Well that's better than slowly asphyxiating or dying of hypothermia, probably didn't even know what hit them.
> 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.
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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
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...