If you think the final frontier for us Earthlings is space, buddy, we haven’t even seen a full percent of our own ocean floor. Despite 71 percent of the planet being covered in water, humans have visually explored a massively disappointing 0.001 percent of the deep seafloor.

A new study from the Ocean Discovery League, working alongside the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Boston University, paints a pitiful but unsurprising picture of the human race’s exploration of its own home planet’s oceans: out of 43,000 recorded deep-sea dives since 1958, we’ve only managed to observe and explore an area slightly bigger than Rhode Island — just 1,476 square miles.

Worse, nearly a third of that data comes from old, blurry black-and-white photos taken with woefully outdated imaging technology. The study did not account for any explorations from private oil and gas companies, but the researchers say that even if their estimates are way off, it still wouldn’t budge the percentage of the ocean floor we’ve explored.

The “deep ocean” is defined as anything below 200 meters, so it isn’t just some mysterious underwater void that’s unreachable to us. It’s an ecosystem covering 66 percent of Earth’s surface. But because it is dark, cold, and expensive to visit, few nations even attempt to explore the deep seas.

Nearly all recorded deep sea dives (97.2 percent) have been made by just five countries: the US, Japan, New Zealand, France, and Germany, and most of their explorations have been within coastal zones, with few venturing out into international waters, which largely remain a mystery to us.

This presents a major problem. With deep-sea mining and climate change revving up, we have no clue what we’re disturbing down there. We might be destroying currently unobserved beds of biodiversity for the sake of some new phone batteries.

Lead researcher Katherine Bell puts it bluntly: observing the entire seafloor at the current rate would take 100,000 years, a comically long time. Or, we can completely overhaul how we explore oceans, finally and fully understanding that we should be treating them as ecosystems vital to our well-being instead of only exploring them when there’s a new resource to exploit.