The People Under The Sea.

If no human has ever seen a living giant squid, if we don’t know when and where “…the most gargantuan beast the Earth has yet produced…” breeds, if we have better maps of the surfaces Mars and the Moon than we do of our ocean floors, if there could be as many as thirty-million species of animals living under the sea, if we’ve only sent humans to the very bottom of the ocean once, in 1960, in a metal ball with small windows and no lights, is it too far a stretch of the imagination to entertain the possibility of intelligent life under our oceans?  (With all due respect to them, I’m not speaking here of dolphins and whales, I mean creatures with some or other form of technology).  And if we choose to entertain this inane suggestion, could we not also presume that they are mightily pissed off at us landlubbers? 

It has been recently brought to my attention that throughout the twentieth-century, until the nineteen-nineties - when they allegedly stopped - the United States has dumped hundreds of thousands of drums of radioactive wastes into the ocean.  In fact, when many of these drums didn’t sink, they would be shot full of holes.  Absolute genius!  Water in, radioactive wastes out and down they go.  Coupled with that, such “miscalculations” as those that led to the Ixtoc I oil well blowout of 1979 and the recent Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion of 2010, we’ve done our fair share to mess the oceans and seas up.  So yeah, I would think the people living underwater are pretty upset.

Now considering we’ve not seen much of the diverse life that lives below the oceans and seas, including the techno savvy people living there.  I feel we need to ask some pertinent questions:  What technology might they have?  What are their capabilities?  How, if they ever decide to, would they retaliate? 

If these people do exist, it seems obvious to me that they are a peaceful species that has learned to live in harmony with their natural surroundings, inventing technologies that work with, because of and through nature and not against, in spite of or outside of it.  Nothing they have done, to our knowledge, has directly affected us in a negative manner.  Or has it?

As much as we think we can scientifically explain natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes, as much as we think we understand some of the strange weather phenomenon that we have experienced over the past century or so, could it not be possible - at a further stretch of the imagination – that they have so perspicaciously learned to communicate and work with mother nature, they have the capacity to induce her into labour?  Could we not already be seeing retaliation on a scale our soil minds cannot fathom?  Is this El Nino not the premature child of mother earth, brought to life and incubated by the people living with the extreme pressures of underwater living?  People living alongside fangtooth and Pacific viperfish?  People who have discovered how to use deep sea bamboo coral and tunic colonies of pyrosomes for lighting, instead of evanescent hundred-watt light bulbs. 

Are we witnessing a true world war, one which we are undeniably ill prepared for?  With dolphins and whales as their spies instead of a dapper and debonair British man, with fancy gadgets designed by an old man in a wheelchair.  Is the story of The People Under The Sea about to unfold before our very eyes?  All we can do is wait and see…

Thabiso Nkoana © 17 May 2014