超级富豪天价玩具的身后事

    大概14岁时，詹姆斯•卡梅隆就进行了他的首次水下任务。当然，下水的不是卡梅隆，而是他的老鼠。他把那只老鼠放在他自制的潜水艇里，然后看着它沉入加拿大尼亚加拉瀑布附近的奇帕瓦河河底。这条河总共只有四五英尺深。那只老鼠活了下来，因此卡梅隆的潜水任务越做越大、越做越勇。去年，58岁的卡梅隆成为首个独自下潜至太平洋马里亚纳海沟“挑战者深渊”底部的探险家。那里是世界海洋的最深处。此后，他做了一件可能更加不同寻常的事情。三月底，他把这个深潜器和相关技术都捐献给了伍兹霍尔海洋研究所（Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution）。这个私人研究所位于科德角（Cape Cod），卡梅隆将加入该研究所的董事会和新的机器人研究团队。

    卡梅隆此举很少见。10年来，前沿探险主要由私营公司进行，例如理查德•布兰森的维珍航空（Virgin Atlantic）和埃伦•穆斯克的太空探索技术公司（Space X），相关的设备和技术常常是富豪们的玩物，披着神秘和知识产权的面纱。富豪们往往不会把他们的玩具捐赠给科研机构。2002年，斯蒂夫•福赛特成为搭乘热气球环游世界的第一人。后来，他把这个热气球吊舱捐赠给了美国航空航天博物馆（National Air & Space Museum），一直展出至今。他没有把它交给气象学家去分解剖析。

    为了做好深海下潜的准备，卡梅隆在巴布亚新几内亚的所罗门群岛新不列颠海沟进行了海试。之前有关这条海沟的科学数据如此之少，令他吃惊不已。“我们总是在讨论太空，”最近他在纽约探险者俱乐部（Explorers Club）的一次会议上说。“我喜欢科幻小说，我觉得太空也充满了科幻的感觉。但在地球的海洋里就存在着这样一个外星世界。”卡梅隆一钟见血地指出：‘我们说，我们已经到达了海底。但这好像是在午夜空降到内布拉斯加州的某块玉米地，拿着手电筒在四周围走了几个小时，然后就说已经探索了美国。我们需要更多信息。“

    卡梅隆的“深海挑战者”（Deepsea Challenger）号深潜器价值大约1亿美元，其中很多都是卡梅隆自掏腰包。这就像是致力于一种在学术圈子和公募圈子里几乎不存在的全新玩意儿。相比之下，科研人员的“阿尔文”（ALVIN）号深潜器在服役50年后，在2010年退役进行改造升级。“这就像是把喷气发动机安装到螺旋桨飞机上，”伍兹霍尔海洋研究所的国家深潜设备主管安迪•鲍文说。

    When James Cameron was about 14, he embarked on his first underwater mission. Well, not Cameron so much as his mouse. He put it in his homemade submersible and watched it sink to all of four or five feet into Chippawa Creek, in the Canadian suburbs of Niagara Falls. The mouse survived, so the missions got bigger and bolder. Last year, Cameron, 58, became the first-ever solo explorer to touch the bottom of the Pacific Ocean at the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest surface on Earth. Since then, he has done something possibly more extraordinary: Earlier this week, he donated the submersible and all the related technology to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a private research operation in Cape Cod, where he will also join its Board of Directors and a new robotics team.

    Cameron's move is a rare one. While the frontiers of exploration have been carried out largely in the private sector over the past decade -- Richard Branson'sVirgin Atlantic, Elon Musk's Space X, and the like -- the machines and technologies involved are often billionaire playthings, shrouded in mystery and intellectual property rights. The moneyed moguls themselves have tended to be less than civic-minded with their toys. After Steve Fossett became the first person to circumnavigate the world by balloon, in 2002, he donated his capsule to the National Air & Space Museum, where it has been on display since. He did not give it to meteorologists to dissect.

    In prepping for his deep-sea dive, Cameron did a test run of sorts at the New Britain Trench, in the Solomon Islands of Papua New Guinea. He was amazed at how little scientific data there was on the trench. "We're always talking about space," he said recently at a meeting of the Explorers Club in New York, "and I loved sci-fi and I thought space was it too. But there's an alien world right here on Earth, in the oceans." Cameron drove home the point: "We say we've been to the bottom of the ocean. But that's like parachuting into a cornfield in Nebraska at midnight, walking around for a few hours with a flashlight, and saying you've explored America. We need more."

    Cameron's submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, is valued at around $100 million, much of which Cameron paid for out-of-pocket. It is the kind of devotion to brand-new gadgetry that is virtually nonexistent in academic and publicly funded circles. By contrast, ALVIN, researchers' go-to deep-sea submersible, was decommissioned for a refit in 2010 after five decades in the field. "It's like adding a jet engine to a propeller fleet," said Andy Bowen, Woods Hole's director of its National Deep Submergence Facility.