“This operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body.”
“Travel in and around the vehicle could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.”
The obvious question is: Why would anyone want to sign a waiver that reads like that?
And there’s a corollary question: Why would anyone want to go on an expedition like that in the first place? Crammed inside a 22-foot hull made of carbon fiber, a cheaper material than deep-diving submersibles’ usual metal that had never been pressure-tested over time to withstand the ocean’s enormous water weight at the depth of 12,500 feet where the Titanic lies at the bottom of the North Atlantic.
Answers to these questions typically fall into two categories. The first is the “extreme tourism” theory: wealthy people eager to experience a danger-fraught adventure financially unavailable even to the ordinary well-off. Two of the passengers were reported to be billionaires: 58-year-old private-jet dealer Hamish Harding and 48-year-old Shahzada Dawood, vice-chairman of his Pakistani family’s business empire. The third passenger was the wealthy 77-year-old French maritime expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, whose employer, RMS Titanic Inc., holds salvage rights to the sunken ocean liner. And the fourth passenger, Suleman Dawood, was the 19-year-old son of Shahzada Dawood. The cost of the Titanic trip was up to $250,000 per passenger.
The other theory could be labeled as “What’s wrong with risk-taking?” According to this take on the Titan misadventure, the passengers were, in effect, test pilots exploring and also subsidizing with their dollars the opportunities and limits inherent in the commercial use of submersibles. Espousers of this theory point out that during the early years of the 20th century, air and automobile travel were both extremely dangerous and so prohibitively expensive that only the rich could afford them. Wealthy car owners and air travelers who got involved in fatal crashes during those hazardous decades helped underwrite the development of today’s safe and affordable vehicles and today’s mass airplane travel. The Titan passengers were taking a stand against a risk-averse contemporary society that demands that all human activity be 100 percent shielded from potential harm.
Still, there’s something to be said for this position. Hamish Harding, besides being an aviation-business success, had taken part in multiple record-breaking adventures—circumnavigating the Earth in a 46-hour plane trip and boarding a submersible that dove to the deepest point in the Mariana Trench—as well as making a 2022 trip to outer space in Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet was an experienced submersible pilot who had made 37 undersea voyages to the Titanic wreckage and was known as “Mr. Titanic” for his expertise. Rush himself had gotten a jet-transport pilot’s license at age 19, earned a degree in electrical engineering from Princeton, and—you’ve got to give him credit—believed in his vision of inexpensive submersible exploration so firmly that he was willing to go down with his ship.
My own view is that far from being unduly risk-averse, we as a society are often overly complacent in our faith that modern technology has simply eliminated the perils—say, of ocean travel—that our ancestors knew all too well. The wreck of the Titanic itself in 1912 was an example of exactly that complacency: Why waste money on more lifeboats when we have a series of watertight compartments that make the ship unsinkable? Our automobiles are so safe to drive nowadays, compared to the vehicles of 50 and even 30 years ago, that we feel free to drive them more recklessly than ever. It was possibly this sort of complacency that led a father to take his teenage son along on a voyage fraught with danger signals—and led both to sign waivers that ought to have given them second thoughts.
Modern technology and the human ingenuity that created it are wonderful, but the Titan disaster ought to remind us that we haven’t managed to conquer nature yet. And that nature can be a kind friend but can also be a hostile and implacable foe.
