By
Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday,
June 21, 2023
Nothing will
make you feel as small as a little time thinking about the sea.
As I
write, the fate of the five poor souls aboard the Titan submersible
has not yet been confirmed, but the conclusion we can draw is clear. We are
clever, we human beings, but, in the grand scheme of things, we are small and
procumbent before Nature’s God. The work that is being done by our rescue teams
is remarkable, and worthy of our prayers and our applause. And yet each time I
refresh my browser for more news of its progress, I am struck by a feeling of
profound technological inadequacy. Most of the surface of our planet is covered
with an element against which we are helpless. We cannot breathe in it; we
cannot see through it; we cannot communicate when it is in the way. If it is
warm and calm enough, we can swim along its surface, but, if we sink just a
little beneath the waves, it will instantly crush us to death. Our machines
pale in comparison to its power and size. At an air show, those enormous P-3
airplanes that are now circling the coast of Newfoundland seem miraculous.
Above the vast expanse of the Atlantic, they resemble bluebottles. The search
area, which has expanded since Monday, is now twice the size
of Connecticut. The
vehicle that is being sought is 22 feet long — a little over the size of a
giraffe. Moments such as these put the world into perspective.
The
sinking of the Titanic is often held up as a parable — against
arrogance, against carelessness, against ambition. But, by the standards of the
day, the Titanic was actually somewhat over-engineered. Any
fool can play “What if?” What if the bulkheads had extended all the way to the
upper decks? What if the ship had possessed six watertight compartments,
instead of five? What if she had been traveling at 19 knots through the ice
field instead of at 22? But life is full of trade-offs, and the vast majority
of the decisions that were made by the Titanic’s designers were
rational, defensible, and arrived at in good faith. What happened on that night
had never happened before to a passenger ship, and it has never happened since.
It was the very definition of a catastrophe. The men who built the Titanic were
working within the bounds of their imaginations, and, in 1912, their
imaginations did not encompass such a freak occurrence. In their estimation,
the greatest threats were posed by other ships — which, in the crowded harbors
and sea lanes of the time, might inadvertently strike their creation. As it
happened, that eventuality was the least of their worries. The Nemesis they’d
underestimated was Nature.
And what
a bastard Nature can be. Relative to a human being, the Titanic was
gargantuan. Relative to the iceberg that sank her, she was a fleck. The Titanic was
brand-new, 883 feet long, and weighed 46,000 tons; the iceberg was 100,000
years old, 1,700 feet long, and weighed 75 million tons. The Titanic displaced
1,651,244 gallons of water; the Atlantic Ocean contains 82 quintillion of
those gallons. When it sank, the Titanic dropped down 12,500
feet, which is the equivalent of eight and a half Empire State Buildings, or 41
football fields, or 54 Boeing 747s. Imagine more than 2,000 Olympic swimming
pools stacked on top of each other, and you’ll grasp how far down you would
have to descend before you got to the Titanic’s final resting
place. It is another world there — and, as we are so often told, we still know
less about it than we know about the moon. There is reason that, from Richard
III (“Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks”) to Julius
Caesar (“There is a tide in the affairs of men”) to Hamlet (“to
take arms against a sea of trouble”), Shakespeare so often cast the ocean as
the author of human destiny, and even of conscience, and that reason is that
the place is truly terrifying. From time to time, we forget that. And then, all
of a sudden, we know.
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