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Besides the "what about this other accident with 500 victims!!!", "these people are dumb", and the "look how they ignored safety!" comments, I can't help but be amazed at how events like this make people crawl out of the woodworks spouting complete falsities as if they're facts. I've seen so many boneheaded comments over the last few days that I don't even know how to list all of them out, from people saying that Titanic is "relatively shallow" in the ocean, to people speculating that the passengers may have drowned as opposed to being /literally/ instantly vaporized. I think, per usual, this whole event has gone to show just how quickly (some) people assume an authoritative position in areas they have absolutely no expertise or knowledge about. Rant over.

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>vaporized

I mean, that’s not what happens either.

I would assume 5700 PSI of water pressure jetting through any breach would qualify as "vaporised", on top of the structure collapsing.

5700 pounds of pressure per square inch. Ouch.

I saw someone on reddit insisting they were doomed because the hatch didn't open from the inside.

Opening the hatch? At 13,000 feet below sea level?!

There's some merit to this. The hatch not opening from the inside means that even if they did manage to reach the surface of the ocean, if they didn't find their way back to either their own mothership or something else capable of opening the hatch from the outside they still would have died due to lack of oxygen when the oxygen ran out.

I think the concern there is that they would be able to surface but not control the craft then drift somewhere and eventually suffocate.

It apparently had dissolving straps on a ballast so it would (almost) surface on its own in case of issues.

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.

would they be vaporized or instantly compacted? my morbid curiosity kind of wants to see what would happen to a body under such insane pressure conditions.

As I understand it: the pressure vessel was full of air, and at the moment it failed, that air-filled space became the equivalent of the cylinder of a 2-stroke engine, instantly heating as the air compressed.

You probably meant diesel engine. The compression pressure of those is around 300-500psi, and that's sufficient to heat the air to a few hundred degrees and ignite the injected fuel.

For comparison, what happened in this sub was 10x that pressure.

(Yes, 2-stroke diesels also exist, and sound absolutely amazing.)

Ignoring inertia (the water hammer effect), the air would reach 38,000 F, four times the temperature on the surface of the sun.

Much higher than that. The external pressure was ~6000psi, but water has inertia. The peak pressure as the bubble imploded was many orders of magnitude higher than that.

Correct. Except it is heated to a much, much higher temperature.

You're in luck, the Mythbusters tried this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEY3fN4N3D8

... and that was like, a couple hundred feet. The Titanic is at 12,500 feet. An unfathomable amount of pressure.

objection, that is clearly 2083 1/3 fathoms of pressure.

12500 ft is 2083.33 fathoms.

This reply is leagues ahead.

What other nautical-related terms are a part of common speech?

I'm tying myself in knots trying to think of one.

Those are two different meaning of the same word though, and the one in your usage is not specifically nautical, so I’m not sure it qualifies. But a good pun nonetheless.

> Those are two different meaning of the same word though, and the one in your usage is not specifically nautical,

So it was ... notical?

These puns are so deep

There is so much pressure to come up with one.

Ah -- I was confused for like 10 minutes by this comment, since technical divers have gone as deep as 1,000 ft without "anymore than a wet suit" and commercial divers go beyond 300 feet all the time. It isn't the absolute pressure that's the problem (in this video)

Comments about years of ignoring safety are not stupid, neither are comments comparing to other more working-class tragedies.

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.

They actual said "besides" those comments, meaning "other than".

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.

I’m working on the right way to express this correctly but it seems to me pretty reliable that willingness to comment in public on any topic makes it much more likely that the commenter is demonstrably wrong / an extremist.

Maybe, but what's the likelihood that you're just demonstrably wrong / an extremist?

It happens :)

I do on occasion ramble on with unpopular opinions or say things which are probably incorrect

In that case, maybe you're just human like the rest of us.

There was never an indication the comment was supposed to be excluded from the generality. If anything, this thread is just showing it to be more likely (me included). The only way not to show it as such is to get an actual expert on the topic to post an informed opinion with reasoning or citations. This, as the original comment suggested, seems much less likely than us continuing to talk about it instead :).

It's amazing how fast everyone goes from being covid/vaccine experts to {flavor of the week} experts to submersible experts.

There are experts on every topic, you shouldn't be surprised to hear from them when that is the topic of discussion.

Conveniently, my fairly average high school graduating class of around 350 has dozens of experts on nearly any popular topic.

> to people speculating that the passengers may have drowned

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.

Who died and made you the authority on layman terms? I'm pretty sure most people if they heard "drowned" would assumed that it was because they had water in their lungs

Agree, am layman. Dying in a fire underwater is not drowning.

> Who died and made you the authority on layman terms?

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 really don't think that's true at all. I consider drowning to be inhaling water and being unable to breathe, not just any death that happens underwater, and I imagine most people would think the same.

Sure. The people who said they have drowned probably think the same. But it doesn’t mean that they have carefully considered all the possible failure modes of a submersible and postulating that one which leads to a drowning is the most likely in this case. It expresses more a vibe that the speaker thinks they are dead.

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”?

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