Picture the ocean floor, roughly 3,800 meters down, near the wreck of the Titanic. In June 2023, a submersible called Titan lost contact with its support ship less than two hours into a dive. For four days, search crews scanned the surface, hoping for a signal. Then a remotely operated vehicle found a debris field instead. The vessel's hull hadn't slowly failed — it had given way almost instantly, under pressure that had been building against it the entire dive. What stayed with me, reading into this, wasn't the depth or the pressure numbers. It was learning that people had raised concerns about that hull's design years before the dive ever happened. Warnings had already been written down. Somebody, at some point, decided the dive would go ahead anyway. The warning that got overruled Titan's hull was built mostly from carbon fiber — a material that hadn't been used this way in a deep-sea vessel before, and one that engineers and industry experts had flagged ...