[HN Gopher] 'Sea Prison': Covid-19 has left hundreds of thousand... ___________________________________________________________________ 'Sea Prison': Covid-19 has left hundreds of thousands of seafarers stranded Author : happy-go-lucky Score : 47 points Date : 2021-01-29 21:58 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.npr.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org) | draw_down wrote: | At a certain point whatever COVID risk this prevents is surpassed | by the inhumanity of not letting these people go to their homes, | to see their families and loved ones. I think a lot of what has | been done in the past year will not be judged kindly by history. | Bare life is not the only thing that matters. | notafraudster wrote: | This is an aside to the overall story, but | | > At any given time, there are more than 1.4 million seafarers | plying the world's waterways, according to the International | Chamber of Shipping. | | I mean, I guess this is obvious because SOMEONE has to ship all | the stuff everywhere, but that's a truly crazy number of people | to me. I guess it goes to show that the oceans are almost | unfathomably huge that they can still be completely empty, even | though a million people are living there on a daily basis. | handedness wrote: | For context, that's roughly comparable to the respective | populations of Equatorial Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, or | Estonia. | ryan_j_naughton wrote: | 1.4 million is an exceptionally small number of people compared | to the size of the oceans. | | You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all | lived as densely as Manhattan. [1] | | So 1.4 million people on the oceans is still virtually empty | overall. Think about it this way. There are 3.2 million | Mongolians and Mongolia is quite large -- thus, Mongolia is | extremely empty. There are less than half as many seafarers as | Mongolians, and they are spread over a much larger area. | | That being said -- those seafarers are actually mostly just in | shipping lanes -- which are actually quite crowded. So crowded | such that when they intersect with whale migratory routes, the | likelihood of impacts is extremely high. | | [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is- | crowd... | dalbasal wrote: | The vast majority of them are along shipping routes, which are | generally pretty crowded.. at least relative to the open ocean. | dalbasal wrote: | It's sad, but at this point, I don't think we should let them | back ashore. There's a point at which these sea people can't | really adjust and are a danger to society. Something similar | happened 3198 years ago and it collapsed all major civilizations. | Egypt was never the same again. | | We'll have to try seasteading or something. | gabereiser wrote: | > _sea people can 't really adjust and are a danger to society_ | | haha pure gold. | joshu wrote: | i applaud the obscureness of this joke. | | (for everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples ) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-29 23:00 UTC)