10 ms·
> It’s unthinkable today that a tragedy of this magnitude could occur. In terms of death toll, there have been worse shipwrecks in this century.
by boomlinde 8y ago
> It’s unthinkable today that a tragedy of this magnitude could occur.
In terms of death toll, there have been worse shipwrecks in this century.
- freddie_mercury 8y agoTo expand on this: 1987 there was a shipwreck that was 4x as bad as the Titanic (over 4,000 deaths). In 2002 over 2,000 people died in one (nearly 2x the Titanic) A 2006 wreck had 1,000 deaths. The same magnitude as the Titanic. It seems that it is only unthinkable for people who can't use Wikipedia.
- usrusr 8y ago"Unthinkable" is a subset of "don't bother to check this" though, so it has quite some natural resistance to truth.
- magduf 8y agoHowever, if you account for the difference in global population, the Titanic disaster looks worse. There's many times more humans on the planet now than there were in 1911.
- sbmassey 8y agoI wonder if the punishment for murder ought to decrease as world population increases.
- danso 8y agoThe damages from murder aren’t calculated relative against population count.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoPerhaps it should instead increase as the average lifespan increases.
- wongarsu 8y agoWhich would imply that the punishment for killing a child should be more severe than the punishment for killing an old man. And that killing a cancer patient shouldn't be punished as harshly as killing a healthy person.
- magduf 8y agoThere is definitely a good argument there. A child has far more potential years of life left than an elderly person, so killing them seems worse. Perhaps that's one reason why we tend to think so badly of child murderers. Of course, in reality (at least the American judicial system), punishment is usually based more on other factors, such as motive. So premeditatedly killing an old man because you wanted to steal his stuff is punished more than killing a child purely by accident.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoFWIW, I don't really believe that the punishment should increase with increased lifespan, I was just giving a contradictory example based on different numbers.
- everdev 8y agoNo. For the victim it's still a 100% loss.
- Apocryphon 8y agoAnd the victim's loved ones.
- grkvlt 8y agoWhat if you murder someone that everybody hates, and who in turn hated everybody?
- magduf 8y agoThose are the murders that the police frequently don't expend a lot of effort in investigating. There's actually a lot of murders that never get solved.
- everdev 8y agoIt's hard to argue the world wouldn't be a better place, but I think it's hard to know where to draw the line. It's all fine until you're in the minority, then I can't imagine you'd want people killing someone you like and respect even if they're nearly universally despised. It's a slippery slope probably best avoided.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nothrabannosir 8y agoNot the punishment, but to make the analogy more precise: society's "interest" in individual murders does decrease proportionally with its own size. In a village, a murder is the talk of town. In a city, we don't even know. So, yes; GPs point, while cold and calculating in the way only actuaries can sometimes be, was a fair point nonetheless.
- yongjik 8y agoWell, but (by the same metric) the punishment is already reduced. If you execute someone for murder today, you're only executing 1/7.7B of total population. (I agree, it's kinda silly metric.)
- gus_massa 8y agoWith some rounding and averages, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates 1910 -> 1.7 billons 1987 -> 5.0 billons (2.9x) 2002 -> 6.2 billons (3.6X) 2006 -> 6.5 billons (3.8X) So the 1987 case is still worse after adjusting for the global population.
- magduf 8y agoIt is, but not nearly as much; after adjustment, it looks pretty close.
- jopsen 8y agoTitanic made headlines because it was rich upper class people on board. Coupled with the absurdity of a situation where the ship sinks slowly and people drown due to lack of lifeboats (among other things).
- jfim 8y agoIt was also supposedly unsinkable.
- WorldMaker 8y agoAnd the largest for its time. Which leads to my other favorite modern myth that we never built a bigger ship than Titanic since that disaster. It's interesting to point out that very few modern Cruise Ships are smaller than the Titanic.
- nostrademons 8y agoIt reminds me a bit of the Challenger disaster, which was probably the biggest news headline of my childhood. 7 people died. More people die in a typical mass shooting, but we remember Challenger because it was a really big deal with the first civilian in space, and so everyone was watching the launch and had it blow up in front of them. It's likely that people care about the Titanic because it was supposedly "unsinkable" - if it had been the Carpathia that went down with 1500 people, it might've made headlines for a couple days but we wouldn't be talking about it 106 years later. Hell, I didn't hear about Doña Paz until today, despite being the largest peacetime maritime disaster in history and happening just 2 years after Challenger.
- frenchy 8y agoI suspect a big part of the tragedy of the Challenger was a breaking of the "futuristic utopia" myth that many had in their minds at the time. A lot of it has disappeared in the last 20 years (or at least moved over to the singularity/AI myth), but back then things like the L5 Society [1] were popular, and you couldn't read Popular Mechanics without some sort of story about moon/mars bases. In short, people wanted to believe that we could just go into space and leave all the problems we had and mistakes we made on earth behind. It was a sort-of "salvation". The Challenger was a poignant reminder that this was not the case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Space_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Space_Society
- chatmasta 8y agoTo expand on this expansion, here's the wikipedia data: 21st Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_the_21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_... 20th Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_the_20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_...
- murph-almighty 8y agoPerhaps, but the real tragedy of the Titanic is ego and bad safety procedures, in my opinion. The conception of the ship being "unsinkable" led to the lack of lifeboats, and when the ship sank...
- Retric 8y agoThe Titanic made history in large part because rich people where impacted and survived to talk about it. By comparison many slave ships with 800+ people sank with little impact.
- boomlinde 8y agoIt certainly is notable and probably ironic that the Titanic was touted as unsinkable, but in my opinion that doesn't really detract or add to the magnitude of the tragedy. I see what you mean with the bad safety procedures, but now that much better safety procedures are mandated by law and we have radar and real-time weather reports, you could turn that around and say that a disaster with a comparable death toll is even more tragic, given that it's much more easily preventable.
- goodcanadian 8y agoMy understanding is that the "unsinkable" claim was never really made. Also, it had more lifeboats and other safety features than were typical of the time.
- trashtester 8y agoI reacted to that, too, and it made me think. Had this happened in 1919, I think it would have been forgotten already, as it would seem pale compared to WW1. In 1912, people were quite innocent, so this was seen as a big event. Was WW1, at least in part, something that was allowed to happen before most people had forgotten earlier big wars? Roughly 100 years had passed since Napoleon, after all. When authors today again consider Titantic to be "unthinkable", what does it mean? I consider it perfectly thinkable that something in our lifetime will trigger a nuclear war, killing billions of people. Especially if we start to take global stability for granted.
- pawelk 8y ago> Had this happened in 1919, I think it would have been forgotten already, as it would seem pale compared to WW1. In 1912, people were quite innocent, so this was seen as a big event. Also because of this I think it became sort of a shared generational experience. A single, big, widely reported and discussed tragic event, that made people able to recall "what were you doing when you learned about the Titanic" for years to come. Similar to 9/11 for my generation.
- beberlei 8y agoAnd then the Spanish Flu killed even more people than WW1 in 1918/1919.
- reaperducer 8y agoIn 1912, people were quite innocent, so this was seen as a big event Huh? 40 million people died in The Great War, which just ended. And there were world events which killed people on a much larger scale than the Titanic before that. It's a very modern and naïve viewpoint to think people of years past were "innocent," as if tragedy and large-scale loss of life is somehow a new invention.
- lazyasciiart 8y agoThe Great War ran from 1914 to 1918.
- Merad 8y agoIn fact the worst shipwreck in history just occurred in 1987, killing more than 4,000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Do%C3%B1a_Paz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Do%C3%B1a_Paz
- LanceH 8y ago"was found to be unseaworthy, and operating without a license, lookout or qualified master" I think one of the shocking things about the Titanic is that it was considered to be top of the line and operated in a professional manner. I don't think anyone is shocked that third world countries operate unsafely.
- cf141q5325 8y agoFYI, the quote is about the Oil Tanker that collided with the ferry.
- LanceH 8y agook, "vessel was seriously overcrowded, with at least 2,000 passengers not listed on the manifest", "it was claimed that the ship carried no radio and that the life-jackets were locked away".
- wmil 8y agoThe big issue was that ocean liners were the method of crossing the Atlantic for the rich and poor. There was a strong sense of "That could have happened to me!", especially among the elite. Imagine how terrified the tech community would be if a major accident at SFO killed 1000 people trying to get on or off flights.
- k_sh 8y agoThis almost happened last July[0] at SFO - an inbound Air Canada flight lined up against a taxiway (with five full flights on it, over 1000 people actually) instead of a runway, and missed the planes on the ground by about five vertical feet. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759#Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759#Incident
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoThat article says "There was less than 14 feet (4.3 m) separation between the bottom of the Air Canada aircraft and the tail of the Airbus A340." That's still far too close, but it's more than five feet.
- k_sh 8y agoI got my figure from this part of the entry: > AC759 reached a minimum altitude of 59 feet (18 m) above ground level, comparable to the 55 ft 10 in (17.02 m) tail height of a Boeing 787-9, two of which were on Taxiway C
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI think what happened is that it reached that minimum, but not while directly above the tail of a 787. By the time it was directly above one of the 787s, it had gained another 9 feet. But I could be wrong in my interpretation...
- crispweed 8y agoHow do you think the unthinkable? .. With a great big itheberg.
- cm2012 8y agoAh, but the Titanic was full of rich and famous people, who count for more /s
- wahern 8y agoIt's been a few years since I read this article about the 1994 sinking of the Estonia in which 850 drowned in the Baltic, but it still feels contemporary: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-s... After reading that article not only was such an occurrence not unthinkable, I almost felt like a survivor.
- chewz 8y agoMV Wilhelm Gustloff - 9,4 thousand people (including 5 thousand children) died. Another forgotten episode of WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff