Great story, thanks for telling us some things most probably didn't know about noise pollution in the sea. Its true designers of underwater acoustic systems rarely think about the effects of the systems they / we design, on the non human creatures in the sea. The reason for this, from a modern systems Engineering point of view, is that those non human stakeholders and their concerns were never taken into account in the stakeholder analysis, which should always precede any work on system implementation. In fact most of these systems never had a stakeholder analysis at all, with the result that by default, the only stakeholder concerns taken into account were the concerns of the system owner or specifier. Hence the reason why so many human designed systems of all kinds, including actually the system of all humanity interfacing with nature are so incompatible with obviously so much of nature. In general it just was never designed to be compatible. Ironically, the best interests of the main stakeholder requesting the system, or expressing the desire for a system are actually unaware of what should be a primary concern of their own, that the system is fully compatible with nature, because the penalties of not taking those into account, or simply not honoring them, can be existential. And here we are seeing that appears to be the case, as we are actually starting to see in many cases.
Even if taken into account, the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor is often applied, to remove the things that would render a system unprofitable, if the results of the study might impact profitability, and there maybe we see where science itself starts to run into conflicts of interest. Occam’s razor starts to look like a profit driven instrument, which brings us to questioning profit itself, and if we fearlessly trace through the effects of profit in terms of energy, we find it responsible for many negative impacts, actually to all of life. In fact we even trace it directly to global warming, which is the biggest and most immediately threatening existential problem of all.
Even where we might have argued there were some advantages, that we might have gained something by profit, it was always at the expense of the greater good, which has to be the interests of the greater majority of humans, what was gained by profit is only experienced by a minority of humans, and ultimately not even them, because the advantages are unsustainable, for ever shorter periods of time, before the greater harm comes to affect even those making most profit themselves, it's ultimately a self defeating pursuit.
This is the harsh mathematical and physical truth.
So to fix all the problems, we should examine profit itself to understand what it does, what is it's systemic function is vs what we wish it was, and make the systemic changes needed, to fix all the problems.
I.e. the question we should be asking, is how do we get rid of profit, what do we need to do, to quit the need for it?
It turns out that there is a solution, an antidote, which even undoes much of the damage done by profit.
The answer is all in the source of energy.
If the energy powering the systems of humanity are extracted from the planet, then we have to conclude the outcomes from it will ultimately be unsustainable, not enriching humanity at all but actually at the expense of life, all life, even if we do get some technological advantages from it, those were only seen in the period of maximum availabilty of extracted energy, in the seventies and eighties, and again they were only available to the priveliged few who had made maximum profit, by having maximum availabilty of extracted energy.
So we should conclude that to solve the problem of ocean noise pollution, we first have to solve the problem of profit, because only by doing that, will we get money released to become available for development of things like this, needed to fix the the system of humanity interfaced with nature in general.
Otherwise, we will continue to slide ever deeper into the illusion we can fix things at profit, when actually the truth is we can only ever do more damage with more profit, this ultimately resulting in more temperature rise.
Specific examples of this are becoming apparent, and multiplying, including things like covid, and most other human illnesses, we prolong them by becoming dependent on profit yielded by treating symptoms, rather than fixing problems, which would remove all opportunities of profit.
We see this so often now, in so many different scenarios, we should conclude that if profit is being made, the business behind it should be questioned as to its validity of fixing anything including a full stakeholder analysis iif that business, and conclude we need not carry out all these studies, if we just learn from the few obvious examples seen, that this has to apply across the board, that actually all business for profit, which could not exist in a non profit scenario, are actually just bullshit business, pretending to be something beneficial, when actually they are not, it's profit itself which is the thing ultimately harmful, if we can't find a way to propagate the benefits seen by the priveliged few to date, to the majority, whilst stopping all profit, then nothing will have been achieved by profit at all in the end, it will always have been for nothing, if it turns out to be what ends humanity and all of life prematurely, because of a war, or a burning planet, both of which seem inevitable if we can't stop profit.
Anyhow, we should see there are some developments already done in the field of addressing underwater acoustics which might be questioned, because they might be profitable.
To me, knowing a little about acoustics, the argument that a bubble field somehow reduces noise, seems technically questionable, since bubbles themselves are resonant "Bells" underwater, their effect has to be to convert short duration pressure shock waves to longer duration ringing at lots of frequencies, given the bubbles will have a randomly distributed range of sizes, each bubble ringing at a different frequency. So what starts out as a shockwave becomes lots of ringing, after it passes through a bubble field.
Thus the noise power isn't removed, it's just distributed over a wide band of frequencies.
How a seemingly false scientific result like this typically gets recognised as something it's not, is experimental evidence that might be carried out using a bubble field to check whether some animals known to be disrupted by a shockwave type noise source are less disturbed by the noise being converted to wideband ringing, this is used to argue that the bubble field does some good, because the effects are known to be positive on a small number of maybe larger animals, Occam’s razor is then used to remove further expensive studies on maybe lots more, smaller species, to give false conclusion that the bubble field is beneficial, because ultimately the object is to make profit, rather than actually fix any problem, and look, sombody knows how to create a bubble generator, and look, lots of profit can be made building and supplying those.
Who knows what effects fish of a size typical of the sizes of bubbles ringing in the bubble field will have, on fish ringing at the same frequencies, nobody knows, maybe, but presumably fish sensing that noise would at least try to be somewhere else, well away from the noise, resulting in maybe the standard food of the larger fish known to be unaffected by ringing, having less food in their normal habitat, hence less of the latter surviving long term in any case.
The simplest solution is just remove the source of noise altogether by making the business causing it no longer something required, by making profit no longer required, and that solutin always traces to enetgy being required for free, the only one of which is free per KWhr of energy received being so solar.
This is why systemically we can trace so many solutions to solar energy, we quickly lose count.
The solution to all of it, actually all problems, is to go completely to solar energy, and the only way to monetise the latter, as needed to usefully transmit the energy from it to all people and to all all beneficial use cases, is to issue the money representing it for free. In other words to issue solar indexed stimulus.
So if we really want to see the problem of ocean bound acoustic noise fixed, we need to demand solar indexed stimulus.
I wonder what the Saudi Government would say in response to demands for that?