MISSING TITAN SUB - THREAD 5

[tortoishelll]

Thread 5 - a continuation.

My heart aches for those poor men and their families. 💔😔

Pompeii and others aren't 2.5 miles underwater at massive PSI with people
Paying £125000 to
Visit .

The fact it's on the bottom of the ocean should really say it all .

It sank in dangerous waters .

It's in the ocean bed 2.5 miles down .
Is it not just common sense that tourism to its wreck is just not safe ?

James Cameron, who has been to the Titanic site 33 times, and took years designing the sub they used, has some good points to make on the safety aspects of the expedition.
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1671965549381689533?s=19

https://www.fastcompany.com/40406673/the-man-who-wants-to-send-us-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean

He was apparently using his wealthy paying passengers to “monetize the process of proving the technology” so that he could eventually earn $$$ from exploiting it for oil and gas exploration.

Does anyone else find it ironic there people posting 9 pages deep on the 5th thread about this event to ‘call out’ others and their reactions to the news.

I can not get excited about a bunch of stupid very wealthy men / thrill seekers who think it's a good idea to go to the bottom of an ocean in a metal tube at vast expense with zero regulation. Oh and take your teenager. Who didn't want to go. That's manslaughter.

Agree, the thread has descended into chaos. But I don’t think it’s wrong to be invested in the event, it’s human endeavour gone catastrophically wrong and at best we can learn something about ourselves. Humans are not always great at assessing risk or making informed decisions and we are seeing evidence of that here.

I also don’t think it’s wrong to put every effort into rescuing people, all people, from the sea or ocean, no matter the circumstances. That has been a tacit understanding for hundreds of years and we need that to continue.

About why this one imploded, it was a part carbon fibre pressure hull that hadn’t been used before. I have some understanding of carbon fibre in the context of cycling, there there can be sudden failures of the material in bike frames and the fatigue of the material is not yet fully understood. It’s incredibly strong for its weight, but also very brittle in in comparison to the traditional titanium. I think that when the experts wrote to Oceangate with their concerns about the experimental approach, the use of this material for a pressure hull was at the core of it.

To me, it seems like the company used a ‘move fast and break things’, Silicon Valley inspired philosophy that is not a good fit for this context.

But that's an entirely different argument (accessibility and safety). Some people on here however say it's unethical to visit the Titanic as it's a place of mass tragedy and a graveyard. Well, so are other places that people regularly visit.

When it's such a small number of people in total, 1 or 2 is still a reasonable proportion. It's fewer than 200, but there isn't an exhaustive list AFAIK, so I was wondering if you have access to actual information on numbers

Interesting interview with Bob Ballard who discovered the wreck of the Titanic and also the Bismark

It's the first time he thinks anything like this has happened in the history of deep sea submersibles.

I think it’s supposed to be short for ‘ridiculous’. Or possibly ‘rediculous’. (A surprising number of people seem to think that’s how you spell it).

We don't know why it imploded. We are unlikely to ever be sure, because the damage caused by the implosion will have essentially vaporised anything that might have provided evidence.

Speaking of which, I’m wondering if the stepson of Hamish Harding is still being ridiculous on Twitter but I daren’t look.

'Aid in our knowledge' of what? What is it we learn , that is so useful to society, from a ship that sank after hitting an iceberg 111 years ago?

Does anyone else find it ironic there people posting 9 pages deep on the 5th thread about this event to ‘call out’ others and their reactions to the news.

Well no. The first thread could only have been started a few days ago???? Not everyone is on mumsnet every day, I’m probably on once or twice a week.

Maybe there’s something in that though, those that spend a lot time on here, have more time to be on SM, are the sort to get obsessed with things like this and post inappropriate emojis and say they have to come to terms with things that are far removed from them.

This is absolutely nonsense. The titanic is underwater and not accessible unless by submarine. Where as other sites exist in the world and are part of cities and daily life. Having some experience working on archaeological sites not all are considered the same and there's definitely a difference.

There is a huge difference to visiting a 2000 year old site which has been 'distirbed' for so much of that time vs the wreck of the titanic which is decaying in the ocean without human intervention.

If you can't see how one is really unethical you have problems.

But then it could be debated that ethics are subjective eg Kant etc

I know right! I haven't seen other threads. Soz didn't realised there was a time limit to call out bullshit fawning and it was like half a day. 😆😳

Just to be clear about ‘fatigue’ I mentioned above, it’s a term used descriptively in the cycling world relating to failures of carbon fibre, but carbon fibre is not a metal and doesn’t actually ‘fatigue’ in the way metal does.

Aid in our knowledge of the planet the thing we live on and rely on be a bit ridiculous if we knew more about what's in space than what's below our ships

Really interesting post. That’s such a good point about the Silicon Valley style approach

I have a vague recollection of someone interviewed early on, who was talking in terms of recovery, but by the next morning, the official line seemed to be all about rescue.

But that ties in with the idea that the implosion was not heard (which is what was said at the press conference) at the time, but checking back through military listening posts' records (no idea if that's the correct terminology, but I hope you get what I mean) an anomaly was spotted, and that information was used to target the various missions. SOSUS used to be highly classified. I expect there are some capabilities that remain so. Only key (security cleared) people would know the detail. It may never be fully publicly confirmed by the authorities (or at least the detail won't be). But it hangs together

Terribly sad, and ashamed to say I have been invested in the story but in hope of a positive outcome and to understand more about the great deep ocean…

My take on it would be that the submersible was at a great depth at the time it lost contact (I believe it takes just 2 hours to travel to the sunken liner - correct me if I’m wrong). Having lost contact 1 hour and 45mins into the descent, (87.5% of 3800m) it would be 3325m down meaning implosion would have occurred so rapidly nobody would have known or felt it. The mechanics of what happened to the bodies of these poor people will sound horrific but would have been over incredibly quickly - before the brain could receive or process any feedback. There may be a possibility that bone fragments could be recovered.

My bet would be that the window gave in, as it was only designed to travel to depths half of what it was being taken to.

Aside from being billionaires/wealthy individuals, these people gave much to society and above all were loved by their families. It would have been likely that the same efforts would have been deployed should Tom, Dick or Harry been lost down there. We all take risks to some degree, with some more crazy than others. May they rest in peace.