Hubris at Cost
The missing submersible saga tortured the minds of many all week. Rationality on the issue came from an unsuspecting place late in the game - Hollywood.
Have you been following the submarine story? I have.
To catch you up to speed, OceanGate’s deep sea submersible, aptly named Titan, began its descent last Sunday off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
The goal? To survey the RMS Titanic wreckage site. The novelty? Four crew members in addition to the captain. Deep sea tourism, at least in a sense.
I don’t have a lot to say on this story but lets dive in.
Ultimately, after days of news of “banging” - a potential attempt at an SOS message from the trapped crew - and after a race against the depleting oxygen supply (news media included a countdown approach to “suffocation”), the conclusion was what the keen among us suspected all along - a mass causality event early on in the story.
As news reports unfolded throughout the day yesterday, evidence suggested an implosion - scuba lingo for a catastrophic shockwave-like event linked to pressure differentials. For all intents and purposes, the sub and all inside it had been obliterated.
True clarity, however, came from an unsuspecting place in film director and explorer, James Cameron.
I’m not going to rehash Cameron’s take because its worth watching. To put it bluntly, Cameron summed things up with a word I have been repeating ad nauseum this week - hubris.
The evidence suggests an egregious degree of hubris amongst the billionaire behind the company - one of five souls now captured by Titanic’s ghosts.
But amid the media blitz all week, Cameron was oddly quiet. He’d go on to explain that essentially from time = 0, he had insider knowledge on specific and important points that proved an early demise for Titan.
First, nearly two hours after diving into the ocean, the submersible lost both its communication and tracking signals, simultaneously. As Cameron points out, the transponder has an independent pressurized chamber and its own battery supply. To add to this, Cameron cites sources that told him an audible event was recorded close to the time the submarine went missing and lost communication, a fact officials subsequently downplayed.
He took issue with the media, citing the hope it was creating over the last four days, when he knew they were dead. He spoke powerfully about his hesitancy in speaking out against this new found, media-recycled hope - a complex ethical scenario that makes movement around the situation difficult. Cameron, too, has skin in the game - among those lost were some of his friends and colleagues.
Above all, Cameron’s interviews remind us of an important ideal - credibility. He becomes in these interviews, instantly credible on too many fronts to name here.
Expertise is siloed, and perhaps in many cases it should be. The wisdom this film director offers, the instant clarity he provides to a media so mesmerized with itself and its audience, was refreshing.
Engineering. That is what he kept repeating. This is engineering we know about. Cameron ultimately seems to blame the submarine’s carbon fiber composite hull, providing great insight into the fact that these types of materials have a shelf life and each time they bear the unforgiving and almost unbelievable pressure differentials 13,000 feet below the water’s surface, they risk catastrophic compromise. The company’s actions on this point were in a word, egregious. Unconscionable is the word Cameron uses here.
Cameron offered one parting reality amongst the many hard to eat dishes he served on media channels across the world last evening. He points to speculation that the crew did try to resurface using a specific technical move. This, he says, may be evidence that they were aware of the failure acoustically, even if briefly, before the submersible imploded, destroying everyone inside instantly.
Having some understanding of physics does allow one to shift into a higher gear when listening to content like Cameron’s. But the wisdom of his words come with his commentary on unnecessary hubris not forces and masses and other physical parameters. It is easy to forget, it seems, how unforgiving the ocean’s depths truly are. Comparisons to outer space come with difficulty of course, but there is some utility in approaching the ocean that way.
The film maker is experienced. He has surveyed the Titanic crash site some thirty times and has also dived to the lowest point in the ocean - the Mariana Trench, some 36,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.
In an eerie closing comment, he draws parallels between the recklessness of the Titanic’s captain, warned of an impending iceberg field, and the captain of the Titan, willingly wandering into extremely hazardous and dangerous activities, ignoring all the desperate begging on the part of those worried and confused by the submersible and its lazy design.
Cameron bled credibility as he discussed the seven years it took to design, build, and test his own submersible for the Mariana Trench dive. Asking others to take on such risk was always a no go for Cameron, who dived alone.
Out of such a tragedy much can be learned within this outgoing and adventure-seeking deep sea exploration community. One lesson does relate to hubris and its practical limitations and harsh consequences.
Here are two of Cameron’s clips from CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night, who was actually reporting from Newfoundland. Beats a hurricane I guess, CNN’s oldest love affair.
Anyways, Cameron is impressive. Worth a listen to learn the lesson.