The Tragedy of 'Exploration'

 

Sadly, it looks like the submersible Titan and its crew and passengers have come to grief. At that depth, the water pressure is over two tons per square inch: as someone commented this afternoon, the combined forces acting on the hull of the sub were like being crushed from all directions simultaneously by the weight of the Eiffel Tower.

The whole episode, tragic in human terms as it is, throws up some moral dilemmas in its wake. Aside from the possible technical and regulatory issues that will inevitably be investigated in forensic detail over the next couple of years; there is the issue of why? Why are people motivated to spend enormous sums of money to do this stuff, and feed the coffers of a company offering such a trip?

Much like Everest 'expeditions' and the more recent trend for trips into near space, what we see are increasing numbers of wealthy individuals prepared to stump up frankly obscene sums of cash, to achieve what? They certainly don't qualify as explorers of the unknown: they are merely tourists on the edge: in the case of The Titanic, they are visiting a mass grave. Do they visit in order to grieve for the victims of that tragedy, or are they just gawping and ticking off yet another box on their über-rich-person's bucket list?

Climbing Everest, similarly, has become an endless procession of non-climbers with more money than talent, fitness or frankly, sense; aided and abetted by commercial entities only too welcome to part them from their cash to achieve, again, what? This is not exploration but simply ego-massage. The terminally bored wealthy, who feel that they have to 'achieve' something worthwhile to fill the void left by living a life of undeserved privilege [my opinion, but I stand by it]. Everest - Chomolungma - was summited once, by proper mountaineers: a few repeat ascents via different approaches and techniques should have sufficed for the curiosity of mankind, leaving the sacred mountain to the people who revere it.

As to exploration itself, generally; even those pioneers who risked everything to venture into the unknown, often had ulterior motives for their risk-taking. The explorers who 'discovered' the non-European world pretty much destroyed every indigenous culture that happened to be 'in the way' of their ventures: 'primitives' were simply obstacles to thwart their imperial and commercial ambitions. Human curiosity is a wonderful thing, but hitch it to the dogma of political ideology and capitalism, and you have a recipe for colonialism, injustice and cruelty.