The Titanic, the Titan, and humanity’s endless hubris

The Titanic claims another five victims in a story that might be even more illustrative of humanity’s boundless pride than the original tragedy.  If the sinking of the world’s largest ocean liner was Shakespeare, the implosion of the Titan is Vonnegut in a sad sign of the decline of our times.

For generations, the Titanic has been an allegory for humanity’s boundless pride.  A ship that was supposed to be unsinkable promptly sinks on its maiden voyage like a story from some Greek myth or Aesop fable.  Everything, from the lack of lifeboats because no one believed they would ever be needed to intentionally navigating the ship through a field of icebergs, seemed written specifically to serve as a moral lesson, some teachable moment as they say.  Sadly, it appears the Titanic still had more to teach us about our limitations and in the wake of the Titan, now destroyed on the ocean floor with five people dead at the time of this writing, the legend is only likely to grow.  While the scale of the current tragedy doesn’t compare to the approximately 1,600 lives lost when the Titanic originally sank on April 15, 1912, the underlying story reflects and amplifies many of the same themes, perhaps even more so and events seem more fiction than fact once again.  If the Titanic was Shakespeare made real, we might say the story of the Titan submarine could’ve been written by Kurt Vonnegut.  The high tragedy of the days leading to World War I has been transformed into a sad farce in our increasingly absurd, social media driven times.  How else can we explain the folly of even attempting to transform the site of over one thousand deaths at the bottom of the ocean into a tourist attraction?  What macabre instinct prompts people to believe violating watery graves is a suitable means of entertainment?

The wreckage of the Titanic lies some 12,500 feet beneath the surface, in extremely frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, a region which might as well be deep space for all of our ability to survive there, much less control events around us.  The water pressure alone at this depth is close to 400 times what we experience on dry land at sea level, some 377.5 atmospheres, more than enough to crush a human being like a bug on the sole of your shoe.  A friend of mine asked Chat GPT to describe what would happen if there were a flaw in the hull.  “The collapse speed would depend on how quickly the water pressure equalizes with the void and how the surrounding materials respond to the sudden increase in pressure. It’s important to note that the collapse would involve the movement and compression of water, which has its own dynamics and speed of propagation. While it’s difficult to provide an exact numerical value without specific details and a thorough analysis, it is reasonable to assume that the collapse would occur rapidly, potentially within milliseconds or even microseconds. Keep in mind that this is a hypothetical scenario, and such extreme conditions would likely lead to a catastrophic failure of the structure, posing significant risks to any occupants or equipment involved.”  Clearly, this is not territory where humanity was meant to tread.  In fact, the military’s deepest diving submarines, known as the Sea Wolf class and powered by state of the art nuclear engines, can achieve depths of only 1,600 feet.  Reports suggest that there are only a handful of vessels in the world that can reach the Titanic, and some of those few cannot even carry people for obvious reasons, being entirely robotic.   For example, the US Navy’s Curve-21 ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) can travel 20,000 feet beneath the surface, but it cannot be deployed without the aid of specialized ships that were sadly not in the immediate area.  This is why it took until Wednesday, more than two full days after the Titan broke contact, to deploy a ship to the ocean floor.  Even should they have been found alive, it’s not clear they could’ve been easily evacuated.  In 2022, the US Navy retrieved a fighter plane from 12,400 feet in the South China Sea, but that was an operation that took much longer than the approximately 96 hours of life support on the Titan.

Then, there is the Titan itself, a homemade submarine that was supposed to be able to reach the deepest parts of the ocean, explore a shipwreck, and safely return to the surface.  The phrase “homemade submarine” seems to be a bit of an oxymoron in and of itself.  Obviously, most submersibles are “custom” made and not meant for mass production, but I think most people assume any such ship would be made with the same care, attention to detail, experience, and next generation technologies as – say – an F1 car, which experience merely a fraction of the forces that will impact a vessel at 12,500 feet.  Most would also assume that such a ship would be built to the highest possible standards, assembled by the most experienced team on the planet, feature redundant systems for propulsion and safety, and be rigorously tested and inspected.  This we might consider the bare minimum for anyone attempting such an adventure, that is the basics that any sane, intelligent person would expect for a vessel that can safely achieve these depths.  Instead, we have learned over the past few days that the Titan was effectively built in someone’s garage to the standards of one man who’s background wasn’t even in deep sea exploration.

Thus, I can’t be the only one shocked to discover that the ship is piloted via video game controller and that those inside had no means of directing themselves unless they are communicating with the surface.  The game controller itself is actually straight out of Vonnegut.  In the classic Sirens of Titan, humans on Mars invade Earth in tin-can ships with a single button inside that does nothing.  The button is there simply because humans would get upset if they believed they had no control over events. Otherwise, the Titan communicated with the support ship via text messages with no backup strategy.  There was no safety beacon of any kind, even though the Titan was already lost for a period of five hours on its second voyage.  It doesn’t even have seats.  Passengers enter barefoot, and sit cross legged on the floor.  In fact, it’s not even technically a submarine because it cannot be piloted autonomously and relies on a continuous connection with a support craft.  Even worse, these flaws were all known well in advance and were the subject of a lawsuit in 2018.  A former employee at the time had alleged a lack of “quality control and safety” protocols that “​​paying passengers would not be aware” of and a “refusal to conduct critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental design.”  Others had inspected the Titan and found it lacking.  Expedition: Unknown host Josh Gates considered using the ship on an episode, but decided it “did not perform well,” adding “There’s more to the history and design of Titan that has not been made public — much of it concerning.”

Incredibly, the designer of this Frankenstein vessel that used iPads for screens — in addition to the video game controller and other spare parts — had no training in deep sea diving or designing deep sea vessels.  Stockton Rush was both the CEO of the company, OceanGate, and the pilot of the doomed vessel.  A graduate of Princeton University with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, he proceeded to receive his Masters in business, and as far as I can tell his only other claim to fame is being the youngest pilot to receive a DC-8 Type/Captain’s rating at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute.  This complete lack of experience, however, didn’t prevent him from explicitly stating that he was not interested in hiring those with actual undersea experience.  In a piece for The Smithsonian in June 2019, Mr. Rush compared his company to other submarine operators aimed at tourists.  “There are other businesses out there but they typically have…um…gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and…they…you’ll see a whole bunch of 50 year old white guys.”  In contrast, his company would “be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16 year old to go pursue marine technology. But a 25 year old who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational. So we’ve really tried to get…um…very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”  Nor would his company rely on standards for marine safety.  Instead, Mr. Rush would look to his own background.  We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry as related to safety and…um…some of the preponderances of checklists, things we do for risk assessment. Things like that, that are more aviation related…than…um…ocean related. We can train people to do that. I mean, we can train someone to pilot the sub – we use a game controller…but..so…um..anybody can drive the sub.”

Rarely does a single statement sum up so much, but “anybody can drive the sub” is an ideal candidate to replace “hold my beer” as the phrase of choice before someone does something incredibly stupid.  Of course, the cynic in me can’t help but suggest that hiring 20-somethings with no experience is a lot less expensive than hiring 50-somethings with a lot of experience.  The idea of doing it on the cheap in some of the most dangerous and challenging environments on the planet strikes me as insane on its face.  To use the race car analogy again, there’s a reason why F1 teams don’t hire chief engineers directly out of vocational school.  Experience counts, and as even my progressive step son said, if you have to hire an engineer, you always choose the middle-age German dude with glasses.  Regardless, Mr. Rush heralded the Titan as “the first deep-sea submersible constructed from a carbon-fiber composite, which allows the vessel to withstand enormous pressure at great depths while being far cheaper to build and operate than more traditional subs of equal abilities.”  He also bemoaned that regulations were stifling the industry.  “It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations,” he said. “But it also hasn’t innovated or grown because they have all these regulations.”  As a result, the Titan was not officially classified by anybody, and yet Mr. Rush insisted this was a good thing.  “By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system,” a blog post on the company site read. “However, this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply, but it does mean that innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.”  I’m certainly no fan of excessive regulations and believe private governing bodies are usually the better option, but even I am at a loss to explain what led this man to believe he could build a submarine capable of surviving these depths on his own out of spare parts.  What was next on his list, a DIY space shuttle like something out of the 80’s classic Better Off Dead?  Ironically, and rather tragically in retrospect, The Smithsonian article had to be updated at publication.  A correction reads, “In June 2019, OceanGate postponed its planned Titanic expeditions after failing to secure proper permitting for its contracted research support vessel. The Titanic expeditions are currently being rescheduled for summer 2020.”

Lastly, I am at a loss as to how supposedly intelligent, highly successful people could willingly get on this thing, except to say that some have more money than sense.  A trip on the Titan cost $250,000 per person before its demise, a huge sum for something with no seats.  One wonders what precisely the four passengers were thinking while waiting on the dock for the support vessel to depart.  The Titan itself doesn’t exactly look like some next-generation vessel designed by the best and brightest minds in the world. Instead, it looks exactly like one would expect for something built in somebody’s garage.  Did no one ask where’s your second one if something were to happen?  What’s the back up plan?  Is there an emergency beacon?  How many people have actually gotten in this thing and survived?  These questions should all have been asked before they actually opened up and revealed a barren interior, then asked me to take off my shoes and sit cross legged on the floor.  I saw this as a person who isn’t risk averse by any means.  I drive a race car myself for fun (at significant personal expense) and was most recently seen following a grizzly bear with a beer.  My lovely wife frequently questions WTF I think I’m doing with that look reserved for husbands about to do something needlessly stupid.  A video of her from last year watching me work my way out onto a wet rock beside a waterfall in Vermont before jumping into the small pool below is a priceless example.  What is he doing?  Why is he going up so high?  Why didn’t he just jump from where his nephew did?  Still, I wouldn’t have gotten on this thing, not a chance.  At least one of the passengers was a billionaire.  Don’t they have people that vet this stuff?  I can imagine Elon Musk demanding he be taken to visit the Titanic, but one would think a team of people would be deployed to consider his options – and promptly crossed this company off the list because of the lawsuit alone.  Somehow or another, these four ponied up a combined million dollars to tour the site where 1,600 people died, only to die themselves at the bottom of the ocean. Ultimately, the Titanic has claimed another set of victims, and will continue to serve as the morality play of our time for a long time to come, even if we live in an age of farce rather than tragedy.

Bonus irony and insanity:  There are those who insist on politicizing everything, and hence it was no surprise when CNN’s Jill Filipovic bemoaned the attention paid to this story rather than others.  “It’s interesting to watch the national fascination with this story, especially compared to, say, the attention paid to the sinking of another boat, this one full of desperate migrants in the Mediterranean last week; dozens were killed, and hundreds of men, women and children are still missing. Many migrants, mostly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, may be dead.”  In conclusion, Ms. Filipovic wrote, “I hope they’re rescued. I hope the very wealthy among them pay back the cost of what is likely a pricey and largely publicly funded search effort. And then I hope we can collectively turn our attention to the stories of those who we can learn arguably more from: the people who courageously set out into the unknown in pursuit of a better life. Those stories may be less cinematic, but they are far more important.”  Ms. Filipovic can hope, but she could not be more wrong or misguided.  The world has no shortage of tragedy.  As I type these words, dozens of people are getting killed in the most gruesome ways imaginable while billions live in squalor and millions outright slavery.  These are the facts as everyone knows them.  It is the way the world works every day and has worked every day since time began.  It is no surprise that a story combining history and a long running infatuation with the Titanic, a dramatic attempt at a rescue, and billionaires doing something stupid trumps the daily meat grinder that is human existence.