Would Alice tried to have stopped the sinking of the titanic?
This ask fills me with such restrained joy, you have no idea. Suffice to say that last time I posted about the RMS Titanic, expecting a deluge of asks wanting to hear all about the ship, I received a single "are you autistic?" anon instead.
Good times.
That being said:
Why did the RMS Titanic sink?
A non-comprehensive, very brief overview!
This is important if we're answering the question of whether Alice Cullen, a psychic whose gift kicks in when people whose life impacts hers make decisions, could predict the Titanic sinking in time to prevent it.
To that end I will look at some of the human decisions that led to the RMS Titanic sinking.
(TLDR: the ship sank due to the wrath of God. This much bad luck, this many coincidences, and so many minor decisions and insignificant mistakes all leading up to the loss of fifteen hundred lives can only be chalked up to God smiting the ship. The RMS Titanic didn't stand a chance, Alice could not have stopped this.)
1. The hull of the RMS Olympic is designed to have multiple compartments
(The RMS Olympic, for the ignorants, was the RMS Titanic's precursor and sister ship. Minor alterations were made to the RMS Titanic, such as less open space but ultimately larger size, but they were otherwise nearly identical.)
The hull design was a large cause of the confidence in the Titanic. The hull had sixteen watertight cells, separated by transverse bulkheads (a bulkhead is a partition wall on a ship that prevents flooding and stiffens the hull, that it's transverse means it extends from side to side on the ship) and the idea was that up to two of these could flood without compromising the ship.
The trouble was this: they weren't actually watertight. The first four cells interacted with the higher levels, where the passengers were, and safety was sacrificed for comfort. Only bulkheads D through O were actually watertight. More worryingly, for a cell to be watertight, the top has to be closed as well, forming a cube. It wasn't, and as the ship was struck across the side, along the front where the bulkheads weren't waterproof, just under the waterline, several compartments were flooded right away, dooming the ship.
(Source and image courtesy. I also used this source.)
The design choices here were the process of long and arduous process, and started with the RMS Olympic, many years before the Titanic's construction even began, but while Alice at times has incredibly vague, ahead-of-time, "we've moved to Forks... I should get Edward a sleeveless shirt", decisions, this decision in no way concerns her. Alice would not see this ahead of time, and if she did there would be very little she could do about it.
2. The wrong type of iron rivets are used for parts of the hull
The iron rivets used for the bow and stern that held the hull plates together were not optimized for the freezing Atlantic temperatures, causing them to snap when they were put under strain. The iceberg happened to strike the bow.
The iceberg may have opened a tear in the ship's hull, but the hull plates falling off as a result was the result of choice of material (the same as was made with the RMS Olympic and the RMS Olympic was fine! She survived several crashes without any plates falling off! Keyword being, as I understand, her crashes were not in sub-freezing Atlantic temperatures) and another that neither humans nor Alice would have seen coming.
Just really, incredibly, bad luck.
3. The man who had the key to the cupboard hold the ship's binoculars that the scouts in the crow's nest would use to spot icebergs, was on leave and the guy replacing him didn't get the keys before the RMS Titanic left port
What I just said on the headline.
Several small human decisions happening here, none of which Alice would see because none of them lead directly to the ship sinking. They would not have an actual impact until the iceberg spotters are sent out to scout for icebergs, at which point they realize they're spending their night playing a game of "is that an optical illusion or an iceberg?"
Even at that point, Alice isn't going to see anything because the scouts did spot the iceberg, the problem was the timing of when they spotted it. Had they had binoculars the timing would have been different and the ship would not have sunk, but even without them the ship might not have sunk.
4. The ship is warned about an iceberg: the captain doesn't get the memo
Icebergs were a known danger in the area at this time of year, and ships would warn one another about particularly hazardous ones. 1912 happened to be a year of unusually many icebergs, leading to (and don't quote me on this part because I'm going off memory) the captain taking a different route, hoping to evade them. Sadly, the fateful iceberg had also gone off route, where it was spotted by the SS Mesaba. The SS Mesaba warned the RMS Titanic, but Jack Philips (a hero who alongside his colleague is to thank for there being any survivors at all that night) made a typing error, changing the telegram tag from "MSG" to "MXG". "MSG" would have made the telegram urgent and seen it delivered straight to the navigation officer, "MXG" saw it discarded. (source (I also used this source for double checking other things in this post))
This isn't a decision, it was a mistake: Alice would not see this.
5. The iceberg is spotted and the scouts sound the alarm
Bad decision: the RMS Titanic was headed straight towards the iceberg and built to withstand collisions. Had it crashed bow first, only the first hull would have flooded (as RMS Olympic had proven was indeed survivable) and the ship would in every likelihood have been perfectly fine, if in need of repairs.
By reporting the iceberg, however, and only moments before impact, the scouts triggered the next bullet point.
(And no, Alice isn't seeing them either, because it's not the scouts' decision that sinks the ship. Remember, she sees only direct outcomes. The scouts' decision leads to other people trying to make the right decision in time, and she can't see what that decision will be, nor what its outcome will be, until that decision has been made.)
6. First Officer Murdoch gives the order to redirect the ship's course
Rather than crash directly into the iceberg, First Officer Murdoch hoped to avoid the iceberg altogether. He is widely believed to have ordered the ship to move "Hard a-starboard", and the ship pivoted at exactly the wrong time. The ship is struck along the side, opening multiple compartments along the front and dooming the ship.
(Source and image credit)
That decision Alice would have seen had she been aboard, but things happened so quickly I don't think there's anything she could have done by that point.
Alice does not prevent anything and at best gets to save a few people by retrieving collapsible A, a lifeboat which floated off the deck shortly before the ship sank, and help with collapsible B, which floated upside down and had survivors clinging to its hull(x).
Special source credit to this documentary.
Those interested should also check out this very short youtube animation of the ship's sinking, just ignore James Cameron's "badabing badabom" and you're good. If you're a real one, this real time rendition of the ship sinking is really good, impeccable research and to my recollection not sensationalist the way a lot of these real time sinking of a given ship tend to be (and I know that's an incredibly damning sentence).
Also: I can't stress enough this list of reasons why the RMS Titanic sank is non-exhaustive! It is however the ones coming to mind now and that are various levels of man-made and therefore possible, in theory, for Alice's gift to pick up on.
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