Real-Life Decision Making
You are on a ship heading for your destination somewhere in the Pacific
Ocean, where you will spend seven weeks mapping the ocean floor and taking
core and rock samples. You are two days out from Honolulu, Hawaii, before
you realize a crucial piece of equipment, a magnetometer which you will need
to take magnetic readings, is damaged.
You need a new piece of equipment, or you can't do the work you planned.
To turn back for a new piece of equipment means you will lose four days
from your schedule. It costs $20,000 a day for the ship.
Not to turn back means you will lose a crucial portion of the scientific
data you need.
Oceanographer Will Sager faced this decision while on his way to map the
Shatsky Rise one summer.
"We had to hurry to get out of port because of the weather conditions,"
he said. "There were hurricane warnings in effect, so we had two days to prepare
in Hawaii before we left. As a result, we didn't get to test all the equipment."
Sager says the magnetometer is dragged on a long cable behind the ship,
taking magnetic readings as the vessel moves. The crew didn't get around to
checking whether it worked until two days into the voyage, having spent those
two days catching up on all the other work that normally would have been done
before leaving port.
When the problem was discovered, there was a huge decision to make.
"Not going back would mean a lot of the scientists hanging around for some
time with not much to do, and we would lose a lot of the information we were
going there to get," Sager says. "Going back would mean we'd lose more than
just time and money. We'd also have to rearrange our timetables,
which were very precise, and lose some of the science somewhere."
What would you do?