But just for fun, here it is in Fathoms.

That's the depth at the ocean's lowest point, located here, and named Challenger

Deep after an old English boat.

Which is nice, I guess, but if I'm a boat, the last thing I want named after me is the deepest point on the ocean floor—just one boat's opinion.

Challenger Deep is about seven miles down, or fine, like 11 kilometers, and it looks like this because no light gets there.

It's so deep that you could sack Angel Falls, the Burj Khalifa, the Great Pyramid, the Louvre

Pyramid, the tallest sequoia tree, Big Ben, all three members of Destiny's Child, and the entirety of Mount Everest in there without breaking the surface.

The water is always just above freezing and, as a fun bonus, the water above it exerts almost 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure on anything down there, so it's not what

I'd call an ideal vacation spot.

But nevertheless, somewhere between 27 and 40 people have stopped by since the first successful expedition in 1960.

How have so many people managed to visit such an inhospitable place?

Scientific necessity?

Some Cold War proxy thing?

Nope, most Challenger Deep missions trace back to everyone's favorite group, eccentric rich guys.

The US Navy takes credit for the first one, but its co-pilot, Jack Picard, built the ship with his father using money from a bunch of European industrialists, then sold it to the

Navy on the condition that he would still get to drive it.

The next person went 52 years later, and it was James Cameron, who directed Titanic, and is somehow still not afraid of the sea, and today, the vast majority of successful Challenger

Deep missions happen on a submarine built for private equity investor and lover of highly specific vehicles, Victor Vescovo.

Of humanity's 22 trips to Challenger Deep between January 1960 and July 2022, 19 of them were on that submarine, the limiting factor, and we're getting to the bottom of how it gets to the bottom of this.

The limiting factor cost $37 million and was designed, built, and tested all over the world for about four years before its first expedition.

The core of the thing is a big sphere with 9-centimeter-thick titanium walls and a 59-inch, or 1.5-meter, diameter interior.

They chose a titanium grade V ingot for the walls because it offered corrosion resistance and a good strength-to-weight ratio—it's also got three domed acrylic windows passengers can look through.

When assembled, the hull is within 99.933% accuracy of a perfect sphere, which keeps the pressure evenly distributed across its surface.

It's also pretty darn impressive—have you ever tried to roll play-doh into a perfect sphere?

Have you ever tried doing the same thing with a titanium grade V ingot?

Not easy.

Before hitting the mighty Pacific, they needed to prove the hull could withstand some of the greatest pressure on Earth.

Unfortunately, the team couldn't get a titanium ball into an air traffic control job or a middle school game of truth or dare, so they did the next best thing—send it to a state research center in St. Petersburg, Russia, one of the only places with machines capable of this high pressure of a pressure test.

Other components of the limiting factor were made in the UK, Germany, Spain, and Australia, and in the US everywhere from Florida to North Carolina to Wisconsin and beyond, which is to say, despite its name, cost, convenience, and transport distance were not limiting factors in building the limiting factor.

The pilot gets a joystick and touchscreen to drive with, a bunch of computers to look at stuff, and one of two chairs to sit in that, don't worry, I've confirmed are both ergonomic and have enough room to stash a tuna sandwich under—presumably other sandwiches would fit too, but I haven't been able to verify.

The hull sits in this big ol' box, and when it's exploring time, an air-filled chamber above the entry hatch fills with water, and it starts sinking down at about one to two knots.

There's a layer of syntactic foam that adds some positive buoyancy to the whole thing, and because it's above the hull, it keeps the sub upright.

On the side, thrusters allow omnidirectional movement.

On the top, tracking and communications equipment keeps the sub in contact with the mothership, but the pilot has to check in with every 15 minutes.

After four hours, it's time to slow the descent, so the pilot starts dropping 20 weights, each weighing 5 kilograms, one at a time, so the sub becomes positively buoyant by the time it's near the seafloor.

I say near the seafloor, because the limiting factor doesn't actually touch the ground at Challenger Deep—it travels all that way to hover just above, which is both very disappointing and very smart.

See, on the first expedition to Challenger Deep, they landed the submarine on the ground and kicked up so much sediment that it blocked all the windows and nobody saw anything.

So at depth, the limiting factor makes itself just a little bit floaty, then uses the thrusters to push itself ever so slightly down to stay near the floor without disturbing it.

It's got cameras to capture footage, LED lights so you can see stuff out the windows, and a robot arm to collect research samples—though there's not much to see out those windows, except apparently a few freaky little fish things and a plastic bag.

Can you believe freaky little fish things produce and discard single-use plastics?

Despicable.

On the bottom of the limiting factor, there's a big steel weight, and when it's time to surface, the pilot drops that weight to start the sub's ascent.

Because the weight's held on by an electromagnet, it'll drop and start the ascent automatically if the sub loses power.

It'll also drop if the sub detects that the pilot is either passed out or dead.

There are also 12 backup batteries, 96 hours of emergency life support, and several other failsafe features that ensure nothing… um… bad happens.

All these features and more are how, after a 52-year gap between the first Challenger

Deep expeditions, and a seven-year gap between James Cameron's and Victor Vescovo's first, the gap between the limiting factor's first trip and its second was four days, and between its second and third, another four days, then it did 12 in the next two years.

As for why it did all that, I don't know, doesn't seem like that fun of a place to go.

I'd honestly rather see any of these.

If you want to get to the bottom of the ocean, you need a specialized, multi-million dollar submersible.

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