[HN Gopher] 'Sea Prison': Covid-19 has left hundreds of thousand...
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       '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 )
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-29 23:00 UTC)