CNN is correct that it would be theoretically possible to convert modern cargo ships to sailing vessels, but would it be practical.
Let’s do some math.
As a first approximation, let’s assume that the amount of force necessary to move the ship roughly varies in proportion to its displacement, the mass of water it pushes aside as it moves. The Cutty Sark clipper ship displaced about 900 tonnes when loaded and underway and carried just over 2,900 square metres of sails supported by over 17 km of rigging rope. The typical medium-sized oil tanker displaces 1,200,000 tonnes unloaded. That’s over 130 times greater displacement. Thus, we might expect that an unloaded tanker would need at least 380,00 square metres of sail area to achieve the performance of a sailing ship that was obsolescent in the mid-19th-century. Thousands of cargo ships are this large or larger. [Opps, see Update 3.]
BTW, 380,000 square metres is about 94 acres. It will take a lot of cotton (or, more likely, dead dinosaurs to make the kevlar) to make the sails for one ship. Thousands of sets of sails would be necessary to keep world commerce alive.
UPDATE—Where would the energy to run the motors needed to control such sails come from? They would be too heavy to be operated by human muscle power.
Also, how would such a ship maneuver in the confines of a harbor?
UPDATE 2—
UPDATE 3—Math is hard indeed. I slipped a digit. The mass ratio is 1,300:1 rather than 130:1, so the sail area required is 10X larger—940 acres!
Thanks to @WitCoHE_Bak for catching my error.
Of course, they can always learn to code. I learned Fortran when I was a teenager and several other programming languages since then. These days, most coding is done with a keyboard, but I’ve found another tool useful for some forms of communication.
OK, at least one of the Gentle Readers is going point out that manual telegraphy is as slow, essentially obsolete form of communications. That’s true, but Morse code still can deliver truthful information faster than CNN+ ever has. That’s why it will still be in use next month.
One of the most settled bits of “settled science” is that members of the species homo sapiens who are born with an XY chromosomal pair are male and those born with an XX pair are female.
I’m so old I remember when outlets like The Babylon Bee were still satire, and satire was a form of joking.
My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has been following the Williamson campaign 
Then it zapped a sizable crowd of Trump supporters.
Donald Trump is a flawed individual. While the Mueller Report does find that Trump and the people around him did not engage in the “collusion” with a foreign power during 2016 election (or obstruct an investigation into something that didn’t happen), it also reveals some of the tawdry behavior that went on during the election campaign and its aftermath.
