How Many Hours of Oxygen Left?
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhy Can’t We Look Away From the Submarine Lost at Sea?, What it means that we can’t look away from the OceanGate submersible lost at sea., Titanic sub rescue: Why it’s so hard to look away.
‘Deciding that death is just another coding error has become something of a Silicon Valley bar mitzvah of late—when you reach a certain age and net worth, it’s time to start figuring out how to live forever,’ feature writer Suzy Weiss recently observed. The methods for living forever that she chronicled, in a piece for the Free Press, were, to be clear, rather hare-brained: One serial entrepreneur launched a startup called Cryopets; he planned to put his Labradoodle, Jasper, on ice, and then, eventually, his parents. Another hopes to bring woolly mammoths back. Of humans, he told Weiss: ‘If you want to live to 1,000 and beyond … you should be able to.’
The logical customer base for the current available methods to dramatically extend human lifespan—which, to be clear, do not work—is people with tons of money to burn. Peter Thiel, Weiss reports, is signed up for a cryopreservation service that promises to ‘pause the dying process.’ This happens … after you technically die. The cost is ‘a minimum of $220,000 in life insurance.’
But this week, like so many of us, I’ve been thinking about the other direction that can apply to that comment about Silicon Valley—what happens when the goal, having achieved so much else, is not extending life, but risking it? Because if placing a bet on living forever is one leisure activity to put your vast wealth toward, another is extreme feats of travel. The rich people of today can buy tickets to outer space. Or to the deep ocean. Where things can go very wrong, very quickly.
Scrambling to make sense of the unfolding submersible tragedy—it is very strange to know a group of people only has a handful of oxygen hours left—writers, including this one, turned our attention to the sheer cost of it all: tickets aboard OceanGate’s Titan were $250,000 a pop. Interestingly, that’s double what the CEO originally charged—he set the price tag to be more on par with space travel, after realizing his offering, a seatless minivan-sized can that dips to wild depths, really was similar to space travel.
Did the people floating with—checks the live blogs—20 hours of oxygen left now know what they were getting into when they boarded the vessel? A video clip of David Pogue, who took a press trip aboard the Titan last summer for CBS, went viral. He flipped through the waiver form, and told the camera: ‘An experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death. Where do I sign?’
And here is what Mike Reiss, a former Simpsons writer who traveled to the Titanic aboard OceanGate’s submersible last year, told the BBC: ‘You sign a massive waiver that lists one way after another that you could die on the trip. It mentioned death three times on page one, and so it’s never far from your mind. You try to put it out. As I was getting onto the sub, I mean that was my thought. ‘Well, this could be the end.’ ‘
It has been hard to know whether it is OK to make fun of the rich people here, who willingly hurtled themselves to the bottom of the ocean for the experience, or the story, or the price tag. It is sad and quite haunting that people might die on a submersible lost at sea. It is actively painful to think about what the conditions in the sub must be like right now, or what it would be like to be a family member wondering after a loved one on board. It feels like: Yes, this is newsworthy, but also, the live blogs, the oxygen countdowns in the headlines, the breathless coverage of the price tags—should we be watching this? Then the update—there was banging heard in the general area where they suspect the sub may be. They may be rescued yet. It feels like a snuff movie, in real time.
The news is often about death, and accidents: We all know the planes that land safely don’t get covered. It’s the extreme scenarios that are interesting, and worthwhile, to talk about. But still, this situation is getting even more coverage than so many gruesome and unfair deaths—the migrants whose boats capsize at sea without so much as a rescue mission come to mind. There’s anger here, in all kinds of directions: The fact that there are massive resources being devoted to the rescue—truly, as if they are astronauts—of just five people. The fact that they got themselves into this scenario. It feels odd to watch, but impossible to look away from. The exact goal of why we need to ‘stay informed’ is unclear—most of us would never be able to afford such a journey anyway. Gawking feels wrong, but also totally natural.
Reading the New York Times report last night, on the many warnings from both company insiders and expert outsiders about the potential dangers the submersible posed to passengers, the phrase ‘Theranos at sea’ kept popping into my head. Even as far as extreme risks go, this one is shaping up, it seems, to be recklessly risky. There is at least some overlap between the people who truly got themselves into this (the CEO on board; perhaps the experienced, repeat submersible passengers), but also, at least one crystal-clear victim of hubris and oversight (the 19-year-old). Then again: Is a canned, watery death the correct level of comeuppance for alleged oversight? Elizabeth Holmes is merely in jail. The cryopreservation crowd gamble with their bodies and money after they are finished living.
If it is hard to know how to feel, exactly, some things are at least more certain: The wealth gap is widening. Money that could be spent, somewhat straightforwardly, to enjoy a higher-quality life. Often, in these days of pandemic and climate crisis, that means on a life that is just safer—concierge doctors and filtered air and a sturdy house. I guess all of that could get boring. Because instead, some of the ultrawealthy at turns try to defy death, and then court it. The rest of us can only watch.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/ocean-gate-submersible-oxygen-rescue.html
Ref: slate
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