Why we care about the Titan tragedy
The Titan accident represents a moment when the rules of order lapsed, and we were faced with the unknown—upending our sense of security.
It’s been over a month since we learned of the fate of the five passengers on the Titan submersible. Remnants from the vessel indicate that it was a painless, sudden end. An eventful non-event in which an extraordinary amount of pressure caused the experimental, first-of-its-kind deep sea vehicle to implode in milliseconds. The occupants never saw it coming.
In the time between first hearing of the vehicle’s disappearance and the formal announcement of its demise, many of us drew up worst-case scenarios. A submersible sitting at the bottom of the ocean—2.5 miles beneath the surface—with no food, no light, and a dwindling oxygen supply. Stranded, maybe within feet of the Titanic wreck. The passengers banging on the walls every few minutes—hoping that someone, anyone would hear them. Or maybe the vehicle was bobbing on the ocean’s surface; the occupants trapped, because as we learned, the Titan is secured from the outside in, bolted shut.
I imagined myself in the situation. What would I do? How would I spend my final moments? What do loved ones tell each other at the end? How do you pass the time when you’re waiting to die? For those aboard the Titan, such moments likely, hopefully never came to pass. That’s what the wreckage of the Titan leads us to believe anyway.
These questions united a cross-section of society; a rare moment in which people from all backgrounds and worldviews became entranced by a single event. There’s something oddly comforting in commiserating over fear—a macabre version of watching the Super Bowl. For a week, coworkers initiated Zoom calls with talk of the missing submersible rather than the weather.
The last above-the-fold, disaster story that reached an equivalent level of public fascination was that of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Another incident that captivated the world, with an audience that clamored to know where the missing plane had gone. Had it crashed on a remote island? Did it get swallowed up by a black hole? Or, like the Titan, was the ending more predictable. Occam’s razor. Planes don’t just go missing—someone made it disappear. A fate that we figured was the case, but ignored in favor of more fantastical explanations.
What allows these events to hang together isn’t the minutiae (MH370 has more in common with the original Titanic disaster in 1912 than with the Titan in 2023), but the fact that they force us to confront the eerie reality that we can’t control for everything. Every so often a situation slips through the cracks of expected outcomes. And when these events occur, we can’t help but put ourselves in the victims’ shoes, to imagine what it must have been like to watch reality slip away. It took two hours and forty minutes for the Titanic to sink. In that time, passengers went from sleeping soundly in warm beds to freezing to death in the Northern Atlantic, reality fell out from under them. More than 110 years later, we still struggle with the events of April 14th, 1912 because they defy expectations.
Like its namesake, the Titan also defies expectations. Just as unsinkable ships don’t sink, submersibles don’t implode. Titan represented the first fatal submersible accident in history. When that happens, morbid fascination follows. We want to get as close to disaster as possible to see what it must have been like and then, at the last moment, pull up to safety. That’s why movies like James Cameron’s Titanic get made. Hollywood puts on screen what most of us can only imagine. Describe the indescribable. Breathe humanity into a situation that seems too surreal to have involved real people. Make sense out of a nonsensical situation. And, most importantly, allow the audience to walk away untouched. It didn’t come as a surprise when the Internet greenlit a movie about the Titan before the fate of the vessel was even known; it would have worked better had the passengers survived, but death doesn’t rule out a great script (see Paul Greengrass’ United 93). We want to know and see how these events square with our perceptions of reality—helping us comprehend that which isn’t compatible with our version of the world.
The symmetry of the Titanic sinking and the Titan accident is hard to ignore and plays an outsized role in the public’s fascination. The hubris of OceanGate and that of the White Star Line (Titanic’s parent company) dovetail nicely. The remnants of their vessels resting together quietly at the bottom of the ocean—separated by one thousand feet and a century’s worth of technological progress.
The RMS Titanic, MH370, and Titan disasters are exogenous events. We discount them because they sit outside the model of supposed outcomes. We don’t expect them to occur and when they do they make us question how sound the model really is. One hundred years of industrial and technological advancements have brought us a long way, but there are limits; eventually something comes along that illustrates those limits. A moonless night with calm, glass-like water makes it near impossible to spot an iceberg in time. A passenger plane slips past detection in the brief moment when air traffic control isn’t paying attention. Undetected micro-fractures build in a first-of-its-kind carbon fiber hull. What was true in 1912 was true in 2014 was true in 2023.
There are components of the Titanic disaster that allow for a longer shelf life than that of the Titan or even MH370. The sinking of the Titanic blends tragedy with borrowed nostalgia. The horror is juxtaposed against a bygone era of explicit class structure and unabashed opulence, with upper class citizens operating as semi-royalty. As the Titanic sank so too did a different kind of world. Two years after the sinking, World War I would commence and the Edwardian era, which the Titanic belonged to, would officially end. Not so with the Titan. Soon, people will forget; that is until the next exogenous event comes along that makes us question our sense of reality—causing us to wonder what it was like to live through an experience that goes against everything we know.
That’s why we care about the Titan. A moment when the rules of order lapsed, and we were faced with the unknown—upending our sense of security. We expect car accidents and long-term illness; tragic as they are, such events are baked into our risk versus reward calculations of everyday life. Events like the Titan accident are not, they’re cosmic in nature—hurtling towards us with no solution or escape hatch at our disposal.
For years, my parents kept a boat just north of Boston, Massachusetts. Occasionally, we would take trips out past the harbor into the open ocean. There I could jump off the stern and swim for a few seconds before it became too cold to manage. In those moments, I sometimes thought about how many thousands of feet were between me and the ocean floor. Sun shining down while a vast darkness stared back up. That’s a whole lot of unknown I was hoping would stay that way.