Sleeping Underwater

Um yeah, so we're talking about underwater hotels. We just thought one of those things where I just went on a vacation. I went to Disney that's got a lot of underwater theming and various parts of the park, and then I went on a cruise, which happens to have a lot to do with water. UHAMI would imagine. I'm actually not personally familiar with. I've never been on one. I kind of scare me. Uh well, we went through Hurricane Karen, so that was exciting. I'll tell you more

about that after the show. Anyway, it was it was actually a very interesting experience. Nothing negative to say about that, but it brought me to think about, you know, some of the more exotic kind of vacation destinations. And I remember reading back when I first started at How Stuff Works.

I remember reading about these proposed underwater luxury hotels. We're talking like five star hotels with all the amenities, or or totally submerged in the case of one of them, which the one I'm specifically thinking of, the Poseidon, we'll talk about in a little bit later in the podcast. Yeah, they started planning that in two thousand or two thousand one two one, I think, and it still doesn't exist. As it turns out. When we started doing research for this,

we were like, oh, none of these really exists. Yet. There are a few that you can stay in that are real, right, They're not the super luxury hotels, though there's one that is a super luxury hotel that does have an underwater restaurant, and and there's one that has the underwater room because there's the Atlantis, But it's not a completely submerged hotel the way the Poseidon is supposed to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We are,

we are getting weight ahead of ourselves. Um, let us let us start, well, Okay, what do you wanna do? You want to talk about the problems here? Yeah, let's talk about the problems. Okay, So Lauren, if I were to tell you that you are going to go and sleep with the fishes, you would probably think I was going to put a hit on you, you know, Godfather style.

But if I were to say, no, no, no, I mean that there's this hotel that's underwater where you can fall asleep underwater and wake up to looking outside of all these gorgeous fish, you'd realize that there are some issues you've got to work out too before anyone is comfortable staying in that space. I would I would ask, how am I going to breathe? I enjoy breathing. That's something I do. Every top of the list is the breathing problem. Yeah, As it turns out, don't know if

you guys know this. We don't breathe water so well. We like air that has a mixture of some pretty typical gases that you find on our atmosphere. It's very convenient for us, seeing as how this is where we live. But if you go underwater, you know, you get that challenge. So you have to find a way of supplying breathable atmosphere.

You have to find a way of maintaining pressure. Uh and and to prevent front water pressure from breaking the the the confines of your habitat and killing you because you could see above you can't breathe water, so yeah, so and if you're deep enough, then the pressure alone could kill you. Although for the habitats we're talking about, uh, you're in semi shallow water, shallow not to not like

you're you know, waiting around in it. But we're talking maybe thirty to fifty feet deep something along those lines, not you know, a thousand meters below the surface of the ocean. Right. This is partially because water exerts more pressure on us than air at atmosphere pressure. Yeah. So the deeper you go, the more pressure you feel. Right, So, I don't know, we talked before the podcast you have

not seen the ABYSS, right. So in the ABYSS, you have these characters who are going on these deep, deep, deep ocean UH missions, and at one point they start to experiment with a liquid oxygen. The reason why they're using a liquid oxygen is because if they were to go out in a diving suit under the amount immense pressure that they would be under as soon as they left the confines of their submersible, uh, all that air would end up dissolving into their blood and they die.

So they they have come up with this liquid stuff that would allow them to breathe. Well, we don't really have the liquid stuff that we can do, like on the level that they did in that movie, right that there is research with liquid forms of I do not have the name of it right in front of me, but it's some kind of flora carbon actually, which which is weird and interesting to me, but it's it's a pressurized liquid ish gas and odd, very strange. I don't

know how that would feel. Doesn't seem comfortable to me personally, but it right. So, so the problem when you go deep enough, I mean, once you're getting down to ninety thing like that, some of the gases that you're breathing, especially nitrogen, are going to dissolve into your blood and tissues, which is okay for a short period of time, but hey, it's very bad in the long term and be when

you go back up to the service. If you don't take steps to decompress, it can turn back into nitrogen bubbles and forming in yeah, in your tissue and blood and make you extremely sick. Yeah, you get it. It's called the bends or decompression sickness. Right, and it can be deadly. I mean, that's we're talking serious stuff here, right. It sounds like when you hear like, oh, he's got the bends, you might get the idea that yeah, I just I guess did you did you just eat something? Exactly?

What's going on? Are you a crazy straw? What happened? No, it's very serious stuff. It's actually one of those things that divers have to consider. It's when if you've ever been diving, then you know all about this. If you've ever heard people talk about how you have to take dives in very gradual stages. You can't just swim straight down to the bottom of the ocean floor in a very deep area and then swim right back back up right. You have to you have to be much more um careful,

or else you can suffer from it. And that's a huge part of your training when you go scupid eying right, and you have to occasionally go into something like a decompression chamber where the the pressure inside the chamber is controlled so that it will allow you to get back to the surface pressure gradually enough and then you can

go outside and not not suffer from decompression sickness. So that's clearly one issue is you got to figure out not just the breathing, but also how do you do this in a way where people are not going to suffer decompression sickness as soon as they transfer from being

underwater to being within the hotel environment or the habitat environment. Right. So, and so, there are two ways that you can pressure eze an underwater cabin and those are two the water pressure that's surrounding the habitat, in which case you're gonna want to use it in only very shallow situations. And again, have some kind of decompression process if if nest sary, or to pressurize this container to the surface atmosphere using airlocks, right,

and that would be like a submarine. A submarine is pressurized to the surface temperature. Which is why when a submarine comes back up, it's not that you know, suddenly all the sailors on board have to go through a decompression chamber or else they'll all suffer from the bends. It's because that submarine itself is pressurized to the surface pressure.

It's similar to what we see with airplanes to the pressurized cabins and airplanes to maintain a certain within a certain parameter UH closeness to the service pressure so that you don't have these problems that you would suffer otherwise. Now, all what we know about this pressurization and the the gases that you can breathe when you're underwater started. The

research really started about the nineteen fifties. The principle of saturation diving, which is that prolonged exposure to UH to pressurized gases that's going to build up nitrogen in your system, was proposed by Captain George F. Bond, who is a U. S. Navy physician, And that's what really kicked off the ability for us to start doing research with with underwater habitats. And this was becoming important because of a little thing called the Cold War in the space race, Oh yeah,

I remember that. I mean also environmentalism was on the rise and people were becoming really interested in all of the life in oceans. While to study that, yeah, that was still I would say that that really got a lot of traction in the seventies. Apart from one specific person who anyone who's familiar with marine biology knows the

name Jacques Cousteau, right, was certainly instrumental in six. Yeah. Yeah, so his work in the sixties certainly went a far away to giving us a greater appreciation and understanding of underwater environments. And in fact, um he started looking into an underwater habitat right right in nineteen sixty two he

started launching experiments in these pressurized underwater trips. Uh. He created the con Shelf one, which was a free standing structure down about thirty six ft under under the water, and and divers lived in it for about a week. So O, that's pretty that's that's fairly impressive. I mean, considering that you know, you're you weren't going to have many Apollo astronauts going up until wait wait, I guess,

I guess about that time, Well they're starting the training programs. Anyway, it wasn't until the late sixties that you really got them into going out into orbit. But yeah, so so you've got this this underwater habitat staying there for about a week, which that plays into our discussion on underwater hotels. That's you know, a typical vacation stays is a week long.

So it's funny to think that scientific research here, specifically looking into marine environments of marine life is somewhat paving the way underwater as it were, to underwater tourism and underwater hotels. Absolutely. Yeah, there there was another and named Edwin A Link who was um who who was another oceanographer who was working in the same field at the time.

One of his projects called The Man in the Sea would in nineteen sixty four get adopted by the U. S. Navy and that would turn into the Sea Lab program that you guys might have heard of. Yeah, I remember that show on Cartoon Network. No, no different, different, different Sea Lab, although they did have at some point a trained dolphin that would run errands for them. Wow. Really,

I I don't know what to say about that. That was That was Sea Lab two in nineteen sixty right, And so then you've also got uh, I mean Custo continued work of creating the CONSW three. Uh. There was the more sea labs, as I recall. So we have this development where we're learning more and more about how to create habitats that can safely house people for a certain length of time, increasingly long periods of time throughout throughout the sixties. We went from that first initial week

two up to a month and more. Right right there, was, Um, there's one in particular I want to talk about, but uh, I want to I want to give you the opportunity to get through the sixties and seventies first before I jump into it, because I'm going to talk about the Noah one. Okay, I think, go go for it, alright, Alright, So, so again sixties and seventies, we see more and more of these same sort of environments used for Are these

habitats used for scientific research? Noah establishes one called Aquarius off the coast of Saint Croix, and Aquarius is one of the two underwater habitats that are still really actively used these days. Um. The other one is now called Jewels, but it's it's now privately owned. It's now privately owned and operated as an underwater hotel. But it didn't start off that way. It started, right, It started off as

one of these research habitats. And and and all of these that we've been talking about have been research habitats, you know, kind of based on ocean life, but also kind of based on exactly how can we do this crazy keeping people underwater? Right? Right? So the Jewels Undersea Lodge was named after, of course, Jules Willis Vern and his leagues under the sea, right, although this one is not twenty

leagues under the ce certainly not. It is less than that sifically, it's I think it's below the surface exactly. It is The Surfaces, the world's first underwater hotel. It was originally called La Chaupapa Research Lab, Yes it was. It was created in the nineteen seventies and then renovated into a hotel in the nineteen eighties. And you it's

it's scuba focus. It's really for scuba enthusiasts. I think you don't have to have SCOOP certification to go, but they will make you take a training course just to make sure that you're dive down because you have to scuba dive into the hotel. That's the only way to get there. The way it works is that they have a wet room. That's that's called wet room because that's where you go to when you when you come into the hotel, and that's where you end up storing all

your scuba gears. And then entrance is what's called a moon pool, which I just love how romantic and lovely that name is, which is really a hole cutting the floor. It's much nicer than hole cutting. The floors names go and uh and right. It's it's compressed, I think, to the to the water around you. So you shouldn't stay

in there very very long. And the idea is that you swim underneath the structure, you come up through the moon pool, you pull yourself out, kind of like pulling yourself out of a swimming pool, and then you are inside the hotel and uh. You know again, it's it's that that water pressure specifically, because if you were at surface pressure, then you'd have to worry about decompression. Uh. If you can then take off all your gear, take a hot shower, and then move into one of the

other two rooms inside the jewels. UH. Motel is what I've seen it referred to by other underwater hotel companies. Uh it is. If you want to know some statistics, it's fifty ft long, which is about fifteen meters, it's twenty ft wide that's six meters, and eleven ft tall, which about three point four meters. It was. It's off the coast of Key Largo in the Florida Keys, made famous of course by the Beach Boys in their song Anyway, so that you uh, you know, like you said, Lauren,

you have to get there by diving. Whether or not you're certified doesn't matter. They can put you through that course, but you have to get there by diving. They don't have some other means of getting you there. I think that originally they had let guests go down breathing through a tube, a pipe that was piping oxygen down like Snooba diving, which is a combination of snorkeling and scuba, right, But due to safety concerns, they moved it to a

full exactly. That sounds like that was a good idea. Yeah, moving it. Um, it's uh. You know, once you get in there, you've got some interesting amenities. They have windows that look out their forty two inches in diameter or um uh the wait wait I wrote down how many how many centimeters? A hundred seven centimeters. I'm look it out for you guys. I just I can't make the

conversion in my head yet. I'm not that good. Um. Other amenities include things like air conditioning and an entertainment center. The picture I saw was was an old uh caval ray tube television showing I think it was the ABYSS actually on pause. Um. But anyway, it's the You also can have meals delivered down there, including from the tower of Pizza Um restaurant. I know because I actually looked into this to see, you know, I was curious to see how much it was. Did you see how much

it costs to stay there? I did not, or if I did, I did not make a network. So it's really, you know, when you think about it, you're staying underneath the Ochian. So, first of all, when we're gonna talk about these other underwater hotels in the moment, we're talking about super luxurious experiences. At least that's the idea, and so they tend to be pretty pricey, with one in particular really breaking the bank on a per night's day. But the Jewels Undersea Lodge, if it's if it's a

party of two, it's eight hundred dollars per night. So that's a party of two. That's expensive. But you're like, you're talking about being underwater as a unique experience right now, right, So uh, if it's three to but it gets lower per person if you add more people. So if you have three to four people staying there, it ends up being three fifty dollars per person. Instead four hundred per person. If you have five to six people staying there, it's

three hundred dollars per person. However, you are then staying with five to six people in a tin can. Well, you know, not all of us hate everybody, Lauren, So you know we can get along some of us with lots of people in an enclosed space. This open floor plan that we have in our office is really keyed up us on our anxiety levels and aggression levels have gone off the charts, pretty cranky. Yeah, this is only the first day, Lauren. We've got lots more of these

to look forward to, Succa. You have to deal with me. There's some behind the scenes stuff from how stuff works right there for you guys. So anyway, yeah, not not so expensive. Comparatively speaking, it is very expensive our hotel room, but for a hotel room underwater, as it turns out, not so expensive. Um So that's that's kind of the first one I wanted to talk about because it was

a direct descendant. In fact, it was one of these underwater research habitats for us to talk about the other underwater hotels, the one that exists and then the several that are proposed before we do that. I want to take a quick break and thank our sponsor. All right, so now we're gonna talk about some other underwater hotels. There is one other one that we can talk about that's actually running. It's working. You can go and you can book a room there if you wanted to, or

the room there. There's only one. There's only the one. This is called the utter Inn. It is in Sweeten on Lake something or other. I can't pronounce it. I'm not even gonna try, like Millaren, Let's let's say that is that is the English looking pronunciation of that name. It is probably completely incorrect because, as we have previously learned in the episode, Sweden be crazy. Yeah we we are.

Our mouths don't make those sounds utter in obviously that that means otter in it's the cool So it's about otters. It was created as an art project in the year two thousand by Mikhail Genberg. And okay, so so it's got it's got an above above surface part in a below surface part above above ground, above surface. I keep wanting to say ground. There's it's kind of like a

red shed with a deck around it. Yeah, it looks like it looks like it's got a little floating dock that's got nothing but a little tiny red shack on it. So if you were looking at it just from the surface, you think that is the weirdest looking thing I've ever seen. It's just floating out there on the lake. And what's that very small barbridge which with a very small wood shed on it. Um it does have you know, a little bit of a deck for sun chairs or something.

You can fit a good few sun chairs out there, and then there's a tube leading below the surface. You can go down a ladder through this tube into what I believe is a single room. It does not look terribly roomy. No, I think it's a room. It has two beds and a few picture windows that will let you look out into the lake. As of as it listed for UM, I think a thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars for seven nights for one week stage, so not bad. It's actually cheaper than the Jewels one if

you're looking to stay for a week. Uh. If you, however, you're pretty much left up on your own here, you can opt in to getting food delivered to you for an extra charge. Where I think I think it's row about distance to them. Yeah, they give you an inflatable canoe where you can you can row back to shore so that you can go and get things like food

or entertainment. It is, it is pretty impressively creepy looking. Actually, I have to say, I was looking at some pictures of the interior, and the lake is a very living lake, and so it's a little bit briny. It's kind of grayish and greenish, lots of allergae, lots of fish. Yeah, it gets very dark at night, and I'm sort of uncomfortable with that. Yeah, the idea that you, yeah, you're

not getting any starlight or moonlight down there. I mean it was the same sort of thing with the Jewels one, right, like the Jewels Hotel that if you ever see pictures of it, you see these big round windows since looking onto very green water, you know, and it's it's not like it's not the kind of don't think about those Caribbean beaches or the ones and you see in Southeast Asia,

whereas that crystal blue water it's not like that. So anyway, the those are the two that you could actually book a room at right now and go and stay in right now. The Jewels and the other. But therefore, for a room underwater, there are a couple other hotels that do have portions. There's something underwater, like the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai. Specifically, there are two Atlantis resorts. There's one

in Dubai and there's one in the Bahamas. If you ever look at this thing, it looks like two giant wings, and the center of it um has sort of an outline that looks like an Arabesque tower with a sort of a bridging kind of section on the very top. That will come in into play in just a second, because I've got a tangent that I have to talk about. But anyway, it has two suits, the Poseidon and the Neptune.

Very clever. The Posidona Neptune suites are multi floor suites and part of it is above the level of a lagoon that it looks out over, but the bottom floor is actually under the surface of the water line and

has windows look out into the lagoon. So according to one picture, although I couldn't find any confirmation on the actual Atlanti site, it was one of those pictures where I wondered if it was a an artist rendition or if it was actually this was really taken inside the suite, and one of them that showed a bedroom where the entire bedroom was submerged in the lagoon, so you you are looking out like when you look up from your bed, you're looking at the aquarium a centially or in the

inside the lagoon, so you're looking at all the sea life swimming around you. None of the pictures I saw on the actual site reflected that specific setup, so I don't know that that's really how it turned out. That might have been one of those things like and what it really looks like is No, you've got a window that looks out into the lagoon, which still is gorgeous, but it's not the same effect obviously. Um. Anyway, these

two suites are a little a little expensive. If you want to stay at either the Poseidon or the Neptune Sweet in the Atlantis Resort in Dubai for one night, that will set you back eight thousand eight for one night's stay. Yeah, it's not the most expensive Sweet in the hotel I and I'm sure it's not by far the most expensive sweet in Dubai. The most expensive Sweet in the Atlantis Resort and Dubai is Remember why I said I had that bridging kind of section that's at

the very top of that Arabs tower. Well, that that bridging section is actually a suite. It's called the Royal Bridge Suite. And one night's stay will set you back about thirty seven thousand, eight hundred dollars for one night. So that's a good salary right there for one night's stay. Yeah, that's that's much like many people's yearly k Yeah, yeah, to stay for one night. Yeah. Anyway, clearly there's a section of the world that lives in a different bracket

than I do. Uh, it's still pretty interesting, but it's not the same thing as the submerged hotel idea that we were promised. No, and uh, well there's there's also a restaurant that you can go to in a Hilton hotel out in Maldives, Maldives Islands. Yes. Um, that's the Conrad mal Dives Rangali Island. It's it's owned again by the by the Hilton Hotel chain. Um. The hotel itself spread over two islands connected by a bridge. Most of it is top side, but it does have this this

undersea restaurant that's available. Um. It only has fourteen chairs, but you can also rent it out for events for an undisclosed amount of money. Undisclosed huge amount of money, meaning huge. The pictures of this are very similar to what I was talking about about that bedroom where it's the you know, because the the ceiling itself is also

made out of a crylic it's this arc. There's an arch all the way through the dining room where you're surrounded on both sides and above it's like a two seventy degree so you're you're you're looking around underwater, and it looks very much to me like the there's a tunnel in the Georgia Aquarium in downtown Atlanta that is a very similar view or um. Maybe if you guys have seen a really terrific BioShock causplay of a big daddy and little sister, it took place in this in

the Georgia. Have you've seen the documentary Jaws three, which takes place in Sea World and they walk through some of the Sea World tunnel, same sort of thing, except you know, wider. Uh So that kind of brings us to some of the ones that have been proposed, posed, but as far as we can tell, have yet to be built. In some cases have yet to have any work done on them whatsoever. In most cases, have yet

to have any work done on them. And that that I think we should probably go ahead and just start with the Poseidon, because that was the one that that I first heard of and was so impressed by and could not wait to hear. But it was originally supposed to open in two thousand eight nine, I think, okay, two thousand nine. Uh, as far as I know, no work has really been done on the the like they

haven't installed any of the actual units. Now. The Poseidon approach was really kind of a cool idea, and it may still be a cool idea, like as an it may still be built. But the idea is that they would have an underwater corridor that was the connecting uh like like permanently fixed corridor underwater, and then the suites would be connected to it, but detachable and surfaceable in case of either emergency or repair. Right, so so each

suite could be built completely separately. UH. They're neutrally buoyant, so you can move them fairly easily through the water either up or down. You bring them down to the right level, you connect it to the corridors. The corridor has a a sealed door, and so does the suite, so that you can therefore use you can pressurize it to surface pressure. Right, and so the idea is that you could be uh transported by submersible down to the corridor, You get out of the submersible into the corridor, you

go to your room. The entire time you are under surface pressure. You never have that decompression issue, UM, and you have this gorgeous view where you can control the privacy of your room through l C d UH screens. So you could actually make them opaque or transparent and then either you know, look at just a little section of the water, or say, you know, modesty be darned, I'm going to turn all of the walls into windows

for right now. And uh just you know, any divers are swimming by are just gonna have to They're just gonna have to live with the way I hang out in my hotel room. Uh yeah. Those that that that would be some four inch thick plexiglass windows that it's planning on using in twenty four underwater speed. Specifically, I've heard UM construction was supposed to be in Portland, Oregon, and you know it's still in the works. As far

as I can tell, it has not started again. They're they're gonna lead it over to Fiji when it's done hypothetically, and it was announced in they're scouting for a second location that they have so much interest that they want

to build two. However, also that the same year a Swiss firm called Strategic Hotel Consulting estimated that the cost of one suite building one sweet, not staying there, just building it, would be eleven point four million dollars for one suite, So that could end up being a huge issue. If that actually is an accurate estimation, then that could really cause problems with them building this and you know, affording to build a full hotel. So we're still waiting

to find out if that's in fact going to happen. Um, there's some other cool ideas that are part of this hotel there they talked about Each room would also have underwater lights, so you could light up the scene around

you at night and see the fishies swimming around the night. Also, they would have push button fish feeders, so if you wanted to feed the fish eies and and or attract more fishies around your window, you push a button and it shoots food out and Okay, this sounds gorgeous and wonderful, and the cynic in me is saying that it is going to be awful for the local ecosystem. You might see a lot of obese fish like I just yet, I've never seen a flounder around before. Really delicate balance.

There's there's certainly some things that you've got to take into consideration. Although I supposed just the mirror, you know, anchoring of a giant corridor and twenty four submersible rooms underwater, we're probably screw stuff up. There's probably environmental impact there. Yeah, there's also uh, you know, it's not just made of acrylic obviously, it's also made of steel that steals about

an inch thick. It's about twenty five millimeters. For you guys out there who don't follow the imperial system like I do. Um. Then we've got a couple of other hotels we can talk about. I mean, there's more stuff we'd say about the sign, but the biggest thing is that we're still waiting on the poseidon that much information. Yeah. Yeah, China has plans to build one into the cliff side of an abandoned rock quarry in Shanghai heard about this, not at all. This is the SMaL Wonderland. And it

would have two submerged floors. The rock Quarries is partially flooded and so so two submerged floors, and then uh, you know, down there they would have a sports complex, spa swimming pool, restaurant and some guest rooms and then top side there would be some rock climbing, bungee jumping, that kind of extreme sports sort of thing. It was planning on opening, which looks unlikely as of right now, but CNN reports that there are reports of initial construction

having started. Um, which is about as vague as I think it deserves to be. Well, there's another one. Um. Did you hear about the Hydropolis underwater hotel and Resort. I didn't, but that's a really terrific word. So this one was proposed back in two thousand six, again in Dubai. Dubai is going to pop up a lot here. Yeah. Um, So this one was proposed back in two thousand and six.

The projected cost at that time was either, depending upon the source you read, three million dollars or three million pounds. That's a big difference. That is a really huge difference. Unfortunately, half the sources I looked at said one, and the other half the sources said the other. And I think it all depended on whether or not the person was writing in the US or in the UK. So I do not know which one of those figures is correct. I would imagine that both of them are way low,

yea from what it would actually cost. I also, do you want to take this opportunity to say that a lot of our research about these hotels has come from, um, perhaps less reputable sources than we would usually use, just because all of these are technically fictional, right, Yeah, they're

just kind of ideas. Yeah. In fact, if you ever do a search for underwater hotels, you're gonna come across all these top ten lists or seven lists or whatever wacky travel blogs, and and most of them are talking about like these hotels are either in operation right now are going to open it really soon. But that does not appear to be the case. It looks more like these are great ideas that mayhaps are before their time. Um. But anyway, the Hydropolis was supposed to open years ago,

and it has not opened yet. In fact, as far as I can tell, there's been no construction performed at all um or even plans for construction, like actual concrete plans to build something. It's just been in the discussion stage. But originally the ideas that it's supposed to have a land station, so you would enter this hotel through the land station. Then there's a connecting tunnel from the land station to the main hotel, and then the suites of

the hotel are all underwater. Uh, and that was supposed to be two hundred and twenty suites. This hotel is, if it were built, would be enormous, would be two d sixty hectairs, which is about the size of Hyde Park in London. Yeah. Big one night's stay was projected to be at a measly five thousand five dollars now pocket change. Yeah, I'm sure that that number has probably gone up as the hotel has failed to be built, but I would imagine that number is even higher now

due to inflation if nothing else. But then we've got another another Dubai one right, the water discus right, and this is being designed by Deep Ocean Technology, which has plans to launch several of these suckers around the world, including one over in Maldives. Um and Yeah. This this plan is for twenty one rooms under the surface, plus a lobby and in a Scooba training pool. Useful. This

one actually looks like imagine two frisbees. One of them is above the water and one of them below the water, and they're connected by a tube, and the tube actually has inside of it an elevator and stairs, and then there's a few kind of outlying disc ufo kind of looking things coming coming off of it as well. Occasionally they kidnapped cows for no reason. I don't know why, you know happens. Uh. Supposedly, the latest estimate I read was that it would be finished if everything goes as planned,

by March two thousand fifteen. So we still have a couple of years to go before this thing gets built. If it gets built, keeping in mind that we have the Poseidon and the Hydropolis, both that predate the announcement

of this hotel that still have not been built. UH. This one, that underwater portion would also be serviceable, like like those room pods from from the Poseidon and UH, and those top side portions that the kind of outlying UFO things that I was talking about can be released and used its flotation for the rest of the hotel in case of him agency, which is important. I mean, you know, if you have an earthquake or something, or tsunami or some other issue when you're right next to

the ocean. Um. Then there's also there's one that I saw where I found mentions of it across the web except for anything that actually said it existed. There were a lot of blogs that said this is going to be an amazing underwater hotel, and then when I tried to actually find any real information about it, it would just fade away. But it's called Reef World and it's supposed to be a floating hotel that's along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and it would have eight underwater

suites UH that you could stay in. So the suites themselves are submerged underwater. The rest of the hotel is sort of floating on the surface and even had like a helipad in the illustration I saw where a helicopter could land ah, But it was all artist concept drawings that I could see. I couldn't find any actual information

about whether or not construction ever started. There is a Reef World UH project in Australia, but that refers to these pontoon boats that you can go out to two snor Cole and to explore the Great Barrier reef, and there are a couple where you can do an overnight stay as part of a package. But it's not it's about Yeah, it's a boat. It's not designed as a hotel. It's a boat. It does have it does a underwater viewing area. It's kind of like a like a glass

bottom boat. But it's not a submersible. So it's and it's not. It's clearly not the same thing as what all these blogs were saying, or if it is the same thing, they scaled down big time because they went from this massive floating hotel with a helipad to a pontoon boat that I would say is a step down into the water, you know, And anything without a helipad is obviously yeah, I don't I don't stay and I won't stay in a holiday in unless it's got a helipad.

It's such as the life of a podcasting, right, you know, I live in a helipad. That was a terrible joke. That was bad even for me. I feel almost ashamed. If I could feel shame, I would feel it right now. Well, you know that's getting Do you have any other underwater hotels you wanted to talk about? I do not. That was everything on me. Yeah, yeah, there's there. Occasionally you'll see other suggested underwater hotels, but most of the cases

it's not really an underwater hotel. And again, the ones I'm really interested in are these ideas that the submerged, the totally submerged hotel, where you you aren't just looking out into an aquarium or a lagoon, you really are under the ocean. I think that's really an interesting idea. I would be willing to try it. Lauren, you said the dead's doesn't really appeal to you. Yeah, I'm kind of quicked out by open water. I'm not really okay with it. I really like breathing, and I really like

walking on solid stuff. It's all they don't. They don't reject you into the ocean, I think, not on purpose. And accidents can happen. You get that champagne bottle in there and the cork explodes with just a little more force than you were expecting the next thing, you know, and acrylic panel pops in that would be an issue. I'm I'm sure I'm sure that they if you know that the safety issues are why they do not exist right now, and that if they were created that they

would be very safe. I would certainly like to go check one out and maybe leave afterwards. Maybe not stay. I'm not sure if I could sleep, so uh, while I I do still want to do the tech stuff travels around looking at cool things. Idea that we have, um, the underwater hotel, we may just may just breeze through. I have maybe have like a five star meal. Yeah, I would be fine with justifive star there and then we'll go stay at the holiday and with the helipad

that works, I can I can deal with that, all right. Well, anyway, this wraps up our discussion about underwater hotels. It's one of those science fiction ideas that I really do hope we see come to life in the near future. Guys, if you have any suggestions for things that we should talk about in future episodes of tech Stuff, let us know. Send us an email our addresses tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on our social networking sites. Actually, I guess they're not our sites, and

we like to think of them as our own. We're talking about Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. You can find us there with the handle of text stuff. Hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it has staff works dot com