Ross: Ship stuck in Suez Canal taught us a valuable lesson about going too far

The Ever Given is finally free, and the traffic jam at the Suez Canal is clearing up, so it’s time for people like me to ask: What have we learned?

“Well, Dave,” you might say, “what we have learned is that maybe container ships have finally gotten too big.”

They have indeed been getting bigger.

According to the World Shipping Council, if all the containers on a ship the size of the Ever Given were loaded onto a train, that train would be 44 miles long. And bigger is cheaper – up to a certain point. The trick is discovering what that point is.

Because a giant ship may be super-efficient if everything works, but on the day the ship hits the sand, suddenly you have a 44-mile-long train derailment.

At the same time, “pushing the envelope” until it rips is what has made us so triumphant a species. We go as far as we can until the laws of physics stop us.

If we can drill an oil well one mile into the ocean bottom, then by golly let’s drill a well seven miles into the ocean bottom. And if it blows up and leaks forever? That’s when you know to stop.

If getting 400 passengers on the same plane is a good idea, getting 853 passengers on the same plane is a really good idea. Unless you want to make money on it, which is why the Airbus A380 will go out of production this year.

It happens in big ways, and it happens in small ways: building yet another housing subdivision in a fire-prone area, putting a whole state on a mostly unregulated free-market electrical grid with insufficient backup…

Holding one political rally more than you should have.

Bottom line, there’s only one way to know when you’ve gone too far – and that is to go too far!

We are in this world to test its limits. So, I’m pretty sure that we are destined to be neck-deep in ships. Hitting the sand.

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