Hacker Cinema
Sealab 2021
2000 · TV series · 12 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Adam Reed, Matt Thompson
The year is 2021. Deep below the ocean's surface, looms a vast, magnificently high-tech compound: Sealab. A multi-national scientific station with an annual budget in the trillions, manned by a motley collection of malcontents and screw-ups who were unfit for work in the private sector. They really don't get any research done, but instead spend their time bickering among themselves or just plain goofing off. The crew have manipulated their luckless leader, Captain Murphy, into submission, and are content to ride the government clock, raking in fat, hazardous-duty paychecks.
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You wrote: "No one wondered how it would disturb the seafloor since so little was known about the deep sea environment back then."
The "Sealab 2020" cartoon show had an episode about this in 1972 (so, over 50 years ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealab_2020 "7 "Where Dangers Are Many" October 21, 1972 Sealab crew investigates a disturbance to find an automatic bottom-dredging mining operation in their area. The captain of the operation, Samuel Carlson, becomes trapped under his dredge and is rescued by Sealab. While Carlson is decompressing after having received medical attention at Sealab, the crew manage to convince him to allow them 24 hours to demonstrate how to mine less destructively."
Available here: https://archive.org/details/sealab-2020-the-complete-series
Specifically: https://archive.org/download/sealab-2020-the-complete-series/Sealab%202020%2007%20-%20Where%20Dangers%20are%20Many.mp4
One issue though: in the episode, the Sealab 2020 crew were worried about damage to sealife as a byproduct of mining. They were OK with removing the nodules if they could be done without causing significant seafloor disturbance. But it sounds like removing the nodules might by itself harm sealife by depriving sealife of oxygen.
Another theme in the episode is the need for a person in the loop to guide the dredging machine to do less damage -- compared to a fully automated system the owner was so proud of investing in. Interesting to think about given the push to AI these days.
I watched Sealab 2020 at the time as a kid and very much enjoyed it and saw these characters as role models. I very much dreamed back then of leading such a lab when 2020 rolled around (like a "Paul" character did in the cartoon). Heartbreaking in 2001 to see "Sealab 2021" make fun of all this hopefulness for the future and the environment -- when I was hoping for a good sequel building on the Sealab 2020 values.
Sadly, my own plans from the 1980s to make Sealab-like habitats in the oceans, in outer space, and elsewhere never got very far (yet):
https://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
I've also been wondering if there is something similar to Content Aware Fill that can help process old 4:3 cartoons to 16:9.
A lot of the really old cartoons would use a background art image and would pan over it with the characters dong stuff to create a sense of motion. Sometimes the characters would move over a still background image but the 'camera's would zoom in.
Something that could extract the full size background image to apply it to the frames to enlarge the aspect ratio could go a long way toward revitalizing a lot of older cartoons. Especially fit could fill in any gaps using the opensource equivilent of Content Aware Fill (is there an FOSS equal?)
I've been trying to get my kids into Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Home Movies, Sealab 2021, the Simpsons, etc. If the video is wide screen they try it and enjoy it. If it's 4:3 they barely give it a chance because it's "too old"