When I was 12, I remember falling prey to the idea that one could be anything they wanted to be if you worked hard enough. This meant a lawyer, a doctor, or hell, even an astronaut. Because why wouldn't you want to explore the stars? That belief held fast til the moment we watched the Challenger explode in an arc over the ocean in our sixth-grade classroom, then over and over again on the news. My fifth grade teacher the previous year had been one of the semi-finalists to be in that coveted spot. Luckily she was not chosen. The next day, I quietly crossed "astronaut" off my list of potential future careers.
When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of a very charismatic and smart AP Bio teacher combined with a best friend who was fanatic about environmental issues. It was a good kind of peer pressure, and soon I was penning self-righteous environmental editorials in the school paper and planning to study marine biology in North Carolina. Because who wouldn't want to study the depths of the sea? Sadly, while I excelled in bio and zoology and even anatomy, my chemistry was abysmal and my physics just so-so. Even worse, my math skills were seriously dimmed by what I now suspect is the very real learning disability of dyscalculia. I reached a point in my studies beyond everyday geometry and all went dark. At UNCW, through a tangled mess of prerequisites, my math was going to, down the line, encumber my supporting courses in things like chem that came along with a bio major. I bailed.
I've oft seen the joke that there are two kinds of teenage girls. Horse girls and dolphin girls. I was definitely the latter, especially in those last couple of years of high school. A fascination I'm pretty sure sparked by watching Jaws 3 and maybe The Little Mermaid. It was no doubt for the best, me being a much better writer than scientist. I also am sure an innate tendency toward anxiety and claustrophobia would not have served me well underwater in the field--close dark spaces, limited air, and big slimy sea bugs. It actually would probably be the stuff of vaguely Lovecraftian nightmares. So marine science's loss was poetry's gain. Now I live in the midwest.--in a city perched politely on a mammoth lake that is almost like a sea, but not so deep and treacherous and filled with strange beasts. Instead, I write poems about mermaids. It's a fair trade I suppose.
Flash forward 30 odd years. To this morning, where we all watch for news updates on the men who thought of journeying to the Titanic wreckage in a tin can driven by a video game controller and bluetooth. Numerous discussions have surfaced that people threw red flags all over the endeavor, how despite a monumental price tag, its serious lack of actual engineering and science, of any real safety precuations It seems those things would be absolutely required when dealing with the sea, which is almost as large a mystery (and as dangerous) as space. On one hand, I humorously chide the ridiculous and dangerous things that rich people will do with their money. On the other, I imagine the terror of being trapped in a small dark space with no hope and no air that even your millions cannot save you from.
The distrust of science was not really on my radar until the pandemic. I had assumed, despite the religious zealots who doubt Darwin, most people since Sir Isaac Newton were on board that science was the one thing that could help us understand the universe and our place in it. To keep us safe and control whatever mother nature threw at us. Because it was what separated us from our ape forbears and other creatures (though this is debatable the more we know about animal intelligence.) But people dismissed science in favor of their neighbors, dubious discussion forums, and social media propaganda at every turn. Every extra death a failure to give science its due.
I think about what may have been possible with the money both spent and paid to ride in the tiny tin can under the sea--to go toward actually safe and monitored marine study. Not to see the remains of a ship --esp. one that I have never been all that sure why its more fascinating than any wreckage under the surface of the ocean. Just maybe that it had better PR or had the right (rich and elite) kind of people on board for people to care that it went down. As money is spent and energy expended on finding the travelers before they run out of air, it's constant news coverage, despite boats that regularly still and historically have sunk off Mexico carrying immigrants and the poor (and good god, how many slave ships in the Atlantic). How much energy and attention spent on five people who really could have done better things with $250K than seal themselves into a watery coffin for an amusement park thrill.
Because that's what we do. As humans. Embrace science when it seems to benefit us, dismiss it when it doesn't. When there is money to be spent or clout and attention to be had. It's why the world is burning and flooding in equal measure. A world that has a steadily ticking doomsday clock of our own devising.
