Okay, so you've decided to do the sensible thing and stay up. It's not like you're onboard such an important ship everyday you know. Want to call your family already? I'm not sure your cell phone will be able to pick up a signal here. The scientists? Oh, you needn't worry about them. They're in constant touch with their families. The habitat is connected to Rodrigues Island by cables in the seafloor. Fiber optic cables, you know. And they've got a pretty good bandwidth... 1.5Mbps, I believe. Communications systems are important for several other reasons of course... The scientists constantly send data they collect to the surface and use the system to request supplies too, and a dozen other things. And then, they've got an even fancier intra-habitat communications system. It's mainly a network and there are workstations all over the place. Running Linux if I remember correctly. They've also got sonar communications systems to keep the vehicles in touch with the habitat. Pretty well-organized, isn't it?

What brought up this talk about communication? Oh, yes... family calls. These scientists have been overdoing it lately. Luckily, we've got a neat budget to work with, so it doesn't really matter. Where do we get the money? Mainly private companies, like AOL and Siemens. I think they've got some interest in putting cables down there. Sometimes I feel we shouldn't have taken money from them, because they keep asking us to do research on things that this project wasn't supposed to cover. There are also some other corporations like Kodak which have lots of money to spend and like to associate their names with anything that might sound cool. "Kodak... the official sponsor of hydrothermal vent research." I guess it increases their sales. As you can see, funding isn't a big problem. We've got about a billion dollars to squander!

Stop playing with that cell phone. I'll take you to the captain's cabin and we'll ask him if we can use his radio.