It sounds fun but I can work myself up into a bit of a panic after just a couple of minutes in a snorkel and mask.

In The Life Sub-Aquatic (Radio 4, Wednesday) marine biologist and keen scuba diver Helen Scales went far deeper. She joined researchers from the University of Florida on the Aquarius Reef Base, a research station on the seabed, 60ft down, in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Jacques Cousteau and his aquanauts first created a camp for living underwater in the 1960s, spending 30 days sleeping, eating and bathing underwater provided with television, cinema, radio and other leisure facilities and proving that saturation diving was safe.

The bodies of divers breathing compressed air become saturated with gases, equalling the pressure in the water around them. It means they can stay at the same depth for as long as they want but cannot come up to the surface quickly or they risk getting "the bends" or decompression sickness which can be fatal. Instead they must decompress slowly over 17 hours.

This enforced separation makes underwater living good training for astronauts, and Scales spoke to Chris Hadfield who spent time at Aquarius while part of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations.

It is good psychological training for the isolation of space.

Hadfield spoke of a night excursion and unexpected shark sighting: "It reminded me that I was somewhat of an intruder into someone else's habitat at that point and that was the being that was really in charge, the top of the food chain, down there. You really get a true perspective when you move to the edge of the frontier and start to understand our actual place, both on Earth and in the universe."

If anyone knows about perspective it is someone who has seen the Earth from space.

Soon it will not just be research stations where people live underwater but hotels, restaurants and perhaps even homes. Many of the scientists hoped that the perspective such living provides might encourage people to respect the ocean more.

It sounded wonderful but I would have to get beyond the snorkel if I wanted to join them.