What If Titanic Never Sank

Two years later the maritime nations met and passed the first Safety of Life at Sea convention, in direct response. It required lifeboats for everyone aboard, other emergency equipment, and a continuous radio watch, so that a distress call at two in the morning would be heard. The 1914 treaty never came into force, because the First World War began that summer, but its successors did, above all the versions of 1960 and 1974, and that treaty is today the most important set of rules for the safety of merchant ships in the world. The same year, 1914, the International Ice Patrol was founded, run by the United States Coast Guard and paid for by thirteen nations, to watch the ice lanes of the North Atlantic and warn ships away from them.

Now change one thing

The lookout sees the berg a minute sooner, or the helm answers a little faster, or the ship is a mile to the south that night. Titanic passes the ice and docks in New York on time. Nothing else about 1912 changes.

What follows

Fifteen hundred people live. That is the first and largest thing, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else. The families that were broken that night are not broken. The ship goes on to a long, ordinary career of crossings, and is remembered, if at all, as one of three sister ships, the way her sister Olympic is remembered in our world by almost nobody.

The rules are not written. Nobody in 1912 was pushing for lifeboats for all, because the regulations said sixteen boats were enough and the regulations had never been tested. Without the sinking there is no conference in 1913, no convention in 1914, and the ships keep sailing with boats for a third of the people aboard, because that is what the law required and shipping lines do not exceed the law at their own expense. The continuous radio watch is not required either. A ship in trouble at night still depends on whether the operator of the nearest vessel happens to be at his set, which on the night Titanic sank he was not.

The ice patrol is never founded. The Atlantic lanes in spring stay what they had been: a place where captains kept their speed up and trusted the lookouts. There is no service watching the bergs and no warning on the wireless every morning.

So the next ship hits the ice instead. This is not a guess about whether but about when. The conditions that sank Titanic, ice drifting south into the shipping lanes in a mild spring, a ship running at full speed at night, boats for a third of the passengers, an operator asleep on the ship that could have come, were the ordinary conditions of the trade. Take away the one sinking that changed them, and they stay ordinary until another ship, some other April, meets the same ice with the same boats. The reforms come then, written in the same words, in response to a different name. The people who die that night are not the 1,500 of our world. They are others, later, who in our world crossed safely under the rules that Titanic bought.

Where the guessing starts

Whether the next disaster would have been larger or smaller is a guess. Ships were still getting bigger and faster, and the lifeboat rules were falling further behind with every launch, so the honest guess is larger. Whether some other event, a fire, a collision in fog, would have forced the rules first is a guess too; the record has no shortage of candidates.

What is not a guess is that the rules would have waited. Safety rules at sea have almost always been written after the loss, not before it. In our world the treaty that governs every merchant ship afloat carries, in its first line, the name of a ship that sank. In the world where she does not sink, the treaty still gets written. It simply waits for the ship that does.