ALL IN THE SAME BOAT
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
A few months ago some rich people paid a company called OceanGate a whole lot of money to get into a submersible to go to the bottom of the ocean in order to see the wreckage of the Titanic.
That's a lot of terms. Some definitions are likely in order.
The iceberg didn’t know that the Titanic was unsinkable, so it did what icebergs do to ships that collide with them, which is to sink them, and down the Titanic went to the ocean floor.
As for “the ocean,” it is a very large body of water, which we keep mostly on the surface part of our planet. This particular ocean was The Atlantic one, which we keep in between Florida and Norway, roughly.
How large is this ocean? It’s sort of hard to grasp the scale of it. Try this: imagine a pitcher of water. Got it?
Now imagine 187 quintillion pitchers of water. Hopefully that helps.
Down near its floor, “the ocean” has pressures that exert approximately 6000 PSI, or 600 lbs on every square inch, which is sort of like being in a machine designed to turn cars into cubes, except that to turn cars into cubes, Dr. Google tells me, compacting machines only need to exert 2000 PSI.
A “submersible” is a vessel designed to go down to those depths, supposing that you are somebody curious enough about the deep that you are willing to shell out a lot of money to get into a vehicle designed—you hope!—to survive a trip into a vehicle compactor.
This submersible was known as “The Titan,” and a “titan” is the type of ancient god after which the Titanic was named, with nomenclature suggesting that the Titanic was like the Titan, and maybe it was.
Now, “rich people” are people who have a lot of money, and “money” is an innovative human method of make-believe that allows people to exchange goods and services with relative ease, and which is something that in modern society people need to have in order to live.
“Society” is simply the way human beings choose to organize rules and power and social beliefs in order to shape our shared human life together.
Again, it’s not too difficult to see why a rich person might believe that rules don’t apply to them, because as long as those rules are societal rules, they actually don’t apply.
They think that they are in a different boat, when it comes to rules, than everyone else.
Living in a society designed to accommodate the ease of wealth over the lives of humans has, it seems, led them to that belief.
The captain of the submersible was the CEO and co-founder of OceanGate a man whose name was “Stockton Rush,” because hell yeah it was. Stockton Rush was a fairly rich person, and like many fairly rich people he was a strong believer in “innovation” but not a very big believer in “regulations.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/23/europe/titan-submersible-victims-intl/index.html
“Innovation” is a word with many definitions.
Somebody using it can mean “the act of bringing to light something that wasn’t previously known” or it can mean “combining or reconfiguring already known things in novel and unique ways that create valuable new effects.”
But sometimes when people use the word, they mean “ignoring a rule that was there for what might be very good reasons, in order to gain an advantage by doing things that other people aren’t permitted to do.”
So it seems to me true “innovation” isn’t really about making new rules but noticing old ones either for the first time or in new ways.
But then there’s the other kind of innovation: the rule-ignoring kind—the kind that makes boats that can’t sink, or submersibles that ignore strict guidelines for managing the extreme pressures of the ocean depths, the kind that treats the right of other people to live as if it were something that could be owned like property.
Anyway, as you may have heard, the Titan submersible imploded down there. I don’t blame it. I would have imploded, too.
It hadn’t been made according to regulations that were apparently in place not only to stifle innovation, but also for very good reasons involving natural rules about ocean pressure, set by people who had decided to innovate not by ignoring nature's rules, but by deciding that safety was not obscene.
When the Titan imploded, everyone inside died pretty much immediately. Don’t get all superior on them; you would have died, too. You’re probably not even rich, so you might have died even quicker.
There are many lessons to all this, probably.
One lesson I take away is that physics doesn’t actually care how rich you are; if the systems that protect you from the rules of physics fail, physics will crush rich and poor all the same.
I also notice something else interesting embedded in the story, which is that Stockton Rush believed something that many people—especially rich people—didn’t used to admit they believed, not until recently.
He believed that the Earth’s surface will become uninhabitable.
This is, unfortunately, a very real possibility.
Stockton Rush also seemed to believe that people with access to the innovations he was working on would be able to survive these changes—which would be really good for anyone who had enough money to afford access to that innovation, and even better for whoever controlled that innovation.
The only problem for Stockton Rush was this: the innovation he believed in was the most popular kind—the rule-ignoring kind—and eventually he came face to face with rules that care nothing for money.
It seems that when it comes to the planet, we’re all inside the same boat—or the same submersible, if you like. It seems that outside of our planet it’s awfully inhospitable to people, so our planet becoming inhospitable ought to be a concern to us all.
It isn’t, though.
Many of us, rich people in the world's richest economy, have apparently decided that we're in a different boat.
The 2024 Republican presidential campaign season is in full swing and candidates are stumping on a host of key issues. But one topic that’s missing from their agenda is climate change. Despite a summer of record-setting heat, new polling shows that Republican voters still don't see a warming planet as a concern. As William Brangham reports, neither do the GOP candidates who want to lead them.
It makes me wonder who the last person was to die in the Titan. It all happened in a millisecond, it’s said.
But one of them must have died last.
Maybe it was the person closest to the front, or to the back. Was it the richest person? Maybe it was. Maybe if you had slowed time down by a factor of 1000 the last person in the Titan to die might have had time to observe the fate of the others, situated in the part that crumpled first, and to have the smug thought: “suckers.”
This seems to me no less bizarre or irrational a response than to think “If it doesn’t affect my neighborhood, it doesn’t affect me” in response to a cooking planet.
Still, it’s a popular belief. We’d be hard-pressed to call it an innovation, but it seems an innovation, nevertheless, to believe that living in relative wealth means that you don’t possess a human body the same as anybody else, or that the fate of other neighborhoods will somehow make your neighborhood immune to nature’s laws.
Here’s a question that seems relevant to that belief. It’s an ancient question.
Here it is:
Who is my neighbor?
I’ll answer it in the ancient fashion, which is to answer with another question:
Who isn’t?
Can't we just move closer together, closer to where we work, and stop flying around for stupid reasons?
We only need to innovate if we refuse to change our behavior.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
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