Imagine waking up, brushing your teeth, and eating breakfast while schools of fish and dolphins swim past your window. Going to work just means putting on a wetsuit, swimming out of your habitat, and spending the day with marine life. The only time you need to swim back home is to eat, sleep, and keep your stuff working.

For six Italian scuba divers, this routine will comprise two weeks of their lives as they attempt to live underwater off the coast of Ponza and try to prove that humans can colonize the ocean.

“What we want to do is live with the sea life without altering the ecosystem,” said Corrado Costanzo, the Underwater House Project’s medical coordinator, to Scuba Herald.

Kyle Dell, assistant professor of political science and coordinator of the environmental studies program, has mixed feelings about extending our reach into the oceans.

“In some ways what I like is that in moving to places where we usually don’t live, they really have to appreciate and be intentional about how they’re existing with their environment,” said Dell. “However, given how badly we’ve messed up our (ecological) footprint already, I’m not excited to see us moving to places where there is no footprint yet.”

The divers will live at a depth of 15 meters in a housing complex comprised of four diving bells anchored with 220,000 pounds of ballast and powered by solar panels at the surface. The divers will be provided with water via desalination, a process that removes salt from water, but they will have to provide their own food. Three of the bells will function as living quarters, and the fourth as a common room where the team can cook, eat, and maintain their gear.

“I think I’ll take a book with me, a frisbee, we are going to bring playing cards, and an MP3 player, if I can find a waterproof model,” diver Luca Giordani said to AP Television News. “I’ll try to spend time as well as possible,”

A similar two-week undertaking in Australia will have a man living underwater in a sealed nine cubic-meter container. According to Scuba Herald, marine biologist Lloyd Godson believes he can survive by growing algae to produce oxygen and eat, and can power his underwater home with electricity produced from a stationary bike.

“We’ve got some gas monitors and back-up air supplies to make sure that the air quality stays at a high standard,” Godson said to Scuba Herald. “If it doesn’t, then that’s when I’ll implement my back-up.”

Even though Godson is not the first to attempt an underwater excursion like this, he remains enthusiastic. He told the Australian Associated Press that the fact that it is not a multi-million dollar program keeps him excited and looking forward to the project.
Aside from the obvious benefits of easing the burden of high population density, ocean colonization presents opportunities for new resources and recreational activities. However, problems of economic sustainability, food, ecological influence, and sovereignty still exist as major hurdles to the advancement of colonizing the seas.
“There’s got to be an economic reason for it to happen, and I’m not sure what that is,” said Dell. “The economics also pushes it into the realm of politics, so it’s kind of akin to space exploration. It takes 16 nations to keep three people on the international space station, so I don’t see a lot of political backing on a project like this.”

With many political figures having stakes in oil giants, it might not take much for Exxon Mobil to litter the ocean floor with oil platforms. However, if environmental groups and scientists continue to spearhead research into ocean colonization, living in a non-intrusive underwater habitat may someday become a reality.

Until then, we’ll have to make do with “Waterworld.”