And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of "Titanic," I said, "Okay, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full time explorer for a while." And so, we started planning these expeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the Titanic wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it.

So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. When I say, I'm operating it, but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship.

So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresense experience that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really really quite profound. And may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan.

So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing amazing animals. They are basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They don't survive on sunlight based system the way we do. And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500 degree Centigrade water plumes. You think they can't possibly exist.

At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well, again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going to the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments, taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.

So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real.

文本大意:

在《泰坦尼克号》成功后,我做了一个决定:暂停我的主业--好莱坞导演,做一段时间全职探险家。于是我们开始策划一些探险。在自动探测车帮助下,我们去了些危险的地方。我们发明了技术,对泰坦尼克号残骸做了一次全面勘测,使它再次重现在人们面前。

通过一种会飞行的自动探测仪,我可以坐在一个潜艇里探索泰坦尼克号的内部。当我在操作仪器时,我的脑子就像是在这些探测仪中。我感觉我自己真的到了泰坦尼克号上。这是一种最令人兴奋的似曾相识的感觉。我知道假如我在这里转个弯,我将会看到什么。因为我已经在另一个完全一样的泰坦尼克号复制品上工作了好几个月。这是一次不同寻常的体验。它让我感觉到,远程监控的能量。你的意识可以被注入这些机器或注入另一种存在中。这种体验非常深刻。或许几十年后,当半机器人出现,或者任何后人类生物出现时,人们会对这种感觉习以为常。

在这些探险之后,我开始真正感谢这些存在于海底的生物。这些生物基本上对于我们来说就是外星生物。它们生活在一个化学合成的环境之中。它们无法像我们一样存活于太阳之下。同时,从小被科幻小说影响的我对于太空科学也非常感兴趣。我进入了NASA的顾问委员会,策划真正的太空行程,让宇航员带着3D摄像机进入太空站。这些非常有趣,但我真正想做的是将这些太空专家带入深海,让他们看看深海,取一些样本。所以我们既做了纪录片,也在做科学。这些事业将我整个人生很好地整合了起来。

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