If they get their way, we'll have to change our meme

[Malleus_Incus_Stapes]

Zillionares financing private rocket ships is apparently already passe. These guys are taking the logical next step: submarines.

A new generation of daredevils is seeking to plunge through nearly seven miles of seawater to the bottom of a rocky chasm in the western Pacific that is veiled in perpetual darkness. It is the ocean’s deepest spot. The forbidding place, known as the Challenger Deep, is so far removed from the warming rays of the sun that its temperature hovers near freezing.

Yes, that would be the bottom of our favorite trench…

Humans have laid eyes on the Challenger Deep just once, half a century ago, in a United States Navy vessel. A window cracked on the way down. The landing on the bottom stirred up so much ooze that the two divers could see little and took no pictures. They stayed just 20 minutes.

And they’d like to see their record broken.

“The result will be good,” said Don Walsh, a retired Navy officer who survived the descent to the Challenger Deep in 1960 and is advising some of the new ventures. “It will bring people around to remembering how little we know about the oceans.”