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How a Boat Carrying Refugees and a Submarine Carrying Millionaires Demonstrated Socioeconomic Inequality on a Global Scale

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Perhaps one of the most quintessential and endlessly-fascinating philosophical debates arises from the so-called “Trolley Problem”. Created by British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, it involves a person making the seemingly impossible decision of who to kill given a set of two options and their presence on a trolley that is unable to stop before striking whichever person they choose to die (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021). While in most cases, the decision is rather straightforward, such as choosing to let 750 people live instead of only 5, the level of difficulty of this task can vary with different factors added in. For instance, if you are a person of power in the international community, it is clear that you would choose to save 5 millionaires whose lives were lost while on an undersea joyride over 750 migrants attempting a perilous journey to try and improve the lives of themselves and their families. Think this scenario seems a bit specific? That’s because it is exactly what occurred in the summer of 2023, as European governments did little to aid a decrepit and subsequently capsized boat filled with international migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea while vast resources were devoted to attempting a rescue mission of 5 men trapped in a submersible trying to visit the wreckage of the infamous Titanic ocean liner. 

The first notification that I received about the disappearance of the Titan submarine vessel came on June 19th, 2023. By then, the major news networks had all heard about this story as well and had already begun reporting on what little they knew about this unique situation. The wreckage of the Titanic has captured the imaginations of people around the world for generations, from those who were alive to witness the headlines themselves to those who fawned over James Cameron’s adaptation of the events in movie theaters. Perhaps that is why, for the next week, I would be bombarded with constant updates about the search efforts underway for a vessel that the Navy would later reveal was long gone merely hours after its initial disappearance (Kurmelovs, 2023). Maybe it was the circumstances surrounding the submarine, whose American parent company Ocean Gate charged each passenger $250,000 for the visit to the famous shipwreck in one of the most notoriously dangerous parts of the Atlantic Ocean (Chung, 2023). Maybe it was that the United States and Canadian governments used taxpayer money to deploy a variety of submersible drones, sound-detecting buoys, naval vessels and military aircraft to methodically comb a wide swath of open ocean for a submarine already recognized as lost (Lamothe & Horton, 2023). Whatever the reason, for several days after the initial accident the media and the Canadian and United States governments would do nothing aside from discuss the status of this ill-fated vessel and even provide miniature biographies for its passengers (Salcedo et al., 2023). This reaction could not be further from the opposite for another major maritime disaster that had occurred only days before the implosion of the Titan.

In the eastern Mediterranean, a shoddy trawler ship filled to the brim with over 750 international migrants seeking more economic opportunity in Europe than is presently possible in their different homelands set out on June 13th, 2023. For some, it represented the chance to save enough money to provide for their sick relatives back home. For entire families who boarded this vessel, it was a hopeful gateway to a new life of greater prosperity. This was the culmination of what was, for many, a months-long voyage just to arrive at the port of Tobruk, Libya before being treated like cargo by smugglers and packed onto a dilapidated ship. Many of the passengers used hotline services such as Alarm Phone to report that the vessel was severely overcrowded and the danger of capsizing seemed high. Nevertheless, that ship, the Adriana, puttered along slowly across the deepest parts of the Mediterranean Sea until it neared the Greek coast and began flashing distress signals (Labropoulou, 2023). Over the course of the following day, its passengers would see it deal with engine malfunctions and multiple encounters with Greek authorities and passing cargo ships, all the while praying for some miracle in which they would be freed from this vessel where they were starving and water-deprived and have a better future. That miracle would never come. In the middle of the night on June 14th, the Adriana capsized and sank, throwing hundreds of people into the sea from which only 104 survivors returned to Greece (Loveluck et al., 2023).

The Titan submarine begins its descent to the shipwreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.

These parallel tragic narratives coexisting with one another could not be more opposite, both in the motives for the voyage, the nature of the accidents, and the respective responses to them. In one vessel the passengers had paid a small yet, to them, insignificant fortune to embark on their journey of discovery. In the other, people had mortgaged their entire lives and futures to attempt this ultimately disastrous voyage, with one father of a child dying with Leukemia in a refugee camp even being forced to ask anyone he could for money to fund his trip (Loveluck et al., 2023). In the Titan, engineering oversight and impulsive design choices fueled by an egotistical and frivolous desire to visit what is essentially an underwater graveyard laying 12,500 feet below sea level led to the untimely demise of a few (Chung, 2023). Aboard the Adriana, where cruel smugglers brandishing weapons had given migrants little choice but to board their vessel, overcrowding, mechanical malfunctions, and negative interactions with larger ships led to a watery grave for hundreds (Tagaris & Papadimas, 2023). After the implosion of the Titan, media outlets around the world gave nonstop coverage around the clock to the government-run rescue operations while the Adriana and many of its passengers fell to the depths of the sea while hardly anyone noticed.

I feel it should be known that the purpose of this comparison, and this report altogether, is not to disparage or dishonor the lives of those lost in the Titan. Rather, it is to use these two events as a stunning juxtaposition to shine a light on the relative responses to objectively disproportionate disasters. The aim is to create an indictment not only of the geopolitical systems fueling these contrasting responses, but also of the social and cultural factors which allow us to be so concerned by the Titan accident and largely dismissive of the Adriana.

The manner in which governments responded to these events is absolutely indicative of the extreme socioeconomic gulf separating these two maritime accidents. In the North Atlantic, governments from both sides of the ocean would stop at nothing to provide every resource possible to rescue and, later, recover the Titan ​​(Sky News, 2023). Millions of taxpayer dollars in the United States, Canada, and France were employed to conduct an extremely thorough search mission, leaving no stone unturned until finally high-tech undersea drones were able to locate debris from the submarine located thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. The situation with the Adriana could not have been more different.

Graph demonstrates that the number of people migrating to Europe in the period of January to March has increased dramatically.

Due to the surging numbers of people from the Middle East and North Africa landing on European shores, many Mediterranean countries have shifted towards using hostility as a deterrent for their arrival (CNN, 2023). From sending people in the sea on boats back to their home countries to divvying up responsibility in the form of large search and rescue regions around their coastlines or at times simply not responding to distress signals at all, the authorities in these countries have done everything in their power to bar well-meaning migrants from entry (Sunderland, 2022). Unsurprisingly, it has not worked at all. Migrants continue traveling via boat to these countries and attempting to gain entry, and while often they are successful, in other scenarios like this one, the results are tragic.

The actions of the Greek coast guard and border authorities are, in particular, quite disturbing. According to multiple reports from the remaining survivors of the Adriana, the much larger Greek coast guard ship towed the smaller, overfilled, and poorly balanced trawler behind it using a small rope. This may seem like an innocent attempt to help, but in fact the Adriana was being continuously pounded by the massive waves the coast guard boat was generating, and many survivors say that this is what caused the boat to capsize (Beake, 2023). What makes matters worse is, it would appear that this is something of a common practice among Greek migrant authorities. In 2014, the exact same situation occurred with a Greek coast guard boat pulling a much smaller and heavily crowded boat at high speeds with intense waves battering the vessel until it ultimately sank. On that occasion, 11 Afghan migrants drowned in the Mediterranean (Us, 2022). If it is true that this same practice was used almost 10 years later, then it would only be further proof of these policies’ detrimental impacts to the migrants’ right to life. What’s more is, based on GPS tracking of the Adriana during its final hours, it would appear that it is moving to the edge of Greece’s search and rescue region in the Mediterranean at the same time that the survivors report the coast guard ship was towing them (Labropoulou, 2023). Thus, not only were these openly hostile authorities subjecting this boat to their wake which ultimately may have been a factor in its sinking, but it would appear that they were also trying to remove the Adriana from their zone of responsibility so that they would take none of the blame. I think it goes without saying that the wealthy passengers aboard the Titan would never have suffered the same inhumane treatment if their submarine had failed in the Mediterranean Sea so close to the Greek mainland.

Survivors of the shipwreck are detained in an old warehouse in Greece after being brought ashore.

Based purely off of estimates from the sinking of the Adriana, as the exact body count is currently unknown and likely will never be known exactly due to the nature of the smuggling, it can be determined that more than 100 times the number of people died in that accident than in the Titan submarine implosion. From a purely quantitative perspective that is absolutely horrific and yet, while I was doing research for this, I began to realize that I had much more prior knowledge about the Titan accident than that of the Adriana. Simply because of the formidable amount of media energy invested in covering the submarine accident in the United States and the similar lack thereof toward the boat capsizing, I was already much more familiar with the former. What’s worse is, I hardly think that I’m alone with that mindset. Unfortunately, for many everyday people in Europe and the United States, stories of perilous crossings by refugees and displaced persons from all walks of life tend to fall on deaf ears because we’ve become numb to these tragedies. Therefore, while people such as myself were captivated by the mystery of the vanished submarine, little attention was paid to the plight of innocent people who died not because of some starry-eyed romantic view of ocean exploration, but because they sought out a chance to improve their lives and those of the people they hold dearest.

It would be easy to shift all of the blame for my lack of knowledge prior to completing this post on the media practices which hyperfixate on intriguing stories like that of the Titan and not on the chronic issues persisting in today’s society such as the global refugee crisis and some of its tragic outcomes. We must recognize that the onus of starting positive social change lies with the people and that we must not rely on people of power to move us in a more positive direction but rather take the initiative to explore those new horizons ourselves. We must do so, or the countless migrant deaths at sea each passing year will be in vain, and catastrophic stories like that of the Adriana will only continue to unfold.

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