How Does the Ttianic Relate to Today

     I was originally going to do this blog post last week but the holiday got in the way. Recently I've been thinking of the 21st century ships today. How does the RMS Titanic relate to today's ships? My research started with a simple Goggle search of "fastest ocean cruise liner in 2013" immediately what popped up was, the RMS Queen Mary 2. The RMS Queen Mary 2 out ranked other passenger liner ships with a cursing speed of 34 mph. Now 34 miles doesn't seem that fast, the RMS Titanic's maximum speed was 24 mph, only 10 miles faster with a 101 year gap. 

"The RMS Queen Mary 2 is also the only still operational ocean liner, and she is the fastest cruise ship in the world (service speed 34 mph). RMS QM2 is the most famous cruise ship afloat – simply there’s no other ship in the world to enjoy such respect and recognition." -Queen Mary 2 Cruises

     If the ships aren't getting faster are they getting bigger? The RMS Titanic wasn't the fastest ship of 1912 she was the largest ship.

     With another Google search I soon found out that MS Allure of the Sea currently operating under Royal Caribbean International was given the title of largest ship. More commonly known as the Allure, she beat her twin ship Oasis of the Seas by only 2 inches. Why is this all important? The Allure is 1,187 feet long while the RMS Titanic was 882, however the Allure's maximum speed is 26 mph. There's only a two mile difference between the Allure and the Titanic. The larger the ships get, the slower they'll need to be. According to the ship law of physics, the larger the ship the slower the speed. ( Makes sense!)

     As you can see in the comparsion chart the Titanic is no match to ships today, so if the size don't relate to ship what does? Another Google search lead me to the largest ship wreck according to history

"The sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912, with 1,517 fatalities, is probably the most famous shipwreck, but not the biggest in terms of life lost. In peacetime, the loss of the Doña Paz, with an estimated 4,341 dead, is the largest non-military loss recorded involving a single ship. While the wartime sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945 during World War II by a Soviet Navy submarine, with an estimated loss of about  9,500 people, remains the greatest maritime disaster ever." -Wikpedia

            Military ships sank every day during World War 2, and the  Doña Paz sank and took down 4,341 people. The Titanic's falitiles don't even compare to that. So why is the RMS Titanic the most famous shipwreck? Another Google search recovered an answer that I completely agree with. (I know it's really long but it hits so many points on the head.)

     "The Titanic was supposed to be a supership, incapable of being felled by anything so mundane as Mother Nature. But not only was it felled, it was sucker-punched. Imagine James Bond getting all geared up for a mission with cool gadgets and gizmos, then walking outside and getting killed by a bus. The Titanic's sinking was just that inconceivable, made all the more horrible by the tremendous loss of life and, for some time afterward (and some mysteries still remain) few clues as to how it all happened. Titanic also has to be viewed as a bit of a metaphor for it's age. By 1912, mankind, especially Europeans, had thought they'd reached the pinnacle of human development. Man (specifically European Man) was the master of all he surveyed. The world was full of little empires, all chugging happily (or so they thought) along. There were more than just a few people who thought that everything that could be invented had been invented; the world simply wasn't going to get any more perfect. Nature had been conquered: aircraft were in the skies, virtually nothing on the earth's surface had been unexplored; it was a heady time. And then the Titanic sank. That alone was a blow to many fragile egos. But what happened right afterward? The Great War (aka WWI) and its final resolution, while nowhere near the tragedy of WWII, was in some ways more profound, as it left the world, and the World Order, completely shattered. So not only had the Titanic, just two years earlier, proven that mankind had no such thing as a mastery over mother nature, but the Great War proved that he couldn't even manage his own affairs peacefully, nor contain his own penchant for slaughter.  The Titanic, then, didn't just take 1600 people and a lot of goodies to the bottom of the sea; it marked the beginning of the end of an era, a shock to the system that it took decades from which to recover." -John P from Yahoo Answers

Perfection, I'm unable to explain anything further this man has given out my exact thoughts. 

Works Citied:

 "List of the World's Largest Cruise Ships." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 May 2013.            Web. 07 Dec. 2013.

 "QM2 Transatlantic Crossing Schedule, Cruise New York-Southampton-Hamburg." Queen               Mary 2 Cruises. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2013.

 "What Makes Titanic so Famous Apart from Other Shipwrecks?" Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo!,              n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013. Website