Commercial submarine trips to the bottom of the Marianas Trench | Hacker News Reader

Commercial submarine trips to the bottom of the Marianas Trench

bloomberg.com

103 pointspseudolus66 comments

> a place so deep that its exterior pressure would feel like having five jumbo jets parked on your chest

I had to check the maths on this, but it looks good:

- My chest (upper torso, diaphragm to shoulder blades) is about 30cm * 40 cm, or one eighth of a square meter

- The sub goes down 35,000 feet, or 11,000 metres. So that's 1,400 cubic metres of water above my chest. Water is virtually incompressible even at that depth, so that weighs 1,400,000 kg.

- An empty 747 weighs 373,000 pounds or 170,000 kg [0]. At maximum takeoff weight, up to 400,000 kg [1].

That means the equivalent of between 3 and 8 jumbo jets above my chest.

[0] http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0051b.shtml [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400

Odd unit of measurement, as I assume jumbo jets are manufactured to be as light as possible.

The correct unit is the Whales. 3 to 8 times the size of Whales.

I only understand weight in olympic swimming pools.

An El Reg unit of measurement, no?

Oh the nostalgia!

El Reg? No... Pretty much an ISO standard by now...

At what temperature and altitude?

Since we are doing math and all, area of Wales is 20,740 km^2 ^1, this gives average weight per m^2:

0.0000675024 kg / m^2 = 1400000 / 20740000000

Now then, per ^2 soil weights between 1200 and 1700 kg per cubic meter. Let's take upper estimate to account for constant rain and minor human infestation in Wales (weight of cubic meter of concrete is 2400 kg ^3).

This gives depth of Wales that equals to the pressure experienced by dmurray's chest of 0.0000000397 meters of ~40 nanometers. That is greater than feature size in modern CPU's...

Well, there you go folks, I dare say that is a more useless (and maybe more fun too?) comparison than comparing pressure with jumbo jets.

^1 - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=wales+a...

^2 - https://www.reference.com/science/much-cubic-meter-soil-weig...

^3 - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=concret...

Whales. Not Wales.

Mass, not area.

Far more plausible and chosen for the oceanic theme.

The chance that TrainedMonkey did this unintentionally is 0.0000000397%.

But they're still heavy, relative to everyday items.

Dumb anecdote: I once made a comment to a co-worker about handling hay bales. When I pointed out that the ones I needed to move weighed around 1,600 lbs his amazement was palpable: "Seriously? Grass shouldn't weigh that much!"

> Water is virtually incompressible even at that depth, so that weighs 1,400,000 kg.

Even if it was compressible, it would still weigh the same.

The pressure is determined by the mass of the water column above you. If water were compressible (as air is), that mass would vary by depth, complicating calculations.

As water compresses minimally, density is constant, and computing based on area and depth at 1000 kg/m^3 is sufficiently accurate.

God this is so dangerous. Any weakness in the sub and you get crushed to death by pressure so fast that death would travel backward in time and kill you before you even get a chance to start dying.

I don’t understand how bored a high net worth individual must be that they would choose to risk their life and its potential like this.

I really laughed at this comment.

There was an HN submission about https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ at some point, which is a great visualization of just how far this is, and how amazingly deep some forms of life can get.

What exactly would be the appeal of this, besides pure novelty?

Commercial space travel? Of course. You're weightless, you get to see the Earth from an entirely new, potentially life-changing perspective.

Commercial ocean-trench travel? It's too dark to see anything but what's right in front of you. I don't understand the appeal beyond bragging that you were rich enough to afford it.

You seem to have answered your own question.

It's all about the "ends of the earth." There are people who hike all 7 summits (continental high points) and the poles. This adds one more that was previously unachievable, so I'm sure there will be customers. You need money and good physical condition (strength & stamina) for the others, mostly just money for this one--though a sense of adventure and risk help too.

The ghost stories.

And, so they can play you Queen's Under Pressure as a joke.

If this is commercially successful, SpaceX is gonna make a trillion dollars on Mars trips.

> What exactly would be the appeal of this?

You could get to see the Earth from an entirely new, potentially life-changing perspective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnkHRtpTztc

Novel naming of the submersible vessel too, it's named after one of the hero-characters from an Iain Banks novel (one of The Culture series).

Nice juxtaposition using a name of a space faring craft for a deep ocean sub.

The main ship itself is named after a Mind from Hydrogen Sonata and all the support craft on it are named after Culture ships as well. I guess the guy's just a fan?

SpaceX has been doing something similar...

https://www.space.com/28445-spacex-elon-musk-drone-ships-nam...

Article on the naming from BBC Scotland:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5...

"However, the chief scientist on my expedition, Dr Alan Jamieson and a Scot, once met him in a bar."

I was thinking of the Toots and the Maytals song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw66FA6OTqA

Then again, maybe Iain Banks was a fan of one of the various artists who have covered it over the years.

Love Iain Banks, but this was just a missed opportunity to the much better name Subby McSubface

I worked with Victor Vescovo( sign name V^2 as he was also a Navy reserve intelligence officer)for about a year in the early dot.com days.

Those days he was into climbing. A nice guy, however he would use “I” too much even when others contributed to something and only “we” when he jumped on someone else’s idea. I assumed (rightly or wrongly) being a mountain climber it had to do with not playing team sports.

That experience made me add an interview question later asking the candidate if they played any team sports in high school or college.

> being a mountain climber it had to do with not playing team sports.

Mountaineering is most certainly a team sport. It would probably be fair to say that it requires a greater degree of trust and communication than almost any other sport, given the high stakes and the complexity of the skills involved.

> That experience made me add an interview question later asking the candidate if they played any team sports in high school or college.

Surely this isn’t a requirement...!

Since you will never have any way to seriously lern if that question works you can just as well ask in an interview if the candidate ever wanted to be a panda. I think people who wanted to be pandas are lazy and shouldn‘t be trusted.

I'd never actively considered whether or not I wanted to be a panda before reading this, but my initial reaction was "of course, who wouldn't?" and I thought you were going to express a distrust of anyone without that reaction. Obviously, that's not the case, and I'm a little shocked.

Just a clear case of different approachs, but I'm guess I'm glad nobody's asked me this in an interview yet.

I would certainly employ somebody who could answer "have you ever wanted to be a panda" cogently. A single word answer invites questions. This is not the same question as "what is your spirit animal" which may be a reason to terminate the interview as a candidate.

Rock climbing and mountain climbing is the only team sport I know where you have trust your life to your team members.

Did Victor play team sports in high school or college?

> asking the candidate if they played any team sports

I would fail this question, and not because I don't like teams, but because I don't like sport games (and prefer athletics, cycling e. t. c.). E. g. ping-pong is not a team sport and I don't like it for the same reasons as football or basketball.

I also worked with Victor at that startup (Hi, Salim). I can't say I share this observation about him, and in fact I know he credited me with some trivia I was able to help him with in briefings he gave (in the Navy context).

I'd further opine I consider team sport participation right up there with panda-philia and whether one prefers vanilla or chocolate ice cream in their milkshakes as hiring criteria, but YMMV.

This is great for science. Commercial trips like this and those to outerspace will no doubt lower cost over time which will benefit both tourists and scientists.

This vehicle has acrylic viewports: do they “need” them, if since they have high def cameras? Or is it a kind of necessary real object rather than a digitized version of what you can see though the portholes?

I mean, adding porthole probably adds challenges to the design, no?

Guess it’s the “saw it with my own eyes” thing.

If you're charging $750k, people will want to look out the window.

Sure, it challenges the design, but not nearly as much as putting people inside. It might be irrational to want to go there rather than watch a video, but that is just the way we are.

Being able to see it with your own eyes, and be there is the cool thing about this. Anyone can watch video of the trench.

Probably to help against claustrophobia. I wouldn't want to be in a closed metal object thousands of meters in the water. I know it's only psychological, but it's probably enough.

Then they should just paint black circles on the wall, as that's all you'd see after the first few minutes ;)

That, lots of marine snow, and some bioluminiscent creatures here and there.

Without windows the passengers might suspect they were the victims of a glorious scam.

Vescovo's original proposal to Triton (the builder of the submarine) was essentially a steel ball on a cable. No portholes, nothing fancy, just drop him and reel him back up.

With this proposal, he was trying to anchor the engineers (pun intended) and ensure he'd get a workable end product instead of an expensive flight of fancy that couldn't achieve the mission, and also it fulfilled what he wanted out of the exercise — he's a goal-oriented, mission-focused individual and getting himself to those faraway places was/is job one.

Triton refused and engineered the viewports as well as other compromises that ensured attention was paid to the scientific uses of the submarine and its trips into the deep.

It’s hard to imagine the level of peace one may experience at that depth.

We'll call it the "underview effect", as opposed to the "overview effect".

No need to go that deep to experience it. Dive 20+ meters and you'll feel it.

Until you see some trash: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48230157

As someone who knows some of the challenges of this project closely, it’s amazing to see it coming to fruition

What are the wildest challenges you’re aware of here?

Huge pressure forces pushing the materials to its limits would be one

And assurance covering bills.

Curious if aircraft have cycle limits due to pressurization, how many cycles do these subs support ?

The exact number of cycles would depend on the specifications and materials quality. An engineer could calculate a value, but would not be unlimited, and would be lower than standard vehicles of course.

In any case, we have air compressors and hydraulic machines that run for many years with high pressures inside.

Keep in mind that these vessels do not have bathrooms.

No, no, it said they have bottles and bags for such needs. So completely covered.

Bet they will find tons of plastic garbage

Now that's taking social distancing seriously.

We've reached the point where some people have so much money we need to invent new places no one has been to so they can pay to go somewhere other people cant, while simultaneously half the country dies because the have COVID-19 and no health care.

Your latter two statements are just false though, so it isn’t a fair criticism.

Sounds cool, I'd love to do it. I just need to lose 25 pounds. And save $750,000. Anyone want to pay me 30 grand for every pound I lose?

There actually is a program you can do for this, it's called weight loss bet. I've done it before and "won" $180 against the people I was competing against. It's very motivational imo, you can choose either to compete against randoms or people you know. We did a pool from work.

If you had the money, they would probably consider moving the ballast around...

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