Zero Bubble
When I was growing up, one of my favourite action movies was Crimson Tide. Sitting slightly below The Hunt for Red October on the scale of ’90s submarine movie quality, it’s a pretty interesting story about how systems break down under tension, how two different interpretations of the same set of instructions can simultaneously be true, and whether the precautionary principle should prevail when the stakes are high. Of course, these finer themes were lost on me as a pre-teen (despite them literally being spelled out for the viewer in the final scene) — I simply saw it as an exciting story playing out on a nuclear submarine.
At the heart of the tension is the reciept of a “message fragment” in the midst of the submarine’s preparation to launch its nuclear weapons. The submarine’s Captain (Gene Hackman!) believes that this communication should be ignored because it is unintellgible, and that the boat should continue with its instructions to launch nuclear weapons. The boat’s First Officer (Denzel Washington!) believes that because the message is unclear, and that it could potentially reverse the instructions to launch nuclear weapons, they should await confirmation before launch. The procedures under the message fragment condition are unclear, and lots of men (James Gandolfini! Viggo Mortensen!) go running back and forth in a cramped submarine to a Hans Zimmer score (!). They point guns at each other, exchange torpedoes with the enemy, seal leaks (or give orders to seal leaks) as they sink to hull crush depth, repair electronics, and generally decide what role they should play in the end of the world. I believe there is only one scene that features a woman.
The story positions Washington’s cautious and intellectual First Officer as protagonist, and Hackman’s venturesome and doctrinaire Captain as antagonist. The conflict — and eventual mutiny — is teased early on in the mission during a dinner wherein the Captain and crew muse about why the Navy selected such an inquisitive First Officer to serve on such a vessel; after all, the military is not a democracy. In mutinying against the Captain, the First Officer does the wrong thing for the right reasons and saves the world from a nuclear holocaust — and all in the name of ‘waiting just a little longer and checking to make sure’.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Crimson Tide as I follow along with the story of The Titan, a tourist submersible currently somewhere in the vicinity of the wreck of the Titanic. The vessel is operated by a company called OceanGate. Communications with the Titan were lost three days ago. As of this writing, the United States Coast Guard estimates they have about 40h of air remaining.
There are five souls aboard.
OceanGate has been operating tours of the Titanic for a few years now, at about USD $250k a head. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, currently aboard the Titan with four of his paying customers, said the following in an interview with CBS’ David Pogue:
“At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed,” he said. “Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.” [emphasis mine]
It’s a telling statement, and it echoes the kind of damn-the-torpedoes sentiment often heard in the aerospace sector. It is true that, by design, regulations and standards limit the kinds of choices that people can make — and it’s also true that chafing against regulations is a common reaction when there’s money to be made in avoiding or ignoring them. Listening only to those who risk losing money, one could almost be forgiven for losing sight of the reasoning behind those regulations. ‘Caveat Emptor’, a Rush or a Musk might say; ‘cars are more dangerous than spacecraft anyway — and besides, brave adventurers have always stepped forwards to push humanity into the future’.
Somehow, however, I question whether this “don’t do anything” argument is in good faith.
First, it’s a pretty obvious straw man, as if there were no levels of risk tolerance other than “don’t get out of bed” and “wander blindfolded into traffic”. The CBS news story has a clip of the release being read out loud. I am not a lawyer, but this seems like the language of a business more worried about litigation than the safety of its clients. Incidentally, I wonder which regulatory bodies Rush believes would enforce this release.
Second, it glides over the fact that submarine and aircraft safety records are strong because of procedure and regulation, not in spite of them — and as far as air travel is concerned, private/personal air travel is far riskier than commercial air travel. When things go wrong, regulatory bodies step in. If regulatory bodies give the all-clear, it’s because decisions are to have been made with care and responsibility by a third party with no stake in the success of the business other than passenger safety — not, as one might assume, that there wasn’t anything wrong to begin with.
Third, I don’t believe that Rush’s approach to safety is remotely responsible in the absense of regulation. Pogue went on an expedition aboard the Titan in 2022. He remarked that communications were lost on that expedition as well, for over two hours. He also notes that the submersible was operated with a cheap video game controller. Now, a commercial-off-the-shelf procurement strategy is certainly a valid approach to developing a Bill of Materials for most engineering projects, but it is irresponsible to ignore the drawbacks of such an approach — especially when lives are at stake.
Fourth, It’s one thing to build your own contraption, ride it down to the abyssal plane, and get crushed inside it like a marshmallow in an aluminum can — and it’s another thing for clients to pay you for the privilege. Provided they have no dependents, it’s hard to argue that people aren’t entitled to gamble with their own lives — but here, Rush has done it with the lives of others at $250k a head.
Pogue writes that the submersible should be “bobbing on the surface”, even though the Titan cannot be opened from the inside” — but a submarine, it should be stated, is designed to be airtight. “Just as safely”, indeed.
Risk is one of those words that we use all the time but remains hard to define. Among professionals and academics, however, risk can be generally thought of as the product of probability times consequence. If you were repeatedly forced to choose between:
- A 1% chance of a $1000 problem occurring, or
- A 10% chance of a $500 problem occurring,
that might be equivalent to comparing a $10 problem and a $5 problem. If someone wanted to minimize their costs, they’d most likely take the second approach every time time it was presented. They’d lose more often — but after playing the game a few hundred times, they’d certainly lose less. There’s a subtle line later in that same Pogue article that I’d like to point out:
“It’s not like iPhones [where] there are thousands of them that they can perfect,” Pogue said. “There’s one of it,” and some parts of the vessel are improvised.
There’s a lot of focus on “moving fast and breaking things” with respect to product development, especially in the startup sector. The idea of “failing forward” and learning-as-you-go is an important one, but a key piece of context is often overlooked: this kind of rapid iteration with successive failures baked into the decision-making process is predicated on situations where the cost of failure is low. Websites and mass-production manufacturers can run these kinds of experiments without a lot of hesitation — but no matter how many times you play the game: there’s a difference between a $1000 device and a single human life.
Crimson Tide, for its part, continues to hold up fairly well as a piece of post-Cold-war, alternate-universe, nuclear procedural suspense. For more than a few reasons these days, it’s quite timely.
A final note: Rush’s misadventure is resulting in the deployment of commercial, scientific, and military personnel from the USA and Canada. There are almost certainly hundreds of people actively working to save those five souls aboard the Titan. This activity incurs a cost to the rest of the world that Rush does not have to bear. We bear it gladly, but — as the adage goes — an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I hope we find them, and find them in time.
