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The Airship Adventure
Posted by: Laurie Bennett
I don’t know about you, but the Hardy Boys books constitute a fond era in my life. Indeed, thinking back to the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy (who, like most fictional amateur detectives, have an uncanny knack of finding themselves embroiled in some exciting escapade) still ties my stomach in a little knot of boyhood adrenalin.
No doubt Frank and Joe would have been thrilled to read George Monbiot’s article about the return of one of travel’s most illustrious adventures: the airship. I certainly was.
As we peer into an ominously high-octane aerial future, the thought of floating majestically over the earth is all the more appealing.
During his informed discussion of fuels that could help make the airship a feasible alternative, Mr. Monbiot alludes to an interesting communications principle – the importance of the salience of problems and solutions.
People assume that events that are easily called to mind or easy to imagine are more frequent and therefore likely to happen (these events are more salient). The trouble is, events that occur infrequently, but spectacularly, tend to stick in people’s minds, leading to an irrational perspective on what events are likely or unlikely to occur.
Take Monbiot’s airship example:
‘The word airship elicits a fixed reaction in almost everyone who hears it: “what about the Hindenburg?”. It’s as if, every time someone proposed travelling on a cruise ship, you were to ask, “but what about the Titanic?”. Yes, there was a spectacular disaster – 71 years ago. It has lodged in our minds because, like the Titanic, the Hindenburg was bigger and plusher than any craft built before it, and it was carrying rich and prominent people. The conflagration was witnessed by journalists and broadcast all over the world. It also became the technology’s funeral pyre…’
Climate change has suffered from a salience problem too. Doom and gloom communications, and the odd hurricane, have made the consequences of climate change very salient. Now it’s time to focus on the solutions; making them more salient will increase people’s confidence in adopting them.
And could there possibly be a better way to go about that than getting airships up and running? I’m pretty sure I know what the Hardy boys would say…
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