"Within fifty years," says Dr. F. N. Spiess, head of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, "man will move onto and into the sea – occupying it and exploiting it as an integral part of his use of this planet for recreation, minerals, food, waste disposal, military and transportation operations, and, as populations grow, for actual living space."

More than two-thirds of the planet's surface is covered with ocean – and of this submerged terrain a bare five percent is well mapped. However, this underwater land is known to be rich with oil, gas, coal, diamonds, sulphur, cobalt, uranium, tin, phosphates and other minerals. It teems with fish and plant life.

These immense riches are about to be fought over and exploited on a staggering scale. Today in the United States alone more than 600 companies, including such giants as Standard Oil and Union Carbide, are readying themselves for a monumental competitive struggle under the seas.

The race will intensify year by year – with far-reaching impacts on society. Who "owns" the bottom of the ocean and the marine life that covers it? As ocean mining becomes feasible and economically advantageous, we can expect the resource balance among nations to shift. The Japanese already extract 10,000,000 tons of coal each year from underwater mines; tin is already being ocean-mined by Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Before long nations may go to war over patches of ocean bottom. We may also find sharp changes in the rate of industrialization of what are now resource-poor nations.

Technologically, novel industries will rise to process the output of the oceans. Others will produce sophisticated and highly expensive tools for working the sea – deep-diving research craft, rescue submarines, electronic fish-herding equipment and the like. The rate of obsolescence in these fields will be swift. The competitive struggle will spur ever accelerating innovation.

Culturally, we can expect new words to stream rapidly into the language. "Aquaculture" – the term for scientific cultivation of the ocean's food resources – will take its place alongside "Agriculture." "Water," itself a term freighted with symbolic and emotional associations, will take on wholly new connotations. Along with a new vocabulary will come new symbols in poetry, painting, film and the other arts. Representations of oceanic life forms will find their way into graphic and industrial design. Fashions will reflect dependence on the ocean. New textiles, new plastics and other materials will be discovered. New drugs will be found to cure illness or alter mental states.

Most important, increased reliance on the oceans for food will alter the nutrition of millions – a change that, itself, carries significant unknowns in its wake. What happens to the energy level of people, to their desire for achievement, not to speak of their biochemistry, their average height and weight, their rate of maturation, their life span, their characteristic diseases, even their psychological responses, when their society shifts from a reliance on agri– to aquaculture?

The opening of the sea may also bring with it a new frontier spirit – a way of life that offers adventure, danger, quick riches or fame to the initial explorers. Later, as man begins to colonize the continental shelves, and perhaps even the deeper reaches, the pioneers may well be followed by settlers who build artificial cities beneath the waves – work cities, science cities, medical cities, and play cities, complete with hospitals, hotels and homes.

If all this sounds too far off, it is sobering to note that Dr. Walter L. Robb, a scientist at General Electric, has already kept a hamster alive under water by enclosing it in a box that is, in effect, an artificial gill – a synthetic membrane that extracts air from the surrounding water while keeping the water out. Such membranes formed the top, bottom and two sides of a box in which the hamster was submerged in water. Without the gill, the animal would have suffocated. With it, it was able to breathe under water. Such membranes, G.E. claims, may some day furnish air for the occupants of underwater experimental stations. They might eventually be built into the walls of undersea apartment houses, hotels and other structures, or even – who knows? – into the human body itself.

Indeed, the old science fiction speculations about men with surgically implanted gills no longer seem quite so impossibly far-fetched as they once did. We may create (perhaps even breed) specialists for ocean work, men and women who are not only mentally, but physically equipped for work, play, love and sex under the sea. Even if we do not resort to such dramatic measures in our haste to conquer the underwater frontier, it seems likely that the opening of the oceans will generate not merely new professional specialties, but new life styles, new ocean-oriented subcultures, and perhaps even new religious sects or mystical cults to celebrate the seas.

One need not push speculation so far, however, to recognize that the novel environments to which man will be exposed will, of necessity, bring with them altered perceptions, new sensations, new sensitivities to color and form, new ways of thinking and feeling. Moreover, the invasion of the sea, the first wave of which we shall witness long before the arrival of A.D. 2000, is only one of a series of closely tied scientific-technological trends that are now racing forward – all of them crammed with novel social and psychological implications.