The Deep Sea (2019)
neal.fun
neal.fun
The ship's final action report:
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/NHC/NewPDFs/USN/Action%20re...
"The crew were informed over the loud speaker system at the beginning of the action, of the Commanding Officer's estimate of the situation, that is, a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected, during which time we would do what damage we could. In the face of this knowledge the men zealously manned their stations wherever they might be, and fought and worked with such calmness, courage, and efficiency that no higher honor could be conceived than to command such a group of men."
Which... is kinda weird to me, like with space missions, I'd expect them to launch probes or permanent unmanned observation things down there. Surely they can transfer data through water efficiently enough?
I can imagine they don't want to use nuclear power (like a RTG) on those though, which limits lifetime. A cable going to the surface will be difficult as well, because of its own weight and currents.
Actually, no. Water absorbs most of the electromagnetic spectrum pretty well, severely limiting the communication range. So you're limited to low frequencies or acoustic communication. Both have a low bandwidth, so forget live video footage.
I am not sure you would need that much bandwidth from down there, though - I really can't see that much happening that quickly at the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
For example, what if the image was a pic of various graphs and stats of the status of the machine, but at the same time other critical information is encoded in the image of a Status-Page/Dashboard style KPI image?
How do you propose sending it?
Better yet, is if the image is of a flase map of current in-situ..
So an stegano can give you image ..> code ..Def=code.. image.. infor, it may require more itereations... look into it.
What? Why do you believe this?
From an information theory perspective, you’re talking nonsense.
Try a wiki
You need to revisit information theory and the physical and data-link layers of networking.
It looks like now, at least 3 more people have been to the Challenger Deep than have been to the moon (24 orbited it, only 12 landed on it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_descended_t...
That's more than the 12 who have walked on the moon.
Higher trophic level predators have adapted to bounce dive or undergo their own DVM to match and have to deal with cold, low oxygen (although hypoxia can be ecologically limiting in some areas), but the pressure, which isn't that big of a deal especially if you have limited air spaces.
Once you can dive to 600-1000 m the pressure differential is not that much greater to go a bit deeper compared to at shallower depths (relative difference between 800-1600 m is the same as 0-10m).
There appear to be other functional behaviours besides foraging that push the physiological limits of these animals, for example the webpage has the typical daytime depths of swordfish of 550m which is accurate and they will stay there from dawn to dusk typically, but very rarely they will bounce dive 1000m - 1400m+. Possibly, although not confirmed, related to the need to calibrate navigational faculties.
That said, this is pretty cool. It's made me think how for humans and many other animals, moving 10, 100, even thousands of kilometers horizontally is not a very big deal. But move vertically, and you effectively find yourself in a different world within as little as a few hundred meters.
This observation reminded me of 'Dragon's Egg', the SF novel about a civilization on the surface of a neutron star. Because of the intense magnetic field, movement in the east-west direction was easy but very difficult in the north-south direction.
I also went snorkeling in Hawaii once in cove that had deep areas easily over 10m. Even looking down at that depth could be disorienting and anxiety-inducing.
A hundred meters is technical SCUBA diving depth. A few hundred meters is where military subs hang out, and not much below. A kilometer is crush depth for all but the sturdiest military submarines and special deep-diving vehicles.
I can pop my ears at will in Air, but underwater, at 12' the pain is intense, and I cant normalize. I couldnt imagine say, 30' deep or anything more.
The Deep Sea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29290204 - Nov 2021 (45 comments)
The Deep Sea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850527 - Dec 2019 (96 comments)
The Deep Sea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21787563 - Dec 2019 (1 comment)
The Deep Sea (Scrolling Experience) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774643 - Dec 2019 (1 comment)
Space Elevator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629972 68 days ago | 210 comments
... and still they did not abort the dive. In fact, they continued to go even deeper. Think about that for a second.
That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of. No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years. I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today.
Uhm, OceansGate?
[1]From Schlock Mercenary's "Seventy Maxims of Maximially Effective Mercenaries".
https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...
The crew of the Trieste continued to descend knowing full well that their vessel was damaged.
That's not the same thing in my mind.
I feel like OceanGate did not really pay that much attention to window safety.
There was nothing abstract whatsoever about the lack of adequate preparation and responsibility taken: they did not certify, and they used components that were not rated for the depths of their dives, among many other things. This was not ignorance. This was boldly deciding not to care about safety. They ignored very vocal and direct outspoken concerns from all their peers in the industry for years, specific concerns about what they were doing that was not safe, and they ignored that too. Not abstract.
A reckless teenager driving at 120mph on the highway with no seatbelt is obviously in serious danger, but to their young, impulsive mind the danger may feel completely abstract.
The guts it takes to not abort the dive seems just clinically insane to me
> Observation of the sea outside the craft was conducted directly by eye, via a single, very tapered, cone-shaped block of Plexiglas, the only transparent substance identified which would withstand the external pressure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design
> At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside wasmore than 6 tons per sqare inch., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline....
They died all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions
I don't know why that's laudable: if you die before you make it back, for most of these locations, that means whatever you've learned is lost as well, and someone has to take identical risk to learn it for humanity again.
Seems to be better to see the cracked pane, return to the surface with your lives, write a letter to your submarine enthusiast magazine group or whatever the equivalent of a web forum was back then noting that such and such glass installed in such and such way cracked at N depth, try a new method, and dive again.
> No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years.
Why bother when the ocean is infinitely more interesting?
At least that's what I'd tell myself.
This article describes it in more detail: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-t...
I love all his projects! The one called "spend Bill Gate's money" is really funny too. He also curates a site that collects similar fun projects
[1] https://github.com/callumacrae/transform-when
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171203224250/https://samknows....
> The wreck of Samuel B. Roberts lies at a depth of 6,895 meters (22,621 ft; 4.284 mi), making her the deepest known shipwreck and the deepest shipwreck ever identified by a crewed submersible. It exceeds the previous record of 6,469 meters (21,224 ft; 4.020 mi), set in March 2021 when Vescovo's team found and identified the wreck of the destroyer USS Johnston, which was sunk in the same battle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Samuel_B._Roberts_(DE-413)...
This is all compounded by the fact the deep ocean is very cold so as a submersible descends there's a thermal gradient with "survivable" on the inside and sun-zero on the outside. Temperature differentials interact with the pressures because the atmospheric pressure and low temperature will both cause material to compress/contract. The whole vessel structure needs to be able to remain structurally sound with all of that expansion and contraction.
The submersible is also in salt water which corrodes different materials and can cause electrical shorts. A submersible could have a few successful missions then fail because some corrosion was missed on an inspection.
Building a manned or unmanned device to travel to and return from an extreme environment is really hard. You need to understand or at least make educated guesses about the target environment, understand your building materials, your construction processes, validate and bench test as much as possible, and have the same amount of thought go into actual operations. "Fuck it we'll do it live" is not a recipe for success.
[1] http://mirounga.ucsc.edu/leboeuf/pdfs/PatternDepthofDives.19... (pdf warning)
the sea must be much emptier than it seems.
I do think finding extremophiles in the solar system is a distinct possibility (Titan seems like a good bet) but I'm doubtful any of it will be multicellular.
I'd bet (at least a small amount of money) that life, at least the most basic unicellular life, will pop up wherever the requisite materials exist in environments where they're not immediately destroyed but have enough external energy to facilitate some more energy intensive chemical reactions.
Jupiter's atmosphere (to me) seems just as likely a place for life to form as the surface of Titan. It would be harder for us to find that life since the environment is so demanding compared to our level of technology. The surface of Titan or Europa are much easier exploration targets relative to Jupiter's atmosphere.
Go to high enough pressure and the very polymers of life begin to break. It becomes energetically favorable for proteins to be decomposed to individual amino acids, due to their now exposed charged ends assisting in compressing water.
Edit: Maybe the author can also include: the deepest freedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Nitsch which is something truly remarkable as well.
It amazes me that a film director is one of the about 8 people to have been that deep.
Bit like Musk with spacex before he went off the crazy end with his twitter nonsense.
If you took elephant seal from the surface and teleported it 2km deep underwater, it would die a horrible death.