Beyond Movies: James Cameron is Exploring New Frontiers

When most people think of James Cameron, they first think of his movies: Aliens, Titanic, Avatar, The Terminator. Then they might reflect on how his films have pushed major technological advances in the entertainment industry, from the state-of-the-art visual effects that created the water tentacle in The Abyss to the high-tech SimulCam system used to film Avatar. But for Cameron, Hollywood is just the beginning. His innovations are also expanding human knowledge by exploring new frontiers. "Exploring is, in many ways, my first love," the director says. He has led an expedition to probe the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck and helped design 3D cameras for NASA's next Mars rover. "We let Jim shoot pictures with our cameras in Mars orbit," says Michael Ravine, advanced projects manager at Malin Space Science Systems. "When I brought him the 12-foot-long prints, he halted a meeting and came out to sweep the floor so we had a big enough area to unroll them. He was asking questions about collapsed lava tubes while all these movie folks stood around, wondering what was going on." Cameron isn't a scientist—"I think of myself more as a science groupie," he says—but there's no telling how many have been inspired by his work. Popular Mechanics correspondent Anne Thompson spoke with Cameron about his plans to dive to Challenger Deep, the real obstacle to colonizing Mars and how humanity should grapple with its greatest challenge.

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Next year you plan to dive to the deepest known point in the ocean in a sub that you've helped design. Why?

I believe in exploration. These trenches, which are deeper than 6000 meters, have never been explored. We don't know what's there. Space exploration is really the product of governments. Most individuals can't afford to explore space. For private exploration, we're really bound to the Earth, and the last great frontier is the Hadal trenches.

Footage for both Titanic and the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss came from ROVs. How have your undersea vehicles evolved over time?

In 1998 we started to engineer these small robotic vehicles that were designed to go inside shipwrecks. We decided to use syntactic foamthe only flotation system that works at extreme depthsstructurally on the robotic vehicle, which had never been done before. Now we're building our 23-foot-long piloted submersible, the Deep Challenger, entirely out of syntactic foamexcept for the pressure hull, which is the sphere that we all sit inside.

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What are the challenges of engineering to withstand deep-sea environments?

At 36,000 feet, you've got 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. That translates to tens of millions of pounds distributed over the surface of the sub's pressure sphere. If your pressure port fails, your sub is going to implode. If your penetrator fails, a jet of high-pressure water will enter the sub and cut everything in half. These are the risks that you have to engineer against. But they're also givens from the beginning of every project.

Were there any times on a dive when you were in real danger?

There have been white-knuckle momentscomplete power failures, where we've had to use emergency ballast systems to get back. And that gives you an appreciation of the layers of technology that go into these machines to make them safe. I've done 75 submersible dives since 1995, and, yeah, your life is at risk anytime you go into a hostile environment like that. But you trust the engineering.

You were also very involved in developing a 3D camera for the Mars rover Curiosity before NASA's budgetary concerns got in the way.

I'm a very minor player in development of the Mastcam, the eyes of the rover that will launch later this year. The camera was originally conceived to be 3D and have two zoom lenses, [but NASA] decided to go with fixed-focal-length lenses in two different focal lengths, meaning we can't do 3D.

You used 3D in Avatar to create a completely immersive world. What's the value of sending 3D cameras into unexplored places like space and the deep sea?

Evolution has made 3D the standard method for viewing the world. There's a heightened sense of being physically present, so people will have a greater appreciation of exploration in general and what is specifically being learnedwhether it's on the surface of Mars or at the bottom of the ocean.

Sending cameras is one thing, but do you have any ambitions to go to space yourself?

Absolutely. I was going to go up on the Russian Soyuz system. Elon Musk's Dragon spacecraft (page 70) will have the ability to send seven people into low Earth orbitand none too soon. The space shuttle was just sucking up a lot of money and going nowhere fast, literallygoing 17,000 miles an hour to stay in orbit. That's like Columbus going to Queen Isabella and saying, "I'm going to explore a new continent. But first I'm going to sit offshore for 30 years and study the problem of people living on small ships."

We've learned a lot about Mars in the past decade. What will it take to fully explore it?

I think it'll be like ocean exploration: a mixture of humans and robotics. We could put the most capable rover on Mars, but there's still as much as a 40-minute lagso if we tried to tell it to avoid running off a cliff, it would be lying at the bottom in pieces for 40 minutes by the time it got the signal. If you want to get a lot of work done, you've got to put a human there.

What obstacles do we face in actually getting people to Mars?

We could use chemical rockets to send people to Mars. That's not the issueit's living on the surface. The only way to tackle that problem is to tackle that problem, not talk about it. This country has the potential to be resting on its laurels so long that it loses the capability to do the kinds of things that we pride ourselves on being able to do. No human has been outside low Earth orbit in 40 years. That's crazy!

What is the role of science-fiction filmmaking in inspiring people to think boldly?

Fantasy and imagination have driven the filmmaking process, which has driven technology. And I know from working in the sciencesespecially space science and astronomythat every one of these scientists was a science-fiction fan when they were a kid. It was an outlet for their imagination and their sense of what was possible.

Popular Mechanics is going to be 110 years old next year. Where will humanity be 110 years from now?

We're facing arguably the most challenging century in human history. We have to get our act together and learn to cooperate between nations to solve global-scale problems. This is the turning point where we've exceeded, or will shortly exceed, Earth's ability to support us. And we're going to have to change our thinking. We have to be more organized and self-sacrificing and less contentious, or we're not going to make it.

What do you think we need to do to make these changes happen?

We need to start trusting science a whole lot more. We love when science gives us something we want, like the semiconductors in our brand-new iPad. But we don't trust science when it's a message we don't want to hear, like we need to reduce our consumption of resources. There were warnings in science fiction, whose job has always been to imagine the futurewhether an exciting future of shiny technology or a dystopian one. And now there are very real warnings from the science community, but we're not taking them seriously. The danger is very real. We are racing toward a cliff with the top down and the radio playing. We've got to wake up.

You're passionate about so many of the topics Popular Mechanics covers. What does winning this award mean to you?

The magazine is a mixture of science, engineering and backyard tinkering. I love that, because I like to sit at that particular nexus myself. This award symbolizes that I've managed to pull it offto do something of value in those areas.

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