Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers
bbc.com
bbc.com
Engineering is a discipline that requires experience and guidance. The young learn from the old. In this case accomplished engineers missed a chance to do rewarding work with young engineers and young engineers have to live with the guilt of killing their crew.
This is a lesson the entire tech industry would do well to meditate on. Especially when we call ourselves engineers.
He proudly describes it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc
As for the carbon fibre:
>OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior. So, for Cyclops 2 OceanGate decided to avoid the metallic hull altogether and began a search for a manufacturer that could help it develop a composite hull.
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
Handing the controller around smells like marketing wank, especially when you learn they bolted down the shitter and made the controls remote. Seems like an odd tradeoff. I’d be inclined to use a portable toilet or diapers and firmly attach the controls to the sub near the only window. People can still take turns.
Maybe the intent was for someone to peak out the window to perform a maneuver.
Still, I hope there was a wired controller as a backup just in case.
I would wager that safety is better - not least because standards are tougher - on almost every amusement ride around.
I kind of envision this craft as being a sealed capsule full of humans with all the propulsion equipment and batteries strapped to the outside and controlled wirelessly from the inside. But I haven't seen a full diagram of how Oceangate worked. Like, how did CO2 get scrubbed from the cabin?
The Bluetooth?
Eh. It was there.
The sad thing is, the carbon fiber hull material may not necessarily be a totally losing proposition if you can make the carbon fiber hull module swappable and recyclable, and testable.
Evidently they got, what? 20ish descents to service depth before it lost integrity?
If you worked from there, and figured out those pesky details, you could make something workable.
In fact, we may even be lauding the man if they'd done the 30 + journeys to service depth unmanned, and used the data collected from scanning/ultrasounding or otherwise probing that hull piece to draw strong, clear, unambiguous bars around "number of trips til new hull needs to be swapped in".
Nobody would fault the guy for doing that, and he may have truly advanced the State of the Art in ways he'd still be alive to enjoy.
But here we are.
- Battle-tested and easily replaceable, compared to a custom one.
- Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.
The carbonfiber structure... that's another story. Terrible.
It is battle tested by being used by so many people around the world.
I don't understand what you imply by "3rd party". 3rd party in relation to what exactly in this context?
Logitech makes some great mice but their game controllers are notoriously poor quality for the price, especially since the first party controllers aren't much more expensive.
Some of the "weird brand" gamepads like 8bitdo are considered better than Logitech or even Nintendo!
The navy uses the standard actually battle tested xbox controller and the logitech one has many 1 star reviews on amazon, enough said.
You can literally search on google and see this in 5 seconds, it's bizarre that it keeps being spouted in some posts, almost makes me a bit suspicious because it's so dumb.
How about the batteries that are required to power a wireless controller? Everything on a patchwork sub needs to be at least n+2 across failure domains. I wouldn't have gone in that sub even with n+5 and a paycheck TBH.
How much money was he trying to save here? Competitive gamers with a way lower net worth stick to tethered controllers for a reason, low latency and reliable connection.
Furthermore, I can believe a bunch of b/millionaires being duped into paying a non-refundable $250k. But I am struggling with the fact that they saw the abyssal porta potty and the BT controller, and still thought it was wise to enter.
The best case scenario here was an 8 hour trip in a space that's worse than long haul Economy to see Titanic ruins on a TV screen. I really don't get the value proposition here.
That poor kid.
- Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.
Controls could also be mounted directly to a fixed panel, as is the case in most (all?) other submarines
My engineer brain says that moving from 'wired' to 'bluetooth' for a safety-critical connection is pure lunacy. I don't think any objective appraisal could reasonably conclude that this decreased risk or increased safety. Bluetooth is not even close to reliable enough for this application, and neither is any other wireless technology as far as I know
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at a project by some engineer in their 20s, and it is so over-engineered and complicated, entirely lacking in any ability to future proof against onboarding or feature development, so clever they probably are very proud of themselves, but mostly useless.
Hubris like this will leave you joining the other ghosts floating around the wreck of the titanic shortly.
This is a lesson everyone in the business of making things would do well to meditate on.
Age and skin color, let alone sex, don't a good product make. It's whether the people involved have what it takes to make a good product.
OceanGate clearly did not have what it takes, even if they did check all the proper identity boxes.
I don't think the ageism was some kind of identity politics - I assume it's b/c veterans refused to sign up to such an unsafe project, and the guy sugar-coated the dubious hiring practise by implying it was his choice not to hire them.
Also, I don't think software companies do operate like engineering corps, especially safety critical ones. safety critical software companies themselves are a different breed.
Is this “don’t a good product make” considered (maybe not official grammar but) “right” English grammar? I’m not a native.
Gpt4 seems to think it has no relation to Germanic roots of the language but my gut tells me there's probably no way this ordering finds it's way to English without that history
https://chat.openai.com/share/0c9a56d5-75e3-493f-96b2-2ac3a8...
In engineering experience and precision and discipline matters a lot.
OTOH I hope he still is alive somewhere somehow down there and gets rescued, but he does speak like a douchustler.
I thought they were still searching.
But that's not really the point. The point is ageism weakens engineering organizations. That's not a condemnation of youth. Just an observation that the veterans still have something to contribute.
I guess in this case it actively hurt.
Anyone remembers the Boeing MAX 8 issues? Safety procedures / processes had been disabled on purpose for greed and people eventually died as a result. History has a truckload of examples in that direction, also because, despite better knowledge, proactively trying to prevent problems is often seen as some expense that is not needed ... until something happens and then the blame shifting starts.
At least in this case the perpetrator was eating his own dog food and choked on it. Good riddance. Unfortunately, and yet again, others had to suffer (and some do for having lost family / friends) for this incompetence as well. But there will be no learning process, the amount of people like him is just too vast and they are too dense in their heads to face reality for what it is because they are just too used to "bending reality" to their will. That works with people (up to a certain degree), but when it comes to physics, there is a hard wall they will crack their skulls open.
Virtually the entire world has taken a peek behind the curtain of these extreme sub adventures. Anyone that matters now understands they are extremely risky , and its very likely no 1 company will be able to nurture this market for years without serious engineering bonafides.
And as an additional bonus, the main culprit has been taken out of the gene pool. This is actually rare.
We can argue about the price, but this is pure learning, at every level.
Right. People will be afraid of subs for years. I'm glad we learned so much from this.
thing is, we know how to do it safely, too; "regulations are written in blood" etc etc.
Conservatives Are Now Blaming The Titanic Sub Tragedy On 'Wokeness':
https://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-now-blaming-titanic-sub...
As Jon Stewart once said "Please stop hurting us."
It was only mentioned that the communications was lost, if there had of been media mentioning that the tracking device also lost contact, I think a lot of people would have recognised straight await that it was a critical collapse. No deep gauge device loses contact from distances <4000M unless it was exploded.
I feel bad for the families given some false hope, I didn't personally think they would be found, but did believe they were suffering a far worse way to go.
It's genuinely extremely hard to not notice it losing power.
V5 https://www.sonardyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Sonardy...
Edit: Battery Life (Listening, Disabled) 417 days (Lithium) 417 days (Lithium)
It's actually longer than I even imagined. And this is an old version I believe.
I wouldn’t expect it to be more reliable - or less likely to cause harmful interference — than using Bluetooth.
It's not safety critical like the ability to drop ballast is. If something goes wrong with it you just kill propulsive power, resurface, and replace it. Also more engineering effort will have gone into making the controller reliable by its manufacturer than most would want to be able to justify spending creating something custom.
Mission critical - I'm not a marine, but as I heard they did have redundancies for buoyancy. If the best of the worst happened, I would guess they would have surfaced pretty soon..
What is the specific type of tracking device you're referring to? What signals does it emit? And if overall power was lost, for example, why wouldn't the tracking stop just like communications stopped?
Submarines cannot communicate more hundred meters in the bottom of sea. Sea water absorbs the signal quite well.
When the signal is lost, the expectation is that the submarine is under the water.
Yes! This is true, I would just like to clarify that there is a difference between 'coms' and 'transponder' here. Some friends of mine conflate the two and think they are almost on the same 'circuit'.
In most cases of the Sub (specifically military because there are not many tourist subs), you don't WANT to be located unless in an emergency, whereas here in this situation you most certainly do and in that case you can be located by way of the transponder.
Th
Sorry if I am misunderstanding you. It sounds like you are saying that it is impossible to design a system which would be able to keep in contact with the submarine/submersible all the way down to the bottom?
Because if that is what you are saying that is simply false. We have the technology to keep in contact with a submarine all the way to the bottom of even the deepest oceans.
This is not even speculative. We know it is possible because James Cameron had full communication during his dive all the way to the deepest point on earth. Here is a really cool article about the technical challenges with that system: https://www.hydro-international.com/content/article/communic...
In ”normal” context such signal is not currently known to be really possible. You know that submarines are not equipped with these.
The ship on the surface had to drop cable 100 meters below the ship to combat noise. Which means that for communication to be possible, ship cannot really move. And the ship is supposed to be almost directly above the submarine, to reduce the noise again.
For signal to be practical, it should go either over the surface or go long distances horizontally and be usable even with some noise.
Rest assure that I have read the article i have linked.
> the context was extremely specific and not suitable for general use
What does general use mean? The context is the same. We are talking about an expeditionary submersible having constant and reliable communication with its support ship all the way to the bottom. This was the setup of Cameron’s dive and this was the setup of the ill-faited Titan mission.
Are you claiming that this is not possible?
The lost submarine in this context had no similar support ship. It made connection to base on being on the surface from long distance.
”General” would mean that either submarine is capable for keeping long distance communications regardless if is is diving or on the surface.
Either to any closeby ships or even the ground station.
And for that there is no reliable technology yet.
Sorry. Are we talking about the same case? I'm talking about the Titan submersible which were lost on 18 June 2023, five days ago as of this writing.
It absolutely had a support ship. The MV Polar Prince. Here is a picture of it towing the submersible out from port a few days before its disappearance: https://i.cbc.ca/1.6885535.1687464250!/fileImage/httpImage/i...
The people lost lived on the support ship, and only boarded the submersible when they arrived right above the Titanic. There the crew from the support ship bolted the crew of the submersible in, and the support ship remained in position and in communication with them until they lost that link. Then they waited for a long time, and only when the submersible was overdue that is when they raised the alarm. The only reason why we did know that the submersible went missing is because those on the support ship raised the alarm.
> And for that there is no reliable technology yet.
You can say that, but you are wrong. Sound waves propagate very well. I think what you might be confused about is that military submarines do not communicate with the shore during operations. They remain silent because if they start to transmit everyone will know where they are. But that is not because there is no reliable technology for it. In fact they can just blast a loud sound wave out with their active sonar and everyone all around the ocean will hear them who cares to listen.
I'm not saying that it is easy. All I'm saying that it is perfectly within our capabilities if we want to.
You can always throw a cable down, if you have a handy 2kM long one.
Personally I'm not sure most people can actually grasp the scale of the ocean on it's own. We have the best we have already - transponders.
Assumptions are very dangerous, you've made a few here and that's unfortunately the mentality that can result in disaster.
Dramatic ending : Never assume. Always confirm.
What assumptions have I made and how would they lead to disaster? Please be specific.
The article is actually really interesting, but it's exception, it's certainly not impossible.
Of course it is very hard. It is kinda implied by the fact that I linked an article about the technical challenges! If you order some custom built equipment and the company then later writes an article about all the challenges with it, you can bet that it was a super expensive and specialist device.
Data recorders(airplane black boxes) have a sound pinging unit for this exact case. being lost under water.
As an example I can immediately think of the Compatt devices, they're tested and proven far beyond 4Km depth, and they come with a few options of power supply.
They have their own independent power source as you would expect, but depending on the configuration can pull from the device / vehicle.
The v4 of the Compatt also comes with extensive warnings around the power draw in relation to reserve so if for example they left and it was only on battery-power for some reason, it will start screaming.
The fact that from reports (obviously we don't know for sure) they went at the same time, sadly Occam's razor.
Edit : Disclosure : Worked on firmware for off-shore drilling rigs with devices measuring the vibrations and resistance of material being probed for viability.
The US Navy has literally has experience detecting underwater explosions (see project Azorian). It's not guaranteed of course, but any loud sound near the point of contact loss seems pretty open shut.
Imo, it made a more interesting story in a slow news cycle. How many people died in car accidents the last few days? Has to be more than 5.
Or maybe is it that you’re just classist to avoid any inward criticism?
I actually agree with the facts behind this attitude on Reddit, those groups are totally culpable for exactly what they are accused of. Those responsible should be held accountable, and those of us that care should try to do something to reverse the damage that has occurred, even if we have limited ability to, and those responsible will not.
The situation on Reddit is a case of toxic victimhood, despite the fact that the victimhood itself is real. These people are so focused on hating some specific outgroup, it has become an entire personal identity for many, and they spend much of their free time talking about it online. They use it as an excuse for not making any effort to make the world or their own lives better, and instead wallow in self pity with others online. This makes them also complicit in exactly what they are upset about- they also possess some amount of time, power, and energy they could use to make the world a better place by taking action towards specific problems they claim to care about deeply, but are choosing to do otherwise.
These people are hypocrites. They are largely middle class American millennials, in the top 1% of incomes globally. From a global perspective, they are exactly what they hate: a wealthy leisure class that carelessly lives a life of comfort while outsourcing the negative consequences to others, while having the means to make a huge positive difference yet choosing not to.
Car accidents (not involving anyone of note) sadly aren’t novel or newsworthy anymore. A submarine, with people potentially trapped onboard, with limited oxygen, as rescue teams race to the dive site, unfolding in real-time, isn’t exactly something that happens that often.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy.
In contrast, in a traffic accident you almost always know right from the start what happened.
So most developed societies, for instance, are OK with people dying in mangled steel cages on roads because most people in those places think car-based societies are worth the cost in lives.
US society in particular is OK with people dying in mass shootings, because American people think having access to guns is so important.
But if a bunch of people die in an aircraft crash due to negligence, suddenly it's different because that's not an acceptable loss: it was preventable. Mass shootings aren't preventable in the US because most people there value "gun rights" over these deaths, just like the US and many other places value car culture over the deaths caused by cars.
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/series/uvalde-texas-school-shoo...
So, at 4000m you're looking at something between 4500 5500 psi. Thats a small truck worth of pressure every square inch in the hull. Once you breach the structure, think crushing a tin can in the middle, things collapse pretty fast.
As do bodies. If you figure your body is 2 foot by 6 foot, the pressure would be like parking 100 fully loaded 18 wheelers on a single body within a split second of each other.
Every book or encounter you read about submariners has a section talking about the creaking of the bulkheads and wondering how long it can hold because it's such a nature defying act to build something that can hold that pressure out in the first place.
One of the counterintuitive features of submarines is that they're not built to be waterproof at the surface. The various parts of the hull aren't welded shut and instead rely on the external pressure to press them shut at depth. Making them waterproof at the surface ends up making them less able to resist the pressure at depth.
I'm sure it will be a little more clear as all the parts get put together.
The pressure differential is large. As soon as the hull gives way it's essentially like a bomb explosion in reverse.
I suppose it's possible that some external piece of the sub might have exploded and left the sub itself stranded but intact on the ocean floor. However, it seems that's not what happened -- pieces of the sub's main body were part of the floating debris field.
It provides some level of comfort to know that the passenger's demise was likely instant as opposed to slow and terrifying.
I love to bemoan about the media just like the next person, but sadly this is just human nature.
But I think most of us would agree that it is sad that humans cannot allocate public resources in a more utilitarian way to save lives or maximalize happiness.[0]
And I think the reason of that is human nature. Our empathy doesn't care about scales of a tragedies. An individual sad tale can make us feel exactly the same as a war where millions are affected.
[0] Planet Money had an insightful episode on this: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
I'd like to believe it's just a natural dynamic of how humans learn information about something sudden and bad, but maybe it's to some extent, deliberate to squeeze as much out of the story as possible.
barf.
There can be 2 problems at the same time.
Whatever people focus on shouldn't be a topic.
Edit: That seems far more callous than it was meant. You're right, people are forced to travel the sea almost daily, desperate people will do anything.
This IS different. And hits different because it was a choice, with a real discussion about "Hey, it's really possible you can die, and you already have a rich life"
The fact it's rich people should show that it's a completely different scenario.
As for media coverage. I would agree.
It's different because 'we' would never think to jump on an overflowing boat. 'We' could imagine taking an 'adventure' in a submarine.
So it relates to 'us'.
This isn't a dig or insult. But context matters.
>Whatever people focus on shouldn't be a topic.
On the contrary, I think what people focus on is irrelevant topic for reflection and more importantly introspection. It's important to know what Yanks your emotional chains and who is yanking them.
Looking at what drives public attention lets you know what people really care about, not what they might say they care about. You can learn some hard truth about reality by observing the actions of others.
That is to say, it's not a bad time to talk about these things unless you are speaking with friends and family of The Departed. However, if people want to have a real conversation exploring what drives public attention, they need to treat it as a real conversation. This means engaging the person that you're talking with good faith, respect, and an open mind.
In the case of the refugee boat—but not so much the submarine—it occured because of a policy choice of the leaders of many news observers. These leaders have the power to prevents disasters like these. And media coverage has been shown in the past to be able to influence leaders in making some policy changes.
So I stand with my previous argument of
"People don't change their life or opinion because of either of them."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_migrant_vessel_inciden...
On the one hand we have people who fear they will come and increasingly vote right wing and succesfully pressured sea rescue organisations in not operating in the mediterran sea anymore and on the other hand we have people donating lots of money to private sea rescue organisations that do operate there and also rescue refugees.
Not in the direction the poster thought they would/should change.
I would argue voters are aware of what's going on, and approve of the situation. In at least some of the countries directly involved (UK, France, Italy), the majority is calling for more restrictive immigration policies.
Note that most (almost all) of this negative media coverage has no basis in reality. The only connection between refugees and terrorism is the fact that many of them are fleeing real terrorist threats, there is no correlation between crime and refugees which cannot be explained better by poverty, increased immigration has been shown to have positive effects on the job market, etc.
Despite this, the media keeps churning out the negative coverage, and the policy choices by European leaders reflect that. The lack of media coverage of the human tragedy of the Andriana is therefor pretty consistent. In the media refugees are a burden, not humans lives which deserve empathy. The coverage reflects this, so does public opinion, and ultimately, so does policy.
This is overall a really sad situation in Europe.
"These leaders have the power to prevents disasters like these"
Like if the media coverage was empathetic to the lives lost in this tragedy, and if it had been so in the past, the public opinion towards refugees and the policy made by our leaders would perhaps be different, and this whole disaster would have been avoided. But that’s not the world we live in. European border and refugee policy reflects the media’s attitude of billionaires dying in a submarine disaster is worth the coverage, but not potentially the top 50 worst maritime disaster in history.
Anyhow, I seriously don’t mean to build a straw man, I just cannot see some simple pushbutton policy fix for “nations that are a bad place to live will generate a flow of refugees to better places exceeding the capacity those nations will have to absorb them.” Good luck though, if you come up with a grand solution that provably works, which you can convince a democratic majority to support, I’ll be happy for you.
Create a legal avenue for applying for asylum.
Yes, I believe this simple policy change would have prevented this disaster, and so many more tragedies. It could be as simple as having a request form present at the border crossing, where asylum seekers are than directed to a temporary facility.
I believe we are in this mess because refugees are literally forced to illegally cross into a potential host country before applying for asylum. This policy is nuts. And as we know thousands of people still do this. Seeking asylum is not illegal, but there are no legal ways to do it, which results in thousands of people attempting illegal border crossing and a blooming business for human smugglers.
My only point: It’s a complex problem with zero happy outcomes, and people shouldn’t act like a quick, cheap fix will solve it. It just moves the problem somewhere else. Actually solving it would take trillions of dollars that most taxpayers don’t want to spend.
Criminalizing border crossing does not stop border crossing, it only stops legal border crossing, and as we see, people attempt illegal border crossings all the time. This leads to a deadly industry of human trafficking which is causing more deaths in Europe than terrorism (excluding Russian state terrorism in a war zone).
As of now there is nothing stopping the whole country of Somalia, El Salvador, etc. from arriving legally at a border crossing in Europe, Mexico, etc. If border crossings were legalized this wouldn’t change. Sure more people might attempt to seek asylum, but the consequences of failing would be far less severe as currently. And I think any prediction that western systems would fall apart at the prospects are fear mongering. There are no evidence any of that would happen. And any arguments in favor of such failures are ultimately based on vibes.
> The West doesn’t have enough decent “temporary facilities” to warehouse the whole population of Somalia, El Salvador, etc.
> Actually solving it would take trillions of dollars that most taxpayers don’t want to spend.
So spend the trillions, build those facilities. But I doubt this is the issue. We certainly had the facilities when the covid pandemic stopped the tourism industry, yet we didn’t use them. And I don’t think this will cost trillions of dollars.
Europe actually has experience with open borders, and the experience is a resounding success. There are no negatives, and there are a bunch of positives. And no, the whole country of Romania does not migrate to Norway as a result. But I’m not even calling for open borders here (even though I want them open). The humanitarian disaster at the European borders calls for immediate action and we don’t have time for a complicated policy change.
If temporary facilities for asylum seekers are too expensive for your liking, than don’t offer them. Mandate that asylum seekers provide their own accommodation (effectively offload it to charities) during the asylum application process. If you do that than just expect the homeless population to skyrocket. Personally I would favor the state offering temporary facilities (added benefit is you create a bunch of new jobs for your now bigger labor pool).
If you think that, I'd disagree with you.
"It's hard to imagine anything more vain than thinking immigration politics don't affect societies "
"Apples are vain."
The poster wrote thinking that immigration politics doesn't affect societies is vain.
"Oranges are vain."
"Because you wrote it?"
You (?) "Apples and Oranges are the same"
>despite Myhrvold’s enthusiasm, the Photonic Fence hasn’t been all that easy to actually build
>...laser is not safe for your eyes
>...no one has yet worked out how to make the device cheap enough
The new vaccine may do better https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62797776
As for being safe for eyes, I thought part of the idea was to make sure there was nothing in between the mosquito and the laser before firing, though I'm not sure exactly what the plan there was.
Unless of course in your point of view anyone that seeks a better future to avoid problems in their own country is a refugee, which could be a point of view but not one I (or dictionaries) agree with.
How are they not refugees?
UNHCR:
Refugees are people who have been forced to flee their homes and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan declared Monday a day of mourning for Pakistanis who died after a fishing boat
Um that's literally the definition of a refugee. Or perhaps your definition of "problems" needs clarifying?
Forced to flee
Other definitions range from :
a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a person who has lost the protection of his or her country of origin and who cannot or is unwilling to return there due to well-founded fear of persecution.Pakistan is certainly a place some people would want to flee from, Malala Yousafzai being the most obvious example of the terrors that have happened there.
Do you think that gang violence and what we traditionally call “mass shootings” have the same underlying causes and represent a similar level of risk to the public?
In all honesty, both types of shootings pose relatively small risks to the American public compared to, say, traffic violence, but that’s no reason to ignore a problem that has largely been solved in other developed countries.
Hold on a second here. The FBI definition of mass shooting has always been the same, and gang violence meeting that standard (four or more casualties) has always been considered a mass shooting. Years of media only ever using the term “mass shooting” when it involves a school ambush scenario has distorted, in your mind (and many other people, frankly) what the term actually represents. The problem with this is that people draw a false association when they hear statistics about how there’s “x00 mass shootings” every year —- your mind instantly thinks that there’s x00 Columbine-level assaults on schools every year when in fact it’s more like 10 school shootings and the rest of the several hundred are the kinds of shootings that happen in Chicago and other places every other week.
> have the same underlying causes
The popular opinion is that easy access to guns is the only reason, so yeah apparently.
> and represent a similar level of risk to the public?
Again, see the earlier point about how people hear “mass shooting” and can’t conceive of any way in which a “mass shooting” doesn’t involve someone randomly shooting up a school or workplace. There are indeed a lot of mass shootings every year, but the majority of them _don’t_ involve the sort of crazy lone-gunman-shooting-up-a-school scenario that people _think_ are the majority of mass shootings. The majority of them are in fact gang violence. As far as threat to the public? Depends how likely you are to be somewhere that gang violence might occur —- and those areas aren’t as isolated as people like to think.
>> when in fact it’s more like 10 school shootings
This year, guns have been discharged in schools only 66 times. So on track for about 130 this year. Down from 177 last year.
Not all discharges in deaths. Only 57 last year and 26 this year (so far).
And yes, presumably some of those discharges are gang related. Still, in school though.
Is this blood sacrifice of young children simply the price we pay for the 2nd ammendment? Is calling it a "blood sacrifice" excessively colorful language?
Is 50 kids a year too many?
[1] https://everytownresearch.org/maps/gunfire-on-school-grounds...
A huge proportion of the victims of violent crime in the US (these victims are dramatically more likely to be black) are not in gangs, and mostly just live in poor neighborhoods and get caught up or accidentally shot. See the book "Ghettoside" for details in this.
Actually for many years the idea that "murder victims in the inner city are just gang members" was used to deprioritize investigations there, which has led to the current high crime in those areas - i.e. very low clearance rate, people rationally feeling that the police won't protect them, so they have to protect themselves.
Allowing lawlessness there (by not counting them as regular people and regular victims would be counted) has just resulted in a chaotic and unsafe environment for people there, which perpetuates the problem.
Take a look at this list of recent killings in LA. https://homicide.latimes.com/ by the author of Ghettoside. Far from a SJW/"Racism is the cause" it's a very reasonable, infrastructure-based understanding of why the problem exists and persists, from the left, with empathy.
It’s like calling it a mass shooting when police shoot bank robbers brandishing firearms and kill just one of them.
Hysterics designed to juice stats for a political cause.
I've been in lots of discussions about gun violence, but I've never seen someone argue for reducing gang crime, even though they cause a majority of the gun deaths.
People often use gang violence in stats they use to argue for increasing gun control. Bringing gang violence into the conversation makes no sense, since gangs historically get guns no matter how many laws prohibit it. Doubly so since often gangs are in cities and urban areas: the places in America that already have the most strict gun laws.
Acting like armed groups of criminals breaking the law to fight each other fall in the same category as a mentally unwell individual shooting innocent civilians are in the same category, and using the same term to refer to them both, helps nobody and just muddies the conversation.
From Wikipedia: > A mass casualty incident (often shortened to MCI) describes an incident in which emergency medical services resources, such as personnel and equipment, are overwhelmed by the number and severity of casualties.[1] For example, an incident where a two-person crew is responding to a motor vehicle collision with three severely injured people could be considered a mass casualty incident. The general public more commonly recognizes events such as building collapses, train and bus collisions, plane crashes, earthquakes and other large-scale emergencies as mass casualty incidents.
It then goes on to discuss the other type of "MCI":
> A multiple casualty incident is one in which there are multiple casualties. The key difference from a mass casualty incident is that in a multiple casualty incident the resources available are sufficient to manage the needs of the victims. The issue of resource availability is therefore critical to the understanding of these concepts. One crosses over from a multiple to a mass casualty incident when resources are exceeded and the systems are overwhelmed.
And for the general public. The headlines I saw implied that they were hearing sounds and these people could be rescued. Turns out it was a lost cause from the get go.
Here, news outlets probably would have been motivated to carry the “hope” story even if they knew it was false, because money. A conspiracy theorist would believe that because the news outlets probably would have been so motivated, then they probably actually were so motivated.
And I certainly agree that it was terrible for the search team to manage to both give the families hope and make them even more worried at the idea of their loved ones suffering.
He also mentioned that they reached out to civ/military nets and confirmed the noise event.
For comparison, what happened in this sub was 10x that pressure.
(Yes, 2-stroke diesels also exist, and sound absolutely amazing.)
What other nautical-related terms are a part of common speech?
So it was ... notical?
In layman terms “drowned” simply means that you died under water. It is not a sophisticated statement about the manner of anyone’s passing. People in the know understand that on a submarine you can die of hypoxia (if they mismanage the oxygen), or die of hypothermia (if they get stuck on the bottom with an intact pressure vessel, but no electricity) or die in an implosion, or burn to death in a conventional fire. In an everday conversation these all would be described as “drowned” by virtue of dying underwater even though none of them are what a coroner would report as drowning.
But why not make it more concrete. Can you find a single example where someone says that they have drowned and the speaker means it as a carefull engineering analysis regarding failure modes, as opposed to a general vibe of “they dead”?
Fair. I'm not an expert on it or anything. But I do listen to how people speak, and what they mean. Many people are using words loosely.
I searched on twitter for tweets with the term "drowned". Scrolled through a few hundred, and filtered out the ones which were talking about the Titan incident and which said or implied that the people on-board "drowned". I found 5 such tweets. This is of course not an exhaustive sample, but is what I have now.
Here are the five tweets (please don't harass any of these people, also I'm not endorsing these tweets in any way)
- https://twitter.com/OfSymbols/status/1671581923825668098 - https://twitter.com/samphiresprite/status/167196593855857459... - https://twitter.com/Devin_Young_/status/1671237153446035456 - https://twitter.com/NagaSlateTTV/status/1672006200538570752 - https://twitter.com/martinvars/status/1671994282478010368
Do read them. Do you have the impression that these people considered the failure modes of a submersible and concluded that the people on-board died due to a slow leak filling up the cabin and their lungs filling up with water? Or it is more likely that they use the word "drowned" as a loose shorthand for "died under water / died due to the sea"?
I think they more likely did the second. Either never considered how one dies on a submarine, or they were writing without care for exactitude. In fact I have evidence for this second one in one of these cases. Devin_Young_ who claims to be a veteran submariner and he was called out[1] in a later tweet for the implications of the term "drowned".
His answer was "I used “drowned” loosely. You are correct; it would be violent, and instantaneous.".
Also NagaSlateTTV used the hastag "implosion" right after calling those lost "drowned". Which to me implies that they are using the term in a more general way, rather than precisely per the definition.
1: https://twitter.com/Devin_Young_/status/1671267529392783360
I mean, that’s not what happens either.
5700 pounds of pressure per square inch. Ouch.
Opening the hatch? At 13,000 feet below sea level?!
If it wasn’t an explosive event they would have been stuck just under the surface with no way to get out. That said, opening a hatch in that scenario would be an absolute last resort anyways. It’s not like the people that went overboard on the Titanic lasted long and it’s in the same exact place.
I do on occasion ramble on with unpopular opinions or say things which are probably incorrect
You use an idiom comparing people to insects crawling fourth from woodwork like some master of science laughing at the plebs.
That said of course lots of stupid stuff is said, it's the internet, but your comment is just as stupid which is pretty funny.
Also, "crawling from the woodwork" is an idiom in common usage: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/come-cra...
It's not literally comparing people to insects, or implying that, even though it has a disapproving tone.
Given that Stockton Rush risked and lost his own life, he must have believed these words. He ignored pleas from others in the industry that what he was doing was unsafe. What was he thinking?
Those who cause progress to happen to some extent have to have something in them that causes them to ignore conventional wisdom. Because they're swimming against the current. And if they succeed it may well pay off, both in credits and financially.
Montgolfier brothers, Lilienthal, the Wright brothers and so on, and that's just a small slice of aviation. Every one of them went against conventional wisdom and the laws of physics as they were known or suspected to be at the time.
But there is a final arbiter, and those are the real laws of nature, and it's first order derivative: materials science. And this is where it gets much more complex. To design something that can work is an accomplishment in itself, even if it works only once. That one mr. Rush can chalk up as a victory. Where he fails is to take into account the fact that safety knowledge is written in blood and that the difference between 'device safe enough to take passengers on' and 'device safe enough that I, the builder/designer will travel on it' is very, very large. And if all of the industry, including some of your own employees say that you are doing it wrong and you still persist, and risk the lives of others then you are crossing over into irresponsibility, rather than being a pioneer.
Whether or not he realized this himself seems a foregone conclusion: he likely thought this was all perfectly safe and those others were needlessly concerned but they were simply more aware of the real risks involved than he was. Fine line between 'god complex' and 'innovator'.
WW1 happened very quickly after the invention of the plane and there was a huge explosion in quantity and type of airplane in WW1.
I'm no historian though, there could be nuances I'm missing.
The Florida Man you linked was the pilot for two other men [1], the first commercial air service was Delag operating Zepplin airships .. followed by Aero Rt in Hungary .. then followed by [1] in Florida.
I can't (right now at least) determine if Aero Rt was operating airships or airplanes ... so you may or may not be correct wrt planes at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg%E2%80%93Tampa_A...
This is not true of the Wrights. Their first step was to gather together all the known aeronautical knowledge at the time. They relied on them, too, until they discovered the coefficient of lift was off by a factor of two. Then they built their own wind tunnel to determine the correct value.
They also discovered there was no theory of propellers. So they developed their own theory, which turned out to be 90% correct. Their propellers were twice as efficient as their contemporary experimenters were. This means they only needed half the horsepower! A tremendous advantage.
It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments. Same with this story, or even the 'flat earth guy' who was launching himself in rockets. [1] For those who didn't 'get it', the flat earth stuff was just an overtly transparent schtick for interest/funding.
They set up experiments to prove the existing theory was wrong. That is completely counter to what you write. Nobody else did that.
> It's not like the aviation enthusiasts prior to the Wright Bros were just strapping aluminum sheeting to their backs and jumping off cliffs. Well I mean maybe somebody somewhere at some time did do that, but for the most part people always try to start from a basis of what's known, and work their way up from toy experiments.
That's pretty much what the Wright's contemporaries were doing. Trying random things in a disorganized manner with eyeballed designs. It's very, very different from the Wrights who:
1. researched all available material
2. identified the fundamental problems that must be solved
3. developed prototypes to solve each problem
4. put the results into a new design that worked
Nobody else was doing that. And that's why the Wrights succeeded, and the others failed miserably. Later, when the Wrights took their Flyer to Europe, they astonished the European aviators by literally flying circles around them. (European designs could not turn.)
In many problems where we're all just standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, somebody's going to eventually get high enough to grab the flag. And while that final achievement deserves distinguished recognition, marginalizing the merit, impact, and ability of the countless individuals holding us up is just crass.
Nothing I wrote marginalizes Lilienthal. I never wrote that the Wrights started from zero. In fact, I wrote that they researched all the available knowledge of flight from the start.
"About 100 years ago, an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, carried the science of flight to a point which it had never reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century."
— Wilbur Wright, 1909.
Curtis later attempted to prove that the Aerodrome could fly. He did this by adding a new wing, a working control system, and a much more powerful engine. I.e. he cheated.
I did not claim that the Wrights invented the scientific method.
Whether Edison's research labs were true R+D programs is debatable. From my reading about them, Edison eschewed theory and did not understand what he was doing. He just tried things until he found something that worked. His efforts to develop the multiplex telegraph, while eventually successful, showed little understanding of electricity. The same with the light bulb - trying thousands of materials for the filament instead of trying to figure out why the filaments didn't last is going around the horn.
Edison invented the vacuum tube by accident, and did not recognize what he had done, because he didn't understand what he was doing.
That said, Edison certainly was a great inventor and deserves the credit for his inventions. But it was not the modern way of doing things - the Wrights get the credit for that.
There were certainly contemporaries of the Wrights attempting to use the scientific method to develop a working airplane.
By the time of the Wright's success at the end of 1903, The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was already 34 years old. They sponsored the first wind tunnel in 1870 designed by Francis Wenham, one of their members who had also given the inaugural lecture on flight, and the principle by which lift is generated by wings.
This was very much a scientific society, with regular reports and lectures and its members were scientists or engineers, not crazy people strapping sheets of metal to their arms and jumping off towers.
"The organization has never been a large one, and probably years will pass by before the importance of its twenty-nine years of work will be fully understood and appreciated. Even as the missal painters kept art alive during the Dark Ages, so has this band of men kept aeronautics alive during the years in which their branch of science has been by the many regarded almost as a pseudo-science." James Means, Aeronautical Annual Vol 1 (1895), a passage probably read by the Wright brothers, after receiving the journal from the Smithsonian.
Percy Pilcher ('a pale serious fellow, with a great bent for invention, and a brain that was razor keen.') completed his powered triplane in 1899, based on his own research, correspondence with Lilienthal, his work with Hiram Maxim (who had legal battles with Edison over which of their companies invented the light bulb in the US) and correspondence with Octave Chanute (who advised the Wright brothers to choose the mid atlantic coast for their experiments and visited them) and his correspondence with Lawrence Hargrave. It is assumed that the triplane would likely have needed some modification to be practical but it was never tried, since he died in a glider accident before he got chance to try it.
This is just one example of a person at the time who did extensive research, communicated with many of the other key figures of the time, and built lots of prototypes to test approaches. There were lots of others too.
If your point is just that the Wrights succeeded first, then I agree, but to characterise all these characters as approaching the problem in an essentially stupid way is just not true, if anything, I'm struck by how much the early aviation pioneers seemed to be in touch with each other and understood some of the basic principles of aerofoil design and the science behind how lift works.
Keep in mind that the Wrights built a series of gliders, each one was to test a particular aspect of the flight problem.
Pilcher's designs were not capable of flight:
"Cranfield built a full-sized working replica of Pilcher's aircraft, but, based on wind tunnel tests with a scale model, they made several alterations to Pilcher's original designs, which they speculated Pilcher would have made, including filling in cut-away sections of the wings to increase the wing area, and therefore lift, and adding a swinging seat to aid control of the aircraft through shifting body weight; a refinement developed by Octave Chanute, which they believed Pilcher would have been aware of. They also added the Wright brothers' innovation of wing-warping as a safety backup for roll control. Pilcher's original design did not include aerodynamic controls such as ailerons or elevators."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Pilcher
and he left no lasting contribution to aeronautical advancement.
It is interesting, however, how many people assert that Wright's rivals designs would have / could have flown, and they set out to "prove" it by modifying those designs by incorporating the Wright innovations.
Besides that, the fundamental reason these competitors could not get into the air is pretty simple. The Wrights had a propeller design that was double the efficiency of everyone elses' propellers. This means the Wrights doubled the effective engine power. Still, the Wrights could not find an existing engine with the needed power/weight ratio, and so they designed and built the very first lightweight aero engine. The Wrights also were the first to create an efficient wing cross section. It still required a much bigger wing than the Wrights originally anticipated.
I.e. even tossing aside the lack of control the rival machines had, there is SIMPLY NO WAY they had the power/weight to get it off the ground. They didn't have the engine, the propeller, or the wing section.
P.S. Even a brick shithouse will fly if you attach a powerful enough engine.
My disagreement is not at all about whether the Wrights had their own insights and strengths or can justly claim priority to have the first human carrying powered and controlled aircraft. I know it can seem like I'm doing them down in some way, but I do not intend to. So, I recognise their advances and their focus on building their vision of an actually useful flying machine.
Where I disagree is when you say things like:
> Keep in mind that the Wrights built a series of gliders, each one was to test a particular aspect of the flight problem.
as if that were unusual. Almost all of the names I mentioned in my previous comment did exactly that too.
We probably disagree on precisely which of the Wright's achievements meant a significant advance on state of the art (some of the advances you mention were being systematically investigated by others too), but my main point of departure from you is really just the apparent characterisation of the Wrights contemporaries as not following the scientific method and approaching the whole problem in a haphazard and isolated way.
My own impression of those days is of a small group of pioneers that were in touch with each other, building on each others advances, and with incomplete but growing knowledge of the science behind what they were trying to do.
It's not about the scientific method. It's about a directed research and development program. I just don't see any of the other experimenters doing that. I didn't say they were isolated, either, but they were haphazard. They tried to leap right from an unproven theory to a working airplane. Their airplanes were not even close to flying, which is evidence of their haphazardness. The other evidence is the lack of a trail of documentation - notes, calculations, drawings, etc. Disorganized and haphazard, absolutely.
Which one of them identified control as a crucial element of flight, for example? Which one did the calculations to show they had enough power? Heck, which ones did the calculations to make the airframe strong enough? The Langley Aerodrome fell apart on launch, Pilcher died because his glider broke up in flight. Many copied bird designs rather than trying to figure out what the right shape should be.
An airplane is not like inventing a car, where you can just attach an engine to some wheels, eyeball the whole thing, and it'll work. You have to do the math and the engineering. Eyeballing something that looks like a bird and sticking an engine on it will NEVER WORK.
> with incomplete but growing knowledge of the science behind what they were trying to do.
One of them would have eventually succeeded, just like the Japanese eventually figured out how to make a Samurai sword after centuries of trial and error, but no knowledge of metallurgy.
And that is why the Wrights were different.
You can see the Wrights' notebooks in the Smithsonian. Take a look at that, and you'll see they are not mere bicycle mechanics. We still have the 1903 Flyer, too, and people have built exacting replicas of it - that fly, and fly the way the Wrights described how it flew.
The only rival with some documentation is the Aerodrome, and we know it does not fly for many reasons. The other rivals left next to nothing behind, and nobody has successfully gotten a replica (built from guesswork) to fly at all.
Pilcher's design did not have remotely enough power, showing he hadn't done the math. The Wrights calculated a needed engine engine power of 8 hp, but the result produced 12 hp.
[0] https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/In...
1. 3 axis control (as you mentioned)
2. first propeller theory
3. first lightweight aircraft engine
4. wind tunnel tested airfoils
5. solving adverse yaw problem
6. targeted research & development program
They needed all of them to fly. All modern aircraft can trace their designs back to the 1903 Wright Flyer, and none of the other contenders. It's a stunning achievement, and all at a cost of $1,500. (The Langley project cost $50,000 and solved none of the problems.)
In my not-so-humble opinion, the 1903 Wright Flyer is the start of the modern technological age.
[1]: "This Oceangate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack [...] they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate. [...] It's our belief - as we understand from inside the community - that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up trying to manage an emergency." https://youtu.be/rThZLhNF_xg?t=472
[0]https://leehamnews.com/2019/09/30/boeings-737-in-another-pic...
http://o-si-sec.com/2018/10/11/5-facts-to-know-about-stop-dr...
Water pressure increases by 1 Bar every 32ft (10m) of depth. To see the equivalent change in pressure in water (0.6 bar) as you see going up to 30K in the air, you only have to go down ~20ft (6m). The pressure on the submersible at 9000ft (2750m) is 276 Bar.
F16s and other planes with composite body panels will sometimes lose a panel due to water buildup between layers of the composite. The water freezes between the layers popping the panel loose from the frame or retainers holding it in place. That is usually not a life-threatening problem (though not desirable). A crack in a submersible pressure vessel at more than a couple hundred feet is usually fatal.
The description of the Byford Dolphin accident in ~300ft (~90m) of water or 9 Bar pressure, is illustrative: https://www.iflscience.com/byford-dolphin-accident-how-livin...
The pressure on the Titan would have been ~30 times greater than what occurred on the Dolphin.
This is an exaggeration, small cracks can develop and grow very slowly over the course of years. There’s lots of types and sizes of cracks.
There may have been monitors that detected structural issues in the hull (nucleation above), but at the pressures that the Titan was operating at, the amount of advanced warning is likely very, short--_maybe_ a second or two, if that. Probably not enough time to notice and reduce the pressure on the hull in any meaningful way.
The slow-motion porthole cracking you see in movies like "The Abyss" is a fiction created by Hollywood for dramatic effect. The reality is far more likely to be like water freezing in a pipe: everything is fine until it isn't.
The pressure the pipe exerts on the water inside of it keeps the water in liquid form until the temperature drops below the temperature/pressure equilibrium (~10F/-12C for residential copper pipe in the US). At that moment, the super-cooled water transitions from liquid to solid virtually instantaneously. <poof>.
The pipe analogy is the opposite of what would happen in the submersible: the pipe explodes due to internal pressure, instead of implodes due to external pressure. But the pressure going from sustainable to unsustainable in very short order is the same.
Cameron did not say "the system worked" nor do I agree with summarizing what he did say as "the system worked."
The claim in the blog post was this:
> With this RTM system, we can determine if the hull is compromised well before situations become life-threatening, and safely return to the surface.
It obviously did not do that. The system failed catastrophically.
In the part you elided Cameron said: "I think if that's your idea of safety, then you're doing it wrong."
Obviously, a few minutes isn't enough, but the point is that the occupants were likely aware something was wrong because of this system, as opposed to being vaporized without having enough time to comprehend their reality.
I wonder if they knew they were doomed or whether Rush was telling them not to worry to the very end. Personally, I think I would have rather been vaporized without the minutes of terror beforehand.
1. trying to fly the Atlantic
2. flying without a relief pilot
3. flying with only one engine
4. flying without a radio
I don't recall if he had a life raft.
Previous attempts had resulted in disappearing forever, and being incinerated in a fireball on takeoff.
BTW, during WW2 the air crews ferried their own B-17s across the Atlantic. Quite a few left Newfoundland and were never seen again. There was no rescue if they went down. Navigation was still primitive. My dad (navigator) was immensely pleased that they hit Ireland within a mile of their goal.
> "debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel"
> "1600 feet (487 meters) from the wreck of the Titanic"
> "it is a smooth bottom", "there is no wreckage of the Titanic in the area"
> "size of the debris field is consistent with an implosion in the water column"
> "there doesn't seem to be any connection between the noises and the location of the debris on the seafloor"
https://navalpost.com/how-deep-can-a-submarine-dive/ The depth limits of the most known nuclear powered submarines’ depth limits, as follows;
Typhoon-class: Test depth 900 m (3,000 ft) Astute-class: Over 300 m (984 ft 3 in) Akula-class: 480 m (1,570 ft) test depth for Akula I and Akula I Improved, 520 m (1,710 ft) for Akula II and III, 600 m (2,000 ft) maximum operating depth Ohio-class: Test depth >240 m (800+ ft) Virginia-class: Test depth >240 m (800+ ft) Borei-class: Test depth 950 m Rubis-class: Test depth 350 m Barracuda-class: Test depth >350 m
We really don’t know what depth the noise was comming from.
That being said it is vanishingly unlikely that an unrelated submarine trying to remain stealthy would be banging on their hull every half an hour.
The Titanic is at 3800 meters. That it's reachable, by private organizations no less, is just a marvel.
That's also why military specs on things like this are always lies, you don't want anyone knowing how deep you can actually go, which likely includes most of the crew.
https://www.iflscience.com/for-15-years-sweden-thought-enemy...
The 'weaving' is supposed to be link connecting your two hands together interlocking fingers, in one direction you will meet a full resistance, but in the opposite direction your fingers will unlock.
I have no idea but seems to me if there is external pressure the weaving would have 'imploded' depending on the design I guess. Really want to know more about this.
Tensile load capacity is pretty much the resin that keeps the fibers from moving.
The most I could find about the design
> The entire pressure vessel is comprised of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56") internal diameter, 2.4-m (100") long carbon fiber wound cylinder – the largest such device ever built for use in a manned submersible.
suggest that yeah, they relied entirely on its compressive strength of it
I'd like to say it's caveat being as you mentioned but honestly, given then community in this field, even the technical diving alone. Someone must have said it to them.
Thanks for some numbers, maybe tomorrow will play with the simulations to determine the AP's that could collapse the craft. The titanium hemispheres are probably the best option but the sealing would need to be almost clinical.
I'm anxious just thinking about the construction of this sub.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5SUDFE6CA&t=1446s&pp=2AGmC...
(in the vid https://abcnews.go.com/US/james-cameron-compares-submersible... about 3 mins in)
I guess it's in the spirit of the Titanic to kill your passengers doing dumb stuff.
Buckling is not a material failure, it's a structural failure. In pure buckling [0], the strength of the material is not actually a factor in whether something buckles or not. In most cases, material failure does occur as a side effect of the buckling, but not always. (The material's stiffness does matter, though. All else equal, something that's more flexible will buckle sooner than something stiff.)
Rope.
I think this might have been the first one. In minimal fairness, at least the owner put his money where is mouth was.
Sidebar : The owner/ceo did a 10 hour overall at max ~3kMeteres
A lot of measure of units thrown around in this thread too.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/david-pogue-misinforma...
There’s also a documentary on bbc about one of those trips
I took that to mean this was their 5th trip with this submersible
But that’s the thing about ratings. The manufacturer guarantees safe usage at 15 PSI and anything above that all bets are off and you’re on your own. Same with milk and expiration dates. Many times the milk is fine after the date, but the dairy won’t guarantee freshness and food safety.
Same for this looking glass. It says what the CEO thought about safety. He was willing to take chances and roll the dice. And every once in a while you get snake eyes. The consequences of rolling • • at 9,000ft of depth in the ocean is sadly instant soup. The water entering the vessel would likely be 5,000F degrees or so. While some people say it would be an instant death and not consciously detectable, I disagree. I think they were given just enough time for the brain to go oh shit, but only got to the oh part, and lights out.
Looking glass rated 4k 'feet' around 1200 meters..
Not sure as there is a video of the ceo going to 3k meters solo in the titan on a 10~ hour trip..
That said, not much of this craft was 'rated' for anything..
Slacking this hard on safety for a submarine engineering company should not be tolerated in our rapidly advancing industrial society.
39 to beam up.
When was the last time an investor handed an additional $10 million check for 0% to a startup to improve and test their safety systems before launching? Instead their usual mandate is "launch yesterday or die". Which is okay for a SaaS platform or grocery delivery app, but not a deep sea vessel.
Today's version of capitalism is every bit responsible for tragedies like this. While the CEO is directly at fault for certain things, the system is equally at fault for raising and educating a CEO (and huge numbers of post-2000s CEOs) to be like that.
Hypothetical users of the SaaS platform or grocery delivery app who find out later that their personal information wasn't handled with the appropriate safeguards might disagree with that one.
> Today's version of capitalism is every bit responsible for tragedies like this
Correct.
There’s a lot of sleight of hand with confounding governments and financial systems, however.
You can move fast and innovate in life-critical systems so long as you prioritize the engineering and testing.
This event reads like nature going "no, seriously, you monkeys aren't anywhere nearly as clever as you think you are".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/06/21/oc...
(already submitted minutes ago)
I live in this little personal bubble.
Believing with great confidence that the edge of my bubble and the edge of reality are one and the same is actually quite empowering.
Those who Dunninger Kruger with greater intensity tend to win.
>Why Isn't Titan Classed?
[...]
>Classing assures ship owners, insurers, and regulators that vessels are designed, constructed and inspected to accepted standards. Classing may be effective at filtering out unsatisfactory designers and builders, but the established standards do little to weed out subpar vessel operators – because classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel.
[...]
> The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.
Did they not consider that the reason for this fact is, oh I don't know, maybe because the vessels have passed the checks for mechanical integrity?
You can't make this stuff up...
> When a submarine implodes, a variety of fairly ugly things will happen to the crew. If we assume that a pressure hull implodes at 2000 feet (~60 atmospheres), the pressure will increase from 14.7 to about 875 PSI almost instantly. In the parts of the submarine that have volumes of trapped air, it would be like being inside a diesel engine cylinder when begins its compression stroke.
> Anything flammable would burst into flames until a huge wall of water slams into the area and snuffs it out again. The impact of the water would cause significant injury to anyone unlucky enough to still be alive and there would be no time to suffer the effects of oxygen poisoning or anything else.
> As others have stated, most human tissues are fluid-filled and are for the most part, incompressible. Human lungs and sinuses would be crushed instantly and the immense shock would render them unconscious immediately. Of greater concern would be the surge of incoming seawater, bulkheads, decks, heavy equipment, motors and other random bits of equipment being slammed into the crew at high velocity.
> Essentially, the crew would be killed several times over in less than a blink of an eye.
and from another answer:
> When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
> A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
> The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
> Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured.
---
While specifics differ, it would be over very fast.
For this case: To put it simply, picture an unexpected scenario where an airplane plummets from above and lands directly on top of you. The impact would be quite painless.
> Chimpanzees can withstand even longer exposures. In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later. One chimp that was exposed for three minutes, however, showed lasting behavioral changes. Another died shortly after exposure, likely due to cardiac arrest.
Then there was this oops:
> In 1965 a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After 12 to 15 seconds he lost consciousness. He regained it at 27 seconds, after his suit was repressurized to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the accident, but he was otherwise unharmed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space...
Dying in a submarine would be very different. The pressure differential in space is a single atmosphere. Water increases by about one atmosphere every 33 feet. At Titanic's depth it's ~ 368 atmospheres of pressure. Reddit discussion from 3 years ago:
https://old.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/gy1wc6/what_exa...
> The collapse of a submarine pressure hull happens quick, just 37 milliseconds in the case of the Scorpion. The incoming water had a velocity of about 2,000 mph. [...] Over such small time scales, there is no time for the water or the steel hull to absorb any heat from the rapidly compressing air inside of the submarine. Because no heat is transferred from the air to the water or hull, the compression is adiabatic. [...] The collapse halted when the air pressure was approximately equal to the water pressure at 1,530 feet, which is 4,630,000 Pa. [...] 1,122°F.
That was at 1,530 feet.
Contact was lost with the Titan at 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive. A typical dive to the bottom took it 3 hours. So it was likely at least halfway to the bottom (6000 feet). Its implosion would have involved even more spectacular forces.
They were dead before they knew what happened, incinerated and pulverized. There are no bodies to recover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_inciden...
See "Why the USS SCORPION (SSN 589) Was Lost 50 years Ago"
https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/scorpion_loss_50y...
Is this actually true? I see it being repeated everywhere but there is a lot of mass in a human body. Can 100 milliseconds of "ignition" (as you put it) really burn off all of that?
Do the bodies themselves get hot from being compressed? I’d assume largely no with our water content.
Having gotten hit on the head in a low speed car accident I wouldn’t worry at all about the suffering through the actual implosion. The speed of the shock wave would be much faster than nerves conduct information.
The gas can heat to thousands of degrees but there isn't much energy in it. It wouldn't do much damage by itself.
The sudden change in pressure causes the majority of the destructions through purely mechanical effects.
The sub, on the other hand, would be under something like 350x the atmospheric pressure, so we can expect its implosion to be orders of magnitude more violent.
The sub (hull) is made of a carbon fiber and titanium mix - and I'm not sure how that would react, if it buckles / collapses like regular metal, or if it simply shatters into millions of pieces like glass.
If the sub just collapsed / imploded into itself, well - that's that. The crew got crushed to death in an instant.
If the sub explode, then that would be a very violent reaction. Probably enough to kill them, purely from that - but let's say they don't die instantly from the crushing influx / wave of water:
Air / gasses in the body would compress significantly, if not allowed to exit the body. Your lungs would collapse in an instant, and your chest cavity would collapse on itself, until all air has escaped, and then replaced by water. Your ear eardrums would also rapture in an instant. With a severely collapsed upper torse, which would happen in an instant, I think your heart and major arteries would also become destroyed in an instant.
All that space would instantly get filled up with water.
I personally think that the violent process would kill them instantly - as in milliseconds...and then when all air has escaped the body, water would fill that space, until the pressure has reached an equilibrium.
EDIT: I personally don't think they suffered. The sub likely imploded in an instant, without little prior warning (noises) if the material behaves in the way I suspect it does. Just lights out, and that's that. Brain didn't even get time to react.
real time view of tensile failure: https://youtu.be/gmMRPmEYWhU
high speed 10m fps view of tensile failure: https://youtu.be/OePpVwCvCZg
when compressed along an axis that's not properly reinforced by carbon fibers, it will just disintegrate: https://youtu.be/BaSXRoD2xaQ?t=61
another interesting example of rapid failure: https://youtu.be/DM6J-yw8yjA?t=226
As to who should share in the cost… my take is that it’s time to discuss whether some expeditions (e.g. risky commercial tourist rides) should sign a Do Not Rescue pledge before they head out and/or self-fund a commercial rescue operation.
It's just better that they call right away rather than wait too long and die.
If you search around on the internet, you can find people writing this up in much more detail and more eloquently.
But the considerations for something like this are pretty much entirely different, risk to non-technical rescuers is pretty minimal and the costs are just gas and the time spent on what is essentially just an unplanned hike with some extra gear.
I'm sure this is rare though.
https://npca.s3.amazonaws.com/images/11275/93882d38-5217-4aa...
https://preview.redd.it/mx98brhdszg71.jpg?width=960&crop=sma...
> We will serve our Nation through the selfless performance of our missions.
> We will honor our duty to protect those we serve and those who serve with us. [1]
In answer to your question: No. That's what taxes are for.
There could be other legal penalties if the SAR mission is prompted by negligence or illegal activity but the Coast Guard doesn't chase anyone down for operating costs.
Basically everyone in this thread is in the top 1% of global wealth (not just industrialized or western wealth) and does stupid things all the time and get treatment or are rescued. Happens every day. So, the argument is really weak.
No, and that's not what I am saying. The poor people you mention deserve help or assistance, not forgiveness, they did nothing wrong. You're making a categorical error, I think. Forgiveness is a separate deal from charity or inclusion or equality. We forgive actions, not living conditions.
At least some of the CEO's estate should go to paying for it, but pay out to victims' families first.
This. When the shit hits the fan, and lives could be at stake, the participants in responsive operations seem to focus more intently, and the lessons learned seem to get imprinted more firmly, than when it's a drill.
(There was a reason that when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the emergency radio transmission that went out was, "Air raid Pearl Harbor X This is no drill." [0])
I suspect the psychology might be related somehow to Samuel Johnson's dictum that "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/0...
And, yes, it's a zero sum game. People looking for the five rich guys are people that cannot look for the hundreds of children trapped on a sinking ship.
It could be that someone/something damaged the hull (oceans and boats are notoriously hostile environments) and that created a weak spot that failed under pressure, or that some other mechanical failure occurred. However, those are both every bit as speculative as what I'm cautioning against. They are provided for illustration, only.
The 5th passenger from the French, maybe not
I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if
you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown
into trying to find you.
And not just the rich either, no matter what Twitter would have you believe.
Oceangate had been warned by pretty much anyone with any knowledge of their efforts. They fired and sued their Director of Marine Ops who tried for stricter safety measures. They've already had to repair stress damage to the hull before the final dive. They were using parts not expected to hold up to 4000m dives, they were using flammable materials inside the sub.
The Thai team did something generally recognized as safe, and got caught up in a bad situation. The Oceangate folks did something that they'd been warned against repeatedly and consistently, something nobody thought was safe. Oceangate took every opportunity to do the wrong thing and try to profit off of it.
Insofar as wealth has anything to do with it, pedo guy happens to be pretty damn wealthy (ex financial broker). If those Thai kids hadn't caught a rich guy's attention their misadventure would've been a mere footnote.
I wouldn’t know, because i live in the kind of society where if you are lost at sea and you call for help but the call handler assumes that you have the wrong kind of passport they just tell you to call some other country and then hung up on you. [1]
But i would rather live in the kind of society where we spend our pooled resources to heal those who have fallen sick, than in one where we spend our pooled resources to rescue statistical anomalies. Everyone can become sick one day, not everyone will get suckered to buy a deluxe sea going group coffin by a conman.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/13/uk-coastguar...
>The refugee said it was his fourth attempt to cross the Channel. During the previous three attempts French police had caught them on the beach and punctured their dinghies with knives.
Honestly didn't realize though refugees thought the benefits in the UK were better than France's.
This is a simple observation of facts. If you don’t like some implication if it so bad for you. I don’t like it either, but I suspect we disagree in what way we don’t like the implications.
Solving an unknown problem with whoever is available on hand at that moment. Coordinating between that ad hoc group and analyzing the results afterward is a real world activity that can't truly be simulated.
We still rescue them. I never argued against rescuing them.
The owner of subversive bragged about safety being useless, punished employee warning about safety ossies, by all reports pushed the luck again and again and his missions had track record of failures and issues.
not the same
Nobody asked me if I want to pay for it or not. So i don’t feel that the “we” is justified. But if they would have asked me i would have voted to not move a finger unless some private entity (the company or the families, or literally anyone who wants to) pays for it.
They went out of their way to do something knowingly recklesly dangerous, and the cost of any rescue attempt is enermous.
But even in a hypothetical where the government sent out a snap poll saying “Sup citizen. 5 fellas lost in a sub. Need $140m for rescue attempt. Send yay or nay.” I would have responded with “nay”. So even in that hypothetical I wouldn’t feel I need to justify why we should spend money to rescue these people. (By the by, this hypothetical sounds crazy, but we could totally have this kind of direct say in matters. We have the tech for it.)
If training is not real, they create it. They spend billions every year simulating events.
But anyway, I expect them passing at least part of the bill to the company, that will go bankrupt.
Here in the alps, if you have an injury hiking and need a helicopter ride then you are required to pay for the ride (normally a few thousand euros). I assume it's the same if you're lost.
And I would assume it's the same on high sea...
Then recoup what you can from me or my estate if you determine I was reckless after the fact, when you have plenty of time to evaluate the facts.
Obviously there is an insurance for mountain climbing. But search party is not free, just that insurance pays if you have it.
The better question is 'Who do we refuse to help?'
Even if it doesn't balance out or make sense financially, I'm much happier living in a world where we care about each other rather than one where we're weighing the value of saving a life.
I had this same thought when watching The Martian. If you're unfamiliar, an astronaut is accidentally left on Mars. The story is about how he survives and the immense measures those at NASA and the CNSA go to just to save one life. It's an inspiring thought.
A bit under 400 atmospheres at the depth of the Titanic. But I don't think that meaningfully changes your conclusion. It's instant.
Getting to your question via this preamble. The bathyscaphe could be pressurised with a helium/oxygen/other gas. The US navy has done many experiments with various gas mixtures - none are good to 6000 psi due to physiological limits. Dissolved oxygen and nitrogen are toxic above certain pressures - look at the Navy stuff for more on that via google. They are between 1000 to 2000 feet more or less - far below 6000 feet and it can take weeks to get the excess gas out of your system via gradual decompression chambers. There have been experiments with inert freon liquids with dissolved oxygen, tested on mice = lived and some Navy experiments with people who breathed the fluid under close medical control - I doubt this has progressed far, as this wiki shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing.
So yes, you can make the sphere thinner if you add pressure to the inside. Fish do it, with nothing, but often die unless they are sirfaced under controlled conditions as chemistry varies slightly as they come up, dissolved gasses fizz etc.
This probably failed via the inadequate window = broke = near instant death for all. However, it may have a carbon shell failure?? if they recover the parts more will be known how the failure occurred.
Also, would the implosion necessarily be that loud? It would be like crushing a large tin really. Maybe blends in with background noise.
exploitation of heterogenous and anisotropic ocean conditions definitely remains the crux of submarine warfare.
400 atmosphere of seawater pressure suddenly slamming together creates massive pressure wave.
Or maybe they did and the data hasn't been processed/made public yet.
Titan was 10 tons and mostly made of carbon fibre.
I don't think that submarines explosively decompress under the ocean.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_San_Juan_(S-42)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incid...
I'm not suggesting anything nefarious, I'm just hoping someone who understands these things better than I do comes along.
The ocean is not a homogenous mass. As you go down you can measure temperature, pressure and salinity changes. These all individually and together affect the speed of sound in the water. Given the right circumstances a layer can form which bends the sound waves away from an observer. It is possible that they couldn’t hear the implosion precisely because they were on top of them. Perhaps they could have heard the implosion better if they were off to the side a few kilometers, or if they would have had a hydrophone dangling to the other side of the layer. More info on the layer. [1]
This perhaps also can explain why they routinely lost contact with the sub during dives. (And normalisation of deviance explains how they become okay with that. [2])
1: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/backgrou...
2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
at this point i expect it had imploded before the coast guard or anyone who knew what they were doing was on-site.
The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety. I was taught to aim for a margin of safety of (I think it was) 50% back in the day. Operating so close to the safe limit for the sub is appalling. That doesn't even include all the other warning signs about the design that were brought up.
The missing beacon on the sub, in case of loss of radio contact, is another standout. No consideration given for loss of power or anything. Consideration of contingency plans is so important.
A minor one that is really indicative of the overall attitude is drilling screws into the carbon fiber hull, possibly exposing the hull to stress fractures from both the screws and the constant weight of holding a monitor. It's... just a silly thing that could have been avoided. I'm not saying those screws are why it failed, but if you can use an adhesive to hold your monitor in place, wouldn't you rather do that then by drilling directly into the hull keeping ~100 atm of ocean out of your face?
It just makes me so sad for so many reasons. It definitely could have been avoided...
Wouldn't a a 5% margin of safety mean the sub was designed to survive at 105% of the trip's expected maximum depth? 95% sounds like the opposite of a margin of safety.
Sorry, but this does not follow. I believe you are confused about the fact that the Titan was designed to go down to 4,000 meters, and the Titanic lays at 3,840 meters.
And because 3,840 is so close to 4,000 you believe they had no safety margin. Do I understand you well?
But the thing is when you design a submarine which can go down to 4,000m you don’t design a hull which instantly implodes at that precise depth. You add a safety margin on top of your design requirement and that is what you design for. And then using calculations, simulations and tests you convince yourself that your submersible is still safe even at that extra safety padded depth.
I’m not saying that this is how they designed it. After all it seems their engineering culture was deficient in several ways. But you simply can’t conclude that they had no safety margin because they dove close to their design limit.
Some ballpark typical numbers for safety factor: spacecraft ~1.2, airplanes ~1.5, automobiles ~3
How do you know they were operating close to their safety margin?
My understanding of safety margins, as I was taught, is that one should design such that you have a safety margin of 1.5x the intended use case. In other words, for 3800m expected frequent usage, it should be able to reach a depth of 5700m.
Alvin, for example, can reach a depth of 6500m.
But you’re right, we don’t know what that 4000m means, really. I’m just assuming it means safe depth without damage.
I can't imagine it was loud: vessel was tiny, and the energy will reduce at the order of 3 quite a bit at 4 km distance. I can imagine it would be detectable with the right equipment and that this equipment is installed in the Atlantic.
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” said Rush.
Fucking idiot CEO, took 4 innocent people with him. Aero, naval, automotive, all have a a history written in blood, and all those rules and regulations aren't to hinder innovation but to save lives based on what we've learned from all the people who lost their lives in the past.
Arguable...but which government? They were operating in international waters, and it's not like the UN runs an Ocean Engineering Safety Police Dept.
(And, so long as you keep your rape and murder within your ship - that is also a feature. If you are a crime victim on a cruise ship, and the cruise company feels that looking into what happened to you is not in their own business interest... OTOH, you or your survivors may be able to sue the cruise company for damages in a shore-based court. Google for the obvious if your want to see stories about that.)
You're thinking only of FSD. That is a legitimate observation. But objectively, Teslas tend to score highly for safety in independent tests.
Tesla is one of the safest car brands to drive, SpaceX has yet to kill or maim anyone.
Fucking idiot CEO, took 4 innocent people with him. Aero, naval, automotive, all have a a history written in blood, and all those rules and regulations aren't to hinder innovation but to save lives based on what we've learned from all the people who lost their lives in the past."
I agree, except maybe on the notion of "innocent billionaire". They too usually have a history of blood. Except maybe the 16yo tho. Maybe.
"50 year old white guys have a lot of experience but would cost a fuck ton of money. I prefer to exploit, er, um, employ, 25 year old white guys and gals because they are about 1/4 the cost."
When you take all the BS justifications out of it, that's really what the guy was saying. Elon Musk school of capitalism. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
EDIT: "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife; the karma snatching Tesla fanbois are rife"
Here, it’s in compression, not tension. And its light weight doesn’t matter.
So it seems it's more a matter of cost and passenger space than just weight alone.
From their perspective it kinda made sense even though its not safe at all.
If they could they probably still wouldn't have done so. The founder who was onboard the Titan was known for calling safety regulations unnecessary and a barrier to "innovation", like a window only rated for a depth of 1300m used at 4000m.
It probably did, but unfortunately, I think the window of time was not enough the return to the surface (perhaps milliseconds, but who knows)
Carbon fibre is a ply. Plies are much harder to nondestructively inspect for flaws. That is an immediate, obvious risk in a use case involving cyclic pressure of hundreds of atmospheres. It is also brittle, so strain deformation does not occur nearly as much before fracture.
Welds are a vastly more well-understood feature that is possible to easily design around and - more critically - inspect afterwards. Metals also stretch before snapping, which is why you can go and measure the spacing of links on your bike chain and know when it’s time to replace it. All of this makes through-life maintenance and inspection much easier.
Carbon fibre was an incredibly poor design choice, selected to prioritise cost over safe operation.
If the hull itself failed, however, given the way carbon fiber fails, finding the hull in many pieces seems to be the expected result.
> the submersible was designed to reach depths of 4,000 metres, but Lochridge said the passenger viewpoint (window) was only certified for depths of up to 1,300 metres
The carbon fiber hull was a much bigger concern.
> Debris patch was found by an ROV from the Horizon Arctic, a Canadian commercial vessel which arrived last night near the Titanic wreckage site.
> It was loaded with support equipment and was also carrying an Odysseus 6k ROV that can reach depths of 6,000m.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464?at_bb...
(Submitted URL was https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671907901542211584)
1) hydrophones heard it implode at the same time it lost contact
2) it took until early 6/22 to get a deep-diving ROV on site
3) once the ROV got to the bottom, it swiftly found the debris from the implosion as expected
EDIT: Looks like the US Navy heard it happen, as per the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-detected-titan-sub-imp...
EDIT2: HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439661
kind of funny pun...
Though they could not confirm that it was really the sub (they probably thought that it was, but they can't officially say it).
The latter is more probable to me as it has never been tested under water for more than a few hours at a stretch.
This will also be consistent with your banging hypothesis which was only heard after a day or two when it got lost. And also with the fact that no immediate sound disturbance was registered with the controlling ship.
I of course would very much hope it imploded way before any psychological trauma was inflected on the passengers, but sadly I think the most consistent hypothesis with the little data we have is that it got lost and went astray for around two days then imploded.
They got lucky with that until they didn’t.
They even fired a guy for whistle blowing about the porthole.
It’s a shitshow from start to finish.
The filing states that OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build
a viewport that would meet the Titan’s intended depth of 4,000 meters. The
Titanic lies about 3,800 meters below the surface.
The filing also claims that hazardous flammable materials were being used
within the submersible."It imploded later" requires at least two failures, first of power/comms, and THEN of the structure itself.
Occam's Razor
It imploded later requires only one failure (the structural failure), just as the relatively short time duration option requires only one failure. Right away is also a later event.
We have no way of knowing what its structural true condition was in terms of whether it was more likely to make it a very short duration or something more like a day.
is only good as a heuristic for finding which hypothesis to test first.
It's basically a scientist's "where there's smoke there's fire".
Wouldn't an implosion be really loud?
"Lost then imploded" explains both by adding only a small extra assumption so by occam's razor is strictly superior to imploded straightaway as far as I can see.
My money is on simple catastrophic failure of the hull and it not being detected either because the private company is run by jokers who weren't listening for it or because they have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off because the CEO and paying customers just died and they don't want to have to report that to the family, government, media, insurance company, etc... Either explanation is plausible, but I'm slightly more inclined to go with the second simply because they were actively trying to communicate with the sub when it happened and it seems so improbable that they could miss it.
As for the banging sounds heard days later, there are a thousand possible sources of those, especially with a dozen or more other vessels on the scene. Anything from a buoy with a loose part clanking away, to some waves breaking and clapping on the surface, to a whale slapping its tail, to extraneous noise from one of the search vessels or its equipment, to other sources of sea life making a racket. It's a bit like trying to listen for the buzzing of a bee in a basketball stadium with a game going on. Any signal you get is far more likely to be something else, but when you have literally no better options, every signal, no matter how unlikely, is worth investigating. Then they report they investigated and found nothing, and in a bit of target fixation, people assume it must have been people in the sub. Understandable, but it's not necessarily the most likely/logical conclusion.
> The latter is more probable to me as it has never been tested under water for more than a few hours at a stretch.
That's not true, they've successfully reached the Titanic several times over a dozen or so expeditions. Mike Reiss (a famous writer for The Simpsons) said his trip reached the Titanic but got lost for most of the ~8 hour trip, but that another group on his trip had several hours to explore the Titanic.
is there more information on these dissolvable ties? or their redundant ballast systems?
https://unsungscience.com/news/back-to-titanic-part-1/
Excerpt from the transcript:
But what if the hydraulic system breaks? Well, then they have roll weights.
KYLE: Ah, so, we’ve got these weights here on the side, these are roll weights, we can actually roll the sub and those come off, and that gains us some buoyancy to come back to the surface.
These are pipes that sit on a shelf that juts out from either side of the sub, held in place only by gravity. If everyone inside the sub shifts their weight to one side, the sub tips enough to let these pipes roll off.
If that doesn’t work, there are ballast bags, full of metal shot, hanging below the sub.
KYLE: These bags down below, we drop those off using motors and electric fingers.
OK. But what if the electronics go out, and the hydraulics fail, and everyone inside has passed out unconscious?
KYLE: There’s fusible links within these that actually can dissolve and come back in time if it’s drop off.
Fusible links are self-dissolving bonds. After 16 hours in seawater, those bonds disintegrate, the weight bags drop off automatically, and you go back to the surface.
You'd think - but past passengers have said that when they dove they lost contact as well.
Mutiple trip passengers said they lost contact every time.
So multiple anecdotes of loss of contact with the same vehicle without an implosion. The jankiness of this operation continues to be discovered bit by bit.
ETA:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-titanic-submersible-passeng...
David Pogue seems to concur with this [1]. He saw them lose track of where the sub was located (wrt to the Titanic wreck), but he said the support ship never lost the ability to communicate with the sub.
[0] https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
That indicates a certain blase, routine attitude to communication loss.
This is more concerning, given that metal fatigue is an understood phenomenon (1).
(1) https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...
...With titanium hemispheres at each end, so some sort of poorly understood titanium carbon-fibre interface.
That would mean it had two mostly independent failures (which is less likely than one).
The only way it wouldn't have already surfaced on day 1 is if it got stuck on something (and lost power, unlikely), or it imploded.
https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/article/what-is-a-sn-curv...
If the were too cheap to design and build it properly then they were too cheap to check for wear and tear properly.
A sub is subjected to static stress mostly. Quite a lot actually at these depths. And having it certified for 1.3 km hints to over stressing.
As was pointed out, the submersible is pretty large and its a essentially a large cylinder which induces stress in the middle. Usually you make deep sea submersibles out of a sphere or spheroid because you don't have this failure modes.
It isn't surprising it failed. They were strong claims that the company did do enough test, rejected safety advice and even had the CEO claim that at one point the titan wouldn't be able to reach the titanic because it (a model maybe?) had experience a pressurization failure. To say nothing of the materials they were using.
Just comically bizarre that anyone involved in the project thought it would somehow survive let alone be safe.
So saying it got lost and imploded after a few days solves two problems. Explains why there was no implosion noise originally, and that the banging heard afterwards was the implosion. Also it has a history of losing contact in its previous tours.
Why would they be listening? They would be looking at a device that was communicating via SMS or some radar screen at best.
> and that the banging heard afterwards was the implosion
Every 30 min?
We don't know that. There's a chance a noise was recorded but it wasn't made public in order not to compromise rescue attempts.
Weren't there a lot of boats and other resources listening once it was reported missing?
It's one thing for the tender to not hear an implosion when no one else was following this excursion. It seems harder to explain no one hearing an implosion when a growing number of resources were trying to detect any signs of activity from the sub.
I watched most of the press conferences and don't think I heard anyone ask about it. But hearing loud noises across thousands of miles is certainly within the U.S. military's capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
https://www.amazon.com/Red-November-Inside-U-S-Soviet-Submar...
I mean the thing was a tiny 7x3m cylinder located 700Km from the nearest coast...
Crossmatch that with the time of loss of communication and it's safe to assume that it's it.
Without any actual knowledge, I imagine that a ship or sub could be festooned with hydrophones, enabling it to detect faint noises, but also to determine their direction from phase information.
Here's a naval study where they measured underwater sound propagation: https://www.navymarinespeciesmonitoring.us/files/7514/2780/4...
They found that a 10lb block of C4 exploding produced ~210db of underwater sound. If we use that sound level as an approximation of the implosion of 200 cubic meters of submersible, which seems not completely unreasonable, then we can use the inverse square law to calculate the perceived sound far away.
Halifax, NS is 1100km from the Titanic wreck. A sound that is 210db at 1 meter, is 89db at 1100000 meters. Boston is 1700km away; at that distance it would be 85db.
85db is really quite loud. You would be able to hear that, if you were underwater and paying attention.
If the implosion was instead, say, 180db, then it would have been 55db in Boston harbor. Still easily detectable by instruments.
For reference, when divers are performing construction using e.g. rock drills, those commonly reach 170db. The implosion of close to 200 cubic meters of air seems like it would produce a louder noise than a rock drill.
A former employee claims they were fired after brining up concerns about safety. The glass apparently was not rated for the depth required to see the titanic.
IMHO this was a get rich scheme the two founders spun up that went sideways. They spent the absolute minimum on safety and repeatedly cut corners on the sub in order to get it up and running, then charged people a ton of money to take a trip down deeper than the sub was clearly capable of going.
Perversely, a bunch of near-disasters can reduce people's concern and make them less likely to demand fixes because "it did that last time too and everything turned out okay" is a powerful rationalization.
Meanwhile, smart organizations have decades-ago stopped tracking (primarily) "Time-Lost Work Accidents" and replaced that with tracking "Close Calls".
I've seen prominent signs for "N Days Since a Time Lost Accident", and more recently "X Days Since a Close Call".
Sadly, it is so obvious that this CEO clown was doing everything possible to avoid experienced people ("not as inspiring to hire 50yo white guys as hiring young upstarts") so he could overrule any safety or redundancy concerns, firing people as soon as they raised things like "this porthole window is only rated to 1500m and we're going to 4000m", using cheap scrap scaffolding as ballast, and completely ignoring any kind of redundancy in case something went wrong. He seems to have gotten a just end, but his deceived customers didn't deserve that.
This problem extended far beyond this one individual, who was merely a symptom. The entire Birmingham maintenance facility, and perhaps British Airways more broadly, had a singular focus on “getting the job done.” If doing the work by the book took longer and jeopardized schedules, then doing the work by the book was discouraged. The shift manager who used the wrong bolts stated in an interview that if he sought out the instructions or used the official parts catalogue on every task, then he would never “get the job done,” as though this was a totally normal and reasonable attitude with which to approach aircraft maintenance. This attitude was in fact normalized on a high level by supervisors who rewarded the employees who most consistently kept planes on schedule. That a serious incident would result from such a culture was inevitable. The shift manager believed it to be reasonable to just “put on whatever bolts came off” and make a quick judgment call about what kind of bolts they were — not because he was personally deficient, but because he had been trained into a culture that didn’t consider this a flagrant safety violation.
In the absence of a proper means to report "That could have been bad" as you say it can cause normalization. But it's understandable that you don't implement something like ASRS when you haven't solved most of your "That was bad" problems. If you regularly have CI failures due to the code not even compiling, "We need more unit tests" isn't top of the list of your problems.
http://resource.npl.co.uk/acoustics/techguides/seaabsorption... -- here is a quick calculator for sound loss by distance. I think actual geography is important too but from understanding whether or not it's hypothetically possible, it certainly looks like it.
For example, at the default inputs we see .061 db/km absorption. This is at 1khz. Higher frequencies attenuated more and lower frequencies less.
I have no idea what frequencies an implosion generates, but given that, a sound at 120db might still be 60db 1000km later. Certainly seems possible and in fact given what we have seen from the US Navy (detecting imploding soviet subs in the middle of the pacific ocean) it seems totally possible to me that this small sub could be detected if microphones were places in quiet spots offshore of the continental US and Canada.
I think we don't have enough information to rule out that this was detectable.
Also, I wonder, if sound of explosions propagate that well, can one install multiple sensors to detect and map source of gunfire and artillery positions in realtime? (I hope I haven't disclosed NATO military secrets here).
I would think another failure mode could be water rushing in without the overall structure catastrophically failing, which would actually relieve pressure on the structure as it happened and be much less energetic.
"The Spencer-built composite cylindrical hull either was repaired or replaced by Electroimpact and Janicki Industries in 2020 or 2021, prior to the first trips to Titanic."
Solid 5inch thick carbon composite OR a sandwich design with thick outer facesheets of carbon fiber? I suppose under that pressure not much would take the hydrostatic loads other than carbon, but that seems thick compared to everything I've seen made out of composites.
I think it was in Sub brief YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac&pp=ygUJc3ViIGJya...
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
...since that article is from 2017, it is not clear that this was the unit that actually failed.
Not saying they are related at all but I am reminded of this:
Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) are fairly common in cases where a pressurized system needs to be relatively lightweight (e.g., spacecraft). To your point though, the failure mechanisms can be hard to model.
For a sub you have the opposite problem, which carbon fiber is very weak at.
What motivates this idea?
Not only does it explain nothing, it requires additional explanation.
"Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while".
Why would you turn that into
"USN knows that a sub imploded. Did nothing observable. Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while."
I looked at the link, I can't see any reason to interject into that more capability than was demonstrated. It may exist, it may not. There is no reason to comment on additional capabilities based on this event.
Whether they did or not, nothing would presumably change about the Coast Guard conducting search-and-rescue/recovery operations (since they still don't know for sure what happened). Worth pointing out that private explorers, led by Richard Garriott (aka Lord British, apparently), complained that they had optimal rescue equipment but got pushback from the U.S. officials:
> “Magellan has received mixed signals, first hearing from US Gov to get ready, waiting for plans, then getting told to stand down,” Garriott wrote in an email sent to Vice Admiral William Galanis, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John W. Mauger, who is leading the recovery mission, Congressman Lloyd Doggett, and Representative Eric Swalwell on Wednesday afternoon.
Again, hard to know if this is just standard operating procedure or not. If it's the case the U.S. govt already had things figured out by now, then it makes sense they weren't going to expedite Garriot's group, given that the search effort had already resulted in the loss of 1 (maybe 2) search vehicles:
> In addition, at least one ROV, possibly two, was damaged or destroyed during the search-and-rescue mission—a testament to the difficult conditions currently facing rescuers.
A lot of people are saying sounds travel far under water that's true.. but laterally and not between the typical layers of the sea.
Not to mention that these hydrophone systems are at critical choke points not littering the ocean floor uselessly.
It seems motivated by a sci-fi understanding of the physics.
Don't get me wrong things like this happen as cover ups. In this specific instance it seems driven by nonsense.
Rather than any information specific to this event leading to the conclusion that USN can.
This is the same reasoning "UFOlogists" use to insist area 51 has aliens.
1. Aliens must exist.
2. US must be able to detect any aliens.
3. The US must be covering up that aliens exist.
I don't believe I said that. You can draw your own conclusion from the fact that it is within their capabilities to detect, localize, and to some extent classify a wide range of sources in this region of the ocean.
What you won't find is a lot of information about those capabilities in the public domain. Just consider that what _is_ known tells us that we had these capabilities in the 1950s, and that they were continuously improved upon throughout the cold war. This is not Area 51 conspiracy speculation; it is bread-and-butter NRL stuff that is more than half a century old at this point and is classified for good reasons.
As far as I can see not only is the answer to that is "nothing" but the claim itself is non-falsifiable.
Detecting extraterrestrial aliens requires technology that is not publicly known. Therefore, it is not at all logical to compare "hearing an imploding submersible in the Atlantic" to "detecting aliens/UFOs"
You've got to be kidding!
* submarines make loud noises when they implode
* the navy can hear loud noises underwater
* the submersible is thought to have imploded based on debris
therefore,
* the navy heard the submarine implode
[0] https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/16challenger/wel...
Doesn't matter, I was curious why people were speculating this and that's clarified.
You believe that USN would detect this, and it's not motivated by any factor in the story. And a conspiracy to cover up capabilities is the only way you can sustain that belief.
Let's assume that in our current reality, U.S. agencies did not detect an anomalous sound. So what we've observed is how they would operate if they had zero foreknowledge or data other than the initial report to the Coast Guard.
Now imagine the alternate scenario in which Navy or NOAA buoys pick up a suspicious sound near the Titanic. There might be a flurry of U.S. gov activity (e.g. communication between NOAA, the military, and intelligence agencies) to make sure it's not a Russian sub, but that would be completely hidden to the public, and for all we know, is something that happens relatively routinely.
In this alternate scenario, what would change about how the Navy, Coast Guard, or any other U.S. official has responded? Coast Guard rescue ships would still conduct search-and-rescue, the Navy would still send a deep sea salvage ship. You honestly think the Navy would volunteer information about an intelligence report that, as far as they know, may or may not be related to a now-missing civilian sub?
Maybe they kept it quiet to not reveal the satellite was still operational? I doubt it given the current situation, mostly likely it'd be all over telegram and we'd have known about it.
> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.
Instead they leaked it once the debris was found?
As for why they revealed their foreknowledge now? I don't speak for the military, but admitting to it vaguely, well after the fact is a significantly different situation than talking about it at the time and making it actionable intelligence. Furthermore, something may have leaked to a journalist, who then pressed them to make some kind of answer.
Are you aware that there is, in fact, a such thing as "classified" information? If you'll pardon me linking to that hotbed of conspiratorial thinking, the Cornell Law School, here's some of the basic, completely open, law covering such things: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798
Where on Earth do you get the idea that everyone in the world is operating in a regime where they tell you everything you want to know simply because you want to know it?
You are operating at personally dangerous levels of naivety, like, levels that are going to cost you money when you fall for a big scam because you thought someone was just informing you of a great money-making opportunity, as everyone always does when they find a way to make money. Or worse. You're light years beyond "rejecting conspiracy theories", you're operating on a Theory of Mind that has no visible correspondence to the real world. This is not how the world works. People and organizations do not rush to reveal everything they are, everything they can do, everything they know, to everybody, all the time, for free, simply because it would be really nice, and the military least of all!
I asked what about that link made them think that. The answer nothing.
They were making up explanations about how to maintain a pre-existing belief.
I've seen a bit of discussion around time of release, especially around it being a putative "distraction" from the Hunter Biden news stories, but that doesn't make any sense; those have been going on for a while now and will continue to go on for a while regardless of this. What I see here is roughly the expected speed of the military internally deciding this is safe to release, through several layers of bureaucracy, all of which are concerned about being court martialed if they are too excited to say "yes" without making sure their butts are 100% covered. I'd even call this a surprisingly fast release, honestly, probably because the physics of this are such that they weren't fooling very many people (and none of the ones who really mattered), except, apparently, psychphysic.
/r/UFO must be leaking.
A complete non sequitur to assume it was detected with no observable action taken.
Yesterday the Coast Guard spokesman [0] said he hadn't even heard the notion that the banging noises were made at regular 30-min intervals, even though Rolling Stone published a leaked DHS report the day before [1], something which completely dominated the news coverage and gave people hope that there were survivors. When directly asked about most anything, the officials frequently demurred. Giving out the least amount of info necessary is their standard operating procedure, not a conspiracy
[0] https://www.dvidshub.net/video/887852/coast-guard-partners-h...
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/titani...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_ARA_San_Juan
>On 23 November the Argentine Navy said an event consistent with an explosion had been detected, on the day the submarine lost communications, by CTBTO seismic anomaly listening posts on Ascension Island and Crozet Islands
>The organization had been asked to analyse data from the search area by the Argentine government on the week of the disappearance, but no leads had materialised until 22 November when the CTBTO informed the government.
>The Navy added that it received information on the explosion on the afternoon of 22 November, adding that it would have concentrated search efforts in that area had it known sooner.
- Pro: increased chance of saving a few people's lives
- Con: risk of leaking info about U.S. sonar sensitivity
I.e., the decision would depend on the magnitude of the "pro" and "con" probabilities.
The actual Pro would be "minor calibration opportunity for our secret sensor network".
Relays don't really work because you'd need a LOT of them and they'd all have to keep themselves positioned within like 30 meters of each other which is very hard with ocean currents. That's with very low bandwidth VLF radio.
The real reason is that they were stingy as fuck and that it's mildly impractical which outweighed their complete disregard for safety.
Those also carry electrical power to supply the inline repeaters on those cables. If the cable does not have repeaters, it wouldn't need this, and the shielding could be greatly reduced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-short_baseline_acoustic_...
U.S. Navy Detected Titan Sub Implosion Days Ago Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy
WASHINGTON—A top secret U.S. Navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission, officials involved in the search said. The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
My understanding (very much not first hand) is that he was seen as an expert in the specific engineering disciplines necessary to safely build and operate deep sea submersibles like Titan.
He was also apparently a father to members of the Seattle tech community, who are no doubt grieving at the moment.
Please remember that, for some members of the HN community, this one hits close to home.
[0] Talk at last year's GeekWire Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PGpjEDc96I
source https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-submarine-oceangate-hul...
To relate it to flying in an airplane, “If you take one flight a day, you would on average need to fly every day for 55,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash.”
I'll take those odds.
Take a deep dive in an experimental vessel with public safety concerns expressed over years, nope I'm out.
You sign similar waivers for all kinds of benign things - including amusement park tickets, concerts, skateboard parks, etc.
I have a feeling the safety of this contraption was grossly oversold to the passengers...
When you have to start putting that on coffee cups, it loses all meaning.
So much hand wringing and I've seen about two whole comments talking about the boat that sank carrying 100x as many people while this saga was unfolding.
How is it dehumanizing for me to not care about one, when virtually no one gave a single shit about the hundreds of non-wealthy people dying?
For me all human life is precious and equally worthy of effort to save, as well as sympathy and grief for their loss. I suppose that's not your position, but I don't quite understand what it is.
"Equally worthy of effort" - ironic because the amount of money spent trying to save these 5 people could save hundreds or thousands of times as many people. But I don't see people clamoring for equality in helping the disenfranchised.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
Here it's off-topic to talk about the sunk ship and the migrants that died. Here it's on topic to talk about the people on the sub that died. People should have empathy with both situations, but are much less likely to express it when they're frustrated by someone complaining about something off-topic.
At the same time we're being asked to support tax money going to search for these 5 risk tourists and being accused of ignoring their humanity when we simply point out the utter stupidity and greediness of their escapade.
Starving? Homeless? Too bad. We have so much money that we gotta blow it to go look at this thing over here instead.
Bill Gates has hubris because Bill Gates has a fuckton of wealth that he did nothing to directly earn. Merely having capital yields capital results.
You can also see in this thread people calling them "precious lives" as though that doesn't apply to the people making the ultimate sacrifice to try and bring their families to safety.
I have nothing against people being rich but it's frankly scary to see these refugees be dehumanised, framed as economic immigrants and become victim to to increasing legislation to keep them out of safety on the basis that we can't afford them using our resources when we suddenly have resources enough to spend on extensive missions to search for people who made bad decisions for fun and risked the lives of others for nothing but profit and fame.
If you want to call them refugees then take them home. They are economic migrants where “we” live.
And delegitimising all others forms of feedback and expression.
The US was a bit late to the game, but appears to have caught up quite well.
And while in Europe these people often first set sail for the western Balkans, it usually isn’t their destination.
I thought it wise to only mention those whose colonial history I knew about, and avoid exposing my whole point to criticism by over-extending myself.
Where are they sailing to that this doesn't cover? The recent example being spoken about in this thread was trying to make it to Italy, which has been involved in various conflicts in the middle east since the middle ages.
If you die doing something dumb, then yeah, people are gonna point that out.
If you die doing something dumb that you spent house money to do, the pointing out will be much more pointed.
>"I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said "you're remembered for the rules you break." And I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fibre and the titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did."
https://www.reddit.com/r/titanic/comments/14ekh3r/stockton_r...
Can read more here: https://www.corrosionpedia.com/galvanic-corrosion-of-metals-...
I see a problem in stress loads so. Titanium and carbon fibre composites behave differently under load. And at those depths, they are under a lot of load. These small differences induce additional stress at the critical joint between bulk heads and submarine body. That stress causes, over time, material fatigue.
That's why those components are, in most othee use cases, fatigue tested to their breaking point. Knowing that point, allows you to define a save service life for those components and replace thek way before they fail.
If you think you're going to reinvent the wheel and bypass regulatory bodies and ignore subject experts, and move fast and break things, you're delusional.
Any baby can break things; any toddler can break rules. What's hard is to discover new rules, make things that don't break.
Carbon is fantastic stuff if used properly, used improperly it will seem to be perfect right up to the point where it fails catastrophically.
> In the days before the Titan vessel went into the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said Thursday in an interview.
> Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he "wasn't very up for it" and felt "terrified" about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.
> But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard OceanGate's 22-foot submersible because the trip fell over Father's Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, according to Azmeh.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/titanic-submersible-shahw...
Even though everyone knows flying commercially is incredibly safe, lots of people are still anxious about it. Its not like this kid, or maybe any of the other customers, knew of any of the safety concerns and just thought it was as safe as flying.
Its also good to remember the titanium wings bear the full weight of the plane.
When corners aren't cut building the planes, and Boeing has never cut corn... oh, crud.
I told my 10 year old son that one day his life might depend on being able to recognise danger and not follow the herd. I said that might mean you staying out of the cave even if the teacher and all the other students went in, called you names, etc.
He rightly pointed out that would be almost impossible such is the power of peer pressure. Still I hope if that day comes he remembers it.
But it's been tough, on occasion and I can see the point that your son makes, and I hope with you that if that day comes that he will remember it. FWIW you can tell him this internet stranger agrees with his dad and that peer pressure can be overcome.
That's awful, and if there's one thing that I learned from Thai cave rescue a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue) it's that you never want to go swimming in caves when it might start raining.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/how-about-not-overcoming...
it isn't just Americans or even First Worlders. In some cultures they're not able to do it, but they all want to. And it's -- guess what? -- peer pressure that makes them do it. Brain scans show that they recognize the danger as well as adults do, but they're more susceptible to the peer pressure.
It's ok to be afraid. No one had to go down to 12,500 feet to see the Titanic.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/132006337/dad-who-stopped-son...
It blows my mind that anyone thought it was a good idea to make a deep-sea submersible out of the stuff.
Carbon's tendency to abruptly fail without warning was a source of significant anxiety whenever I'd go riding the more aggressive trails on my ibis mojo hd3. And that wasn't a certain death outcome should the carbon let go...
You need to be able to attain both positive and negative buoyancy, which constrains density within a range, right? That limits design choices like “giant block of steel with a tiny passenger cavity”.
I know little about the topic but it sounds terribly early to rule what exactly had 'a pretty active role' in the incident. Is it not?
Him saying "it's obscenely safe" just sounds like a Silicon Valley CEO saying they're going to save the world by selling their users' personal data under the table. EDIT seems like I interpreted this wrong according to comment below.
Most software doesn’t implode though.
The CEO was quoted[1] as:
> “We only have one button and that's it,” Rush said in the CBS report. “It should be like an elevator.
What an example to reference. Early elevators resulted in many deaths [2] and safety regulations and mechanisms needed to be invented to prevent them [3].
Similar regulations existed for submersibles, but he decided not to take all those lessons learned. I'm thankful building elevator operators do not have a cavalier attitude towards safety like this.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/20/david-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents [3] https://blog.ansi.org/history-of-elevators/#gref
I'm not even a risk-adverse individual. But I can often recognize when people say things like that, not because they're comfortable with the risk, but because they are blind to it. It's hard for me to feel like the teenager aboard was fully cognizant of the risks.
I don't think it's great to make this guy into a folk hero just because he was pushing the limits. Imagine, for a second, how this would be reacted to in the aviation space.
If the CEO cut corners then that should be his legacy. Great people can be flawed. Flaws can be fatal. It's just a shame if those flaws weren't properly portrayed to those who dove with him.
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/titan-titanic-missing-sub-dav...
Not so much when you’re building life-critical systems or those where there are real big serious problems when they go down or fail.
https://www.planecrashinfo.com/famous1910s.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviators_killed_in_av...
progress in both aviation and undersea exploration stopped about 50 years ago when we stopped doing that
The links you provide show a stark difference in end game from then and now. None of them killed tourists in the name of pushing the limits. That and those risk takers in aviation didn't blindly disregard highly researched and engineered vehicle designs, and oh by the way, publicly state that your design was ultimately against what other experts in the industry have shown to be non-viable with our current build process and manufacturing capabilities using those materials. And to top it off using control mechanisms not even remotely designed for the use case of a real time system that could cause a grave outcome of life. One that you can buy at Walmart to play a video game.
In my mind comparing this situation with those innovators is unfortunate.
Boat owner: "This boat has been certified as insubmersible"
Guest 1: "Certified until what depth?"
Guest 2: "...All the way to the seafloor"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/oceangate-titanic-miss...
letter (pdf): https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/marine-technology-soc...
There's no absolutely safe way to dive that deep, just like there's no absolutely safe way to ascend K2. People still want to do it.
This submersible was basically a rollercoaster ride that wasn't up to spec. If a participant doesn't need to know or do anything on a trip, they are going for a ride not an adventure, and they aren't expected to be safety experts in the field.
Also one of the passengers was a teenager who was concerned about going, but went along to make his dad happy. Hardly a clear eyed risk taker who was fine with the risk.
He even said he was well aware of the risks involved and kissed his wife goodbye not knowing if he would see her again. Just because something is insanely dangerous doesn't make you an explorer, and you're not performing in any research capacity, you're a former writer for the Simpsons and this is TOURISM. Get some perspective.
They consented, but were they aware of the actual risks? That seems unclear at best, given the active concealment of safety issues and the misleading marketing that has been cited in various reports.
> There’s no absolutely safe way to dive that deep
Nothing is absolutely safe, but deep submersion diving isn’t a new field, there are established safety standards and practices (including in the latter third-party audits to confirm compliance to the former) and OceanGate uniquely among operators of manned vehicles refused to conform to either (though it marketed its subs as exceeding the standards it decided not to be certified against). And its also unique in experiencing a manned disaster.
Now, we aren’t at the point where it can conclusively be shown that those two unique features are directly connected (and practical issues with investigating a disaster at this depth may not make that practical any time soon), but, its not unreasonable to suspect that they are.
I would take that bet.
> I would take that bet.
And I would agree that that is where the smart money is, I’m just acknowledging that the actual specific cause of the disaster and any connection to specific cut safety corners remains unknown.
The fact that the two end bells are separated from the central cylinder and that the cylinder itself can't be located pretty much singles out the carbon fiber structure. The company was aware of problems with previous iterations of the hull of Titan which may have been rebuilt at least once and possibly more than once (this is a bit unclear in what I've been able to dig up about it so far). If the window blew first I would expect things to look a bit different.
I wonder to what extent gross negligence trumps the language in the consent waiver.
That's true, but there are (substantially) safer ways. This design should have never been used for passengers.
I really draw the line there: innovators are free to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own lives and if a professional who really understand the risks decides that they want to take those risks they should be free to do so.
But to charge passengers for a ride requires a completely different attitude towards safety. No matter what you are going to write on your consent forms. Besides being unable to properly evaluate the risks inherent in your design they will be subject to all kinds of pressure to participate which will reduce their ability to properly assess the risks.
This is why we have different classes of aircraft, and why depending on your goals you will be assessed differently by the authorities if you intend to operate one for ferrying (paying) passengers.
Is that entirely true? In a scenario like this they're going to incur tremendous costs borne by others in search and recovery, and potentially put rescue personnel in harm's way. Modulo these things being used as useful exercise and training for the military.
Besides the legal complications of being in a place that technically is outside of the legal boundaries of all countries, so who would enforce that?
That's cheap talk. As soon as there is some major accident, some people creep up to declare: it was obvious all along. Of course it wasn't quite obvious enough for them to actually make that declaration in advance.
That he fired.
Then sued.
No, but using a vessel built the same way as the one James Cameron used would be safer (he did 33 dives).
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-big...
They didn't change the name and technically the cylinder is just another part but it suggests that the same hull was used which isn't correct as far as I read it.
From what I've read, in there minds there hull design was the best part of the sub. I inclined to believe he believed it, since the CEO frequently dove in it.
"This is shaping up as a rebuilding year for the nearly 11-year-old venture, based in Everett, Wash. The main task on the agenda is to build two new submersibles capable of diving as deep as 6,000 meters (3.7 miles), which is more than a mile deeper than the part of the North Atlantic ocean floor where the Titanic is resting.
OceanGate will take advantage of lessons learned during the construction of its carbon-hulled Titan submersible, which was originally built for Titanic journeys. Rush said tests that were conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Annapolis, Md., revealed that the Titan’s hull “showed signs of cyclic fatigue.” As a result, the hull’s depth rating was reduced to 3,000 meters.
“Not enough to get to the Titanic,” Rush said."
From:
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-big...
> Because Titan was once known as Cyclops 2, the working titles for the new submersibles will be Cyclops 3 and 4.
So they lowered the depth rating of Titan back in 2020 .. but then continued to dive down to the Titanic with it?
Even the diver that piloted it imagined at least one way how it could implode (window).
Material science is hard, especially on a budget. This is definitely daredevil territory.
Based on what I've seen, it doesn't sound like OceanGate had decided on a fixed number of dives. Instead they were planning to continually monitor it (x-ray scans after every dive and real-time acoustic monitoring during the dive) with the assumption that they would get some warning before it failed.
Also the Titan did successfully complete ~20 deep dives from what I've read, so the design was apparently sufficient to stand up to the pressure more than once, meaning even a non-trivial testing program might not have detected the problem. Unfortunately the problem (as many have stated) seems to be in the choice of carbon fiber, which (particularly when taking into account the interfaces with other materials) will weaken over time even if the initial flaws are very small. All materials experience fatigue but the problem is much worse with carbon particularly under those kind of pressures.
I do feel awful for the kid seemingly unhappily dragged into the trip.
As for the CEO's credentials: nature can't be fooled.
By my estimation he committed manslaughter with his recklessness. He's every bit as bad a drunk driver that kills 4 people in an accident.
I don't judge.
"If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating. If you're operating in a known environment as most submersible manufacturers do, they don't break things." (8:49)
"Our rule is we risk capital, we don't risk people." (9:56)
"We used the same prepreg that's used on the 787." (11:15)
And my favorite: "When you're outside the box, it's really hard to tell how far outside the box you really are." (8:30) He does seem to be far outside the box now.
But the most significant quote IMHO is the one about "the same prepreg that's used on the 787". Like they often tell you that phone holders for bikes are made of "aircraft-grade aluminium" (which usually means it's 6061, the most common alloy). It's a strong indication of bullshit -- name dropping that doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter.
In the rest of the presentation he seems nice enough, and truly passionate about deep sea exploration. So maybe he was a cool guy, I don't know. But in the end it's his hubris that killed him and his clients.
This is a good point.
However, it's probably worth pointing out that in the past few decades -- at least here in the PNW -- carbon fiber availability to the hobbiest and small producer has been spotty.
I'd refer to Boeing and being the same 787 carbon fiber for my personal projects, but that's just because they're made from Boeing offcuts donated to a local University. At the time (ca 2006), even bare weave was hard to obtain from private suppliers.
Its feasible that Rush may have had help from Boeing sourcing his material, which puts comments like that in a different light.
6061 is more commonly used in automotives than in aircraft.
- “2024 aluminium alloy is an aluminium alloy, with copper as the primary alloying element. It is used in applications requiring high strength to weight ratio, as well as good fatigue resistance. It is weldable only through friction welding, and has average machinability.
- “7075 aluminium alloy is an aluminium alloy with zinc as the primary alloying element. It has excellent mechanical properties and exhibits good ductility, high strength, toughness, and good resistance to fatigue. It is more susceptible to embrittlement than many other aluminium alloys because of microsegregation, but has significantly better corrosion resistance than the alloys from the 2000 series.”
- “6061 is a precipitation-hardened aluminium alloy, containing magnesium and silicon as its major alloying elements. It has good mechanical properties, exhibits good weldability, and is very commonly extruded. It is one of the most common alloys of aluminium for general-purpose us.”
Materials science is a fascinating field.
It means you're using a material that's been vetted over decades in life-critical applications in harsh conditions by expert engineers all over the world. Aerospace aluminums today are derived from Japanese alloys invented in WW2 and were a major innovation in metal aircraft. It's much more expensive than steel, but we use it because of favorable characteristics. Here's an overview of different aluminums and where they're used: https://www.aircraftaluminium.com/blog
That said, I think there are times when it does mean something. I believe military grade/milspec chips/ICs are often engineered to be more resilient to environmental factors like heat and vibration, interference, etc. If I'm wrong about that, I suspect it won't be long before we learn if I'm right.
It did not guarantee anything outside of that. Soundness of design and ensuring inputs and environmental factors conformed to the spec was up to the engineers.
The problem, it is a military specification so the public may not be able get access to it.
If I start using a screwdriver to hammer in nails, it doesn't matter how many expert engineers use screwdrivers. I'm using it for a purpose it is unfit for.
Just because it's aircraft grade doesn't mean that it is (or isn't) suitable for building a submarine.
Why use novel vessels when tried and true work. Why did they have to try a carbon-fiber wrapped vessel? The bathysphere went all the way down to the Marianas trench --many decades ago. Why try something new in unforgiving environments?
Why fire an engineer after he started raising questions about safety?
It seems like there was a bit of a cavalier attitude that cost five people their lives.
- "Oxygen was supplied from high-pressure cylinders carried inside the sphere, while pans of soda lime [hn: sodium hydroxide?] and calcium chloride were mounted inside the sphere's walls to absorb exhaled CO2 and moisture.[6] Air was to be circulated past these trays by the Bathysphere's occupants using palm-leaf fans.[2]"
- "Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the bolt was torn from our hands, and the mass of heavy metal shot across the deck like the shell from a gun. The trajectory was almost straight, and the brass bolt hurtled into the steel winch thirty feet [9.1 m] away across the deck and sheared a half-inch [13 mm] notch gouged out by the harder metal. This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which slackened after a while into a cataract, pouring out the hole in the door, some air mingled with the water, looking like hot steam, instead of compressed air shooting through ice-cold water.[6]"
- "The ocean during this dive was rougher than it had been during any of their previous dives, and as the Freedom rocked on the surface, its motion was transmitted down the steel cable, causing the Bathysphere to swing from side to side like a pendulum. As the Bathysphere descended, Barton succumbed to seasickness and vomited inside it. However, the first half of the radio transmission had already been broadcast, and neither Beebe nor Barton wished to cancel its second half, so they continued their descent.[5] ... the Bathysphere was still rocking wildly and Beebe and Barton were both bruised and bleeding from being knocked about inside it."
- "During their first test dive, they demanded to be pulled up after descending only four feet (1.2 m) because the sphere had begun to leak; they soon discovered this was because Tee-Van had neglected to fasten all of the bolts that hold the hatch shut.[2] Another problem occurred on their second test dive, during which they discovered that the lower end of the rubber hose holding the power cable and phone line had begun to deteriorate, and they spent the rest of the day reversing the hose's direction so that the end which was deteriorating would be the end above the water.[5]"
Very poor taste to say this now.
And yet he called safety "pure waste"...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/titanic-t...
People really need to remember that tech bros aren't really smarter than most people, they're usually just more willing to take risks.
Being seen as an expert doesn’t mean you are one, and it’s unfortunate the Seattle tech community didn’t have a better role model to look up to.
I also wonder if it was the ideal place for Mr.Titanic to rest his bones. He surely was used to having a small gun on his numerous subsea expeditions in order to avoid a miserable end in case of being trapped. Maybe that was indeed the perfect plan after an adventurous life like his certainly was.
Not wanting to come off as impious. However, I know I am..
Also some inspirational title... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Fu... His wife died some years ago.
- class warfare enthusiasts because the passengers were rich
- regulation enthusiasts because the pilot espoused weakening them
You'll see this online when a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a driver (along with "right of way doesn't mean anything when you're dead!" and "was he wearing a helmet?")
At some point, the personal tragedy for me is realizing that a lot of people in this world really take great pleasure in others' suffering even if those people have done them no harm. Makes me want to use the Internet less, if I'm being honest, since I don't want to encounter this kind of glee at others's suffering.
Sucks for the 19-year old kid involved in all this, that I agree with.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rising-physical-p...
In pure HN spirit, that of problem-solving, I don’t see a reasonably quick solution to this, on account of that repressive nature of the current socio-economic regime that I mentioned earlier.
And nice privileged use of a Latinism, I’ll give you that.
Celebrating a Pakistani billionaire’s death because of the existence of poverty in America is not surprising for a tankie. Pretty on-brand in terms of ghoulishness and level of logic.
the 19 year old was rich too, shouldn't you be celebrating?
This sort of thing on the internet predates many of us being born. The Darwin Awards got their start on Usenet in 85.
The fact of the matter is that this entire story is way overblown by the news, and many people die of much more tragic (and not self-inflicted) causes every day. Give these people their Darwin awards, and let's move on.
I keep seeing reports that they've search an area "the size of" Massachusetts or Connecticut. Shouldn't OceanGate have recorded the exact coordinates where it was released and then been able to localize its possible location to a small area around that by modeling ocean currents or something? My understanding the Titan was designed to sink to the bottom and could only move very slowly under its own power. I know OceanGate was cocky and cut a lot of corners, but I just can't believe they wouldn't have the exact release location recorded somewhere, even if it was just an automatic track log on their ship's GPS navigation system.
Modelling and knowing surface currents is one thing, but this submersible was thousands of meters deep. Deep ocean currents can be very fast, change often, and we have way less data on them.
- Oceangate, probably
I can think of 10 different ways to maintain some contact with the surface and store some data about dive conditions. Honestly perplexed at all the people who are still buying into Oceangate's demonstrably bad way of doing things and just saying it's impossible to do any better.
I'd assume they were assuming a worst case scenario of something like a ballast malfunction paired with a propulsion malfunction, so you have a partially buoyant (enough to stay off the ground, not enough to surface) craft being pushed both by currents, and possibly its own propulsion, in an unknown direction in some radius outside of the Titanic. I've no idea of the depth sonar can accurately ping, so they may also have been considering the 3-d area around the Titanic in which case you're hitting radius cubed, and so even a "small" max distance could be huge.
The Navy & Coast Guard would definitely have access to their own fleets
This sounds a lot like https://xkcd.com/793/ - "and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of>."
They lost contact 105 minutes into a 120 minute, 2.5 mile descent. The release point for that descent was well known, and currents estimated closely enough to allow the sub to descend close enough to the shipwreck that the submersible's thrusters could move it very slowly to viewing locations.
They don't know what happened to cause it to lose contact more than a quarter mile above the ocean floor. They didn't know whether it went neutrally buoyant at that point, whether it ascended quickly, or slowly, or stayed near the bottom of the ocean and continued looking at the Titanic and only later drifted off course - they've done that before. Those ocean currents, unknowns, and distances are large; merely pulling the release point from a GPS track does not suddenly make the search point tiny.
drop a penny into a swimming pool vs drop it into the ocean.
This was the size of the search _on the surface_.
>Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.” So OceanGate developed a new acoustic monitoring system, which can detect “crackling,” or, as Rush puts it, “the sound of micro-buckling way before it fails.”
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0776658...
I don't suppose there is a huge line to license this technology.
[1]: "This Oceangate sub had sensors on the inside of the hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack [...] they probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate. [...] It's our belief - as we understand from inside the community - that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up trying to manage an emergency." https://youtu.be/rThZLhNF_xg?t=472
But also confused why we learn only now that the US Navy already detected an anomaly that’s matching an implosion
[1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Messenia_migrant_boat_dis...
But there's also the concern of frequency, [2] occurs more frequent than [1], people generally don't care about the people at [2] because they are "unimportant", and not prominent in any way. They are background characters on the other side of the world for many, they are not well dressed, they do not perform functions with significant influence on the broader society.
Or at least so they are perceived by the general public. They are labelled illegal immigrants, or leeches, or whatever else because people in many places can't fathom being born in a third world or very poor country and doing everything in your power to make it out.
Imagine, feeling so low, that you'd give everything, your life even, for a chance, a sliver of chance, at what others are born into.
The point being made is about misallocation of resources, not news coverage. (Novel stories will always grab more attention.)
Who?
The US Navy/Coast Guard sending an ultra deepwater ROV isn't even comparable to the Greeks actively monitoring the boat enough to take a photo of it before it capsized, let alone is anyone mobilizing "entire nation states"
The families of the missing rich people have the resources to fund the search. The families of the missing people in the Mediterranean obviously do not.
what resources? were US and canada supposed to ship deep sea ROVs over to the Mediterranean to help refugees?
even if you wanted the US/Canada to help, it wouldn't have been the north atlantic coast guards doing it.
Do you have a detailed list of rescue vehicles deployed for each event ?
I lived in South Asia for a while and the thing that would strike me is the everyday catastrophes. For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US https://apnews.com/article/india-passenger-train-derail-dead...
275 deaths.
It was only covered in the NYT, LAT, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, WSJ, USAT, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News....just to name a few.
the US and Canadian coast guards don't operate in the Mediterranean, and (presumably) couldn't have gotten ships there fast enough to do anything about it, anyways.
I don't know. Do you ?
From wikipedia: "Immediately following the sinking, the Greek Coast Guard and the military initiated a massive search and rescue operation."
It wouldn't be surprising that some of those rescue ships were funded by the families of the victims, considering the size of their bank accounts.
But the contrast is still striking between both the situations and media reporting of 5 rich men vs 700 of some of the world’s poorest and most desperate people.
Both are unbelievably tragic.
The reporting on the Mediterranean disaster seems to have gone a lot quieter than I would have expected given what we now know about how the Greek authorities story simply does not match up with what actually seems to have happened. (It seems like there may have been an opportunity to prevent that disaster).
There is no way in hell I would pay $250k to board a janky-ass sub going deep into the ocean.
For $250k, I could buy a nice house for me, my girlfriend and our future family.
And even that is not possible yet. Because I don’t have that kind of money.
A lot of the Central American refugees are fleeing very sharp increases in gang violence.
Fukushima a) happened and b) Japan and the world are still there
There's a reason migrants take the Mediterranean route, instead of the Atlantic route.
Why? As a Minnesotan, the first thing I'm doing is hopping on my boat and heading north to Canada.
When China, Western Europe, or the US collapses into civil war refugees from those countries do indeed migrate. The problem is other countries start collapsing as well because they were dependent on some form of trade with those regions. As a result its unlikely there will ever be a large scale exodus of people from the US. We'll all just be survivors in the wasteland at that point.
That's not even enough of down payment for a tear down where I live!
Similar stories like the Thai boys trapped in the cave, or the Chilean miners, had a similar effect.
A bit like "Snakes on a plane". Again, trapped with your phobias.
Everyone is screaming, death is all around you. People are drowning, and in their drowning flailing limbs they are pulling others to their deaths.
[Edited to add: The migrants would've had time to process what was happening to them. There would be many long minutes of terror, suffocation, as they died. Hundreds. Women, children.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o
A friend of mine was involved with computer forensics on recovered cellphones on this one. Just awful.
Local news trumps global.
I am sure in Greece the Messenia migrant boat disaster got more coverage than Titan.
That said, the big factor is how sadly common migrant boat disasters are (just like liquid gas exploding in a restaurant in China and killing 10+ people, happened yesterday).
Carbon fiber submersible on the way to Titanic containing cocky inventor, plus billionaire, plus kid hits so many spots for news cycle.
My opinion is the complete opposite, I think it has more coverage because it's a feel good event for 90% of the world who absolutely despise rich fucks in that specific part of the dumb X rich venn diagram
I haven't seen a single post about how sad the sub story is... it's all memes and people amazed at how stupid humans can be
Someone who took the trip before said they had to sign a waver which mentioned death multiple times. It's like climbing Everest, walking to the north pole, commercial space flights, base jumping etc.
The med disaster was people embarking on a dangerous "adventure" out of what they perceived as being a necessity.
Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
Now people _pay_ to be carried on the Everest, pay for a ticket to space, pay for a ticket to the titanic, &c. There is nothing left so they fight for the crumbs, looking for the next dumbest idea on the list
Some even had brand new boots, which anyone with half a brain knows is a bad idea. A few did turn out to be tough bastards though, spending several days up there alone in a state of delirium and eventually making it back down on their own accord.
Guardian also mentioned a Mexican Youtuber having taken the trip down to the Titanic in that titanium coffin, just for clicks & views.
They died close to the shipwreck. Maybe the Titanic site will slowly fill up with corpses, just like Everest is doing.
> Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.
Lives sure. But not deaths. Bringing yourself in a confirmed dangerous situation just for the thrill of it, even being so desperate for it as to pay what post people would dream of earning over multiple years, and then dying during this adventure ... in contrast to desperate refugees trying to escape into a better life and then dying because traffickers don't care about their survival.. Idk man, doesn't sound equal to me.
Just nitpicking here but this is quite normal. Any somewhat physically involved commercially offered activity has waivers to sign that mention potential death and that absolve the business from responsibility. Gyms for example do this.
I thought to have read the boat capsized while being towed, as claimed by one of the survivors. Being towed could be an involuntary act, while throwing a line seems solely meant to help.
> The 104 survivors of the tragedy have very limited mobility and access to communications. Some of them said Greek Coast Guard vessels threw them a line shortly before their vessel capsized [1]
On a personal note. I myself got once rescued by the navy with their Zodiac. That was a mutually fantastic experience. I believe that coastguards anywhere would prefer to rescue above anything else, that is what they signed up for. I hope this dual tragedy will help the leadership to remove anything that creeps between that objective.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-06-20/greece-i...
And from what I’ve read about, the U.S Coast Guard are awesome folks that’ll trip over each other to save anyone if they can..
We (I say this not from my point of view) don't want to see poor people.
We don't relate to them and we think they should just be successful in their countries.
In contrast there is someone who is part of us, not poor, has achieved something and entertained us in an interesting way.
Of course we will try to help them and not those refugees.
The mental issue of us living great while 3th world countries exist is nothing new for a long time.
It's now even so old that there is research done on how to help people because the obvious things didn't work.
But you don't use resources to help people who are forced to leave their country and now are drowning in the sea.
Occasionally we can see here on HN stories about lost sailors being rescued after weeks lost in the water, or shipwrecked on some remote rock. The common theme for those stories is that there wasn't a bunch of ships that went looking for them for weeks. For every person who survived such event, many more died.
When there is a lot of media coverage you also tend to get more reaction by officials, which then generate even more media coverage. It is the same concept why a individual can create a story on HN and reach people at google/facebook/apple, while thousands of users can have an identical situation and never reach a single person from support. It not a fair system but its a very well understood phenomenon.
The response on sending rescue teams was high even before it got popular on the news. I remember reading some statements that "we sent everything we can" in the very first news.
The problem is that there's no immediate feedback when they go missing so the search areas are too pointlessly large to even attempt SAR operations. Areas where there's lots of immigration traffic are always monitored, like the Greeks were monitoring the boat before it capsized (enough to get that aerial photo of the overcrowded decks).
The vast majority of Coast Guards aren't stretched to their limits, they're sitting there ready to launch SAR operations if anyone calls, all largely operating for free as a cheap way of supporting maritime trade. The USCG alone responds to tens of thousands of cases a year, rescuing thousands of people. Some corrupt nations skimp on their CGs but that wasn't really the case here.
The Titan was A, your average fishing boat or other vessel is B. And all those migrants are, and that pisses me off to an incredible degree, C.
The average human can't tread that long without a life jacket, the average is ~2-3 hours and that's in still water (to be a lifeguard you have to last 30 minutes), not a choppy ocean/sea. By the time any country other than Italy or Greece came to the location, they'd already be dead. It's tragic, but there is no discrepancy. If there were a chance of actual survival for days, there would have been a much larger response.
Also, apparently the Greeks offered aid before the boat even sank and the boat declined because they didn't want to go to Greece, they wanted to go to Italy. There are mixed reports on that though as now some are blaming the Greek coast guard for tipping the boat over by accident.
If you want something to be upset about, be upset about practically every country on Earth's broken immigration systems that cause these tragic events.
Regarding the US Navy, well, they do have a Fleet in the Mediterranean, it's not like they had to sail all the way from Pearl Harbour.
Also, what people also forget, the Mediterranean is under almost comlkete surveillance. So no big surprise if a vessel goes down, most of the time authorities knew of said vessel before.
And some lights to try if it gets dark.
That’s not in any way to detract from the tragedy, just pointing out one reason why it’s barely covered.
Once something becomes common, it’s not news anymore.
In the case of the sub, there where a chance to find them alive. This makes the story more compelling.
The average person here might think they are, but they'd be deluding themselves.
I'm never the first one to start whining about refugee related disasters but hundreds of women & children drowning on a boat after having been in a miserable state for days on end is just the worst. Other boats had been circling it for days and apart from providing some food & water nothing was done. Maybe an attempt to tow it, which could well have led to the capsizing.
How could such a ship have been rescued? Any attempt at evacuation would have probably led to a capsizing anyway due to people moving around in a panic, unless ... the boat was wedged between two strong boats?
Mysterious cases always get more traction on social media too. There was an instance in the UK where a woman went missing near a river. People were speculating for weeks about what had happened. They would travel to the location and try and be detectives. It's was insane. People said it was because she was a white woman, but I don't think it's that. It's just the mystery of not knowing what happened and a body not being found straight away after divers searched the area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nicola_Bulley
Same goes for the sub. It's not because it was full of billionaires. It was because it was from a company infamous for cutting corners and people wanting confirmation that it did in fact implode. It also just boggles the mind why people who are so wealthy would get in something so shoddily put together. They have the money to fund a whole expedition like James Cameron did, but they'd rather increase the risk of death by an order of magnitude.
People can't survive for long in cold seas. By the time a migrant boat disaster makes the news, hopes of finding survivors may already have faded.
I watched one video that complained about off the shelf parts being used, but the two examples was an RV light (not safety related) and the gaming controller (which they had multiple back ups).
They also claimed to have been reviewed by Boeing and University of Washington. There was 7 different mechanisms that could force a return. Some of those were purely mechanical.
Clearly the sub wasn’t safe enough, but I’m not seeing anything that makes it obviously badly built.
https://twitter.com/LadyDoctorSays/status/167170098942929715...
The issue as far as I have read is that the hull was made of carbon fibre. There hasn't been any submersible that has reached those depths before made of that material. The effect continued pressurization/depressurization had on the carbon fibre wasn't understood. Composite materials are so much more complicated to model and understand. There was no non-destructive testing to see what effect the repeated cycles had on the hull, no way of knowing whether cracks could form beneath the surface. The failure mode at depth is catastrophic, there's no room for error. Someone pointed all this out to them and was fired https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face....
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/21/us/titan-sub-safety-ocean...
In response to them knowing the sub wasn't fit for purpose they opted to install a "real time health monitoring system" which acoustically checked the integrity of the hull. But it's pointless. By the time any acoustic monitoring system picked something up it would be too late, because carbon fibre just shatters into a million pieces. It's not like Steel where it can gradually fatigue, it's crack BOOM dead.
Using carbon fibre for the hull is like rolling your own crypto. Maybe you can get it to work but unless you properly scrutinize it there is most likely fundamental flaws in your implementation and it's just better to use tried and true methods. In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
I wonder if this event will cause some changes, or if it is an expensive step in figuring out how to properly test this material.
No. Not really. It's a horrible idea. It's irresponsible. It's negligent.
Consumer grade components are not designed for the kind of reliability and failure tolerance requirements these kinds of applications have to face every mission. A simple example of this would be no conformal coating anywhere to prevent failures due to condensation on the circuit board. Also, tin whiskers due to RoHS solder. No redundancy or failure tolerance in any portion of the design. It isn't enough to say "we have extra game controllers". That's not how you build reliable failure-tolerant systems where people's lives depend on things working perfectly 99.9999% of the time.
Also, it is a fallacy to say that millions of people use these controllers. The most obvious problem with this statement is that we have zero data on failure rates and failure modes. And, of course, nobody dies. As a parallel example, you would be hard-pressed to find toy controllers on medical equipment, even in situations where there might be time to deal with failures.
> the hull was made of carbon fibre <snip> In the sub world that tried and true method is just thick steel.
Yup. Fundamental principle: Carbon fiber is best used under tension, not compression. Not a good choice for a life-support compartment under incredible external pressure. One way I think of it is: In compression you are mostly relying on the epoxy to keep things together. Without epoxy carbon fiber will support as much compression as a common string. Zero.
The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
That's what it sounds like.
> The carbon fiber seems to be the critical nail in the coffin.
If the CF vessel failed it would have instantaneous and violent beyond comprehension. What little reliable info is out there seems to indicate that's what happened.
A lot of this is bewilderment at the choice of carbon fibre for the pressure vessel, which is sensitive to impact damage and wear from repeated load cycles, damage is hard to diagnose, and as it's very brittle, prone to catastrophic failure. It's not commonly used for this sort of application, and there may not be good data on (1) when it would eventually fail and (2) whether you'd be able to tell before use.
As I understand, the choice was motivated by wanting the sub to have the large interior space necessary to bring along that many passengers. Deepsea subs usually don't attempt that either.
All more or less untested and uncertified. Throw in the reported comms issues that were common during past operations, a highly inexperienced engineering team, a culture promoting unsafe practices and you get a death trap of a vessel.
I think there was a fair bit of other concerns. I thought this video was informative and the kind of thing the HN crowd would appreciate, so take a look.
These design flaws weren't an unfortunate mistake, they were part of a very deliberate pattern that went predictably wrong.
Some highlights include:
* Design inspired by the "DeepFlight Challenger" - but DeepFlight said their craft was only rated for one dive, and weakens with each cycle, and could not be used for five dives.
* Hull designed by subcontract manufacturer in 6 weeks - scarcely enough time to do much testing.
* In an early dive the CEO performed solo, lost contact with the surface ship for approximately one hour
* While diving with a journalist, lost contact with the support vessel for 5 hours.
* It was impossible to open the sub from inside (admittedly, this is only relevant if you first manage to ascend to the surface)
* Hull started showing showing signs of cyclic fatigue in January 2020 (they got it repaired)
* Assembly and testing procedures so sloppy they managed to attempt a dive with a thruster installed the wrong way around.
* Employee called for a stronger front window, and nondestructive testing of the hull. Company fired him and sued him.
* CEO on record as saying ship safety laws "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation" and that "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed."
* Couldn't get certified by a ship classification society, claimed that was OK because most marine accidents are operator error not mechanical failure; and the standards didn't give them adequate credit for their corporate culture of safety.
The other thing that indicates it was a deathtrap is the deaths.
With that said, personally I support the right of people to expose themselves to the risk of death in search of adventure. Normal folks can buy motorbikes and quadbikes, millionaires can buy cessnas, why shouldn't billionaires have deadly entertainment options befitting their wealth?
A migrants boat. Most of the people crossing the Med into Europe are economic migrants but in the past decade it has become known that claiming asylum on arrival (or at least if caught) is a good strategy so many do.
> Refugee immigrants are unable or unwilling to return home for fear or threat of prosecution, and thus, must make a life in the country that gives them refuge. Economic immigrants, on the other hand, are free from this constraint and can return home whenever they so desire.[1]
But then further clarification of the term 'economic migrant' is also interesting:
> The term ‘economic migrant’ has no legal definition. It is not mentioned in any international instruments of migration law.
and
> The inaccurate dichotomy between ‘economic migrants’ and refugees creates two fixed categories and gives the misleading impression that only refugees have and deserve legal protection and rights at the international level.
> Yet, the reality is different and far more complex. Migratory movements are composed of various types of migrants who may have specific protection needs, even if they are not fleeing persecution or a conflict. These include accompanied or unaccompanied migrant children; victims of human trafficking; migrants attempting to reunite with their families; and migrants affected by natural disasters or environmental degradation, including as a consequence of climate change. [2]
[1] https://docs.iza.org/dp1063.pdf [2] https://weblog.iom.int/false-dichotomy-between-economic-migr...
A 'refugee' has a legal definition because this is a status that is created and governed by international treaties, which is what makes it interesting for migrants because in 'nice' countries like in Europe this means that they are protected from deportation while their claim to refugee status is processed, which can take a very long time. They are provided accomodation during that time.
All other migrants are simply people who migrate for whatever reason people move to other countries, which are mainly family and economic reasons. When people from poor countries want to move to rich countries the main reason is very obviously economic. All those migrants fall into normal national laws of the countries they move to, in general this means that if they enter without visas they face a form of arrest and deportation.
That's it. There is indeed in a clear dichotomy. The rest is purely a political/ideological point of view as to whether people have effectively a right to migrate vs. whether countries have a right to decide who to let in.
While another refugee boat sunk is just that.
Might not be true in this case - the very idea of people locked up in a submarine is attention grabbing - but its certainly true for countless similar laments where people will point out the outsized attention a random investment banker getting attacked would get vis-a-vis the many murders in the inner city on any given day.
The Messenia disaster was over by the time it hit the news (and it was covered extensively in the UK press), whereas the Titan situation was ongoing. Watch how quickly it disappears from the news cycle now it's been resolved.
I just want to say, another issue is that to be perfectly honest, we don't like to humanize migrants, nor do we want to examine our culpability in their misfortune and demise. We want to mine resources from foreign countries even if that means destabilizing their governments, but we absolutely do not want to deal with the people fleeing those places whether we had nothing to do with their misfortune or we were in some way complicit.
The misfortune of a few rich guys is much easier for us to process than the avoidable death of hundreds, which was reportedly ultimately caused by the European Coast Guard who attempted to tow the vessel and in doing so supposedly caused it to sink. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/world/europe/greece-migra...
What actually happens in an implosion like this?
Does the whole sub squash down, like stomping on a tin can? (Apologies for the graphic metaphor)
Does buckle in the middle, tear open and flood?
I heard it would be instant, which is a mercy for them.
Stuff like this can not be done without risk.
Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.
It should be safer, but everything is done to a price point and I'm sure those on board recognised the risk of such an expedition.
Optimist.
I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic.
https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/15450925299718184...
https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
Repeatedly cycling carbon fiber in compression is a bad idea, and a CEO that throws out the rulebook and shows a very cavalier attitude to safety is fine if it is just you on board but with paying passengers it is utterly irresponsible.
I'm quite curious about this, too. I'm not so sure. I think even if you are not an engineer, it should be quite easy to understand how under-tested this vehicle is compared to, say, a commercial jet airliner, and how much more difficult the application is at the same time. These were business men running companies of some size. It should come with basic work experience to reason about how proven processes or articles are.
I think it's more likely that the threshold for "you know what? let's take our chances" works differently for different people.
For example: I would never get LASIK eye surgery, safety statistic be damned, because the consequences in the unlikely event of failure are too large for me. And yet many other people know the data just as well and make a different call.
We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.
Even helicopters have a fatal accident rate that's at most 1 per 100,000 flight hours (in the US at least).
This sub seems to have a fatal accident rate of 1 per 1,000 hours at best
Challenger's disaster was the 25th shuttle flight.
Columbia's disaster was the 113th shuttle flight.
I'm pretty sure you could find large numbers of people who would happily climb on board a shuttle mission today, even knowing that history.
For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch.
Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm
But I still hope that this will bring some innovation - in form of stricter regulation for tourism.
Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto.
If we want to explore these oceans we will need to understand how to build lightweight subs that can tolerate extream pressures.
This tragedy will help humanity explore the solar system. I for one salute the explorers who died they have helped push us all forward.
I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert.
Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing.
Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger
As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.
From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure.
No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety.
We should never do this again.
After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.
This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example.
What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion.
It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working.
On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place.
I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.
Would an iPod glued to the inside that played yellow Submarine by the Beatles.
At what range would that be detectable? How long could it last?
Edit: even better this banger on loop https://youtu.be/uzR5jM9UeJA
'FSD' scam killing people and the myriads other problems aside:
1. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/we-need-to-talk-about-tes...
2. https://www.slashgear.com/1075194/whats-up-with-teslas-whomp... https://www.flickr.com/photos/136377865@N05/albums/721576584...
I wouldn't even buy a used carbon fiber road bike.
Would make a great long-overdue post for bustedcarbon.com
Do you feel it? The brain stays alive for 20 seconds after your heart stops. I would imagine your skull doesn't get crushed because fluids are only a tiny bit compressible with that much pressure
I imagine your ribcage would collapse, stopping your heart immediately
I want to climb K2 alone in shorts, don’t cry my loss. I’ll die doing what I love.
what will the insurance payout look like? will there be one to the victims?
I hope at least these souls died instantaneously from an implosion when Comms first dropped.
> We have just had an update from dive expert David Mearns, who says the debris includes "a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible".
> Mearns is a friend of passengers aboard the Titan.
> Mearns has told the BBC that the president of the Explorers Club (which is connected to the diving and rescue community), provided this new information.
(Submitted URL was https://twitter.com/USCGNortheast/status/1671907901542211584)
Considering the current geopolitical weather and the presence of Russian submarines, you'd think the US army would be able to locate the missing object in no time, even with a triangulated location, they failed
Worrying times
https://www.livescience.com/chinese-submarine-record-dive.ht...
However, it sounds like they've had comms issues on most of their previous dives, so perhaps the 1hr 45 is just a red herring here.
The wireless Logitech controller was still in pairing mode.
Titan, oh Titan, the sea's most stalwart knight, Bathed in cold silence, yearning for daylight, A sub of sturdy steel and human determination, Set forth to reveal the past's doomed creation.
A journey steeped in echoes, through waters unknown, Into the abyss, where sun's grace is never shown. Titan searched for the Titanic, a ghost in the haze, Through the endless night, in a chilling ballet's craze.
Beneath the waves, where pressure sways like the titan's fist, Where the sea's lament whispers a chilling tryst, The skeletal Titanic sleeps, in a shroud of mystery, A timeless tale of man's hubris and history.
Titan neared its quest's end, the Titanic in sight, A monolith of memory, veiled in the eternal night. But the sea's cruel clasp tightened, a relentless grip, As the ghost ship waited in stoic fellowship.
A sound then shattered the silence, a mournful sigh, Titan under the pressure, its limits defy. Its hull creaked, it shivered, it began to groan, And in the darkness, Titan was suddenly alone.
In its quest for discovery, to the abyss, it fell, Imploded in silence, no one to bid farewell. Titan and Titanic, now silent together, A testament to humanity's reach and tether.
Two steel giants resting deep below the foam, Far from the surface light, far from home. The Titan's tale echoes through the seafarer's lore, A lesson from the deep, from the ocean floor.
A tale of two Titans, of steel and cold precision, Both met their end in a haunting collision. Under the crushing sea, they found their tomb, In the silent world, where no roses bloom.
Their names will echo, in the salt-tinged spray, Titan and Titanic, forever bound in a tragic ballet. A dance in the deep, where light has no reign, In the realm of the sea, where triumph and tragedy reign.
I appreciate the imagery but you’re in danger of over romanticising the reality: the sea wasn’t cruel. It is nature. The reason this happened, much like with the Titanic, was human hubris.