It made perfect sense to me. You have passenger planes, you have passenger ships, so logic concludes there should be passenger subs
I didn’t recognize the look I received in response at the time, but it ended up being a core memory. That mixture of surprise and the urge to say “because that’s the dumbest fucking idea” - but you can’t really tell a 7 year old that.
“Because they don’t.” Was a perfectly cromulent answer, and I went back to Mario Paint.
Many years later, I realized the full answer was even more simple. It’s related to the pact signed when our earliest ancestors crawled onto land. In exchange for the verdant bounty of the world above, we could not return or the ocean would crush us back into primordial goop.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this exchange a lot in the last day, what with the billionaire death coffin and all that. So here’s to you, 7-year-old me: There aren’t any passenger subs because one tiny fuckup will cause everyone to die horribly and capitalism can’t be trusted to maintain a single thing.