By the time weā€™d reached the bottom of the Cayman Trench, some 2,000 feet below the oceanā€™s surface, Iā€™d lost feeling in my legs. My neck was aching, and my ears felt as though they were going to explode under the mounting pressure. ā€œHeavy,ā€ said the passenger sitting next to me. He stared out the window with shell-shocked eyes, and I looked, too. A Milky Way of multicolored stars twinkled in blue, violet, and white as far as we could see, like fireworks in a night sky. But these were no fireworks, and the view was no starscape.

What we were seeing were the bioluminescent emissions from tens of thousands of plankton, cephalopods, and who knows what else. This is what the world looks like at the oceanā€™s sunless depths.

Iā€™d come here because I wanted to see where the planetā€™s largest collection of organisms called home. I wanted to explore one of the last frontiers on earth.

This was more than ten years ago. Back then, regular folk werenā€™t talking about vacations to the deep ocean, let alone booking trips to it. There were no sanctioned tours or government-licensed operators to take you. The only way for a private citizen like me to get down there was to either save up several million dollars and purchase a custom-built submersible, or fly to Honduras and meet with the renegade undersea explorer Karl Stanley. I chose the second option.

Stanley had hand-built his own submarine, the Idabel, without any formal training and without any government oversight. Because taking tourists down 70 stories in a homemade, unlicensed submarine, without insurance, was a liability nightmare, Stanley moved his operation to Roatan, Honduras, where regulations for underwater craft were lax or nonexistent, and deep water is close to shore. He ran his submarine business off a tiny dock along Roatanā€™s touristy West End, between a few sand-floored tiki bars serving pink slushy drinks and packs of stray dogs picking through trash heaps.

Stanley had completed more than 2,000 dives in his little homemade sub. Along the way, he had some close calls. Like the one time in an earlier sub when he got stuck in a cave and snagged on a rope. Or another when a window cracked at 1,960 feet as he carried a local from Roatan and the manā€™s pregnant wife. Dangers aside, thus far Stanley had chalked up more time exploring the deep waters between 1,000 and 2,000 feet than anyone in history.

To join him on a deep-sea adventure, Iā€™d need to autograph no waiver, wear no helmet, strap on no seat belt. I just needed to show up at a dock at the end of a dusty dirt road with several hundred dollars and an empty bladder. I signed up. Soon after, I was 200 stories beneath the ocean, witnessing lifeforms that put Avatar to shame.

Today there are more than 200 private submersibles operating around the world and a dozen companies selling tours to the sunless depths. The deep ocean has finally become accessible to anyone who wants to go there. What could go wrong? Even back then, I knew the answer: just about everything.

A Year After the Titan Disaster

Itā€™s been a year since the world saw exactly how lethal these deep-sea voyages can be. On June 18, 2023, the private submersible Titan launched five men on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic, which is roughly 400 off the coast of Newfoundland. The dive was supposed to take a few hours and reach a depth of more than 12,000 feet. But 105 minutes after the Titan ducked below the waves, it went dark.

The U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards and the U.S. Navy were called in on a frantic search to rescue the passengers, only to discover days later that the Titan had imploded. There were no survivors.

The Titan disaster made international headlines for more than a week. Soon millions of people around the world were talking about submersibles and debating the merits of manned exploration to the oceanā€™s depths.

On various social media platforms, many people wrote condolences to the families of the deceased passengers. Many more mocked the whole enterprise. I saw people label the passengers ā€œdaredevils,ā€ ā€œfools,ā€ ā€œarrogant,ā€ ā€œidiotic,ā€ and worse. Several journalists (rightfully) lambasted media outlets for focusing on the lives of five wealthy men lost at sea while 700 migrants drowned in the Aegean Sea a few days after the Titan was lost. The comments and derisions continue to this day. I should know. Iā€™ve been on the receiving end of some of them.

Iā€™ve since spent a decade praising undersea explorers and arguing the importance of visiting the oceanā€™s depths. Several people scolded me, explaining how manned deep-sea pursuits were not only dangerous and expensive, but also pointless.

They argued that in the age of robotic drones, cameras, cables, and computers, no human needs to go down there again. We can explore the planetā€™s secret wonders in HD from the comfort and safety of a climate-controlled office. Why bother boarding a sub? Why go deep?

And so I find myself here, defending the human compulsion to explore. You know, that messy, tactile, anything-can-happen kind of exploration we used to be proud of. The kind that shot us to the moon. That brought us across oceans to new worlds. That led us out of caves.

Without that kind of exploration, a scientist canā€™t prove theories and a journalist canā€™t tell rich stories. Iā€™ve learned over the past 20 years, through much trial and error, that the only way to really write about a subject is to know it; the only way to know it is to experience it; and the only way to experience it is to show up.

The road to discovery, Iā€™ve learned, is long and hard and filled with frustration, wandering, and dead ends. Itā€™s expensive and too often feels fruitless. Which is the whole point. I believe that casting a wide net and blindly trying to follow leads is an essential part of the discovery process.

The Merits of Showing Up

Anyone with a computer can view HD virtual tours of the Louvre, the pyramids of Giza, and Pisaā€™s leaning tower. Yet that kind of tourism hasnā€™t overtaken our collective desire to experience things in person. Families this summer and last have, in record numbers, chosen to spend weeks on the road and thousands of dollars adventuring to these landmarks in person. Business travel also stormed back as soon as airports reopened, and bars, clubs, and restaurants in many cities have become packed to the gills.

After a few years of lockdown, of experiencing life on Zoom, human beings are flocking to IRL experiences. The metaverse is a failed, desolate wasteland, and virtual cocktail parties have gone the way of Iggy Azalea.

As wasteful, time-consuming, and seemingly pointless as it may seem, even bean counters and glad-handers realized that the best experiences in business, science, journalismā€”and life in generalā€”can only be had in person. This is what the submarine skeptics seem to be forgetting.

The U.S. Navy submersible Alvin has made more than 5,000 dives in the past five decades at depths below 20,000 feet. While researchers were putzing around the GalĆ”pagos Rift in Alvin, they witnessed giant ā€œchemosyntheticā€ tube worms, the first life-forms ever observed to exist entirely without the need for sunlightā€”one of the most significant biological discoveries. It was in Alvin that researchers recovered a 1.45 megaton hydrogen bomb that had been lost over the Mediterranean Sea in 1966.

It was in another submersible that scientists caught the first footage of a giant squidā€”a massive, mythic creature that no human had ever witnessed in the wild before. The list goes on and on, and includes hundreds of supposedly impossible discoveries made during deep and dangerous dives into the ocean. Discoveries that were made by showing up. One sub captain told me that on every dive they discovered something new.

Certainly, the passengers aboard the Titan werenā€™t on a serious scientific or journalistic mission of discovery. They were on a joyride to see the remains of historyā€™s most famous shipwreck. But they were moved by the compulsion to explore. We can have the debate about how deep a submersible can safely go, which safety precautions should be required, who ought to be trusted to build and captain them. Those are worthy discussions, and there are people above my pay grade who should have them.

Iā€™m not against rules and regulations, eitherā€”rather, itā€™s the idea that we should avoid certain kinds of exploration that irks me. I believe that the only real way to experience life and truly connect with the ineffable, otherworldly wonders of the world is to experience them in person. I learned this valuable lesson in those sunless depths, 2,000 feet below the waves.

The View At the Bottom

A carnival of the bizarre danced outside my porthole ten years ago during that submarine dive in Honduras. Weā€™d just touched down on a sandy dune below 2,000 feet. On the other side of the window, a fish with stumpy legs waddled past another fish covered in brown blotches, yawning with pouty Mick Jagger lips.

Minutes later, a beach-ball-size orb appeared a few inches from the glassā€”a jellyfish, I thinkā€”emitting flashes of bright pink and purple light like some kind of underwater disco ball. First only blue lights flashed, then red, then purple, then yellow, until every color in the spectrum had appeared. After that, all the colors appeared at the same time, and the spectacle was repeated. The hundreds of rows of lights were evenly spaced around the glob. It looked like a cityscape after nightfall. When the lights were red, they looked like the taillights of cars on a freeway; when they were white, they looked like an urban grid as viewed from an airplane thousands of feet above.

Between the lights there was nothingā€”no visible flesh, nerves, bones, or body. And there it was, this thing, two feet from our faces, at a depth equivalent to twice the height of the Chrysler Building, watching us with its non-eyes, communicating with its non-brain, and dazzling us with its Las Vegas lights.

I realized that not only had no human ever seen these animals, but that these creatures had never seen themselves. The ocean down there was completely black; the only way we could see anything, and they could see us, was through the glare of the submarineā€™s headlights. These animals had been evolving at these depths for millions of years; weā€™d been evolving on land for just as long. And here we were sharing space for the first time.

Beyond witnessing these life-forms, I wondered how else our presence might be interacting with theirs, what other information we might be broadcasting to one another.

As I sat there cramped in a tiny metal sub pondering all this, I felt an emptiness in my chest that breath couldnā€™t fill. The undersea is the largest living space on the planet, the 71 percent silent majority. And this is how it looksā€”gelatinous, cross-eyed, clumsy, glowing, flickering, cloaked in perpetual darkness, and compressed by more than 1,000 pounds per square inch.
Iā€™d love to share with you some pictures or videos from my sub experience, but I didnā€™t take any. I was too busy being gobsmacked by wonders of the natural world and our place within it.

I guess you had to be there.

James Nestor is the author of . This essay was adapted from the book. Ā 

The post The Ocean Floor Is Dangerous. We Should Keep Exploring It. appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

I first heard about the disappearance of the Titan submersible, and the Titan’s passengers, on the morning of Monday, June 19, the day after reports emerged that something had gone wrong. Because it was a holiday in the U.S., I wasnā€™t as online as Iā€™d normally be, but the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek texted me a link to a New York Times story. He thought of me immediately because Iā€™d profiled , the CEO of OceanGate, for his magazine back in 2017, when Rush was going full steam with plans to build a submersible and take tourists 12,500 feet down to view the Titanic, but that subā€”the one we now know as the Titanā€”was still just a prototype.

My next stop was email, and there among the unread messages was a note from Rob McCallum, one of the most experienced deep-sea explorers on the planet. ā€œHi Josh,ā€ he wrote. ā€œThe word is that the OceanGate sub Titan has gone missing at the Titanic site. I still remember our long ago conversation about this very dayā€¦ā€ And that was it.

The ellipses arenā€™t there to signal that Iā€™m truncating McCallumsā€™s message. He didnā€™t write more, because he didnā€™t have to, because I knew what he meant: that he already felt sure the Titan had imploded underwater. As we could find out later, James Cameron, the film director and submersibles innovator, had quickly decided the same thing. It would be days before the rest of the world reached the same conclusion, and Iā€™ve spent a lot of time lately wondering why it took so long.

When I ran into McCallum again two years later, his worry had only grown. This time we were both onboard the Pressure Drop, the support ship for Vescovoā€™s expedition. He was about to attempt to reach his first ā€œdeepā€ā€”the deepest point in the Atlantic Oceanā€”in an extremely robust, extremely expensive submersible, custom-built for the purpose by Triton submarines at a reported cost of $35 million. That vessel, the Limiting Factor, was the opposite of Rushā€™s Titan, an experimental prototype assembled by Rush and his team in a small marina in Everett, Washington, and constructed around a pressure hull made of carbon fiber, a material that was completely untested in such ocean depths.

The Limiting Factorā€™s hull was made of titanium, proven in the deep seas, but the most significant difference between it and the Titan was that the LF was ā€œclassedā€ā€”as in Triton had sent the entire hull to Russia, into the only pressure chamber on earth big enough to accommodate it, to make sure it could hold up to pressures at 36,000 feet down. Every wire, every circuit, every piece of hardware on the LF went through the same process, at great expense. (McCallum estimates that classification was probably 25 percent of the total cost.) The Titan, on the other hand, was not classed. Rush swore by his own tests and experts. When pushed, as we heard many times, he liked to say that regulations only stifle innovation. The tiny submersible industry, Rush said back in 2019, was ā€œobscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasnā€™t innovated or grownā€”because they have all these regulations.ā€ A blog post on OceanGateā€™s website referred to classification as ā€œanathema to innovation.ā€

And this was what worried McCallum, as we revisited the topic on Vescovoā€™s ship, off Puerto Rico in 2019. He was extremely concerned that if Stockton kept at it and took tourists to the Titanic, something catastrophic could happen. That the subā€™s hull would fail and implode.

Unofficial Confirmation of theĀ Titan‘s Collapse

Looking at his email that first morning after the Titan disappeared, I quickly fired back a reply, asking what he knew. ā€œIt happened exactly as predicted,ā€ he wrote. ā€œAn implosion at 3500m.ā€ Did he have confirmation? Because thatā€™s not what the international news was reporting. Yes, he wrote back. ā€œIt was detected acoustically ā€¦ but that needs to come through the formal channels.ā€

I am not a deep-sea expert. Iā€™ve just written about the subject a lot, because my centered on the attempted salvage of a submarine from a depth of 16,500 feetā€”a wreck that was heard and then located, usingā€¦ top-secret acoustic sensors. (In that case, sensors owned by the Air Force and deployed in the Pacific.) Researching the book led to a fascination with the ocean bottom, which led me to the guys who plumb around down there today, like McCallum. It really is a small world, which is how a guy like McCallum is connected to Rush, Vescovo, and Cameron, not to mention the guys who ran trips to the Titanic back in the 1990s. He knows what heā€™s talking about, and I knew that if he was saying the Titan had imploded, it almost certainly had. I was so confident, in fact, that I told my wife (a writer for People) thatā€”on a day when every other news organization was running with a ā€œCan we find them?ā€ narrativeā€”she should tell her editors to prepare a story about the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s implosion. I even gave her quotes. That was on Tuesday. But I told her to wait for official confirmation from the Coast Guard or Navy.

She waited, and waited, and waited. As did the rest of usā€”America, and the world, because that confirmation didnā€™t come. Not on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or even into Thursday morning, by which time the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s oxygen would almost certainly have run out, if by some miracle the sub was stranded out there and not blown to pieces. To my great surprise, the narrative that emerged, and continued over the week, was about an urgent mission to locate the Titan and rescue its occupantsā€”about the world marshaling resources and coming together in pursuit of this heroic goal. Reporters from NBC, the BBC, Sky News, Fox, NewsNation, and the German network Welt all flew to the front lines in St. Johnā€™s, Newfoundland, to wait for updates. CNN sent Anderson Cooper.

Itā€™s a narrative we all love: humans rallying to a common cause. Remember that soccer team stuck in the Thai cave? But this was different, and it felt like a charade, like total bullshit. Because if I knew the sub was gone, plenty of other people did, too. So where was that coverage?

James Cameron confirmed as much after the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s implosion was finally announced, when he told Anderson Cooper that heā€™d known since Monday, too. For Cameron, it started with a hunch. Implosion was the only explanation that fit the facts he knewā€”a sudden loss of communication and tracking, all at the same time. And when he shared that theory with friends in the submersibles community, he was told about the detection of a ā€œloud noise consistent with an implosion event.ā€ By the Navy. But the Navy was also apparently telling people close to the situation that the results were ā€œnot definitiveā€ā€”which is to say that, as much as it sounded like something had imploded, right around the time the Titan vanished, there was no way to be 100 percent sure until someone had visual confirmation of the wreckage. And the only way to do that was to get a deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to the site. No one knew how long that would take.

For three days, I told people the sub was lost while growing increasingly confused about what the hell was going on. Was this an intentional charade, and if so, to what end? Or was that original intelā€”from the most dependable of sourcesā€”somehow wrong?

The noises did apparently create some hopeā€”and panicā€”on the Polar Prince, the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s support ship. McCallum later told me that this particular twist ā€œreally did their heads in,ā€ because there was no way for the crew to zero in on the soundsā€™ precise location. The mood onboard Wednesday, he said, was ā€œfrantic,ā€ and heā€™d been forced to consider something that had previously seemed impossibleā€”that the Titan, somehow, was stuck in the water somewhere between the seafloor and surface.

This, to any deep-sea explorer, is basically an impossible idea. The crafts themselves are negatively buoyant. Theyā€™re either sinking or theyā€™re rising. To be stuck in the middle? That was mind-bending. McCallum and his friends around the world stretched for explanations. Perhaps thereā€™d been a partial flooding on the sub, or perhaps the crew had been unable to drop all of its ballast. The most plausible guess to explain how the Titan could be lost somewhere out there, he said, would be that the sub was somehow slowed during its ascent. In this scenario, it could have been pulled by currents far outside the search areaā€”an outcome ā€œtoo ghastly to contemplate,ā€ McCallum said, because in that hypothetical, the sub could reach the surface and not be found in the vast search area that was involved.

Meaning that the passengers inside could possibly see the outside but not reach it, because the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s design didnā€™t allow passengers to open the hatch. They would suffocate while staring out the porthole at the air they desperately needed. Think about that for a minute.

Hearing that the mood was frantic on the Polar Prince fixed my sense that maybe OceanGate was responsible for the disconnect between perception and realityā€”that there was some incentive for the company to keep hope alive, for PR or insurance purposes. According to McCallum, the crew on the mission had never given up hope.

It wasnā€™t until I stumbled into some back-and-forth between Navy guys on Twitter that I really understood what was happening, though. Because of my book, I follow submariners, Special Operators, and naval historians, and a few of them had been pulled into arguments about possible conspiracies. People had all kinds of ideas about why the whole search could be a lie, ranging from ā€œthe Navy was afraid to reveal the secret acoustic sensorsā€ to ā€œthe Biden administration wants to drown out the latest Hunter Biden scandal.ā€

What moved me was this idea, stated by a few of these guys: sure, the acoustic anomaly could be an implosion, and probably it was, but until that could be visually confirmed by an ROV locating the wreckage, you have to assume thereā€™s some chance of an alternate outcome. Because imagine this scenario: they call off the searchā€”or never start itā€”declare the sub imploded and lives lost, and then a few days later the Titan is found wedged under the the Titanic wreckage, or worse, bobbing on the surface somewhere just outside the search zone, containing five humans whoā€™d all suffocated. Even if the chance of that being the case was 0.001 percent, you have to search.

And what about the major TV news organizations? They had all leaped to the search narrative. At least one put a countdown clock on the screen anticipating when the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s oxygen would run out. ā€œWe didnā€™t know,ā€ a breaking-news producer at one of the leading networks told me. ā€œI mean, any smart person could deduce that it probably wasnā€™t going to end well.ā€ But at her network, anyway, there was no prevailing sense that the Titan had been destroyed early on. And if someone did know this, the opinion wasnā€™t widely shared. There was, she admits, plenty of incentive to buy in to the faint hope of a happy ending. Viewers loved it. Ratings are monitored on a minute-to-minute basis, and when a story gets traction, a network will stick with it. ā€œIt was a feeding frenzy, and ratings were high,ā€ she says. ā€œNews organizations are a business,ā€ and the longer the search dragged on, the more people devoured it. ā€œThatā€™s the sad reality of corporate media in America.ā€

The finding confirmed what McCallum had originally surmised, based on the information he received Sunday night, half a day after the Titan vanished. The same thing heā€™d told me on Monday morning. ā€œIā€™m a professional expedition leader,ā€ he said by phone, from a location off Papua New Guinea. ā€œI strongly believe in logic and in Occamā€™s razorā€”that the simplest explanation is the one. We had the report that it had imploded. We had the report of the loss of comms, loss of tracking. We had the report of them dropping weights and bolting for the surface.ā€

The tapping sound had thrown everybody off, and it couldnā€™t simply be dismissed. ā€œBut it was always just that they imploded at 3,500 meters [about 11,500 feet],ā€ he said. ā€œThatā€™s why they were found where they are, which is exactly where they were supposed to be. They wouldā€™ve been on a glide path to land on the seabed, a few hundred meters in front of the bow. And then you approach the bow and thatā€™s the wow moment. Thatā€™s the money shot.ā€ The experience people pay $250,000 to have.

ā€œStockton thought he was going to be the Elon Musk of the ocean,ā€ Victor Vescovo told me. ā€œAnd he ignored not just a warning here and there, but the industry as a whole was saying, ā€˜Dude, you need to stop doing this.ā€™ People keep asking me, ā€˜Why didnā€™t people stop him?ā€™ Because thereā€™s no international police force on the high seas. You can do whatever you want.ā€

Vescovo and McCallum and Cameron have all expressed concern about what this catastrophe might do to the entire industry. Not so much for themā€”because they work on private expeditions and build their vessels to extreme levels of safety. But smaller commercial operations that take tourists out to even shallow depths could suffer.

Operations like the one run in the Bahamas by Karl Stanley. Stanley was out on an early test of the Titan, with Rush, in April 2019 and got freaked out by some sounds he was hearing in the hull. He told reporters that he couldnā€™t stop thinking about those sounds and went so far as to try and dissuade Rush from going forward with his Titanic trips. Hereā€™s what he wrote to Rush, in an email obtained by The New York Times: ā€œA useful thought exercise here would be to imagine the removal of the variables of the investors, the eager mission scientists, your team hungry for success, the press releases already announcing this summer’s dive schedule.ā€ In other words: Please donā€™t rush and cut corners because of external pressures. You have to get this right.

Itā€™s basically what McCallum had been trying to tell Rush for years. He remembers one lunch, three or four years ago, when Rush explained why he didnā€™t need to get the Titan certifiedā€”that his system of strain gauges that provided real-time monitoring of the carbon-fiber hull was all the safety he needed. ā€œI was incredulous,ā€ McCallum says. ā€œI said, ā€˜Dude, you are standing way too close to the edge.ā€™ā€

Vescovo said, ā€œI think it is very important for people to note that for the last 50 years, there has never been a loss of life or even a serious personal injury in any deep-diving submersible operation until now. And this is the only submersible that flouted those conventions and [Rush] said, ā€˜We donā€™t need to certify this submarine. It takes too long. Itā€™s too expensive and itā€™s not necessary.ā€™ And so in many respects, this was a bit of a rogue operation, and hopefully this incident will curtail that so that we go back to having a well-developed submersible like mine, [or] others that are very, very safe, because we do need humans to explore the ocean.ā€

The post The False Hope That the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s Passengers Might Have Been Saved appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

February, 20 years ago, long before OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded.Ā It kept snowing and snowing and snowing. Slopes that hadnā€™t gone in 20 years were sliding. Five skiers from the Front Range were missing in the mountains outside Ashcroft, near Aspen, Colorado.

Each night as darkness fellā€”I remember it clearlyā€”Iā€™d peer out a window and wonder, Are you still out there? Can you make it to morning? The people were missing for five days. I didnā€™t know any of them. But I hadā€”haveā€”a friend, Hugh Herr, who in 1982, at 17, was lost in the wintertime mountains of New Hampshire for days, dying of cold and thirst, fearing heā€™d never see his family again. As a lifelong climber and skier, Iā€™ve known many people whoā€™ve had accidents, and havenā€™t exactly avoided risk myself, just tried to be careful.

That year of 1993, people with backcountry skiing experience in the Aspen area felt off-the-record certain the skiers had been buried and killed. When I heard on the radio that they had emerged, I stumbled into the common area at Climbing magazine, where I then worked. ā€œHey!ā€ I cried weakly. I was trying to shout that theyā€™d been found, but my voice cracked and failed.

People streamed out from their offices. We were all so happyā€”everybody in town wasā€”but then came the harsh second-day analyses. The skiers had gone out amid storm warnings. They had split up, which is what you donā€™t do. There was further criticism; there always is. Usually some is fair. Itā€™s hindsight.

Now here we are again, minus the happiness phase.

When word broke on Sunday about the missing Titan submersible, I started obsessively checking the news, wondering about the people inside. Many of us felt especially bad for 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, but I actually felt even worse for his father, Shahzada, imagining him down there looking into his sonā€™s face, knowing that the trip had been his idea. My son, in his twenties, didnā€™t think the father should have castigated himselfā€”he had offered his son an incredible adventure, and, yes, there was risk, and sometimes things go wrong. But I thought Shahzada would have been wracked.

I felt a huge jolt of hope on Tuesday night, when it was reported that banging sounds were being detected at 30-minute intervals. I remembered a brilliant, wrenching short story from 1960, ā€œThe Ledge,ā€ which was very loosely based on a real incident in Maine. It was about a hunter, his son, and a nephew who are stranded on an offshore ledge in December, hoping for rescue as the tide rises.

The fisherman tells his son and nephew to load their guns.

ā€œIā€™ll fire once and count to five,ā€ he says. ā€œThen you fire. Count to five. That way they wonā€™t think itā€™s somebody gunning ducks.ā€

The systematic nature of the reported banging, possibly coming from Titan, gave me hope. On Wednesday night, knowing that oxygen in an intact-but-immobile submersible would be running out, likely gone by morning, I kept picturing the five people in there: cold and huddling, rime forming on the surfaces around them, with a boy who was afraid and a father who felt responsible for the death of someone he loved. I did not sleep for hours.

I accept that preoccupation with the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s predicament was giving short shrift to a in the Mediterranean, off the Greek coast, five days ago. Much commentary on social media and in writing, such as on Tuesday, showed how our attention to the Titan was a misplaced priority, focusing on the few rather than the many. ā€œWidespread outrage and anguish for the hundreds of souls taking an extraordinary risk in search of a better life,ā€ the author wrote, ā€œand those who failed them along the way, seems much more justifiable than the frenzy over a small, lost group of hyper-niche tourists, tragic as both circumstances may turn out to be.ā€

But I was sickened by the lack of sympathy I saw on social media. ā€œRich people are a drain on society,ā€ one person wrote on Twitter. ā€œNot sure why taxpayer funds are being expended on people who bought into a fancy underwater coffin.ā€ The same kind of schadenfreude was on display in comments attached to stories published by the Washington Post, the paper I grew up with. Sneering and jeering because the people involved were wealthy, bored billionaires who somehow deserved what was happening to them. There were jokes, with more cropping up Thursday after the implosion and deaths were announced. I saw awful puns on my Facebook feedā€”ā€œsinking low,ā€ ā€œsubparā€ā€”and references to Darwin Award winners. Morbid humor is a common response to tragedy, but the aggregate this time was next level. I know: Itā€™s the internet, what do we expect? Yet those on the submersible were real people.

All week, many in the nation were fixated, as I was. Why? I have no simple answer. It involves many things, one being that the Titanic shipwreck is an icon, a symbol of tragedy, the way Everest is a symbol, of both excellence and tragedy. But I think the main reason we were drawn in is that the drama was happening in real timeā€”or so we thought, until we found out on Thursday that theyā€™d died the first day. The passengers could still be alive, we mistakenly thought. They had over 90 hours of oxygen. I kept thinking of the Aspen skiers. They came back.

In the end, many of us were pulled into this story by the power of the individual. The most influential piece of journalism I read as a graduate student was John ±į±š°ł²õ±š²āā€™s New Yorker story from 1946, ā€œHiroshima.ā€ It was pioneering in its approach and structure. As the professor who assigned it explained, if a reader takes in an article about hundreds or thousands of people being killed, he or she often thinks, Thatā€™s terrible, and then turns the page and goes on to something else. Hersey based his story on individuals, six of them, survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. He noted where each was at the time of the blast, how far from the epicenter, and then followed them through his or her day, struggling amid the devastation. Readers experienced the events as seen by that person. It made a difference to know their names.

±į±š°ł²õ±š²āā€™s New Yorker editors saw what they had, a human account, all the more powerful for its muted tone. In magazine and later book form, ā€œHiroshima” humanized the Japanese to Americans, who were accustomed to dehumanizing them during the war. These were real people, men, women, children and babies on the ground, people with eyes burned out and skin falling off, a young mother carrying her dead infant for days, refusing to let go.

ā€œThat kid didnā€™t get to live his life,ā€ I said to my husband, referring to Suleman Dawood.

ā€œA lot of people donā€™t,ā€ he said.

Ever hear the parable of the starfish? In it, a boy is walking along a beach where a storm has washed up thousands of starfish. He is picking them up and throwing them back into the waves. An old man asks why he is bothering, saying there are too many to save. ā€œIt wonā€™t make any difference,ā€ he says.

The boy listens, then reaches down, picks up another starfish, and wings it into the water. ā€œWell,ā€ he says, ā€œit made a difference to that one.ā€

The point of that tale is that you can make a difference, if only to one person. My husband is in the Buddy Program, a friend and mentor to a 12-year-old; several friends work with that program, too. Why? Because thereā€™s a world within one person.

Each of the people in the submersible was a human being, and at the end of the dayā€”the sad end of the storyā€”that is why we cared.

Alison Osius is an editor at ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų, and a former editor at Climbing and Rock and Ice magazines.

The post What Made Us Care So Much About the Titan? appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

Five people were killed this week when they took an experimental submarine, theĀ Titan,Ā into ocean depths to visit the wreck of the RMS Titanic. Yesterday, search and rescue officials confirmed the vessel had seemingly imploded.

Internet reactions to the tragedy continue to range from compassion to outright vitriol directed at both the submersibleā€™s maker, Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, and its paying passengers: Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman Dawood.

Why the mixed emotions? Is it because the submersible ride cost a steep $250,000 per-personā€”unaffordable for mostā€”and because at least two of the passengers were billionaires? Or, because despite dire warnings from industry peers about the safety and functionality of Stockton’s Titan submersible, he and his tourist crew went anyways? Or, because we put dangerous faith in innovators and these missions sometimes result in loss of life? Or, perhaps, it’s simply easier in today’s digital age to weigh in on disasters from behind a screenā€”positive or negative.

ā€œRich people taking risks outdoors is nothing new,ā€ explains Dr. Len Necefer, an ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų contributor who works at the intersection of Indigenous peoples, natural resources, and environmental policy. ā€œFrom Christopher Columbus to Richard Branson, money and resources have historically brought the ability to do dumb, dangerous stuff.ā€

We asked Dr. Necefer, along with Matthew Scott, an ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų contributor and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and frequent leader of vehicle-based expeditions through some of the worldā€™s most remote places, to examine some of the social media memes, comments, and reactionsĀ to this tragedy.

https://twitter.com/superking1816/status/1672224657142054912?t=OiTonpD0Z9wbPyJCXJ2TCQ&s=19

ā€œ$250,000 is a lot of money. Couldnā€™t it have been better spent helping people in need?ā€

Scott: That kind of coin is being thrown around daily, all around you. When I see a person of extreme affluence spending their money on experiences, instead of a gold-encrusted steak from that terrible Salt Bae guyā€”I support it.

Dr. Necefer: This particular adventure is one of the dumb outcomes of a gross misallocation of societyā€™s resources. Letā€™s not forget the other stories from just this past week of in the Mediterranean and outside the Canary Islands.

The willingness to allow certain people to die while every effort is made to save others is a really dark reflection on humanity…

— Olabode (@olabode_szn)

ā€œItā€™s unethical for billionaires to exist at all since the only path to hoarding so much wealth involves exploiting others. Good riddance.ā€

Scott: Billionaires are a by-product of the values and legislation that a majority of society supports. If society didnā€™t want billionaires, we could tax them out of existence with the stroke of a pen. But deep down, you want to be a billionaire the same as I do.

Dr. Necefer: Iā€™m sure OceanGate, the people in it, and anyone who decided that it was a good idea to associate with this missionĀ are going to get sued out of existence. I can just see those wrongful death lawyers wringing their hands together in delight with the money theyā€™ll make on the stupid litigation that will come from this. Who knows, maybe a new billionaire will be minted through these lawsuits?

ā€œThat sub looked sketchy. It was stupid for anyone to even get on it.ā€

Scott: Thereā€™s no way in hell Iā€™d get on a submarine controlled by a knock-off game controller. But letā€™s not forget that some of the people on that submarineā€”which included elected members of the Explorerā€™s Clubā€”had legitimate deep sea submarine experience, including at the Titanic site. They obviously felt comfortable enough to strap themselves in. There are few, if any, regulations or standards for submersibles capable of this depth. You have to accept this risk before doing something like this.

Dr. Necefer: Letā€™s quote OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush: ā€œSafety is just pure waste.ā€

ā€œThe passengers were just paying for a seat, theyā€™re not real adventurers.ā€

Scott: ā€œThe battle for authenticity, as viewed through someone elseā€™s eyes, is a battle you will never win. How many people reading this went on a gap-year backpacking trip to Thailand where they spent a couple weeks getting drunk and then went home to brag about their ā€œadventure?ā€ These folks bolted themselves into a steel tube and went to the bottom of the ocean. Sounds like an adventure to me.

Dr. Necefer: Honestly, if I had access to this kind of money? Hell yeah Iā€™d do it. But hell no would I think of myself as an adventurer.

https://twitter.com/KhandakerMunta/status/1671671157106573314?t=4_V1Mzwb6TlcDMnzO-9Cmw&s=19

ā€œThey were just watching the trip through a 21-inch TV screen from inside the sub, and occasionally through a tiny porthole. What was the point?ā€

Scott: Were you expecting a double bay window with a screen door? This is 3,000 meters below sea level. The small porthole was the entire point of the tripā€”to see the wreck of the Titanic with your own eyes.

Dr. Necefer: From what I can see from the vesselā€™s layout, the toilet has a direct view out of the porthole. Talk about a million dollar view, huh?

ā€œStockton was just exploiting gullible rich people to pay for his research.ā€

Scott: Itā€™s really easy to point fingers at this early stage. When you consider the exploration credentials and accomplishments of some of the expedition members, my opinion is that youā€™d be hard pressed to take advantage of those guys without them knowing what they were getting into.

Dr. Necefer: Good marketing can convince people to do just about anything. Up to, and including, spending a quarter of a million dollars on a vacation theyā€™ll never come home from.

For those who keep saying "it's cruel to laugh at him , y'all are just jealous"
Just want to point at the jackass who said "safety is pure waste" and dimwit billionaires who actually listened to him deserve this.

— HeZukka (@SpaceBoiAhmed)

ā€œThese guys argued against government regulations and purposefully chose to operate in gray areas. Why did they expect those same governments to come to their aid once they got into trouble?ā€

Scott: Letā€™s be humans here for a second. If someone had the assets necessary to help, why wouldnā€™t they?

The outrage comes from dissimilar responses to two disasters happening at similar timesā€”the migrant ship disaster off Greece, and this OceanGate thing. But, the resources and training of the combined United States and Canadian Coast Guards, plus the United States Navy, are also dissimilar from the training and resources of Greek government responders.

Dr. Necefer: Of course we should ensure that search and rescue services remain accessible without a paywall. But damn, reaching Titanic depths is a next level SAR mission. There should at least be contingencies paid by the wealthy people who do stuff like this. You know, like taxes.

ā€œAt what point does extreme risk taking become unethical?ā€

Scott: Walking out of your front door comes with risks. Staying inside raises certain risks. Everything is a risk. Racing drivers, who often come from the same financial group that undertake extravagant trips like this, die all the time. They assume the risk, and that risk is their own. You have no idea how much stupid money is being spent in that world. Winning the Baja 1000 costs millions. Winning a Formula One constructorā€™s championship? Billions. Risk taking becomes unethical when youā€™re endangering lives other than your own without their full knowledge or understanding. If those folks willingly got on a submarine which they knew was experimental with a window that was rated for less than half of the pressure and depth they were going to, thatā€™s on them. But if they were misledā€”thereā€™s an ethical issue.

Dr. Necefer: I am fully in support of people taking risks if theyā€™re fully aware of the dangers involved. These folks should be able to get their submarine thing on, but should also be aware that society is going to have little sympathy when things go wrong.

ā€œDeep ocean and outer space travel should be regulated by governments.ā€

Scott: We have to be careful that as a society we do not regulate ourselves into complacency. The survival of our species largely depends on furthering our understanding of the unknown.

Deep ocean exploration will never fall under the realm of public transportation. It is inherently experimental. However, space travel might one day become commonplace, and just like our governments agree on air travel regulations, there will need to be space travel regulations.

Dr. Necefer: Iā€™m not an expert in either ocean or space tourism, but pulling from environmental and technology policy: we cannot let private actors externalize costs and risks to society. In this particular instance OceanGate was circumventing safety regulations by calling this vehicle ā€œexperimental.ā€ When the experiment predictably goes wrong then the coast guards of two nations come try to save them? Yeah great business planning there.

ā€œWhy is there so much hate around this?

Scott: In our highly unequal world, this was a look over the fence between the haves, and have-nots for a lot of people.

Trips of this cost are happening all over the world, all of the time. Itā€™s crude to say, but $250,000 to go to the bottom of the ocean and see the Titanic is an incredible bargain. Right now, as we speak, dozens of ultra-wealthy people are paying that just in jet fuel to hop back and forth across the Atlantic in their Gulfstreams.

In my opinion, this Netflix-special-waiting-to-happen has clearly triggered peopleā€™s feelings,Ā but itā€™s not really about submarine travelā€”itā€™s about the perceived differences in treatment between the poor and the wealthy.

Dr. Necefer: This is just an easy target for justified frustrations about society.

The post Why All the Hate for Billionaire Explorers? appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

The race to save five passengers aboard the OceanGate submersible Titan came to a sad end on Thursday afternoon.

Officials with the U.S. Coast Guard announced that searchers had found debris from the missing craft on the ocean floor, approximately 1,600 feet from the wreckage of theĀ °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ō¾±³¦.ĢżAmong the parts was theĀ Titanā€™s nose and tail cones.

ā€œThe debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion on the vessel,ā€ said Rear Admiral John Mauger. ā€œOn behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families.ā€

The depth of the debrisā€”it was located at approximately 12,500 feet below the surfaceā€”make it virtually impossible for any of the five passengers to have survived the incident, officials said. At the time of the subā€™s disappearance, it was being piloted by Stockton Rush, the CEO and founder of OceanGate, which is based in the Seattle suburb of Everett, Washington. Also aboard were British aviation billionaire Hamish Harding; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman; and French maritime explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

The announcement ends a massive four-day search for the missing vessel, an endeavor that roped in more than a dozen ships and multiple aircraft from various U.S. government agencies, as well as boatsĀ from Canada, France, and the UK.

The discovery occurred early Thursday morning. A remote-operated vehicle from a U.S. ship named Horizon Arctic found the nose cone first before locating four other pieces of the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²ŌĢżin a large debris field on the ocean floor. Mauger said images of the pieces were the analyzed by undersea experts working with the search and rescue teamĀ Paul Hankins, a salvage expert with the U.S. Navy, said the robot later located a second smaller debris field, where other parts of the sub were located, including the tail cone. The fields, he said, were a sign of a ā€œcatastrophic event.ā€

According toĀ Carl Hartsfield, an expert with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the vessel did not collide with pieces of theĀ °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ō¾±³¦.ĢżThe arrangement of the debris, he said, was a sign of an ā€œimplosion in the water column.ā€

°Õ³ó±šĢżTitan was on its third expedition to theĀ Titanic on Sunday when it went missing, having completed similar visits to the wreck in 2021 and 2022. OceanGate hoped to develop a tourism business to take passengers down to see the wreck, and the company was charging $250,00 per person to ride on the submersible. In 2022, writer Alexandra Gillespie interviewed Rush for °æ³Ü³Ł²õ¾±»å±š.ĢżThe CEO told her he hoped to create a business for adventure travelers ā€œwho want to do something different than just sit and then get a tourist experience.ā€

Rush received ample criticism for his boat. and in 2018 a nautical-industry group wrote OceanGate a letter stressing the firm to have its craft analyzed and regulated by international-vessel firm Det Norske Veritas, which is based in Oslo, Norway, andĀ conducts safety testing on new boat designs. According toĀ The New York Times,Ā Rush shrugged off the request and told one of the letter writers that protocols stifled innovation. Also in 2018, a former OceanGate staffer filed a wrongful termination suit against the firm, alleging he was let go for raising red flags about the safety of the carbon-fiber hull and the monitoring system used to measure its strength at extreme depths.

In 2019, OceanGate pushing back on critics, arguing that its futuristic design could not be adequately measured by industry standards. ā€œBy definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system,ā€ the post reads. ā€œInnovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.ā€

At Thursdayā€™s press conference, reporters asked Mauger if rescuers had any plans to recover the bodies of Rush and the four others.

ā€œThis is an incredibly unforgiving environment,ā€ he said. ā€œWe will continue searching the area down there.ā€

The post The OceanGate Saga Has Come to a Tragic End appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

While researching an ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų story on high-end adventure tourism, I spoke twice by Zoom with Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, once in 2021 and again in 2022. The company is located in Everett, 25 miles north of Seattle.

Energetic and passionate, Rush talked about the need to advance the worldā€™s oceanic knowledge and why he was pursuing deep-sea tourism as a business. A picture of an OceanGate submersible cockpit served as his video-chat background, giving him the appearance of taking my calls from the helm of his fleet.

Rush and four others disappeared in the Titan on Sunday, June 18, during a dive to see the historic wreck of the Titanic. A fervent search-and-rescue mission ensued across an area about 900 miles off the coast of Cape Codā€”in a region often referred to as twice the size of Connecticutā€”as the subā€™s final hours of oxygen were believed to be dwindling.

In an update at 3 P.M. ET on June 22, Coast Guard officials announced that a ā€œcatastrophic implosion,ā€ which instantly killed all the passengers, occurred in the submersible, and offered ā€œheartfelt condolences.ā€ Debris from the submersible was found on a smooth section of sea floor 1,600 feet off the bow of the Titanic by a remotely operated vehicle searching the site.

Three adventurers were onboard with Rush: British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman. The French maritime expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet was also onboard, serving as the subā€™s Titanic expert after more than 35 dives to the wreck.

While marine rescue is never simple, °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s depth complicated this mission even more. The Titanic rests 12,500 feet deep, so it took two-and-a-half hours for his sub just to reach the wreckage, Rush told me.

What We Know About Stockton Rush, OceanGate CEO

Rush, 61, graduated from Princeton in 1984 with a degree in aerospace engineering. He had become the worldā€™s youngest jet-transport rated pilot at age 19, and went on to build his own Glasair III experimental aircraft in ā€™89ā€”the same year he earned an MBA from U.C. Berkeley. Rush led several successful IP ventures over the subsequent decades and served on the board of multiple tech companies. He married Wendy Rush, also a Princeton ā€™84 graduate, who works as communications director at OceanGate. In an uncanny coincidence, Wendy is the descendant of the married couple Isidor and Ida Straus, who died in the Titanic sinking in 1912.

How Rush Launched His OceanGate Business

When Rush recognized in his 40s that he would never achieve his dream of being the first person to walk on Mars, he told in 2017, he turned his attention to the sea. He then built his own submersible (which he dived in over 30 times). In 2009, he founded , to conduct commercial research and exploration. Moving sub research and development into the private sector, Rush aimed to bring down the cost of deep-sea exploration and to make it more accessible to scientists and researchers. On most trips, scientists are on board. OceanGate has provided grants for scientific and archaeological marine research through its .

While OceanGate has offered other underwater exploration trips, like to the , the Titanic expeditions have been the companyā€™s marquee project. Fusing research and tourism, missions discovered a deep-sea reef and another shipwreck, collected environmental DNA, and captured the first 8K footage of the Titanic (see video below). Private individuals have paid $250,000 to take part in the trips, helping underwrite the cost of the research. Hamish Harding,Ā  Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, were such participants.

The Titan was one of very few vessels capable of reaching these depths with humans on board. The only other one in operation is The Limiting Factor, which was until recently owned by Victor Vescovo. The Deepsea Challenger, the submersible that James Cameron went down in to see the Titanic, was damaged in a highway fireĀ in 2015.

When we talked, Rush was frank that his company pushed the boundaries of underwater exploration.

ā€œNargelot made a comment to somebody that every deep diving submarine is a prototype, that they haven’t made more than one of all of them,ā€ Rush told me last year. ā€œThe first year we had prototype issues, we had some equipment problems. We had some tracking and communications problems. We overcame those, and by the end got to the Titanic and took a bunch of people down.ā€

As many are questioning the ethics of deep-sea tourism and safety issues with the design of °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s carbon fiber hullā€”and as we await the results of the ongoing investigation about what happenedā€”here are Rushā€™s thoughts from our conversations about diving the Titanic.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It includes comments from my conversations with Rush in March 2021 and September 2022.

ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų: Why visit the Titanic? Why do these expeditions?

Rush: The Titanic is just such a unique thing underwater. I like to say that if you stopped someone on the street and said name three things in the deep ocean, they’re gonna say sharks, whales, and the Titanic. Everything else is a distant second.

There are some other great wrecks that we hope to go see, and there are great wrecks weā€™ve seen before. But the Titanic really has captured the world’s imagination, and it is the pinnacle of things underwater at this time. And it’s a proven site that people want to visit. When the Russians were in need of hard cash, they did some tourist trips out to the Titanic. James Cameron went to it [numerous] times. There’s some history about people wanting to go see it.

Equally important is, it’s decaying and nobody really knows how fast. So there’s a lot of science that hasn’t been able to be done on the Titanic. Past exercises in tourism didn’t do any science, and ours is all going to be focused on not just the decay of the Titanic, but also looking at the biology. There are hundreds of species that have only been found on the Titanic wreck.

The short answer to your questions is the Titanic draws attention. It’s a great research component. Itā€™s basically an artificial reef in the abyssal plain, and what life forms are there? What fish and corals and the like is a huge question. And it’s decaying and we don’t know how fast.

What are the scientific objectives?

They’re twofold. There’s an archeological component. The fundamental question is the one everyone wants to know: When is the thing going to collapse? ā€¦ Itā€™s being eaten by bacteria that are literally eating the steel, eating the iron. So with the laser scaler, we’ve been able to take measurements of the expansion joint that was in the ship as well as the starboard crackā€¦I’d say the number-one [archeological] goal, other than to document its current state, is to come up with a better answer to how long it will be recognizable. Thatā€™s how I like to define it, because it will always be an artificial reef.

The biological objectives are longer term, and that’s really where we’re focusing. How does that as an artificial reef compare to other structures around the Titanic that don’t have this metal structure there? And how is that changing? How are these creatures growing and being colonized? How are they colonizing other sites nearby?

One of the key elements of the Titanic that I get is: Why do we go back to the Titanic? We’ve been there a lot, and it has been visited a lot. But what’s amazing is, there are very, very few sitesā€”a handful, probablyā€”that get visited more than once, when you get down to this kind of depth, more than 3,000 meters. There’s so much to be explored that if you’re a typical research organization, you’re just going to go to a hydrothermal vent, you’re going to analyze it, you’re gonna go to another one. Or you’re going to go to a subsea canyon and document the flora and fauna. But you’re not gonna go back again, because there are so many other sites to go to.

Because people want to go to the Titanic, it’s a very unique opportunity, because they’re going to pay us to go there. And now we can go every year. I don’t think there’s anywhere else on planet Earth at that depth where you’re gonna be able to take researchers every year to get that kind of granular data: ā€˜Hey, this type of coral is more prevalent, here it’s not.ā€™ That’s quite relevant, because there are a million shipwrecks, and there are tens of thousands that are in the deep ocean from World War II. We really don’t know their impact and how they’re affecting the ecosystem. The scientists are pretty excited, because you just don’t get that opportunity.

Given the scientific aspect of your expeditions, why involve Mission Specialists (what OceanGate calls the paying tourists)?

I started OceanGate back in 2009, with the idea that there were two needs out there.

The first one was, we knew very little about the ocean. Our knowledge of the ocean, particularly the deep ocean, anything below scuba-diving depthā€”it’s sad, very sad, how small it is. It’s getting better, and there are a lot of efforts to increase ocean knowledge, but we don’t have it. And there were researchers who wanted to go and actually see the environment in person, not just look at an image from a robot.

So you had on the research side a huge need. But subs were expensive. I knew from my own personal travel experience that there was also this growing market of people who want to do a different type of travel. In particular, I looked at Earthwatch and how they were able to get people to pay to work on archeological digs. They had the same kind of thing: a great need for manpower to dig an archaeological site and help fund it and a research need. So I thought in the ocean, maybe there’s a match there.

That’s really what OceanGateā€™s been working on for the last 10 years, coming up with different projects. We’ve done over 18 major expeditions (at much less cost than the Titanic) matching these adventure travelers who want to do something different than just sit and then get a tourist experience where somebody tells them what’s going on. They want to be involved in both the planning of the operation and the execution and the follow up. That’s why we’ve set up the Titanic mission and why we bring the Mission Specialists, because they help underwrite the cost of doing this research.

Who are you finding is in the current market for these experiences? Who are the people that are coming to participate?

It’s a remarkably diverse group. The Titanic is an outlier in that it is such an iconic piece. So on the Titanic we have what are often referred to as Titaniacs. These are people who are just [obsessed]. I’ve had young kids come up and say, ā€œI just love the Titanic. I know everything about the Titanic.ā€Ā Yet they weren’t even born when the movie came out, which was a huge bump in enthusiasm. There’s been something like 16 feature-length movies on the Titanic. Lord knows how many books. So in the Titanic world, we have the folks who are just all Titanic. They really want to see it.

That’s probably half of our client base. The other half are these people who are these adventure travelers who go scuba diving in Indonesia or set up their own safari off the grid in Africa. One couple shipped their bikes to Croatia and started biking without a backroads guide or anything. So they’re definitely early adopters this first year.

They range in age from I think 26 to 80. We’ve actually taken a 92-year-old gentleman in the sub. They range from people who have climbed Everest to people who are not that physically able. We’ve designed the sub to handle the average person. Our requirements are: you should be able to climb a ladder or stand on a chair, and get up off the floor (you can use your hands). Basic agility is really all we need, given what we’ve done to design the experience. We try and make it as accessible as possible.

For the Mission Specialists that first time that they see the Titanic, when they’ve made such an effort to get there, what is that moment like?

It varies from specialist to specialist. In general, everyone says it’s more amazing than they expect. They have an idea of what it’s gonna look like from the movie, or maybe some of our earlier videos. But when you get there, the colors are just incredible. And the colorsā€”as you get closer and closer, once you get within about five feet, all of a sudden the oranges and the reds come out. It’s this pastel portrait. It’s so amazingly beautiful as a wreck.

Then you’ve got this giant window [on the sub]. One of the great things is it’s 21 inches, so you can have three people all looking at the same image and not looking at this teeny little porthole like they had to do with the Russian Mir subs. That ability to be in a group setting and have multiple people is really one of the key elementsā€¦With five people they really get an interesting dynamic. You get two and a half hours going down. People get to know people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x40SAJS2whY

Can you tell me about the personal travels that inspired you?

I built my own airplane and went in the early 2000s on a trip to Central America with a group called the Baja Bush Pilots Association. That was sort of a weird form of extreme travel: 21 private planes flying through Central America, [landing on] the little dirt strips all over the placeā€¦I realized that the trips I enjoyed most, it really depended on it being different and having a purpose. I really didnā€™t enjoy going and looking at a museum. It’s OK, but I’d rather go out and hike or explore a new areaā€¦.

If you want to do extreme travel, one of the other challenges was, I’m not going to be climbing Everest. Thatā€™s something that has huge physical requirements, time requirements, and other things. I had wanted to go to space, and I still do, maybe when it gets cheaper. But when I looked at space, I thought there wasn’t a purpose there. I’d love to go work on the space station for a month, but that’s not generally available at any real price point.

So I looked at my own personal experience, and that of the folks that I travel with, I said, going somewhere with an explorationā€”this bush pilot thing was like we showed up without a purpose, and you land in the middle of nowhere. And you have to figure out where’s the hotel? Where am I going to get gas and all these littleā€”I liked problem-solving. Those experiences and my love of the ocean blended together.

What is this article going to be about?

Exploring tourism at the edge of existence, including space and deep-sea travel.

We’ve been talking to a couple of the space folks on using the sub as a space analogā€¦. The only really good [analog] is underwater, because in that case, you’re in a capsule with some people in a life-threatening or a potentially dangerous environment. It’s about as close to being in a space capsule [as we] can get.

If you mock it up on the surface, you know, ā€˜I can just open the door and go to McDonald’s if I don’t like it.ā€™ When youā€™re in the sub, it’s a good stress test. Weā€™re talking to the space folks about, ā€œHey really your folks should go in a sub. If they want to go to space or they want to go to Mars. If they want to go around the moon, a good training exercise is to put them in a setup where they’re in there with four other people for 12 hours, two and a half miles away from anything. If they’re going to lose it, that’s where they’ll lose it.ā€

How accessible is deep-ocean exploration right now in your view, and what needs to change for it to become more broadly accessible?

If you want to go on the web and see pictures of deep-sea creatures, that’s becoming more accessible. If you want to actually go down and see them and be part of that discovery process, it’s extremely inaccessible.

The only way you’re gonna get into the deep ocean in a submarine is if you work for NOAA, or you have a PhD and you can get time on Alvin or one of the deep-diving subs, or you’re a billionaire. There are a number of billionairesā€”Ray Dalio, Victor Vescovo, who made the sub to go to the Mariana Trench. Then you have to be a friend of theirs, or have something to offerā€¦ If you want to dive shallow, there are a few subs out there. So [if you] want to go 100 feet, or 1000 feet even, you can do that. But if you want to get to the average depth of the ocean of 4,000 meters, there really isn’t an opportunity to do that.

What would need to change for those sorts of experiences to become more broadly accessible, like you’re working on?

We came at it from that perspective. My perspective is from a business background, and I looked at what was happeningā€¦.There were a number of projects, but they were typically altruistic. The idea was, We’re going to either go to the government to get money, or go get donations to do a project.

To make a business, and the only way we’re going to get more people underwater is to have more subs available, more people doing it so the price can come down. That’s what we did with OceanGate. We do dives in the Puget Sound area that are only $2,500 to be a Mission Specialist, up to the Titanic [at $250,000]. What needs to happen isā€”and I hope to have many imitatorsā€”you need to have more OceanGate subs out there, or more OceanGate-like subsā€¦.We are hoping to lead the way in that so that if you come to, say, New York City, one of the things you might be able to do is go dive in the Hudson Canyon at a reasonable price. It’s always going to be expensive, but we hope it gets down to the cost of, you know, premium seats at a Super Bowl game or something like that.

Is there anything else important I should have asked?

I think the biggest piece for usā€¦is this need for knowledge of the ocean. We all were taught that two-thirds to three-quarters of the planet is underwater, but it’s actually 95-plus percent of the livable volume. Most of the life on this planet is underwater. If there’s life in the solar system, it’s probably aquatic. If there’s life in the universe, it is largely aquatic. NASA came to this conclusion that where you have water and energy and carbon, you have life. They find that with these extremophiles and the like.

The size of the opportunities is going to require lots of methods of exploring it. There’s a place for the average person to contribute and to really get out there and do something. That’s really what we want to do, be able to make it accessible to help advance our knowledge of the world.

of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a freelance writer who specializes in water and travel coverage. Her writing has appeared in NPR, National Geographic, and other national outlets. She is the former digital editor of Scuba Diving magazine.

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