Two Paper Sheets

...that is what was responsible for sinking the Titanic. Not the actual paper sheets, but that was the size of the holes responsible for flooding the compartments of Titanic that eventually led to its tragic ending.

For the first time in 2022, scientists were able to map the entire Titanic in life size imagery and piece the entire seabed in one large capture. The entire process took them over 3 months of 24 x 7 on-site scanning, and then another year just to process and analyze the data captured over those three months; and after many hours spent researching, analyzing theories, hypothesis and shortlisting causes, they came to the conclusion that a hole which was potentially the size of two sheets of paper was responsible for one of the most infamous and tragic losses in modern history.

A common misconception is that Titanic formed a major hole in its hull from its impact with the iceberg but the truth is that it had a series of small, seemingly inconsequential, dents from the collission that would not have made a major impact on any other day. Titanic was considered as unsinkable because it could stay afloat even with four of its compartments completely filled with water. That one hole which was the size of two sheets eventually led to the flooding of the second boiler room, and things just went south from thereon.

This got me thinking - we may prepare ourselves for the worst case scenarios, but sometimes, its the seemingly inconsequential things, a scrape here and there, minor events in our lives that we completely ignore that eventually lead to much bigger impact in our lives.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is to not do anything at all - a theory that stands true even for Titanic, and quantified in simulation models by scientists. Had they hit the iceberg head on, although they may have faced a lot of damage and a lot of seamen may have lost their lives since they were based on the impact side of the ship, but Titanic would have stayed afloat, eventually saving more lives than they could during the aftermath of their last-moment course correction.

This serves as a reminder to not ignore the smaller things in life - be it positive or negative, because they add up quickly while we may not be noticing them.