Deep-Sea Utopias

Dr. Joe MacInnis’s Breathing Underwater is a double feature from the age of Aquarius. We get not only the Ethos of an Era (the 1960s bubbling with adventurism and idealism), but also the Eros of Ether (a personal account of the rapture of the deep).

While Marshall McLuhan was writing about the cultural and psychological effects of new technologies, which he called “the extensions of man,” hard scientists and inventors were bent on colonizing sea and space. Their projects, mostly financed by the U.S. military/industrial complex, envisioned a man/machine future with astronauts and aquanauts living in self-sufficient habitats. In 1964, MacInnis met Jacques Cousteau, inventor of the aqualung, who told him how “a new kind of human, Homo aquaticus, lungs filled with an incompressible fluid, will come into being shortly after the year 2000. They will extract oxygen from the ocean by means of artificial gills.”

As a young medical graduate...