“I’ve been working on Titanic for nearly twenty years. I planned this investigation to be my final word. It’s time for me to pass the baton and move on to some new challenges, but I’ll never stop thinking about Titanic. For me it’s so much more than simply an exercise in forensic archaeology. Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we are too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before? It was this big machine, this human system that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t turn; it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now, within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm for the world, you have different classes. You know, you’ve got first class, second class, third class. Well in our world right now you’ve got developed nations and undeveloped nations. You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn, we can’t turn because of the momentum of the system. Political momentum, business momentum, there are too many people making money out of the system, the way the system works right now and those people, you know, frankly have their hands on the labors of power and aren’t ready to let them go. Until they do, we are not going to be able to turn and miss that iceberg, and we are going to hit it. When we hit it, the richer are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on. It’s going to be the poor, it’s going to be the steerage, they’re going to be impacted and it was the same with Titanic.
I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people, because it’s a perfect little encapsulation of the world and all social spectrum. But until our lives are really put at risk, at the moment of truth, we don’t know what we would do. And that’s my final world.”
- James Cameron Titanic
