What Exactly Did These Guys Pioneer?

Photo: Paul Daly (AP)

Last month, a submersible full of tourists headed for the Titanic crumpled under the pressure, killing everyone aboard. By this point, we all know the story: The sub was made with a comical lack of concern for safety, its previous dive attempts had been besieged with issues, and the first time it tried to do its sole job — shuttling sightseers high on hubris down to the site of another aquatic disaster — it caved in like a Coke can. These are the facts of the matter.

But it seems there’s a certain Type Of Guy who disagrees. The kind of person who joins — then leads — the Explorers’ Club, who takes tourist trips to space, who visits Challenger Deep for funsies. Someone who writes a full op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how attempting to visit the Titanic wreck, and dying horribly in the process due to a blatant disregard for the bare minimum of deep-water safety, is actually deeply important exploration. These men were pioneers, you see.

But what did they explore? What did they pioneer? Richard Garriot de Cayeux, the author of this op-ed, compares the Titan submersible to early aircraft, saying that without early flights (which were “ridiculed as the foolhardy larks of the ultra-wealthy”), we wouldn’t have modern consumer air travel. But air travel allows people to go to real places — other cities, other countries, locations with infrastructure and human people — in a way that tiny single-window submersibles simply don’t. The Titan isn’t pioneering anything; it won’t pave the way for a large-scale submersible tourism industry because there’s no incentive for that industry to exist. The technology isn’t the issue here.

So if the Titan passengers weren’t pioneers, were they at least explorers? No. Not even a little. Exploration is pushing the bounds of human knowledge, going somewhere that no one’s ever been before in hopes that we can learn something while we’re there. Yuri Gagarin, Roald Amundsen, Don Walsh — these people explored. The passengers on the Titan were trying to “explore” a location that James Cameron has visited 33 times.

The Titan’s passengers explored nothing, they merely attempted to boldly go somewhere that plenty of other people have gone. They didn’t pioneer anything except a particularly embarrassing way to die — at the altar of cost-cutting and “disruption.” Don’t make tourists out to be heroes.