US Navy detected Titan’s likely implosion

theguardian.com

24 points·quantisan··5 comments

I actually had this concern in an earlier comment… it’s very likely that militaries may already have the capabilities needed but can’t (and probably shouldn’t) disclose them.

It’s the tradeoff between 5 civilians and potentially hundreds or thousands of sailors in wartime.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36416052

It's not even a trade off - if they detected an explosion the people were already dead, the only thing they'd be doing is save some time on search and rescue.

And every article also mentions that the USN told the USCG so the only trade-off is that the average joe learned 3 days after the fact that an implosion occurred.

Finding debris within 3 days of searching actually sounds really fast given how huge the ocean is, how crap cameras are underwater, and that the USCG has to travel to the area. The USN was probably actually extremely helpful for the USCG to find the remains so fast.

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I think the best parallel is the MH370 flight. There's now way will all these spy satellites a flight near China wasn't on some camera/radar the entire time but I bet the USG/partners knew the flight crashed at a high speed and so there's no survivors.

The network was already known. Things that are typically not known are specs.

This has happened before - US Navy was able to pinpoint the exact location of soviet K-129 shipwreck using recordings from spy hydrophone array after they observed search and rescue efforts from soviet navy. It was laying hundreds of kilometers away. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-129_(1960)

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