The plight of the Titanic submariners has engulfed the media over the past week and demanded the attention of countless rubberneckers to catastrophe. Parts of that attention are due to morbid curiosity, or the ghoulish nature of social media’s animosity toward the super rich; those who Ben Dreyfuss terms “the abnormal people” on his Substack: “They heard the news, read the stories, took in all of the information that made you sad, and their first reaction was: anyone who can afford a $250k tourist trip deserves to die.” But another slice of attention is due, at least in part, to the audacious nature of their chosen craft.
While obviously the choice of vehicle was a mistake — it resembles nothing so much as the decrepit blood-soaked sub in the video game Iron Lung — the motivation of figuring out a different way to traverse the ocean at 13,000 feet below is not itself a bad thing. “Hold my beer” moments are better if they don’t hold the possibility of horrible painful death. But never taking any risk? That’s worse.
“In an age in which people have developed an unrealistic expectation of absolute safety in all activities (and expect government to provide it), we are also attempting to open up space, the harshest and most challenging of frontiers. The conundrum is that these two goals are mutually exclusive, at least at current technology levels (and perhaps at any),” Rand Simberg wrote in his 2014 book, Safe Is Not An Option.
So at least give the crew of this ill-advised expedition this much credit: they tried something crazy and it killed them. How many people will die today doing something equally foolish but without the merit of audacity?
As a culture, we need more risk-taking and less comfort with things just staying as they are. Striving and searching for the new is a good thing, even if it ends in tragedy.
