Lessons from a sub-standard sub

All this week, the search for the Titan submersible and speculation about its fate have occupied a massive share of both media and public attention.  While some might question this focus -- accidents that kill or threaten more than five people are not rare -- the saga does shed some light on a few noteworthy issues.

The most striking part of the story is the shoddy and careless standard of engineering of a vehicle built to operate in the extreme conditions of the deep ocean.  For example, its viewport was rated safe for depths of up to 1,300 meters, but the depth at which the Titanic lies -- and thus the pressure -- is three times greater.  It did not carry the emergency communication devices which ought to be standard for such a vehicle.  There have been numerous stories of people familiar with the Titan expressing concerns about safety over the years.

Much of the reason for this seems to have been standard libertarian disdain for regulation.  OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush has said that "at some point, safety is just pure waste."  In an interview four years ago, he complained that the submersible industry is "obscenely safe because they have all these regulations.  But it also hasn't innovated or grown -- because they have all these regulations."  The company apparently evaded those regulations by various means when building the Titan.  Mr Rush was aboard the vessel when the inevitable consequences of this attitude caught up with it, and is now dead.  People who evade safety rules often end up discovering, in tragic fashion, why they exist.

The more recently-arisen problem of woketardia may also have played some role.  Rush explicitly hired a young and "diverse" workforce at OceanGate, disdaining the "fifty-year-old white guys" with military experience who commonly form the backbone of such companies.  I suspect that those more experienced and qualified people had an off-putting tendency to point out that his views on safety precautions were dangerous horseshit.  Whatever the reason, when employees are hired on some basis other than their ability to do the job, in almost all cases the quality of whatever they are producing is likely to suffer.

The episode also illustrates that in such cases, the consequences of people's risk-taking and foolishness are not borne only by themselves.  The costs of the search-and-rescue effort must have run well into the millions.  Hopefully OceanGate's assets can be seized to recover some of that cost.

Aside from OceanGate's crummy engineering, we mustn't forget the deeply dishonorable character of the whole enterprise.  This was not exploration or scientific research.  It was a bunch of rich men (one of them a billionaire) on an outing to gawk ghoulishly at what is, in effect, a mass grave, showing their class's typical contempt for normal human sensibilities and decency.

Perhaps not unrelated, a good deal of the social-media chatter about the saga had an air of mockery and even schadenfreude (that link is from Fox News, so it's laced with lots of wailing about how bad and terrible and awful this is).  While certainly in poor taste, this is surely inevitable in a period of gross economic inequality and of domination over our politics and society by a tiny super-rich class.  Perhaps the wealthy, and those who treat them as celebrities, would do better to take this opportunity to consider seriously why they are so hated.

We live in an age when someone like Elon Musk, whose rockets and cars are notorious for exploding and whose bungled management of Twitter threatens its very survival, can talk about leading a private-sector colonization of Mars and be taken seriously.  The fate of the Titan is a reminder of what is likely to happen if such a project, vastly larger and more complex, is attempted by a narcissistic billionaire who also seems to believe that the rules don't apply to him and his ventures.

The ocean is not a playground.  It is a totally alien environment filled with horrible-looking things that spend all their time trying to eat each other.  If you are wise you'll completely avoid it.  If not, at least pay it the respect of taking sensible precautions against its dangers.