https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna90336
good thing we put so much effort into saving a billionaire with a deathwish while we let all these poor people die. Good thing so many peasants were more interested in a billionaire’s life than our brothers and sisters the billionaires oppress and exploit out of proud, insatiable, sociopathic greed.
Thanks for sharing the link. Fewer deaths is definitely less tragic than more deaths, but less tragedy makes it easier to talk about - it’s not a judgement.
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I find it incredibly sad that the teen, Sulemon Dawood, only agreed to go on the trip to appease his father. Left on his own, the teen was not interested in going. And although I’m saddened to hear all five perished, the four older adults made their own independent decisions to take the risk. I feel an extra sense of sadness for the teen though who was influenced by his father into going.
“catastrophic loss of pressure”?
Wouldn’t it be a catastrophic increase of pressure? They were at the bottom of the ocean.
Yes? I want to agree, it’s an increase of pressure from the surrounding waters.
No, it’s catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber, the thing that keeps the squishy humans inside separate from the tons-per-square-inch of water outside.
Nope. The air pressure on the inside of a submarine is close to ~1 bar = ~1 atmosphere.
Yes, that’s correct. The pressure chamber is the hull that separates the 1 atm of pressure inside from the 375 atm of water outside. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
Turns out I’m to drunk to read. Sorry, I misread the headline. Man, I hate english writing words separately…
No worries, had a feeling it was something like that. It also doesn’t help that there’s a line break between “pressure” and “chamber” (at least on my screen), so it’s an easy mistake to make.
Same line break on my screen. Thanks, that’s one more thing to blame.
Look at this interaction, just look at it. Everyone playing nice, nothing toxic in sight. If this were Reddit we’d have started a flamewar.
I freaking love Beehaw, stay classy Beeple.
You need high internal pressure to not implode, I guess that’s what they mean
No? It’s the hull of the vessel that counters the outside pressure. The main reason to use a submarine, instead of scuba diving, is to shield yourself from the pressure. If the inside pressure was even close the the outside, which it would have to be to keep it from imploding, you wouldn’t need the submarine at all; you’d be crushed regardless.
At the depth of the Titanic, roughly 4000 m, the water pressure is ~400 bar. The record for highest survived air pressure is around 70 bar. That was for 2 hours, breathing a special gas mixture of 99,5% hydrogen and 0,5% oxygen.
I find it highly unlikely that they’d rely on the inside air pressure for anything other than the comfort of the passengers.
The hull needs to have high pressure internally, which adds to the strength of a vehicle like this.
With all the red flags I’ve seen in the 4 days of them looking for it, I cannot understand how anyone spending that kind of money on this didn’t see enough to back the fuck off.
It does seem like Oceangate advertised in a misleading way, emphasizing claims of safety and compliance with safety standards. There’s also probably an unfortunate bias, of sorts, of “rich and powerful man saying something is safe in a confident and authoritative voice so it must be true”
Main character syndrome, wealth-induced hubris
i’m sorry but the cables on the OUTSIDE of the sub? hell even just LOOKING at the damn thing. And once I saw the controller I’d be out so quick.
The controller was probably the least problematic aspect of the whole thing, and that’s saying something given that they were relying on fucking Bluetooth at the bottom of the ocean.
Better that than them surviving all that time slowly dying on the seabed.
If it were me or one of my loved ones, aside from rescue, this may be the best outcome.
They went down there, where hundreds of people from the titanic died in a boat called titan…
Maybe in the future, some quadrillionaires will go down there explore the titan in a boat called tit.
(Too soon?)
Also both had a lot of iron in their structure. One might call them ironic.
Wow! Like the Simpsons!
A Simpsons writer was a former passenger on the billionaire death sub. Makes you wonder how much money Simpsons writers make. He said he knew it was janky and he was taking a risk getting in the thing.
I feel sorry for thecreww members who were just there to drive the thing, but the rich I could care less and I’m pretty hungry
The CEO/founder was the operator.
I still don’t think this is anything to celebrate though.
This is incredibly sad but at least it was a quick death.
A sudden implosion is the best-case scenario, given how else it could have gone.
Better that than suffocating to death slowly on the bottom of the ocean. Sympathy for their families.
Hypoxia is way better than drowning
Nobody drowned, they were instantaneously squished under the massive pressure of the deep sea
Yea by the time water could’ve gotten to their lungs their lungs no longer existed.
Not actually correct in this case. Hypoxia is only painless if oxygen is displaced with an inert gas like nitrogen. Our bodies detect low oxygen indirectly via chemoreceptors that detect the increase in blood acidity (respiratory acidosis) induced by high carbon dioxide (hypercapnia).
As humans breathe in a sealed environment, oxygen is replaced with CO2. Hypercapnia is what causes the panic and pain of drowning prior to inhalation of water. Consciousness is lost mere seconds after water inhalation.
Drowning and hypercapnic asphyxiation are essentially the same experience in terms of suffering.
Secondary outcomes and resuscitation are a different story, but are obviously not applicable here.
Okay, so I am gonna check those two off my lists of ways I want to die.
I think I read something about the sub having a CO2 scrubber which would mean their bodies wouldn’t feel the lack of oxygen due to what you explained, but I know nothing about this.
This is a good question! Not sure which precise units they had and in what quantity, but given the size of the Titan (no way they can support liquid regenerative system with their size and energy reserve constraints), they would have had canister containing solid CO2 adsorbent with a fan (example).
Without the fan, it’s not going to be very effective since CO2 has to actually pass over the solid. Passive diffusion is not going to move the same volume of CO2 over the solid even if the solid was removed from the housing. Even if they didn’t run out of battery, The solid has a maximum capacity - about 7.5 kg for the unit linked above. Even with reserve capacity, an average human exhales ~0.97 kg of CO2 per day.
O2 to CO2 exchange via respiration is mole for mole (you do lose a little mass in carbon and water just by breathing!). Atmospheric CO2 is 0.041% (410 ppm) and O2 is a hair under 21% and that’s the standard to which life support systems are held. Humans lose consciousness at around 3.7% oxygen, but experience hypercapnia at >6% CO2. (Physiology nerds - I converted from the partial pressures in mmHg to % of 1 atm for comprehension)
So in this hypothetical scenario, hypercapnia would definitely precede loss of consciousness due to anoxia.
Well the fact that they are saying it was a catastrophic implosion leads to the thought that it was crushed in a very short amount of time maybe even a few seconds so I doubt they had time to drown.
It’s not a few seconds, it’s a very small fraction of a second. The Thresher imploded in 1/20th of a second at 730 meters. We don’t know for sure how far down Titan was when it imploded, but based on the time they lost signal, I’m guessing around 3500 meters, so we’re talking about 4-5 times as much force. Plus the hull was made of extremely brittle carbon fiber, so it wouldn’t buckle at all, it would just collapse all at once. It’s hard to overstate how much force we’re talking about; at that depth, it’s about equivalent to building the Empire State building out of lead and sitting it on top of the ship with no other supports.
It’s not just that they didn’t have time to drown; it would have imploded so quickly that they would have been dead before their brains even had time to process that something was happening.
They would have died (or at the very least, lost consciousness) from the pressure long before they drown.
For those wondering about James Cameron’s comments, I’d thoroughly recommend watching the Deep Sea Challenger documentary. It is enthralling. I have a friend who actually worked on the sub and went on the expedition with Cameron. In his words: “to underestimate the safety requirements is, put simply, to die.”
Nice going with the breaking report. At least they went painlessly.
I do feel awful for their families. But I feel more awful for the refugees in the Mediterranean.
The CEO’s wife lost her parents to Titanic and now also her husband.
Her parents? Wouldn’t that make her more than 110 years old…?
It was her great great grandparents
Maybe he kept her in a liquid nitrogen cooled hyperbaric chamber, like Mr. Freeze.
I think they were her grandparents.
You’re right my bad.
i’m just glad this whole thing is over. what a sick world we live in where five billionaires in a submarine sparks wall to wall coverage and five hundred migrants gets barely a passing mention
4 billionaires and one guys 19 year old kid.
Definitely shows where the media’s priorities lie, ie the wealthy lamenting the loss of their own
In my country, they started the newscast 2h earlier than usual just to say “Debris were found; may be unrelated”. I think they initially went live earlier because the conference was meant to happen earlier and they couldn’t wait to show it; it had to be live. When it got postponed, they spent 2h just talking about it with commentators and different specialists; all just theorizing what could have happened, and whether there might still be a chance for rescue or not, and repeating that there would be a conference “so stay tuned!”.
But refugees you barely hear about.
I get this story has some more “thrill” and novelty to it, being a submarine near the titanic and all, but this really is ridiculous.
The more prosaic explanation – bordering on “banality of evil,” but still – is that a story about a rickety overloaded fishing boat full of desperate war refugees sinking in the Mediterranean has become a fairly common occurrence in the years since the Arab Spring turned into a decade of civil wars, but whiz-bang private subs going missing while diving on the most famous shipwreck of all time is unusual. Horses vs. zebras and all that.
Yup. Also why do people want more media attention on this. It’s not going to stop the human traffickers from overloading their boats. It’s not that no one did anything. The coast guards and navies of multiple countries acted as soon as they became aware the boat sank and as a result saved a ton of people. Would people really be happier if we had end to end coverage of a disaster that had no mystery to it just an all too common occurrence of lives being lost fleeing Africa and the Middle East dangerously.
I think it’s more how uncommon the situation is, the complexity and odds of the rescue, and the ‘ticking clock’ effect that came from them only having 96 hours of oxygen. Stories need to be interesting to get mass media coverage (look at the Tham Luang cave rescue - none of them were billionares), and, as incredibly bleak as this sentence sounds, a boat capsizing with hundreds onboard just isn’t interesting enough.
Yea it’s totally not that every major news outlet is owned by and serves the interests of the rich.
Not to say that that idea itself isn’t saddening
Interesting enough to get a gaggle of billionaires in a bolted metal box and explore the capsized boat. 🤨
There’s also a sort of morbid fascination and curiosity that comes from a situation this unique. I definitely agree that of course the sinking refugee ship should have gotten far more help and attention, but I think the “morbid curiosity” element is certainly part of why this got so much attention. The whole situation of paying a fortune for visiting the Titanic in a janky unregulated submersible and then vanishing underwater is…bizarre, and surreal, in a way that captures attention
I still can’t get over how janky that tin can felt to me when I was looking into it. Not even getting into the safety cuts, the whole picture felt cheap. The Poop-Bucket a foot away and audibly masked with turning up the music; five people sitting cross-cross applesauce on basically an exercise mat in cramped real estate; working with two desktop monitors and a Logitech controller; the CEO explicitly bragging about cutting corners and breaking rules.
I think that even if the sub more closely resembled expectations and even if the CEO was on top of safety, the story would’ve still been a quick sell on mass media. A sub exploring the Titanic going missing invokes the kind of visuals and what-ifs that start to depart reality and arrive to movie territory. Add the schadenfreude to it and the minivan as described above and that movie becomes a sort of dark humor comedy blended with horror.
I think that this story makes for a good sideshow to gawk at. It’s also a good vehicle to laugh at the rich. The shipwreck in the Mediterranean, as much as it demands our attention in contrast, is much more grounded in reality—hard and painful realities—that I think a sizable chunk of society gets squeamish about. It demands we answer questions and take actions that certain someones would rather we don’t.
Agree, I don’t think much of the coverage at all had to do with “Oh no, look at the poor rich people in trouble!” And had a lot more to do with the potential for a Hollywood style life-saving mission.
Were all of them billionaires? I can’t imagine the people actually operating the thing were, surely, just the passengers?
it was literally just the five of them
Maybe we should send another 150 or so subs, also filled with 5 billionaires each.
The CEO was the pilot.
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The pilot may not have been, although anyone described as an “explorer” is pretty likely to be wealthy. Three of the other four (including the CEO) were, and the last was one of the billionaire’s 19 year old son.
It sucks that 4 other people were killed by the CEOs own hubris. But at least they don’t appear to have suffocated to death. At that depth, it would have been instantaneous.
Yeah, that was my concern when we got reports of regular banging noises.
Is the general thought that the banging noises was the vessel imploding…?
Unlikely, implosion makes a very different sound. It could be almost anything. Might have been parts of the wreckage getting moved around by currents and knocking together, might have been some undersea life bumping into the wreck of the Titanic, might have been completely unrelated.
Wonder what made the banging noises…?
The phrase “red herring” originated because the u.s. navy mistook fish noises for incredibly stealthy russia submarines for years :P
Could be anything
“Red herring” as a term originates from the early 1800s. Although you’re absolutely right on the larger point; the ocean is noisy and sound carries, there’s no telling what it was.
What if the banging was them trying to crack the window to avoid suffocating?
Implosions require a lot of pressure, so whatever took them out did it while they were still deep.
My guess is it happened as they approached extreme depths. Metal fatigue and poor design aren’t always instantly apparent, but they stack up exponentially. The same way the CEO had piloted it down before he did again, then BANG and done. Would have been practically instant and without warning.
Worth pointing out that only the end caps were metal (and titanium at that, which is already brittle), while the bulk of the hull was carbon fiber, which doesn’t
gradually fatiguebend and buckle, it fails catastrophically.Also, they lost signal at 1 hour and 45 minutes into a ~2 hour dive. I don’t know how much their dive rate varied, but if we assume it was effectively constant, that puts them at ~3500 meters at LOS.
Combining those two points, two to three years after building the ship, they identified cyclic fatigue in the carbon fiber that reduced their calculated rating to 3000 meters. Since that’s not enough to get to Titanic, they completely rebuilt the ship, two years ago.
So yeah, I think you’re right. With the public facts available, I think the most likely scenario is the carbon fiber hull was fatiguing again, they decided to trust their acoustic/strain monitoring system that they believed would give them enough warning to resurface (which the guy they fired in 2018 said might only give them warnings milliseconds before there was a problem), and it failed somewhere below 3000 meters.
Definitely not. For one, the banging was heard a couple days ago, when there would still have been hope of rescue. Two, if 375 atmospheres of pressure hasn’t broken it, you’re not going to break it with whatever random stuff you can find. And three, although we don’t know that the implosion happened at loss of signal, it’s more likely than them losing signal and then imploding at some later point.
Edit: Should also add that if the sonar buoys that the search team dropped were able to hear them banging on the hull, they would almost certainly have also heard the implosion. Given that it imploded, it’s much more likely that it happened before the buoys were deployed.
