2023-06-23 12:08:42
When in 1986 the space shuttle “Challenger” exploded 73 seconds after takeoff in the sky over Florida and seven astronauts died, President Ronald Reagan was called upon to make sense of the events in a television speech for his compatriots. After hailing the crew – including a high school teacher dedicated to inspiring America’s students about space travel – as “pioneers,” he continued, “And I also want to say something about the school kids of America who helped launch the… watched the space shuttle live on TV. I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes such painful events happen. They are part of the process of exploration and discovery. They are part of the daring to broaden human horizons.”
Bertram Eisenhauer
Responsible for the “Life” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
Those words could have crossed your mind over the past few days as, it seemed, the world stared spellbound at the North Atlantic, where a submersible the size of a Multivan with five people on board that had gone missing had gone to the two parts of the… In 1912 the legendary ocean liner “Titanic” was supposed to dive down to a depth of 3.8 kilometers.
On Sunday, almost two hours after the start of the mission at around 8 a.m. local time, the connection between the submersible “Titan” from the company Ocean Gate, which organizes underwater expeditions to the wreck of the “Titanic” for research and tourists, and the mother ship ” Polar Prince” demolished. Within four days, the rescue operation had grown to include a stretch of open sea larger than Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and a dozen ships from four countries – the USA, Canada, Great Britain and France – equipped with all kinds of special equipment.
For a few days, diving robots and breathing rates became the subject of small talk
It was, as one likes to say in such cases, a race against time; According to experts, the missing persons had 96 hours before their oxygen supply would be exhausted – i.e. probably until Thursday around noon. However, just hours after this ruthless demarcation line, the US Coast Guard said they had found debris from the Titanic about 500 meters from the bow of the Titanic and are now assuming the boat had imploded; there is no longer a chance of survival for the missing. 48-year-old British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, entrepreneur Hamish Harding, 58, deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, and Stockton Rush, 61, founder and CEO of Ocean Gate – they are dead.
But where is it that breathing rates and diving robots became the subject of small talk for a few days, where does the enormous attention for the five from Titan come from, which is reported in the “New York Times” as well as in “Bild”? Here, too, media psychologists point to the power of narratives to help us understand the world.
Maren Urner, for example, a professor at the University of Media, Communication and Economics in Cologne, believes that the submersible story offers media users a change from the complex topics of today – in the sense that “it’s about a very concrete story that we can tell each other,” as she just put it on Deutschlandfunk. Five protagonists are a “manageable size”; there is a clear beginning and a clear end – one would almost like to add: like a Hollywood script in the in the film schools often-taught five-act structure—or at least the expectation of it. That can be “handled by our brain”. It’s, one might also add quite uncynically, like watching a thriller or a true-crime– Listen to the podcast: exciting, but ultimately not worrying because order will be restored in the end – or at least other people will be affected.
#fascinated #history #Titan