Robert Ballard
Robert Ballard
Robert Duane Ballardis a retired United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionExplorer
Date of Birth30 June 1942
CityWichita, KS
CountryUnited States of America
Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing.
I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take control of my vehicle system.
NASA's annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA's budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years.
You don't let a historic site rot.
Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent.
Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas.
Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet.
The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight-previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life-has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.
My final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonizing the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet, and the technology is at hand!
Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend.
It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest.
Remember to always dream. More importantly, work hard to make those dreams come true and never give up.
The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.
The greatest discoveries all start with the question "Why?"