With GPS systems and other geographical technology being as sophisticated as it now is, do lighthouses still serve an integral purpose? Are they more now just in case the captain/crew lapses on the monitoring of navigation systems? Obviously lighthouses are more immediate and I guess tangible, but do they still fulfil a purpose beyond mitigating basic human error?
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I don’t even boat and I know the answer. But I’m in technology: I watch systems fail all day long and I get to sit there and say “where’s your failover plan?” And people just don’t fucking know what to say.
You could put gps in every floating object and you’d still want lighthouses: Electrical short, dead battery -‘d no gas, Smashed gps device. Human error. Sabotage. The only truth I know in life is that shit happens, so you better have a plan.
Anyone on a boat can look up and see a massive beam of light cutting across the sky, or hear the deafening boom of a foghorn and know “oh shit I gotta get outta here!”
Think of it as a last line of defense.
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