Thom and Alan get access to a sound stage and get to actually record the podcast in the same room for the first time.

In recent news there seems to be some pop-culture discoveries, the Eye of Sauron and Spongebob and Patrick have been found in the deep sea. Finally, we try not to get too depressed about ocean warming and deep-sea mining buy considering our own energy budgets.

The topic for this double episode is, as ever, the deep sea. But this time we are talking about the deep sea… Innnnnn Spaaaaaaaace! It turns out there is deep sea outside of earth in our solar system in the ice-covered moons of the gas giants. How likely are they to contain deep-sea life completely independent from the life that originated on earth? Thom chats with astrobiologist Kevin Peter Hand, author of Alien Oceans: The search for life in the depths of space, and director of NASA’s Ocean Worlds Lab. What are the best candidates for alien life in our solar system? What could that life be like and why does our own deep ocean provide a perfect test bed?

It turns out that the early versions of the vehicles which may some day explore these ocean worlds are already in development. Thom chats with Casey Machado, Research Engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution about the Orpheus AUV, the first generation of such vehicle and a new asset to the exploration of our own deep ocean.