Recovering the Titanic's radio could signal a disaster for underwater heritage | Hacker News Reader

Recovering the Titanic's radio could signal a disaster for underwater heritage

theconversation.com

16 pointswglb22 comments

The ship is rapidly disappearing due to corrosion. It won't be long before there's nothing left but mud. I don't understand the point of not making an effort to preserve it for posterity. It's lost if we don't. There won't be any heritage there.

The Titanic artifact exhibit made its way to Seattle some years ago, and I enjoyed seeing it very much.

By all means, bring back the radio.

The article identifies degradation of the shipwreck as a controversial topic. Opinions on the matter differ between specialists, archeologists and the company that owns salvage rights to Titanic. The following site is linked, which I enjoyed reading

https://archive.archaeology.org/0101/etc/titanic1.html

We also have this weird dichotomy in regards to people that die in a shipwreck, calling it a grave site that must not be disturbed. But if it wasn't a shipwreck, we'd make every effort to recover and "bring home" the bodies.

If we could ask the people that went down with the Titanic, I suspect that very few would want to remain with the ship that killed them.

I agree and I've always thought it was a bit odd. We don't leave plane crashes out to rust.

I've always wondered how cost effective it would be to bring up the sunken freighters of WW2. There were quite a lot, and many had very expensive cargoes, such as tungsten and gold. Check out this global map of identified WW2 wrecks.

https://mapsterman.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/fe88b5e18...

You might enjoy Neil Stephenson’s book, “Cryptonomicon”, as this is a key plot point in a book about 1990s crypto. It’s fantastic.

Cannot upvote enough; ahead of its time and always draws me back. For a tome so thick and full of nerdery, it reads as fast as a grocery store paperback.

> We don't leave plane crashes out to rust.

That's not actually true, although I don't blame you for not being aware of this... Here in the US, there are plenty of identifiable, unsalvaged plane wrecks left in the wilderness.

I hike a lot around Southern California... The San Gabriel Mountains alone have at least a half dozen wrecks with significant portions of the fuselage & engines.

Some of them are remarkably accessible... IIRC there is a T-6 Texan from the 1950s along the Mt Baldy summit trail (~9500' elevation) which is hiked by thousands of people a year. In Joshua Tree National Park, there are two wrecks on Quail Mountain... Plenty of others besides those.

Oh, almost forgot the famous wreck on Mount Rainier's South Tacoma Glacier...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Tahoma_Glacier#History

Crashed in December 1946 with 32 US Marines aboard... This was before helicopters and GPS, so the wreck wasn't located quickly enough, and got buried by the early Winter snowfall. Some recoveries in the following years, but the bulk of the wreck and the bodies were left in place, as a permanent monument.

I believe the area is now off-limits to climbers, as well.

But no one cares if they're disturbed. You can hike to them, clamber over them... if the owner of the property gives you permission, you can haul it all away and sell it for scrap and no one will care.

Also, not true... See my sibling comment to yours about the Marine Corps transport that went down on South Thomas Glacier on Rainer in '46. Most of the plane and the bodies are still up there, buried in the glacier, and the area has been permanently closed to recreational climbing, as a resting place for the dead Marines onboard.

Obviously wrecks in national/state parks will be protected.

No, the decision to protect the plane wreck as a burial-in-place had nothing to do with it being a national park.

In 1946, simply setting foot onto the Tahoma Glacier required a highly technical mountaineering expedition. There were no helicopters at that time to bring in search & rescue personnel or to remove bodies. Park rangers and the Navy determined that a huge team of mountaineers would be required, and it would take them several weeks to extricate the bodies, by hand and on foot. A recovery could only have taken place in the late Summer/Fall, when the snow was at it's lowest level--but that would also require exposing the recovery team to the worst dangers of rockfall, crevasses, etc while they worked and camped on the glacier.

The risk to rescuers was simple too great, and there were no feasible alternative options at the time.

https://www.historylink.org/File/7820

Listen, this is the THIRD time in row that you've asserted something that's just factually false, on this topic... Don't you think it would be a good idea to do some research and educate yourself about this topic, before you make any more comments about it? I mean this with respect... We all have gaps in our knowledge, and I assume that growing your knowledge is important to you?

https://www.historylink.org/File/7820

And also, their steel (hulls and etc.) is valuable because it was forged in the pre-nuclear age, and is thus "pure" for medical use.

I visited the graveyard where many of the recovered victims of the Titanic were buried in Halifax, NS. People behaved incredibly rude there, just stepping all over the graves without watching their feet. In the case of the titanic, "resting in peace" unfortunately more applies to the people in the sea over the people who made it to land.

I've never understood this. There's 6 feet of soil between the people walking and the corpse underground. They people above ground are in no way disturbing anything 6 feet under.

It is a social signal of respect.

Maybe I am okay with someone spitting on a grave then pissing on it, all the while yelling abuse at the occupant . . . because I think those are harmless activities.

But most people would find that rather offensive.

It's a custom. Try walking on the tomb of the unknown soldier in Paris.

What use is a 100 year old radio that operates at 500kHz?

Ebay listing: Slightly used radio once on the Titanic. Buy Now OBO!

If you just added an NFT, you could sell it at Sotheby's.

Is not the Antikythera wreck a monument to the now nameless sailors who perished when their vessel sank?

Furthermore, the practical utility of the objects so blithely and destructively harvested from that Monument To The Dead is questionable in the extreme. timeanddate.com provides extensive information about the positions of the planets, the moon, eclipses, conjunctions, seasons. The Antikythera mechanism is antiquated, redundant, and broken. While the gold coins yanked from this watery and much disturbed grave may have utility as industrial feed-stock for iPhone manufacturing, or simply for profit-taking by cynical exhibitors and their coterie of unscrupulous artifact dealers, gold is already available by the ton on the open market!

All these causes for shame, and I haven’t even mentioned the sarcophagus lid that they hope to dredge up! What do we need that for? A soul twice afflicted by tragedy - dead and then shipwrecked - is to lose his lid, and for what? Do we have no decency at all? Is it all so that bored children can gawk at misfortune in some capitalistic museum of horrors, having duly paid for their admission tickets? Or, even worse, perhaps so Elon Musk can appropriate it via Bitcoin payment for his Martian Mausoleum?

Carefully lower it all back into the ocean! Our heritage and very humanity are at stake!

I can’t believe I’m getting downvoted. Sorry if I offended any grave robbers! Or grave robbing Musk worshipping Bitcoin enthusiasts! Is it not enough to defile the planet, the cosmos, and ancient monuments? You must also strike out against me? Help, all good people! Upvote me at once!

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