The next frontier: human settlements in the marine environment

Human settlements have permeated most terrestrial environments on Earth. With a rapidly growing global population, surging demands for finite resources and an unprecedented alteration to Earth’s ecosystems, the conservation of our only suitable habitat is a contemporary zeitgeist. These threats present a stark perspective on the trajectory of our species, and many have declared that we have reached a crossroads in this Anthropocene epoch. Now more than ever, humanity imagines a future amongst the heavens, while governments and private industries grapple with the challenges associated with settling our nearest celestial neighbors. Yet, in our over-ambitious attempts to forge new frontiers we have overlooked the largest domain of potential habitat: Earth’s oceans. Here, we present the case for humanity’s future over the marine environment. We support these notions with a global, constraint and opportunity based model that incorporates biotic, abiotic, political, and socioeconomic factors to assess the suitability of marine settlements. Our analysis shows that every oceanic basin supports regions where sustainable human settlements are plausible. More broadly, we discuss the implications of a human-marine frontier and the benefits that will ensue for science, humanity and global conservation efforts. Finally, we argue that the human-marine frontier should be the immediate stepping stone for exploration and must be overcome before we can realistically set our gaze beyond our biosphere.,All the data has been converted to netcdf or GeoTiFF files, and the script for processing and modelling the data is available at: https://github.com/StanleyMastrantonis/The-Next-Frontier.,See https://github.com/StanleyMastrantonis/The-Next-Frontier for the R script.,

人类定居活动已遍布地球绝大多数陆地生境。随着全球人口快速增长、有限资源需求激增以及地球生态系统遭受前所未有的改变，保护我们唯一适宜的生存栖息地已成为当代的核心议题。这些威胁为人类物种的发展轨迹勾勒出清晰的警示图景，诸多学者断言，我们已然在人类世（Anthropocene）到达了发展的十字路口。如今，人类比以往任何时候都更加憧憬遨游星海的未来，与此同时各国政府与私营企业正全力应对在邻近天体建立定居点所面临的各类挑战。然而，在我们雄心勃勃地开拓全新疆域的过程中，却忽略了最大的潜在栖息地领域：地球的海洋。在此，我们论证了人类未来依托海洋环境生存的可行性。我们依托融合了生物、非生物、政治以及社会经济要素的全球约束-机遇模型，评估海洋定居点的适宜性，以此支撑上述观点。我们的分析表明，所有大洋盆地均存在可实现可持续人类定居的区域。更进一步，我们探讨了人类海洋疆域的发展影响，以及其将为科学、人类社会与全球保护事业带来的诸多益处。最后，我们主张人类海洋疆域应成为深空探索的首要垫脚石，唯有攻克海洋定居相关难题，我们方能真正着眼于地球生物圈之外的星际探索。所有数据均已转换为NetCDF（网络通用数据格式）与GeoTIFF（地理标记图像文件格式）文件，数据处理与建模脚本可通过以下链接获取：https://github.com/StanleyMastrantonis/The-Next-Frontier。R语言脚本可访问上述GitHub仓库获取。