Over the last few days I, like many others, have been drawn in to the analysis of ‘what went wrong’ with the Titan submersible, diving on the Titanic when it suffered a catastrophic implosion at depth, instantly killing all on board. My deepest sympathies are with their families after this terrible tragedy.

Sidebar this for a second.

The previous week we learned of the capsize of a boat carrying up to 750 refugees of the coast of Greece, with most of those on board remaining both nameless and unaccounted for. When the Titanic went down the loss of life was around 1,500 souls. So just to put things in proportion; between 1/3 and 1/2 of the Titanic disaster just happened in the Mediterranean. I cannot begin to comprehend the depths of grief and suffering those left behind by this disaster must be feeling; compounded by the worlds’ media shifting focus on to the fate of a small number of very rich and privileged individuals who chose to put themselves into the jaws of extreme danger.

How the hell have we become so immune to suffering? Perhaps because they were poor? Fleeing persecution? Nameless? Mainstream story-less?

Hold this as sidebar #2.

Sidebar #3. Here in Canada we are in the midst of what is rapidly shaping up to be the worst-ever fire season. Note the progression between reports in early June and at the time of writing. There is going to be a lot of analysis about the exact causation of each individual blaze, however the underlying cause is abundantly clear – the climate change signal is profound and will only become stronger. And in the face of this, we appear to be stuck in some kind of trance; as clearly indicated in this recent speech by Antonio Gutterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Now to weave these together. Here is my assertion – the same thinking which led to the tragic and entirely avoidable loss of 5 lives in a catastrophic submarine accident is identical with that underlying our cultural trance; one that we – collectively – need to snap out of if our civilization and much of the natural world on which we depend are to survive.

A lot has been written and said already regarding OceanGate – the company behind the ill-fated Titan submersible. The information available online from multiple angles is pointing at a mindset, promoted by the CEO of that organization, of over-confidence and a lack of willingness to accept feedback or other points of view. This led to developing a machine, designed to provide life-support in one of the most inhospitable environments accessible to humanity, using novel materials and approaches, subject to no external oversight, scrutiny or certification process. The construction and wiring of your house are subject to more structured procedure and oversight than the design of this submersible was. Instead, the CEO, who apparently had an an engineering background, concentrated in ‘introducing innovation’ against commonly-held wisdom and the counsel of experts throughout that industry. When an expert consultant who was bought in from the UK, who became a director with responsibility for safety in the organization rang alarm bells about the design and processes, he was fired and subsequently sued by OceanGate.

All of this behaviour appears to reflect a mindset; a way of perceiving and thinking about the world with the following characteristics: a) Inflated self-confidence; I know what I am doing, b) People who are telling me otherwise have a nefarious agenda and should not be listened to, c) expert ‘wisdom’ is overrated and is designed to hold me and my vision back.

A sidebar I will not follow here, but I think reflects the same kind of ‘magical’ thinking has afflicted the UK since 2016. A trance which I believe in the face of reality is beginning to break. I digress…

The result of this mindset in the case of the Titan catastrophe was that an individual, driven by an internal self-confidence and unwillingness to accept feedback or that legitimate concerns for safety were just that, continued to operate without accepting any external scrutiny. Further, through persuasion, they involved others in taking on risks that they had no means of assessing. Four people died because they trusted this individuals’ judgment, and that external regulation and oversight was ‘just there to hold him and his vision back’.

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To speak to the Engineering side of this for a moment: Carbon Fibre and other composites have extraordinary characteristics. Incredible strength-to-weight being primary amongst them. Utilizing this property allowed OceanGate to develop a vehicle with some extraordinary characteristics. The trouble was that the implementation of this design was not subjected to the rigour of testing that effective risk-management requires. Any mechanical element subject to repeated stress (such as cycling repeatedly from 0 to 6,200psi (430 atmospheres)) can exhibit signs of fatigue and weaken over time. This is why airframes for example only fly up to a certain limiting number of take-off/landing cycles. Metals have well-understood properties with respect to repeated stress and tend to show signs long before failure becomes a risk. Overdesign, periodic inspection and planned retirement are both prudent and practiced for all such certified safety-critical systems.

One of the key problems many people have asserted with using composites such as carbon-fibre as pressure-vessels is the nature of failure in these materials. They have incredible strength – however that strength is different in different directions. They are built up by a layering process which may introduce hidden flaws. And when close to failure, their failure modes are characterized by brittleness and sudden change. Much was made by OceanGate of their ‘innovative’ (and patent-applied-for) real-time strain-gauge and acoustic sensing of the integrity of the pressure vessel. However without a deep knowledge-base of what the approach to failure would sound like and an understanding of how much warning this system would actually give of impending failure, it gave, in this author’s opinion, a false sense of security. It is useless to warn of a failure that is mere milliseconds in the future when recovery would take minutes or hours…

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Engineering digression over… Let’s get back to mindset.

There is another element that enters the equation of the mindset within OceanGate that I found very hard to make sense of until I thought about it in relation to the disaster in the Mediterranean. Culturally the capsize of an overloaded boat full of desperate migrants (otherwise why would they be on an overcrowded boat?) became a cultural footnote very quickly. The horror of seeing a three-year-olds drowned corpse washed up on a beach in Turkey in the recent past has been replaced, it seems, with a passive acceptance of this is how the world is. Our hearts armour-up as the pain of opening it to the true plight of our fellow humans becomes overwhelming. In the face of the loss of their friend and almost undoubtedly the end of OceanGate, the co-founder and at least one investor doubled-down on the ‘safety culture’ of the company in the face of a catastrophic incident that, as the unfolding investigations are likely to conclude, was a direct result of that culture. Time will tell.

And so all the elements of mindset of our cultural trance are now in place. To recap: a) Inflated self-confidence; our culture knows what it is doing, b) People who are saying otherwise have a nefarious agenda and should not be listened to, c) expert ‘wisdom’ is overrated and is designed to us back, and d) Yes, shit is has happened, and however tragic, everything is and will be okay.

The captain of the original ‘Titanic’ must have come to understand his own personal version of this trance in the moments before he went down with his ship along with 1,500 others who perished then or in the hours soon after in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic in 1912.

Now lets talk about the submarine we are all on – the biosphere of our planet. As far as we know it is the only one that exists. It has never in the memory of our culture, broken (well, unless you read the stories of the Garden of Eden, and of Noah and wonder where they came from). Conventional wisdom holds that (a) there is nothing wrong with the way we are doing things. Yes, perhaps it needs some tweaks but fundamentally all is well. Anyone protesting is getting in the way of progress and prosperity, and probably are being funded by foreign billionaires to sabotage our economy and way of life (b). It is okay to question scientists and scientific wisdom and refute it. What do they know? (c). And finally (d) – if we really looked at where we are straight in the face and let it in it would be overwhelming. Better to pretend that even though stuff is happening, everything will be okay.

It would be nice if we could rely on gradual change. The ability of engineers working with well-understood materials to measure a stress and know the strain would be predictable and proportional provided the material is in good condition. Unfortunately, along with the individuals who lost their lives deep under the Atlantic, we are unlikely to know how far off the edge we are until it is way too late to do anything useful about it; catastrophe is non-linear. The evidence we have is climate change can be gradual, and also very rapid (for example, 14,000 years ago). Banking on the former whilst risking the latter is foolhardy. We can look at the pilot of the doomed submersible as one who should have known better.

Shouldn’t we all? After all, there is comfort in projecting all of our cultural trance onto this individual.

Part of self-knowledge is recognizing and reclaiming my own projections.

Is it not time that we made sure that this dangerous experiment with our climate is bought to a speedy and safe conclusion for us, all future generations, our own children, ourselves, all life?

We know how. The solutions are all around us. It is only old money, old investments and old out-dated stories that are no longer fit for purpose holding us back.

Unless we wake up and do what is needed, there may be no voice able to make the change and no time to alter course.

“What we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity. We are in a very, very desperate situation.”

Sir David King. FRS FRSC FInstP, former Chief Science Advisor to the UK Government. He said this two years ago…

What is that cracking sound I hear?

_{(C) Don Goodeve, 29th June 2023.}