The problem is time.

There aren't that many multibeam sonar vessels in the world. They acquire data over narrow swaths. Mapping all ocean basins with multibeam would take a long time. I've always heard estimates of a few hundred years, though those were based on total the number of academic multibeam vessels operating 24/7. Obviously, it scales with the number of vessels you have doing it, so a large-scale coordinated effort that built lots of new, single-purpose vessels could take significantly less.

At any rate, the cost of one survey made with one ship is not a good way to estimate the total cost, unless you're willing to wait a _really_ long time.

It's futile to attempt to value things as fractions of a war. While typically the dollar is a useful metric for the worth that society ascribes to something, public opinion on the importance of the Iraq war and the federal budget for the military are radically different.

The annual budget for the entire USGS is $1.2 billion. NOAA has a budget of $5.6 billion. NASA has a budget of $19.5 billion. The NSF has a budget of about $2 billion. If these agencies dropped everything else and invested purely in this map, it would take about 5 years to create it.

Or, yeah, you could buy not even 0.1 Iraq wars with those 5 years, if that sounded better...

I'm not sure I understand: why is it futile to attempt to value things as fractions of a war given that public opinion on that particular war is divided?

Because it's poor accounting. Given the scale of the US military and it's annual expenditure just existing, to make a fair comparison you should at least take account of the marginal cost of the war, not the total cost.

There is also the opportunity cost to take account of, but that's much harder (impossible?) to put an accurate figure on.

I thought the figure provided was the marginal cost.

It is, of course. Nobody is calculating the cost of the war as the defense budget multiplied by the time. The cost includes about $750 billion in direct appropriations for the war itself (separate from the overall defense budget), plus numerous indirect costs such as additional medical care and disability payments to veterans, replacement of destroyed equipment, and interest payments due to increasing the national debt.

It may well be futile, but I will never stop trying to convince people that we should spend less on war and more on science.

It's likely futile to try to convince people to spend less on war but convincing them to spend more on science is doable.

The argument is strange.

Nasa has been able to pull off the Apollo program for roughly $150B adjusted for inflation. Those are not real dollars neither because people supported it ?

Companion article: "All of Earth’s ocean floors deeper than 500 meters ... could be mapped by GPS-navigated MBES for 200 ship-years of effort (e.g., 40 ships working for 5 years), at a total cost of US$2–3 billion ... "

https://eos.org/opinions/airline-flight-paths-over-the-unmap...

This estimate is a bit out of date, if you look at the swag in the original article from 2001. But it's on the order of what it would cost. Well worth it. We should prioritize this important work.

Speaking of war, I suspect the Navy already has maps that good or better than for a variety of reasons can't be publicly released.

A better application of money than redoing work already done, might be talking the navy into releasing their data. Declassification isn't cheap, but its cheaper than having civilians re-run the mission.

Actually, they probably don't.

The vast majority of the ocean hasn't been mapped with multibeam, civilian or military. Unless it's an area that's of strategic interest (i.e. mostly costal areas), it's very unlikely that the military has mapped it in detail.

That having been said, getting the military to declassify more of its magnetic anomaly data for the ocean basins would be immensely helpful for understanding global tectonic evolution. They have mapped it in quite a bit of detail from airborne and marine platforms. However, an accurate and detailed map of magnetic anomalies gives a huge edge in submarine detection, so it's unlikely they'll declassify all of it anytime soon.

My understanding from some old nukes I know is that the subs are continually remapping the floor as they travel.

They certainly collect data they can get passively (like the magnetic anomaly data mentioned above). They almost certainly do not routinely drive around updating sonar maps (as that would completely defeat the purpose of keeping the location of the sub a secret...)

At least in 2005, that was demonstrably not true of the US Navy: http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a24158/u...

That's confusing large scale with small scale. You can prove that one time there existed one mistake on one map (or that story is covering up that there was a navigation and/or helm error, or it covering up an even crazier story like hitting a submerged shipping crate or mine or enemy sub). Certainly no one has proven the public map is error free and flawless, and given that this is possibly the first time anything like this has ever happened to a nazy sub, every other map the navy has must be error free to a fairly high level.

> 190 billion USD

190 million :)