Hello! Sorry, it’s been a while. Life happens. I promise I’ll be better about this.
Okay, okay, you and I both know I can’t make that promise. But I’ll try to type more/suck less.
On February 4, 1912, French tailor and part-time inventor Franz Reichelt climbed out onto the railing of the Eiffel Tower’s viewing platform. Then he jumped.
It wasn’t suicide. Or, at least, it was not a purposeful suicide. Reichelt had spent the previous eighteen months designing and perfecting his prototype for a wearable parachute suit, with the hope of making the nascent aviation industry safer for pilots. Needing a suitable test location, he repeatedly petitioned the Parisian police to allow him to use the Eiffel Tower to drop a test dummy to test his invention. When they finally relented and allowed him to conduct the test, Reichelt decided that, rather than using a test dummy, he would test the device on himself.
It didn’t work.
Reichelt plunged 187 feet with the ‘parachute’ following behind him like the least effective superhero cape in history. He was killed instantly upon impact with the frozen ground. Video exists online if you want proof, though I don’t feel like linking it here. Suffice it to say that, while not gory the video makes very clear — even by 1912 video standards — that yeah he was DEAD dead.
I imagine the crowd on the Champs de Mars that day experienced a lot of emotions: horror, sympathy, admiration, pity, regret, disappointment… but I would venture to guess that “surprise” was not high on that list.
If you’re like me, the sentence “five people are missing and presumed dead after their tourist submarine exploration of the wreck of the Titanic went awry” evokes a lot of emotions in a very specific order. That order goes 1) sympathy, and then 2) a compelling desire to know absolutely everything about this situation with a strong suspicion that the sympathy is misplaced.
But yeah, five people are missing and presumed dead after their tourist submarine exploration of the wreck of the Titanic went awry. And we have to say “presumed.” Presumed is the polite modifier here. It’s like how you tack on the word “allegedly” to accused criminals, even when they absolutely did the thing they were accused of doing. You have them on tape, David Garvin-style, stealing TVs. But the news will say “alleged thief.” It’s the safe way to go.
Theoretically, they could be alive. But they took an unlicensed, unregulated submarine operated with a video game controller and outfitted with components purchased at CamperWorld 13,000 feet under the ocean, seemingly without a beacon or any sort of device to allow the outside world to locate them. And now no one knows where they are. Hell, watch this CBS News clip about this thing from before this incident:
They are so very, astoundingly dead. They might still be alive, but this is like the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment where the inside of the box still has a vial of poison that may or may not have been released, but the box is at the bottom of the goddamn ocean with no one around. Whether the cat is alive or dead, that cat DEAD.
I do think we there are a few really important takeaways from this endeavor:
Humans are not designed for the ocean.
Humans have been the dominant species on this planet for somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 years, and we’ve been uber-dominant for somewhere around the last 5,000 years. Our domination is horizontally boundless. But our domination is very, very limited vertically. Putting humans safely more than 8 feet above or below ground level requires some expertise. If you’re planning to put a human more than about 30 feet above or below ground level, you’d better have a REALLY good plan for them not dying.
Oh, we can do it. Every day, thousands of humans fly safely and effortlessly through the air like the greatest eagles who ever soared, provided we’re willing to change planes in Atlanta. We build skyscrapers and dig massive underground structures. But in the absence of experts, at any given moment, the dumbest, slowest bird rules the sky above us, and outwitting the moles in our yards is a fool’s errand.
But none of that compares to the ocean. The ocean can just kill us. The creatures — large and small — can kill us. The waves can kill us. The riptides can kill us. We’re currently in a war with the orcas, who have been ramming and tearing the rudders off of ships. And that’s just the SURFACE stuff. Going under the water is just insane.
First of all, the human-compatible oxygen stops at about 0.1 inches beneath the surface. Going deeper than 30 feet, even if you’ve brought your own breathin’ air, makes you susceptible to the Bends, in which the gasses in your blood start to send little bubbles of pain and destruction throughout your body. The atmospheric pressure at the depth of the Titanic is something like 5,500 PSI. That’s a Chevy Tahoe pressing down on every square inch of your vessel. Do not go under the water. Do not go near the water. Land. We’re SOOOO good at land. Stick with land.
Not every industry needs disruption.
The combination of entrepreneurs, tech bros, and swindlers1 have taken a crack at reinventing practically every task, job, hobby, and industry that mark our journey through modernity. Some of these efforts are, even if accidentally, a success. Most are dumb but harmless, with your greatest risk is spending $600 on a worthless juicer.
Far be it from me to nag you about deferring to authority. You do you. But there are some words that should tip you off that you really might want to look for some government oversight and a large, non-disruptive company that has been doing the same thing for a long time. Those words include, but are not limited to:
“Dosage”
“Parts per million”
“Altimeter”
“millisieverts” or “rads per hour”
“…between you and the gorillas…”
“PSI”
“Decompression”
“Beneath the surface”
“Ocean floor”
Not everything is the way it is because people are “gatekeepers defending the status quo.”
Not every accident is a tragedy.
I’m not saying that the five very dead people in the S.S. Deathtube were bad people, nor that they deserved to die, nor that I am glad this happened to them. Quite the opposite: I picture the scenario where they were/are still alive for some significant time after things went awry, cold and alone two and a half miles under the sea in the pitch black, and I feel terrible for them. I feel terrible for their loved ones. It emphatically sucks. The operator should be shut down and sued into oblivion and sent to space prison and defenestrated.
But something can be sad and not tragic. I mean, watch that video again. These guys paid $250,000 and put in a LOT of time and effort to willingly climb into that contraption. It isn’t disrespectful to the dead to point out, “no shit, what did you really think was going to happen.” There is a limit to how far you a stranger can climb the “fuck around” curve before people cease to be heartbroken when they find out.
Every year people spend between $40,000 and $100,000 each to climb Mount Everest knowing that for approximately every 25 people who successfully scale it, 1 person will die. A 4% death rate. An average of 6 people per year die trying to accomplish something with no tangible benefit, knowing it has a 4% chance to kill them. At least Franz Reichelt was trying to advance science and save the lives of pilots. These guys are conducting knowingly dangerous vanity exercises. Schadenfreude isn’t the right response, but neither is the feigned shock that “oh, gee, why did this happen.”
The Darwin Awards seem a little less funny to me in my middle age, as they tend to involve people who made rash, impulsive decisions and paid a disproportionate price. Something like 175,000 Americans die in various kinds of accidents every year, most of which were probably avoidable on some level, and many of which were the fault of the deceased. No one is creating memes of the guy who runs a red light because he’s texting while driving or the worker killed in an industrial accident. We know that, in a lot of cases, those accidental deaths could have been ours. But I feel confident that my frozen corpse will never serve as a landmark on Everest, and I will not die on the Titanic.
Some day, probably in the very near future, some combination of celebrities, astoundingly rich people, and social media influencers are going to explode in a failed space tourism mission. You know it’s gonna happen. About 1.5% of NASA’s space shuttle missions exploded, and they’re NASA. And when this happens, we’re going to be told to “have some respect” for those poor souls who were struck down by the fickle hands of fate, as if they didn’t strap themselves into a rocket for the sole reason that it sounded awesome to strap themselves to a rocket.
If we all want to take extra steps to recognize the humanity in each other, I’m completely on board. I just think you’re asking us to start in the least defensible place.
Anyway, stay the hell out of the ocean.
Your author makes no statement regarding the Venn Diagram of these three groups. But it’s a circle.