LIVE: CBS confirms, debris from Titan submersible indicates rapid and catastrophic implosion. The people on board are believed to be dead.
Debris from missing submarine found near Titanic wreckage; OceanGate believes crew 'have sadly been lost'
I know a lot of people (not here necessarily) have been commenting on how these were rich people, but regardless of their financial situation they were just people first. I don't know anything about them and that being the case I'm going with this being a tragedy. I feel for the families that were left behind.
TBH what gets me angry is the fact literally less than a week before the single biggest sea faring tragedy that hit the Mediterranean sea, and easily one of the top 20 straight up sea tragedy in recent memory happened and literally nobody gave nor is giving a shit.
A boat full of migrants sunk between Greece and Italy, 80 have been confirmed dead, more than 500 are missing, and the worst is, the boat was being surveilled the entire time by Frontex and the Greek coast guard who straight up lied (or chose not to see) the distress the ship was in.
I can understand people lashing out at the death of rich people driven largely by their hubris and trusting a downright irresponsible psycho. In some way its a shadenfreude-like feeling over the overt and indirect violence that average people experience compared to that of the rich. It's distasteful to be sure, but it is what it is. In an unjust society both the exploitor and the exploited are pushed to brutish, revengeful, detached feelings towards one another and broader ressentiment. The solution is the end of exploitation.
You're correct. I feel far worse for the refugees than the billionaires in the sub. But that being said i feel awful for the 19 year old on that ship. I know i would have said yes too because how many people can say "im going on holiday to the titanic" sounds great in concept. He may have been a rich kid but still a kid.
As a rule, I don't compare tragedies by the number of bodies, but I agree with you. It's distasteful, but it is what it is.
It reminds me of the devastating floods in Pakistan that got some attention for sure, but nothing compared to the billions of dollars that was donated within hours of the Notre Dame fire.
The main difference here is their families had the money to fund the publicity and search efforts. The Refugees on that boat that sunk didn't have anyone rich that cared about them.
I just can’t understand why ANYONE with that much money wouldn’t be a little more careful about where they choose to take risk. A little investigation on their part would have turned up the previous safety concerns.
The 19-year-old reportedly told family he was terrified. It was Father's Day and his father is very interested in the Titanic, so he went anyway. He was just trying to impress and relate to his father.
The 19 year old is the one I kind of feel sorry for, but he still made the decision to go down there and it's a decision I really don't think I would've made myself. But who knows 🤷
After a certain point, you consider the risks and have to make a decision weighing the pros and cons of the voyage. Yes, there's a very real chance of death if things go wrong, but there's also a chance for a life changing experience if things go right. For some people, the risk and adventure of it all is entirely the point of life.
As for the money, the $250K is a rounding error to a billionaire. Someone with a net worth of $1B spending $250K is similar to someone with a net worth of $10K spending $2.50 (e.g. about the same as a bottle of soda from a gas station).
I think a lot of people on here would be willing to take a trip to Mars if it came with a 1% chance of death and a 99% chance of the most memorable experience of your life. You'd probably get a lot of people willing to do the same if the chance of death were increased to 10% too, though obviously, many would view the 10% as too risky. If you increased the chance of death to 50% or higher, most people would decline, but there are a number of thrill seeker / adventurer type of personalities out there that would jump on the offer in a heartbeat. It all comes down to your personal risk/reward tradeoff.
I guess the CEO of OceanGate joining them for the dive would have given them a false sense of comfort.
Interestingly, that same CEO mentioned that the Titan submersible was already showing signs of cyclical fatigue back in 2020:
It would be fascinating if we could get an aircraft disaster style analysis but I don't know if they would do so for marine accidents.
I think CEO of the company being on the board made people think all those regulations were just unnecessary red tape. In fact that was what the CEO thinks.
BTW: kind of unrelated, but I find it crazy that CEO's wife lost her parents to Titanic, and now she also lost her husband to it.
I assume they got more arrogant the richer they are. A lot of things that requires thinking and effort were done for them by throwing money around, so why not this dodgy sub?
AFAIK they had already been down to the titanic multiple times, so I can see people thinking it was safe regardless.
Basically gambler's fallacy. The roulette wheel has come up red every time so far so surely the next roll will be red again.
I just read that. I guess that makes a little sense. Crazy, man.
You know, if I were ever to go down to the depth of the ocean with my friends and family on board to see the Titanic, I would make sure that the vehicle I'm riding in is overbuilt for safety and that everything that could go wrong is considered beforehand.
Why take any risk at all? With the amount of money that they had they could have hired an entire crew of an actual submarine for a day or two.
Most submarines/submersibles can't actually get that deep, and of the few that can, some are government run and others are already on other projects.
What made OceanGate's Titan unique is that they were selling expeditions to the Titanic.
Now with all that said, if I had the disposable income to take on such an expedition, $250k sounds way too cheap/good to be true. Unfortunately in this case it was indeed too good to be true.
They understood the risks; there is no question in my mind that they didn't. I think they were bored with what life could offer them with that much money. At a certain point you really can basically experience it all. Instead of going on a tested rocket ship; they gambled the ultimate wager. Their life or bragging rights. Image the tale you could tell coming back from the journey in such a rigged tube; or the publicity of your fatal demise and making a "historical" moment regarding it. The world was watching. Darkly their death reads better than any final service of passing or headstone does.
There’s something inherently dangerous about rare, exclusive experiences. When millions of people do something, like fly commercial, you know it’s going to be pretty safe. When you find yourself going for an experience that only 6 people have ever had, ever, your danger warnings should be going off.
Why take any risk at all? With the amount of money that they had they could have hired an entire crew of an actual submarine for a day or two.
I can't tell you what their motivations were, but I think there were 2 types of people doing this.
I'm speculating on all of this and I don't mean to cast aspersions on the Pakistani guy and his son. For all I know, my analysis could be all wrong.
Do you feel you could make those determinations? I couldn’t. Have you done so for your car? I haven’t. It’s all too common for us to trust that other people know what they’re doing. You can’t always check everything.
I am going to go the opposite way from one of your other replies. I think they did not understand the risks due to their backgrounds at least the customers.
Being rich it's probably been a long time since they have been exposed to consequences of their actions. Or at least serious consequences. Especially the 19 y.o.
Logically an action that is risky because it is inherently dangerous is different than one where the danger is punishment but people are not 100% rational beings. After all lots of people (not just rich ones) do stupid thing like overspeeding, dui etc and do not actually believe themselves to be in danger.
Finally they might believe regulations to be useless because most of the time they are limiting them (their businesses) to protect other people.
Better to die in an instant than the alternative.
I really didn't care too much about what was going on until last night when I realized the horror of sitting in a metal tube, knowing you probably won't be rescued with a ticking timer of when your resources would run out. It seems like the perfect horror movie but irl. I hope implosion was the cause because the alternative has cause my brain to go into a full panic / existential mode and I am just an observer.
Especially considering that one of the alternatives was, because the sub is bolted in from the outside, they could have been bobbing on the surface, suphocating.
one of them had secret connections that allowed them to obtain immortality. They are now permanently trapped down there.
Wouldn't they just fall asleep from hypoxia? I think I'd prefer that to instant implosion.
Thankfully, if the water pressure is enough to crush the steel hull of a submarine, then you'd be obliterated before you could even think about it. That's probably the best way to go in such a situation...
Can't wait for the Internet Historian video in a few years.
I think he would be more interested in covering the Reddit story - he is the internet historian after all.
Hopefully he'll do both
*20 years
Anyway, what did everybody have for lunch today?
Black bean wrap with lettuce, cheddar cheese, mushrooms, onions, and chipotle mayo.
Yummy!
Soft shell tacos.
Ur mom
But that's just a snack.
Pizza rolls! Or logs. Whatever, same thing.
Black bean tacos!
Well I had a nice Pepperoni Lyoner Sandwich
At least they didn't have to suffer for any stretch of time, I hope.
According to submariners in other communities, the worst part would be any period of time where they knew they were sinking. That could be an hour of slowly falling from periscope depth or no time at all if the hull failed at a deep enough depth. The water forms a piston much like one in a truck engine that compresses the air enough to cause combustion. Any of the three things in that nano second will kill you before your body can process the information. The water hammer, the pressure shift, and the implosion all occur too quickly for the nerves to transmit the information.
Sounds like they did not. An update:
A Navy official says "an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion" was detected shortly after the Titan lost contact with the surface. This official said the information was relayed to the Coast Guard team which used it to narrow the radius of the search area.
Before wreckage found: We hear banging every 30 minutes
After wreckage found: We heard a big pop on Sunday
This is actually quite normal, and similar situations have occurred during search and rescues for missing submarines. The ocean carries sound quite well, and hydrophones will inevitably pick up noises of from all sorts of of things if observed for long enough. Add into that the extra noises of the all the search and rescue assets in the vicinity and the natural biases of the human operators to want to decipher patterns from the background noise; false positives are quite typical.
A similar situation happened with the sinking of the USS Thresher. https://www.forces.net/usa/banging-sounds-heard-during-search-sunken-us-submarine-uss-thresher
Am curious how long this has been there and whether perhaps the "banging" was not related whatsoever.
the debris sites indicate the implosion happened relatively soon after descent because the debris had drifted very far away from the Titanic. If they had descended deeper, the implosion would have been closer.
I heard the banging sound happened at 30 minute intervals for a while, but also the banging sounds could've been from one of the many search boats that were searching near the acoustic bouy
I believe they confirmed in the press conference the bangs were not related due to where the debris was found.
They did.
The underwater banging noises that were picked up by the authorities earlier this week do not appear to have had any relation to the site of the submersible’s wreckage. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor” where the debris was found, Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.
So, I understand that because water is not compressible, animals without air in their bodies are safe at such high pressures in the deep sea, but what I'm wondering is what would it look like if a human in the deep sea was suddenly exposed to those pressures, as would happen if a submarine rapidly pressurizes? I know the lungs would collapse and whatnot because the air would be pressurized into I'm guessing a liquid, like how propane sloshes when under pressure in a tank, but what else? What causes the instant death? Maybe the water shoots into nose/mouth so fast it acts like a bullet and applies a bunch of force to the walls internally?
These are styrofoam cups that've been crushed by the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. The water isn't looking for your nose, it'd just crush your outsides into your insides until you hit a relative density, like the cup, but not as pretty. The air in your lungs would instantly compress and heat to several thousand degrees C, turning your insides back into your outsides. I think.
I wonder if this is truly correct. By default human body is mostly water and made of things deniser than water. If water rapidly flows into the submersible, that might compress the air inside and cause the lungs to explode basically from the pressure differential in the chest cavity? Styrofoam in contrast is less dense and compressible.
Holy shit and all of that happens within 2 nanoseconds I think? So that's why the victims in that submarine wouldn't even know it already happened because our brain takes 4 nanoseconds before we could process that pain.
Ah okay that makes sense.
If it was truly a rapid implosion as described by the Navy, then the whole thing will have crumpled like a steam implosion in which case, everyone inside is likely immediately dead from blunt force trauma.
During the implosion you’ll have to contend with the walls of the sub and the water rushing it at a high percentage of mach 1 if not at supersonic speeds. That includes shards of carbon fibre and the big heavy titanium end plates. The air bubble inside will also be compressed to well above 400 atmospheres as the inertia of the incoming water causes an over pressure scenario. This compression heats up that air bubble to temperatures were a plasma is formed and for a brief moment the imploding sub would be the only visible light source down there. Basically anyone in there at the time is converted to a red mist. Think A-train running through that chick at the start of the boys, or that kid flying through that sheriff in brightburn for an idea of the result.
what I’m wondering is what would it look like if a human in the deep sea was suddenly exposed to those pressures, as would happen if a submarine rapidly pressurizes?
Kinda depends on how fast 'rapid' is. Consider that the pressure difference between the outside and the inside volume of the sub represents a potential energy. At a depth of 4km for a sub that size you're talking about the energy equivalent of about 50 kilos of TNT (thanks to Scott Manley's live stream for the estimate ).
That's a lot of energy even if the release is relatively slow, which means that the forces pushing things around as everything comes to equilibrium are quite large. There might be a rate at which the forces are low enough to not significantly damage a human body, but also fast enough that the people won't drown before the target pressure has been reached. As a guess, an average untrained person under normal conditions could probably last at most 2 to 3 minutes before beginning to drown (an extremely well-prepared person can last 24 minutes 37.36 seconds, the current underwater breath hold record), so that's like 22 psi per second (equivalent to a descent rate of about 45 feet per second or 30 mph, pretty damn fast).
I'm skeptical that this would be survivable, and at a minimum it would be extremely painful. As the pressure increases the air in the lungs would compress collapsing the lungs. That alone isn't a huge problem, breath-holding free divers experience that. However, as the air is compressed the volumes in the skull (nasal sinuses and inner ears) could no longer be pressure-equalized by forcing air into them, so the surrounding tissues would be pressed into them. As anyone who's flown while congested can tell you even a few pounds of pressure is extraordinarily painful. At 22 psi per second I suspect the forces would at least tear nasal sinus and inner ear tissues, and possibly crack skull bone.
Souplike homogenate
Much better way to go right. Better than having sit in there for days.
Congratulations the the 5 latest Darwin Award winners.
There’s a whole lot of hindsight happening in this thread. “They should have known. They ignored the risks. I would have done better.”
If James Cameron had died on his deep sea expedition, people would have said all the same things. He didn’t, so we all just lauded him for being a badass.
Hindsight is 20/20!
Except James Cameron didn't willfully ignore the existing collective knowledge of the industry, did not set out to completely ignore basic safety in the name of "innovation" (read: being a cheap ass), didn't actively fire people who gave the slightest shit about safety, the list goes on and on and on. The CEO was some techbro moron who payed for his own hubris. It's unfortunate anyone but him had to die to prove literally everyone but him right, except maybe the two millionaires being the incarnation of bourgeois stupidity and hubris too.
I feel bad for the french oceanographer and the 19 year old. I sneer at the two billionaires. I laugh at the CEO. I also feel bad for the taxpayers who had to shell out millions of dollar in the rescue effort, a rescue which honestly, while legally necessary, was morally arguable given the track record of the company to shit all over government regulations. At least their death was humane and quick (instantaneous really)
Glad they found something, and that they probably didn't suffer.
quick and painless, probably better than they deserved.
Bruh wat
With the current news surfacing (so to speak) about neglect and dismissal of safety concerns by the owner, that lawsuit is potentially going to be massive.
Oceangate is broke with no assets. There's nothing to sue.
And there's nobody to pierce the veil on and sue directly because the captain went down with the ship too.
Surely all this publicity will have their business booming in no time, though, and profits rolling right in /s
This is, admittedly, news to me. As someone who served on a submarine in the Navy I know first hand how serious neglect is. It can, and has in this case, kill everyone. It's not slow either. If you are negligent about anything for even a second everyone is dead. It's just a shame the person/people responsible also took innocent life. Preventable and inexcusable.