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Comment by simplicio | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm unsentimental, but I don't really see the point of restricting access to the wreck. People say it's a grave or memorial, but its not like it was built for that, its just the ship the people happened to be in when they died. We generally don't preserve crashed airplanes/trains/etc as memorials to the people that died in them. And its not like mourning family members or their descendants can visit it.

If I or one of my family members die in a shipwreck, I can't imagine I'd have any particular problem with people salvaging from the same. If some future salvager wants to go salvage an iphone or whatever from the ship, I can't see why I'd be upset by the fact that my corpse is now resting in a ship with one less random knicknack in it.

The radio seems like an interesting artifact that people will enjoy seeing, while at the bottom of the ocean it isn't doing anyone any good. If people want to bring it to the surface, let them have at it.

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> People say it's a grave

The remains of the people that died on board are still there, so technically it is a grave.

For land or air-based accidents, the remains are easily gathered together and buried. Ships that sink are a little different. There’s even modern examples, like the ferry Estonia that sank in 1994, that has been declared a maritime grave and diving near the wreck is forbidden.

> People say it's a grave or memorial, but its not like it was built for that, its just the ship the people happened to be in when they died.

Obviously the shipbuilders never intended for the ship to become a grave, but that's exactly what it became and the intent of the shipbuilders hardly seems relevant.

As for plane and train crashes, the discrepancy in treatment is obviously a matter of tradition. Not all traditions are problematic relics of the past that need questioning though; particularly not traditions as harmless as respecting the deceased victims of ship wrecks. And if traditions are to be challenged, it should be for a better reason than profit. (Historic inquiry is a better reason to challenge this tradition, but doesn't seem to apply in this circumstance.)

I think that devaluing harmless traditions like respecting the dead in the name of utility and profit demeans our society.

Is there a tradition? Salvaging wrecks, with or without human remains, is a pretty old practice, the law generally seems to support it and I'm not really aware of any religious or other traditional prohibition against it. There's certainly efforts made to respect whatever human remains are present, but not to the extent of a defacto ban on salvage operations.

> Is there a tradition?

Obviously yes, otherwise it wouldn't be contentious.

There are many reasons to salvage shipwrecks, some better than others. Wrecks which pose navigational hazards are obviously removed. Wrecks which contain hazardous materials (oil, nuclear waste, explosives, etc) may also be salvaged. Wrecks which contain valuable materials are also sometimes salvaged, and in rare cases ships may be raised and refurbished to be used again (this happened to the confederate submarine Hunley twice.) There is no hard and fast tradition on salvaging ships, it exists on a continuum of necessity to reviled grave robbery.

Specific instances can be evaluated on that continuum. The K-141 Kursk was dismantled and partially raised, in large large part because it contained a nuclear reactor and several nuclear warheads; I think most would agree doing so was prudent. On the other end of that spectrum, numerous ships sank during the Battle of the Java Sea have been destroyed for scrap metal, which has been widely reviled as grave robbery. (The steel of those wrecks has some value because it dates prior to the nuclear era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel) but "it's valuable tho.." isn't generally seen as an acceptable reason to molest these graves.

I think retrieving artifacts from the Titanic to put on display falls closer to the "grave robbery" end of this spectrum.

Sunken ships are vastly different from land convenyances, historically and in cultures everywhere. There's a gravity to the inaccessible, abyssal deep.

Think of it as a graveyard. It's typically not ok to desecrate it, even if no one visits it.

But it isn't a graveyard. And I think its a stretch to say that removing a radio is "desecration", which to my mind usually implies an intentional effort to disrespect the site.

It's the final resting place of the remains of something like 1,500 people. In what meaningful sense is it not a graveyard?

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