Titan, Titanic, and the calculus of risk
In this image released by Action Aviation, the submersible Titan is prepared for a dive into a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean on an expedition to the Titanic on June 18. Credit: AP
Hubris is humanity’s armor and its Achilles’ heel. It gives us confidence and leaves us vulnerable. It is written into the DNA that makes us explorers and adventurers, that fuels our belief that we can — and must — go anywhere and experience everything. That we can assess the risks, plan appropriately, and hopefully emerge unscathed. That’s how we humans learn, after all, by pushing past boundaries and redefining our limits.
The sad demise of the Titan submersible invites us to consider anew this hubris of ours.
I understand the urge to go where others have not. It is alluring. But to what end, we must ask ourselves. Exploration always has been risky business. But it must be about more than just the risk. Exploration also should have a point. Was there one here other than the mystique of the Titanic and the intoxicating opportunity to say you saw up close the most fabled wreckage in history?
The expedition wasn’t designed to advance science. It wasn’t going to discover some unknown place or species. It wasn’t intended to test some principle, though it might regrettably serve to increase our understanding of how to withstand deep-sea pressure.
It was mostly a tourist trip to sacred ground, the burial site of more than 1,500 lost souls. Now this cemetery of sediment has five more victims.
These six-figure trips are part of a trend of wealthy people continuing to push tourism to the limits of thrill-seeking — whether you measure that in the record number of permits issued this year to summit Mount Everest or the apparent willingness of some to spend millions to travel into space.
They also are part of a trend of expending huge sums of money to rescue the spectacularly imperiled, something that’s also in our DNA, wired as we have become to expect last-minute miracles. None was forthcoming for the Titan, but the mission was riveting.
The immense resources dedicated to finding the Titan, fhowever, contrasted sharply with a different risk assessment for a different vessel lost to the ocean four days before the Titan dropped into the depths. This vessel was a fishing boat packed with migrants that capsized off the coast of Greece, killing an estimated 500 people. It was hard not to note that the criteria for launching rescues is not consistent, and that the lives of some people in some situations might be valued less than the lives of others.
The catastrophic implosion of the Titan and the difficulty of locating the vessel also were sobering reminders that technology has limits. For all our advances, we can’t protect — or save — everyone. It’s particularly distressing to learn — if early reporting bears out — that warnings were ignored about the Titan’s ability to withstand Mother Nature. How eerily reminiscent of the story of the Titanic itself, the grail of the doomed expedition, a technological marvel of its day undone at least partly by an underestimation of nature’s power in the form of those jagged icebergs.
The calculus of risk is complicated not only by that hubris but also by our blurring of the boundary between high-tech tourism and genuine exploration. There’s a difference between an experienced adventurer contemplating and accepting the risks of exploration and someone like Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old son of a Pakistani businessman, terrified about the voyage he would undertake but assured presumably that it would be safe.
If the Titan’s demise leads to better oversight and tougher regulations for a shadowy industry, that would be progress, though it’s lamentable that it would take such a tragedy to take such a step. Perhaps we also will be willing to reassess the risks of exploration and who is undertaking them.
Wanting to do something difficult in order to move humanity forward is one thing. Wanting to do something difficult because it’s difficult is something else.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
