General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans

And yet the ocean floor, which is right here beneath the water, on the planet where we actually live, has been mapped at a lower resolution than the surface of Venus.

The Seabed 2030 project, a collaborative initiative led by the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, aims to produce a complete high-resolution map of the entire ocean floor by the year 2030.

When the project began in 2017, less than 6% of the sea floor had been mapped at modern standards.

By 2023, that figure had risen to just over 24%, Three quarters of the ocean floor remains unmapped in any meaningful detail, and the deadline is approaching rapidly, and the ocean is not getting smaller.

Source: Google Earth.

Data from Airbus, SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO.

However, the front-runner might still struggle to seal off space to newcomers entirely.

While an incumbent observing from above Earth's gravity well would have a strong information and infrastructure advantage, this might not translate into an ability to block rivals from getting into space.