It’s mostly only fatal to the stupid, or ignorant, or weak. Countless situations in human history have required your so-called hard-boiled pioneers for survival. Sometimes everyone died in the end; other times the group ultimately thrived. It turns out that groups of super competent people actually exist.
Space will continue to be hard for a long time. Anyone who wants safety can stay at home. There will still be plenty of people to explore the solar system (and maybe beyond).
Somehow, humans managed to thrive for most of our history without OSHA guidelines. Safety has its downside.
I fail to see how this is inconsistent with the girl in the story dying.
Humans managed to thrive, but not every human lived. A sixteenth-century long-distance colonization effort where only one girl died along the way would have been an outstanding success.
You haven’t actually pointed out any downsides at all to safety, other than your claim that warning labels reduce readiness, which is as dumb a thing as I’ve ever heard anyone say. The situation in the story represents a sub-optimal outcome for everyone involved, and the safety precautions we have advised have no cost or downside at all associated with them.
Unless your thing is that you just kind of like pushing young women out of airlocks, in which case: stay away from me. Thanks.
Especially considering that they put up a sign anyway. Surely, it would have been no more difficult nor more meddlesome to put up an accurate sign (one with at least the word “danger” on it) than the misleading one they did put up.
I never said that they reduce readiness in all cases. But it’s certainly true in some cases, such as the Prop 65 warnings.
Everything has a cost. Some of these things are obvious: security guards, access controls, etc. Some costs are less direct, such as that a lock on the door to your emergency vehicle may pose an obstacle in case of a real emergency.
Do you think we ever would have gotten to the moon if the capsule had to be ignorant-teenager-proof? No–that’s why you have a competent crew.
An outright obsession on safety, such as exists in today’s society, has even less direct but no less present costs, such as the difficulty children have in experimenting with some subjects (like chemistry).
This seems to be verging on a personal insult.
Of course I do not support pushing young women out of airlocks. All I’ve ever really disputed is the claim that it’s somehow the fault of the starship crew when they failed to prevent a young woman from committing suicide and attempting involuntary manslaughter.
The real fault of the crew is allowing the woman to put their lives at risk by allowing her on the ship on the first place.
Better signage is not an obstacle nor a barrier. Some things people have proposed in this thread (e.g. increased security and/or pre-flight checks) would have a cost, even if in the balance I might still think that the cost of them might be worth it in our present day society, as opposed to in the libertarian-wet-dream society of the future where everyone is a rugged individualist with enough time on their hands to read safety manuals on the future-Web all day.
But obtuse signage doesn’t cost less than clear signage.
Bro, I live in Berkeley, CA and damned if the warnings seem to be doing any harm over here. Please feel free to back up your absurd claims with some kind of actual evidence other than the feelings in your heart. Thanks.
Counterpoint: do you think we would have ever gotten to the moon if we had left the fucking shuttle door unlocked?
Friend, I have taught chemistry lab courses and I have never seen any evidence of the effects you describe.
That is exactly what we are saying, tovarisch. In doing so, this crew proved themselves to be supremely incompetent. Guess how we know?
Here’s the problem with the story as written for me. Boiling it all down, it’s not actually about the titular cold equations or the supposed hostility of space.
It’s about a large group of braying jackasses running a starship with the same level of care a sleezy Motel 6. Whether the girl was culpable or not isn’t relevant in the end, because Atlas just shrugged. Basically, if you’re not even going to take the most basic or simplest precautions, well, yeah, people are going to get hurt. But it isn’t about space or physics doing it, it’s human laziness. To be blunt, you could change the details slightly and set the story in an airplane, sailing ship, or even a damn golf cart, and it would be no different. Placing it IN SPACE is just a means of pretending it’s SCI FI and MEANINGFUL and STUFF! But there’s nothing of susbstance here. The novel has nothing to say. It fails to even raise a meaningful question.
What I hear from the defense here (I suppose we have a defense and prosecution) is endless obfuscation, irrelevancies, and distractions. This isn’t a story about real people faced with a hard choice, or who made a simple mistake and ended up in a tight corner because of cold, hard physics. It’s a pack of apathetic morons who somehow got into space. Let me put it to you this way. When the operators of Chernobyl inadvertently caused a nuclear meltdown, they displayed far better judgement, caution, and respect for safety protocols than than anyone in this story. Chernobyl also required poor judgement on the parts of hundreds if not thousands of people, and they were still smarter and more thoughtful than anyone in this story.
People don’t have to be all that bright to learn from failure. When they repeatedly fail to learn from even gross and visible failure, they’re not human beings anymore.
Edit: Let me also point out that despite the suppposed importance of this story, I can’t see any actual impact of it on the genre. Things may have been toned down from the heroic age of the 50’s, but sci-fi is a heck of a lot closer to that than anything remotely like this story. It was mildly notable in its own day, and utterly pointless now.
OK, let’s see if we can break down the story a bit.
Of what importance is the girl’s culpability?
It seems that in the story itself, this is a big issue. She made the mistake, it was a simple mistake, and she’s going to die because of it.
We can imagine a bunch of stories, all with a few details changed that subtly alter the idea that “THE LAWS OF PHYSICS” mean someone has to die.
We add a fuel leak. They had enough space fuel, there’s a space accident in space, and now someone has to die in space. But where’s the interest in that? It’s just another instance of a people dying from random accidents.
We make it clearly a mistake by the crew. Someone adds instead of subtracts, and now halfway through the mission they realize they don’t have enough fuel. But that’s not the point the story wants to make. That’s just another instance of someone fucking up and people dying. Happens every five minutes.
We make it clearly the fault of the stowaway. She shoots a guard, disables the safety mechanisms, whatever. But this isn’t interesting either.
The story carefully contrives a situation where a person makes a slightly bad decision, and pays for it with their lives. But it isn’t the laws of physics that leads to their death, any more than the death of the Scott expedition. Amundsen made it to the pole, Scott died. Scott took unneccesary risks, and died because of it. Amundsen knew what he was doing, and succeeded.
I am in agreement with Irishman. That is to say, The Cold Equations is not a morality tale on why you shouldn’t disregard warning signs. It has nothing to do with “fault” or the speculative aerospace engineering of an author whose book was written before the first human entered space.
Your argument is stupid, ignorant and weak! There is a huge difference between trained professionals getting killed pushing the envelope of human engineering capabilities and getting killed because your employer is too cheap to fix a high pressure valve in an oil refinery.
This is irrelevant. As many, many posters in this thread keep tirelessly noting, the faults that we are finding with the story have nothing to do with space travel per se and could be pointed out by somebody born in 1862.
As far as fault, again: despite your rolleyes, most of the defenders of this story have continued to insist that the fault falls on the stowaway, and there is ample textual support for their argument.
The bones of the story are: two people are in a space ship carrying medicine, there’s not enough fuel, and one of them has to be spaced.
But change the background of the story slightly in different ways, and you provide vastly different Aesops.
A one in a million meteorite hits the fuel tank. Aesop: random shit happens in the universe and you die.
A common meteorite hits the fuel tank. Aesop: only an idiot would travel in space.
A corrupt technician siphoned off the fuel and sold it, knowing that it would cause the ship to crash. Aesop: Man’s inhumanity to man.
A ignorant technician siphoned off the fuel and sold it. Aesop: People are idiots.
An avoidable but blameless miscalculation means there’s not enough fuel. Aesop: Murphy’s law.
A hardened criminal sneaks on board, but he’s got a penis. Aesop: assholes get what they deserve.
A five year old kid wanders on board. Aesop: bad things happen to good people.
The pilot recalibrates the deflector dish, and everyone lands safely. Aesop: Human ingenuity triumphs every time.
The stowaway is a starving peasant fleeing oppression at the hands of the ruling class. Aesop: The means of production belong in the hands of the proletariat.
The stowaway is a young woman who ignores a vague warning sign. Aesop: Uhhhh…it it that you should believe warning signs, even vague ones? Is it that she should have known the danger and therefore it’s her own fault? Is it that the door should have been locked? Is it that they should have had “look in the bathroom for stowaways” on the preflight checklist?
The reason the story’s Aesop is confusing is that it wants to have it several ways. It wants the pilot and crew and higher ups to be morally blameless. It doesn’t want the girl to have done something as obviously dangerous as putting a gun to her own head and pulling the trigger. It wants the girl to be on a dangerous spaceliner where a simple mistake can lead to death, but it doesn’t want to blame anyone for putting her there. She’s not at fault for being an ignorant boob who wandered into the dangerous frontier where she had no business being. The crew aren’t at fault for thinking that nobody on a spaceliner could be an ignorant boob.
In other words, the story is equivalent to one about a kid crossing the street who looks right, looks left, but doesn’t look right again, and gets hit by a car. Aesop: Look right again before crossing the street.
In the interest of pleasing everyone, I have written an alternate ending. The following text continues the story just before the girl steps into the airlock.
*
The exploration party watched as the EDS descended on a ballistic trajectory. It was always surprising how quickly they moved–those who hadn’t seen the spectacle often thought the ships were on a crash course. But the blue torch of the main engine lit on queue, slowing the craft to a gentle landing.
To the untrained eye the landing was perfect, though an expert observer might have noticed a flicker in the engine mere centimeters above the ground, indicating that it had not been shut down cleanly, but instead had run out of fuel.
The party waited, but no one emerged from the EDS. After a half hour, the leader approached the outer door and pulled the emergency release mechanism. Both the inner and outer airlock doors opened.
The inside of the capsule was a mess. The panels on every interior surfaced had been prised away, exposing bare wire and conduit. The housing of the drive control had been removed. Even the door to the closet was missing, leaving only scratched and broken rails that had once fixed it in place.
The floor of the EDS was almost completely covered in blood. In the center, breathing shallowly but visibly, was the torso of a young girl. All four limbs had been replaced with crudely cauterized stumps.
In the pilot’s seat, breathing more heavily, was another torso–save that of a single arm still clenched to the control joystick. Below it lie the blaster, slightly chipped, still set to its lowest heat-ray setting.
*
If this apple pie and forest pit trap are located on your property, with a clear property line like a fence, and perhaps a “No Trespassing” sign, then I am inclined to think you have the perfect right to dig pits and cover them with leaves. Maybe you are experimenting in pit trap hunting for a survival course or something. Of course, I realize that my opinion is not in complete agreement with the law in this manner.
If, however, your forest pit trap is in a National Forest (or other public lands), then I agree your leaving a pit trap covered is gross negligence at best. Because you did not have the right to be digging pit traps there.
No, but Apollo wasn’t ferrying ignorant teenagers to the Moon, whereas this spaceship is a colonist transport vehicle ferrying civilian teenagers through space. So there’s a bit of a difference there.
Clearly, this crew wasn’t.
I work for a company in the aerospace industry, building astronaut tools. The parent company works in the oil industry worldwide. A Safety Culture is a very important element of the company, fostering a sense of looking out for each other, of going home safer than when we came to work. Sometimes I feel like they take it to extremes. Like putting up signs on stairwells telling us to use the handrails. The security guards will actually call you out if you aren’t using the handrail. That’s nuts to me.
“Unauthorized Access” could mean they don’t want the passengers rifling through the hospitality center and snagging extra towels, or the break room where the tour guides hang out to get some down time and don’t want to have their “customer faces” on. It could also mean “you might get sucked into this get engine and pulped, not only spoiling our safety record but doing serious, costly damage to a critical piece of military equipment”. If the intended audience for the sign isn’t from an environment where they regularly encounter the second situation, and expectation is the first kind of situation, that suggests that some better efforts need to be made.
To me, primary culpability lies with the girl for disregarding instructions. However, there is a level of negligence that lands on the crew and the company responsible for not providing stricter security, even some simple things like a checklist and a storage room check, when they know they are dealing with general public, not just trained space personnel.
The girl being responsible for the situation is important to me, because otherwise the lesson is just “shit happens”. The lesson to me seems to be that the consequences of physics do not care how cute you are, or how mean you are, or why you did it, choices matter and the penalties may be dire.
Nonsense, the ship she was let on was a passenger transport, and she was a passenger. She likely needed a stronger safety orientation: (“LISTEN UP! This is a working space vessel, our engineering areas are loaded with specialized equipment to do things like power the spacecraft and propel us through space at ludicrous speeds. This equipment can be hazardous. Areas that are marked off limits are done so deliberately and on purpose. Do not violate these signs, as it could put your life in jeopardy. In an emergency, follow the directions of the crew…”) Probably have to taze her to get her off her smartphone before you begin that schpiel.
The pilot and the central dispatch seem completely baffled that someone could choose to stow away on an EDS ship out of mere ignorance, rather than a deliberate effort to evade some legal issue or else a lack of sanity. But even if this is the first time someone even contemplated the idea that a passenger could be an idiot, the proposed things like door locks, inspection checklists, door guards, etc would be beneficial in preventing the situations that they are aware of, notably criminals and mentally incompetent people. The pilot does not need to be issued a laser gun, he just needs to be issued a preflight checklist. Hey, look at the weight savings right there!
