'Sea Prison': Covid-19 has left hundreds of thousands of seafarers stranded
npr.org
npr.org
> 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.
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...
New Zealand is very mountainous and subject to earthquakes and volcanos. Australia is half desert.
I wonder what the best location to concentrate the world's population and agriculture actually would be. My guess would be North America, India, or China.
It would be like asking if you would trade Madagascar for the rest of the earth to be returned to nature?
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/12/revealed-...
I went to primary/secondary school in the United States. I feel like this joke is the sort of thing that an English teacher would say to me in response to me writing something like this (which I'm sure I did). I think part of the humor (for me, at least) is the refrain of that particular (and common) criticism :)
Can stop spreading these factoids as if they would be feasible in any way?
You can't just stick people vertically on a small plot of land ad infinitum, it doesn't scale. Think about all the services required for all 7 billion people to function properly, New Zealand would collapse on itself.
You cannot scale that efficiently in your proposed scenario in reality, it is absurd.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-951130...
I cannot for a second imagine the absolute horror of feeling THAT alone with god knows what beneath you. But imagine the good fortune required for a random fishing boat to pass by and find you.
Or this guy who fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night and survived, two sharks at one point circling him:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-s...
Also, that guy who survived in a pocket of air in a capsized boat:
And the air is orders of magnitude bigger.
Which is cool, we got our flying city, but unfortunately we made it evenly distributed.
When I first flew to a big city, Osaka, I flew over 3000km of desert before even getting out of my country, and then bam, everything was absolutely infested with life and activity. More 'stuff' than I had ever seen.
Looking at Flight radar not long ago, I saw the veritable stream of Japan Post cargo planes one after the other flying into HK or China, I forget. I remember thinking that just the postage was more planes than were aloft where I live for all commercial, travel and personal activity combined.
Back in 2002 a Russian transport ship and crew spend the summer moored by my birth town without being able to leave the ship. The crew hadn't received any pay for 9 months, lacked provisions, and refused to keep working. The shipping company send some goons to ruff them up, but ended getting arrested and deported. Eventually they sailed on, though I don't know the outcome of the conflict.
At the end of the 10's I attended a party on a large Russian freightship (in another city). The crew and ship had apparently been abandoned by their company without any communication, and they had been stuck on the ship for half a year. Never got it confirmed but I think they had made a deal with the party organisers to host parties to cover food cost and tickets home.
Shipping is a hard business.
We'll have to try seasteading or something.
(for everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples )
haha pure gold.
I'd understand if we were actually enforcing a real quarantine with closed borders, but we're not. What makes these maritime workers such a greater risk? Is it just that they're not wealthy citizens of western nations?
Seriously these people present less of a threat than jet travel but they are decidedly blue collar. Maybe that's the distinction?
These workers have been imprisoned because of politics, not science.
Not any more, the last few weeks have seen several countries completely prevent people setting off for leisure travel, closing their borders not just to entry but to exit. Australia did it already early last year.
The argument is that those travelers will return at some point and bring new COVID strains back, but I’m uncomfortable with countries banning their own citizens from freely leaving, that sounds like old Eastern Bloc restrictions (which were also ostensibly about protecting the common welfare), and it could be that some leisure travelers, if they could only leave, would be gone indefinitely and therefore would not necessarily be coming back during the lifetime of the current epidemic.
What happens if an Aussie simply says "There are some countries out there that are relatively unconcerned with COVID right now, I would rather be traveling them for the indefinite future instead of staying home"? Would the state still prevent him or her from leaving?