![]() The meeting was supposed to focus on the practicalities of launching a new round-the-world deep-sea expedition or similarly, the need to simply do something big. In an age of drastically changing climate, a new appreciation for the size and expanse of the deep sea and its ever more evident linkages with the surface is apparent ( Smith et al., 2008 Danovaro et al., 2017), and therefore an urgent step-change in deep-sea science and how it is perceived is required. The objective of the event was to discuss how to mark the 150th anniversary of the pioneering deep-sea round-the-world expedition of the HMS Challenger (1873–1876), which laid the foundations of modern deep-sea research ( Rice, 1999). In November 2018, for example the Royal Society in London hosted a meeting entitled Beyond Challenger: A New Age of Deep-Sea Science and Exploration. While this famous cartoon is taken with the humour that it was intended, it does raise an extraordinarily pertinent question: “Why don't people care about the deep sea?” It is a complex question that over recent years has been asked in a variety of contexts. The image depicted five well-dressed old ladies sitting for a quiet afternoon tea when ones turns to another and says, “I don’t know why I don’t care about the bottom of the ocean, but I don’t”. ![]() On 21 March 1983, cartoonist Charles Saxon published a cartoon in the American magazine, The New Yorker. This discussion focusses on the nexus of scientific and non-scientific perceptions to catalyze meaningful societal engagement with the deep sea and to try and understand “Why don't people care about the deep sea?” The answers are complex, covering issues such as conscious and subconscious thalassophobia, perspectivism, aesthetics, phenomenology, abstract interpretation, epistemology and media-driven enigmatization, self-deprecation by the science community, and perceived value-driven ethics. A recurring question within deep-sea science and conservation is why don't people care about the deep sea? How does the deep-sea science community convince non-scientific audiences to support, engage, and care more for the largest habitat on Earth? Here, we examine various aspects of an apparent dichotomy of perspectives between the scientific and non-scientific communities by discussing the problematic roots from within human neuropsychology, and how knowledge of the deep sea is delivered to, perceived by, and ultimately valued by non-scientific audiences.
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