New Horizons

[TotalyMeow]

Why do they bother going to uninhabited planets when they still haven't even been to the deepest end of our planets oceans? Its not that hard to attach cameras to whales.

A vacuum is a lot easier to design around than pressures exceeding 200 atmospheres, which is about what a sperm whale dives to. And it probably IS that hard to attach a camera to a whale. Seriously though, we're doing both, why choose between deep ocean OR space?

[Hose]

[Dallane]

Why do they bother going to uninhabited planets when they still haven't even been to the deepest end of our planets oceans? Its not that hard to attach cameras to whales.

or made world peace, or feed every children, or bring free clean water to everyone, or cure cancer or... etc...

or stop pedophiles

[KruskDaMangled]

Why do they bother going to uninhabited planets when they still haven't even been to the deepest end of our planets oceans? Its not that hard to attach cameras to whales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench

James Cameron actually went to the bottom in the Deepsea Challenger as recently as 2012.

All the same, we know a very small amount about it because it's so hard to get down there, and there is a fairly big amount of it. Monumentally more true of deep ocean in general (The surface area of the earth that is average ocean bottom is basically the majority of the Earth.)

It's also hard to study the animals down there because their native environment might as well be a very adversely different alien one. The only thing in our favor is you can go there and back within a period of hours, as opposed to the inconceivably large distances involved with interstellar travel.

And even when you get them back up here, well, it's hard because even the best measures don't preserve them very well and they inevitably die or are unhealthy.

Simply doing decent anatomical studies is hard enough.