{"id":3764,"date":"2012-04-14T16:28:49","date_gmt":"2012-04-14T23:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=3764"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:13:31","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T19:13:31","slug":"earths-titanic-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/earths-titanic-challenges","title":{"rendered":"Earth\u2019s Titanic<\/em> Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/a> What\u2019s to worry? RMS Titanic<\/em> departs Southampton.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic<\/em> disaster in 1912. What better time to think about lifeboats?<\/p>\n

One way to start a discussion is with some vintage entertainment. On the centenary weekend of the wreck of the mega-liner, our local movie palace near the Hudson River waterfront<\/a> ran a triple bill of classic films about maritime disasters: A Night to Remember<\/em>, Lifeboat<\/em>, and The Poseidon Adventure<\/em>. Each one highlights an aspect of the lifeboat problem. They\u2019re useful analogies for thinking about the existential risks of booking a passage on spaceship Earth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Can\u2019t happen\u2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Night to Remember<\/em> frames the basic social priorities: Should we have lifeboats and who are they for? Just anybody?? When William McQuitty produced his famous 1958 docudrama of the Titanic\u2019s<\/em> last hours, the answers were blindingly obvious \u2013 of course<\/em> we need lifeboats! They\u2019re for everyone<\/em> and there should be enough!<\/em> Where is that moral certainty these days? And whatever happened to the universal technological optimism of 1912? For example, certain Seasteaders guarantee your rights \u2013 and presumably a lifeboat seat \u2013 only as long as your dues are paid. Libertarians privatize public goods, run them into the ground, squeeze out every dime, move the money offshore, and then dictate budget priorities in their own interest. Malthusians handle the menu planning. And the ship\u2019s captain just might be the neo-feudal Prince Philip, plotting our course back to his Deep Green Eleventh Century.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Tallulah<\/a>
Think Mink and Don\u2019t Sink: Talulah Bankhead in Hitchcock\u2019s Lifeboat.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Lifeboat<\/em> deals with the problems of being in one. For a very long time \u2013 unlike the lucky stiffs on the Titanic,<\/em> who were picked up in 2 hours. Specifically, it\u2019s about a motley group of passengers thrown together in an open boat with short provisions, no compass, and no certain course. And, oh yes, the skipper is their mortal enemy: The lifeboat is helmed by the U-boat commander who torpedoed their ship. He overawes them with seafaring expertise and boundless energy (thanks to the speed pills in his secret stash) and then lulls them by singing sentimental German lieder<\/em>. At night, the captain solves his problems of supply and authority by culling the injured passengers while everyone\u2019s asleep. He tells the survivors they\u2019re going to Bermuda. They\u2019re actually headed for a rendezvous with his supply ship \u2013 and from there the slow boat to Buchenwald. The point of Lifeboat<\/em> is simple: What can you do in your life and environment so you never, ever end up in one?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
What\u2019s wrong with this picture?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Risk avoidance is the moral of The Poseidon Adventure.<\/em> A glorious old ocean liner, the Poseidon,<\/em> is acquired by new owners who plan to scrap it. But these clever operators maximize shareholder value by billing the ship\u2019s final voyage as a New Year\u2019s cruise to Greece. They take on every paying passenger they can find, barter with a band to get free entertainment, and drive the underloaded ship hard and fast into the stormy winter Mediterranean over the protests of the captain and seasick travelers. At this point an undersea earthquake triggers a 90-foot tsunami, and despite ample warnings this monster wave broadsides the top-heavy liner at midnight, during the New Year\u2019s party. First the ball drops. Then the other shoe drops. The result is the ultimate \u201cBottoms Up!\u201d<\/p>\n

And the takeaway of The Poseidon Adventure<\/em> applies to all of the films and to life in general, not to mention the next few generations on the planet. As David McCollough\u2019s famously concluded in The Johnstown Flood,<\/em> it can be a fatal assumption \u2018that the people who were responsible for your safety will act responsibly.\u2019<\/p>\n

You can have a ripping good time watching these old movies. And as futurists, sociologists, planners, catastrophists, humanists or transhumanists, you can conjure with them, too. Icebergs and U-boats have ceased to menace \u2013 of cruise ships, I say nothing.<\/p>\n

But the same principles of egalitarianism, legitimacy, non-beligerence and prudential planning apply to Earth-crossing asteroids, CERN\u2019s operations and program, Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno manipulations, monetary policy and international finance, and NATO deployments present and future.<\/p>\n

Or do they? And if they do, who says so?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ship beautiful \u2014 the Aquitania<\/em> on her way.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

CC BY-NC-ND Clark Matthews and The Lifeboat Foundation

\n\"Creative<\/a>
\nEarth\u2019s Titanic<\/em> Challenges<\/span> by Clark Matthews<\/a> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License<\/a>.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https:\/\/lifeboat.com<\/a><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 1912. What better time to think about lifeboats? One way to start a discussion is with some vintage entertainment. On the centenary weekend of the wreck of the mega-liner, our local movie palace near the Hudson River waterfront ran a triple bill of classic [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,40,39,30,12,45,172,5,386,37,7,42,24],"tags":[106,2130,182,131,119,100,2132,222],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts","category-complex-systems","category-economics","category-ethics","category-existential-risks","category-finance","category-fun","category-geopolitics","category-homo-sapiens","category-human-trajectories","category-lifeboat","category-media-arts","category-rants","tag-cern","tag-existential-risks","tag-future","tag-humanity","tag-lhc-concern","tag-risks","tag-sustainability","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65125,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions\/65125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}