This is an I-Hart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

The deep seabed

bed covers over half of the Earth.

That's an area that's larger than the moon

and an area that's larger than the surface of Mars.

But we know precious little about Earth's depths.

And just about every time we go down there, we find something amazing and new.

But another thing that we've found down there are resources.

And some of these resources could be used for things like making batteries for electric cars.

So how do we go about balancing the health of a diverse but poorly understood ecosystem

against humanity's needs for resources?

And who gets to make those choices?

On today's show, we're bringing Dr. Andrew Thaler on to answer these questions and more.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Deep Universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist who also likes thinking about aliens, and I love living next to the ocean.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith.

I study parasites and space.

And yeah, I've got to admit living next to the ocean is probably awesome.

I once had an office on the sea, and I could see the sunset over the ocean, and it was pretty epic. I'll score. I'm giving you a point for that.

And I have to do some accounting here also and give you a point because, you know, on the podcast,

...