Lost submersible shows adventurer spirit is always with us — and so is danger from it | Opinion
“Now, this was the work of the hand of man, the dream of a prideful brain, That the wrath that sleeps in the rolling deep might waken to strength in vain.” –Wilbur D. Nesbitt
It appears the submersible carrying five people who were attempting to visit the sunken Titanic has been lost. The devastating tale holds lesson about humanity’s quest for adventure and new frontiers.
There’s the irony of a vehicle lost near the sunken Titanic is devastating. There’s a temptation to mock the millionaires for their greed — play stupid games, win stupid prizes — or even blast the craft’s builder for a cavalier attitude toward craftsmanship.
The vessel, the OceanGate Titan, is equipped with the bare bones for ocean survival: a tiny toilet, oxygen and enough room for five people to remain seated, without shoes, on the floor of the craft. OceanGate Expeditions, a U.S.-based company, offers wealthy would-be seafarers a trip to the ocean depths, 2.4 miles, for a mere $250,000.
The vessel itself seemed sketchy at best. An online video of the submarine company indicates that there aren’t any regulations for this submarine, and its construction seems ad hoc.
“I couldn’t help but notice how many pieces of the sub seem improvised,” the reporter says. The builder says it is steered by a Logitech gaming controller and the reporter laughs in disbelief. Conservatives and libertarians might loathe regulations but here, they might have provided some necessary parameters and guidelines for safety.
One of the people on board the fated submarine is Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the former captain of the French Navy’s deep submergence group. Nargeolet has led expeditions to the Titanic before and is clearly an explorer at heart. Perhaps he will have died doing the thing he loved most, and that is all any of us can hope for in the end.
Most people wouldn’t take or pay $1 million to do such a trip but some adventurous people love to push the edge. Such people — explorers, adventurers, cliff hangers, maritime divers — often have an insatiable thirst for risk and will drive themselves and their equipment as far as possible. They don’t often die alone in their beds at 95 but rather on the side of a mountain, a casualty of a ski accident, or some other similar escapade.
People who desire to go to the next frontier, like Mars dreamers, or to the depths of the ocean to visit a fabled ship, have qualities we often admire, even if we don’t understand. Someone has to push humanity to the limits. These are the people who went to the moon, and we thank them for their spirit of adventure. But I’ll be right here in my living room, thank you.
There is a fine line, though, between risk and recklessness or the rewards that come with it. There is some space between plunging to the depths of the ocean’s floor to revisit one of humanity’s greatest lessons in hubris and respecting the bottom of the ocean from here. People who befriend tigers or lions often forget it’s still a wild animal that could pounce and kill at any moment.
Nature too is unknowable, full of beauty and pain, life and death — no man can fully predict or tame it. It lies in the realm of an intelligent Creator and yet seems to exist by its own set of natural laws, sparing some and burying others in the ocean.
The Titanic was a lesson in human pride, and yet its sinking resulted in bigger and faster ships — ships that had to conform to new and better regulations. But the lesson has obviously not fully been learned. Maybe now it will be.
