slowly and be floating on the surface in a matter of minutes.

Note: this is not the ideal way to end a dive, as technically you should always pause for three minutes at 5m deep to help ensure that any excess gas is out of your system, but all recreational diving is planned in such a way that you don't HAVE to make the stop if things go completely wrong.

Technical divers do not have this safety margin. To dive deeper, they accept that they will give up the option of ending the dive at any point, and that if they have a problem, it must be resolved under the water. (This is why they dive with two sets of working scuba gear, plus quite often extra tanks of gas in case of emergency.) This is a big part of the reason I think I may never technical dive. I respect people who do it mightily, but I am terrified of the idea of having a panic attack under the water without the option of safely removing myself from the situation inducing the panic. (This is also why part of NASA's astronaut training involves scuba diving.)

Which brings me back to Mars One. Imagine this situation for a moment. You're locked in a room the size of your living room with, say, three other people. You want to go outside. You can't. You start having a panic attack and pass out. And when you wake up ... you still can't go outside. You will never, in your entire life, see a tree, or an animal, or the sea, or anything familiar, ever again. You are sealed in that can for eternity, and there will never be a way out. Even regular astronauts in the International Space Station have the knowledge at the back of their heads that at some point, they'll be going back home.

No human beings have ever subjected themselves to this. To my mind, it's not a description of a scientific expedition, it's the plot of a horror movie. To quote another blog on this subject:

Over the decades, people in the colony will die and there is no guarantee that more people will come to replace them. In time, there will be only one person left on the entire planet. If that person is you, it will be very lonely indeed. You could be alone for ten or twenty years and possibly longer. It will just be you, marooned on an inhospitable rock out in the solar system, alone. That is truly the stuff of nightmares.

Ever since that incident in the Farne Islands, space movies scare me. I love them and still watch them, but when Sandra Bullock was floating around running out of oxygen, I was there. Space is unimaginably vast, inhospitable and empty.

And yet, funnily enough, I still do hope that at some point, my species will leave our home and travel somewhere else. Just because... well, I was brought up with Star Trek. Real space is much bigger and emptier than Gene Roddenberry made it seem, but it would truly be a remarkable thing if we could somehow find a way to travel outwards and establish ourselves on another world.

Just... not yet. And in a ship much bigger than a living room.