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.
Tuesday a ferry ran aground in the Philippines.
February 17 cargo ship ran aground in the Black Sea.
February 4 cargo ship ran aground in Indonesia.
Even with the technology stuff happens and extra methods of preventing bad things happening in hazardous places is a decent investment.
The US Coast Guard has decommissioned a lot of lighthouses but not all because some are in places where there is sufficient traffic and enough of a hazard to warrant keeping them active
I have my boating license and I can say I’ve been on plenty of boats with no GPS lol, plus obviously, smaller boats which basically are just a motor strapped to a hull
Defense in depth.
Just imagine that it’s cloudy and stormy, and you’re racing to get to safe berth, and your gps and radio navigation go out. Sure it doesn’t happen often. But it could happen.
You *think* you know where you are. You’re pretty confident. But you know that if you’re wrong you could end up broken up on rocks and lost in the storm. Everything is pitch black, still no instruments, nothing to go by except dead reckoning and maybe your compass…
… and then a flash hits you. From the lighthouse. From the beam size and the location you can now figure pretty accurately where you are, adjust course, and avoid certain death on the rocks that were just out of sight.
Still seem unneccessary?
Outside of still serving a purpose for yachtsman it still serves a great purpose for commercial trades as well. Signals are often blocked or jammed and we rely heavily on landmarks and lights to navigate safely as often the signal is jammed along the coastlines which are also the busiest sailing areas.
Within western europe the GPS signal is stable as long as a war doesnt break out. Outside of that tho in areas as the med, black sea, red sea etc etc the signal is very often not stable / jammed
Source: am a mercant navy captain
Outside of still serving a purpose for yachtsman it still serves a great purpose for commercial trades as well. Signals are often blocked or jammed and we rely heavily on landmarks and lights to navigate safely as often the signal is jammed along the coastlines which are also the busiest sailing areas.
Within western europe the GPS signal is stable as long as a war doesnt break out. Outside of that tho in areas as the med, black sea, red sea etc etc the signal is very often not stable / jammed
Source: am a mercant navy captain
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.
I have my boating license and I can say I’ve been on plenty of boats with no GPS lol, plus obviously, smaller boats which basically are just a motor strapped to a hull
Redundancy is the big reason.
Why do we even have windows on ships if we can just stare at a GPS? Visual is a great indicator to get your bearing.
Remember that GPS only figures out your position and movement over ground. In maritime navigation we do need to know where the bow is pointing, which might be a completely different direction when we are affected by currents and wind.
In my neck of the woods we do have a foreign power that likes to jam GPS/GLONASS/GALILEO every so often, so I would not be casting away without the skills and means to navigate without satellites.
“The GPS says land is .25 km away.”
“Oh, there’s the lighthouse. Keep away from those rocks.”
Human brains don’t translate numbers into reality on a very intuitive level. For short-range navigation, you really need to see what you’re doing.
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