For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
I just … can’t
It’s interesting how just 6 days ago, a boat with 750 people on board, including 100 kids, capsized near Greece, only 104 survived, and it’s less of an issue than those billionaires
I think it’s because the story about a missing submersible is unusual, and moreover, it’s about a rescue attempt. This makes it more interesting than many other, albeit more dreadful, news stories.
750 people drowning is also unusual, and there’s also been rescue attempts.
All these victims have loved ones, and i don’t wish death on anyone, but for the billionaires I find it quite hard to care much.
I still hope they’re saved, though; and if they are I very much hope the experience will have changed them.
That’s just not the same. Drowning is quick and if you don’t save them immediately they’re most likely dead. Slowly suffocating in a sub while the clock ticks and something can be done about it is a different story.
Learn to care.
750 people drowning is also unusual
It’s terrible but not that unusual.
Unfortunately it is not that unusual since the EU stopped Mare Nostrum to save money
And they were diving to look at the titanic, everyone’s favourite maritime disaster.
sure. It has nothing to do with the fact that in one of cases they are 5 billionaires while in the other one they are 750 poor migrants. No, totally not.
Not entirely no, I didn’t see any news outlet leading the story with “5 Billionaires missing after Submersible lost contact”. For quite some time we didn’t even know who was on board. It’s more the fact that boats in the Mediterranean sink all the time, it’s still tragic but we know that that’s an issue we have now (most people unfortunately seem to have decided that they do not care that much). A submersible going missing and the coast guards of 2 countries looking for them, while thei only have air for a couple days, no one knowing where they are and it involving the titanic guarantees clicks, it’s almost like a movie plot. The fact that they are wealthy is certainly not the reason for it though, it’s the circumstances surrounding it, it’s unusual. People also know how ships work and why they capsize, while most people don’t have the slightest idea how deep sea submersibles work.
So yes, the ship capsizing and killing that many people is horrible and should get more attention, especially from the Goverments involved. It’s ridiculous that we let those poor people drown by the thousands and treat the ones who made it like scum. But I’m not convinced the Titanic story got traction BECAUSE the victims have money.
really? The first point of information I found out was that it cost 250k to get on.
"hey did you hear about the submarine that’s lost?
“no?”
“It cost 250k to get on, to go see the titanic wreck”
pretty much how my entire day went yesterday with various coworkers
I agree with you, mostly, but you could also argue that the situation only exists/is only possible because they’re wealthy (the same reason the only sub apparently capable of rescuing them is owned by another billionaire). But that doesn’t diminish your point–were these somehow 5 poor people stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a sub near the Titanic, it would still probably get a lot of attention.
so you think that 2 governments would had started spending millions if 5 migrants had somehow been trapped in the seabed of the Mediterranean?
5 migrants? No fucking way. 5 average citizens of any developed nation? Sure. We perform expensive and resource intensive search and rescue operations for people lost in the wilderness or out at sea all the time. And once the media brings attention to it, there’s a lot of pressure to keep the funding going, otherwise next election cycle people are going to remember the current leadership as “those guys who just left some poor people to die to save money.”
The Thailand cave rescue was all over the news and they were poor.
Its about novelty, nothing more nothing less.
A bunch of rich ppl have died on Mt Everest this year, nobody gives a shit as its a common occurrence.
The Greece tragedy is lacking the irony and hubris of this.
I mean, it’s a tourist submersible that was aiming to bring billionaires to view the Titanic wreckage and it likely got wrecked itself. And they named the submersible Titan.
The sub’s company OceanGate was dinged by a former employee for all sorts of safety issues and they fired and sued him. There are also lots of choice quotes from the CEO (who happens to be on the vessel) about moving fast and breaking things, and regulations stifling innovation. So there’s some possible karma involved.
“OceanGate” sounds a lot like Heaven’s Gate right now ;P
And Watergate. Anything [something]gate is bad news.
Cablegate was kind of good ;)
Ah, another dummkopf manager who thinks a software methodology can be applied to hardware.
Well, better hope he can deploy the fix in production within the next what, 10 or so hours?
I don’t disagree, but missing sub is an unusual phenomenon and mystery that gets people interested.
I don’t think the billionaires part is all that important, I didn’t know about it until today. The Kursk, the kids trapped in a cave, the miners that have spent months in a mine, those were all news too.
But yea immigrants from war-torn regions - nobody cares unless they have “blond hair and blue eyes”.
People tend to care more about the stuff that happens closer to them, or is somehow related to them. You probably don’t care all that much about the armed conflict in Mali between the government, ISIS and Wagner Group.
if you live in europe, the Mediterranean sea is you know, right next to you. And way much closer than the distance of the titanic to the shore in America, which is about 1000 nautical miles.
I don’t know anything about Mali, which is closer to to me than Titanic, but I do know a lot about the Titanic.
Or things that happen to rich white people.
That’s what I’m more upset about.
Who gives a shit about a couple of billionaires. Why does this have to be a world-wide news story? Why don’t we care about the 100s of refugees that die all the time in maritime accidents and why are those things dominating the news?
Time and time again we give the rich people all of our attention. Fuck that. We shouldn’t be letting the media direct our attention like this.
It was an issue for a lot of international organizations, but Greece and EU made themselves look like fools https://vlemmy.net/post/119595
The 5 submariners chances of being rescued are very slim at this point but much much higher than the 500 migrants still missing off the coast of Greece who took to the waters not for a joy ride but to escape war and seek a better life.
I suspect they imploded.
These super deep subs are traditionally not reused very long, because the stress of the water pressing and then releasing weakens them. The more compression-decompression cycles they take the faster they degrade.
From all the reports, they got a lot of reports of issues that they ignored. I read that one of the reporters who saw it found it to be very jury rigged together. Apparently it was not certified in any way.
Even if they did survive and the ballast worked correctly, they would surface quickly (decompression sickness?) and cannot open the hatch from the inside. The thing doesn’t float above the water, so its going to be a pain to find. Also they didn’t paint it bright orange with blinking lights, its white, gray, and blue.
Overall, a lot of poor decisions and ignoring advice lead to disaster.
Not an expert, but I don’t think the air pressure inside the sub changes, so decompression sickness should be impossible. Don’t quote me on that, though
This would be correct. However, I suspect the air pressure in the sub did change. Very rapidly.
Even if they did survive and the ballast worked correctly, they would surface quickly (decompression sickness?)
Decompression sickness is a concern only if they suffered compression. But the main problem, as I see it, is that the sub was made from materials that are famously brittle and tend to degrade over many cycles of pressure and release (resin, carbon fiber, etc). So the likely failure mode is catastrophic failure of the sub under pressure.
There’s a reason most deep sea stuff is made out of steel: it’s somewhat ductile and recovers from compression with minimal change in properties.
Of all the various ways to provide emergency rescue assistance, it appears that they’ve included almost nothing which would help them in the event of an underwater failure that prevented surfacing (i.e. emergency ballast release failing).
Apparently it was not certified in any way
My understanding of this is limited to the two paragraphs on CNN, but there is a process for “classing” vessels. The owners decided not to do so as the process only certified that the vessel itself is safe for use, and does not verify the procedures for operation or the training of the crew. Their logic for not classing was that most ocean failures are the result of poor procedures or poor crew decisions, ignoring entirely that the reason most failures fall into those to cases is because the vessels themselves are vetted (via the classing process) to eliminate the hardware as a failure mode. It’s almost poetic that the man in charge of that decision is on the craft.
Also these depths are usually only explored with unmanned drones, not makeshift tuna cans with store parts
The coloring is a great idea, I’m going to steal that thought for an ongoing project (not a submarine tbc).
Just imagine, these idiots spend 250k to sit in a iron tube controlled by a cheap offbrand playstation controller but won’t spend any of their money to improve the world. Only satisfying their own ego and greed. I can’t feel sorry for them, best I can do is hope that they imploded so they didn’t have to suffer too long.
It’s more than a little ironic they [presumably] died in an accident caused by cutting corners on regulations and safety by saying things like “certifications cost too much time and money, we shouldn’t have to train someone just to convince them that this is safe”, as well as doing things like firing safety personnel when they object to the submersible’s worthiness.
I saw someone call it the ‘minimim viable submersible’ and I’ve never heard a better description as someone who spends all day working on minimum-viable-product style projects
Every billionaires actual job is tax avoidance at all costs. Ima bet a whole lotta tax money is being laid out right now attempting to save these guys from their own hubris and dipshittery
You fuckin know it lmao I was just reading on Twitter how they’re sending up a c-130 and some special military submersible to help with the search. Who’s paying for that? 🤷🏻♂️
It’s very ironic that the wealthiest man in Pakistan and his son are going to die in a submarine when 100;s of Pakistanis just drowned trying to seek refuge from the country theses men exploited.
Its karma.
And here I was beginning to lose faith in karma
“This submersible has not been tested or approved and may cause death”
“wHeRe dO I sIgN???”
To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with using a controller to control things, off-brand or otherwise.
Both industry and the military use off-the-shelf game controllers for things, because they’re easy to obtain, ergonomic and relatively intuitive.
Although using a wireless one that was infamous for having dropout issues, without some backup mechanism that could also be used to control the submersible was probably something of a mistake. At minimum, you’d expect that they would use one that was wired, just in case someone forgot to charge the batteries before hand, and/or didn’t bring a spare.
Sure, but not for something as safety critical as the primary way to control it. There’s just so many failure modes. Imagine if one of the sticks pots failed and made them spin uncontrollably. Regardless, they had IIRC six different independent fail-safes to force them to surface. So I’m sure they put some more thought into it than people are giving them credit for.
I’m not going to diss on Logitech, they make some good reliable controllers. I would place them bottom on the list of things that probably broke.
That being said. I can understand why someone from the outside sees a plastic controller and wonder why they didn’t go with the more expensive plastic controller. But in the end, they both have the same parts. I would also find it VERY strange that there wouldn’t be a backup controller.
Though it is hard to take pity on the situation when one has to consider. That 250k a ticket is more then 20 single mothers working 2 jobs, so they can feed their kids, so this dude can go see the titanic… in person… Because video documentaries of every angle of the titanic in 4k resolution don’t exist in 2023 apparently.
I would also find it VERY strange that there wouldn’t be a backup controller.
I find a lot of people don’t have a mindset of considering how things could go wrong. It usually works, and it’s always worked so far for them, therefore it will always work going forward. Plus, it’s just so convenient.
For example, there are people who use their phone as their car key. They simply don’t think about what happens if their phone is lost/stolen, damaged, or even just out of battery. They may or may not lessen a lesson when they get burned by it.
I’m not really in the business of defending billionaires but I think at least one of them, the guy who brought his son, was involved with charities:
"He works with his family’s Dawood Foundation, as well as the SETI Institute - a California-based research organisation which searches for extra-terrestrial life.
“Shahzada is also a supporter of two charities founded by King Charles - the British Asian Trust and the Prince’s Trust International.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65955554
He sounds (sounded) like a good person… I do find it interesting that the other billionaires don’t have any mentions of charitable works in articles I’ve read in them.
Every billionaire uses charities.
They’re a way to exert control over the money that would normally go to taxes, and be up to the government to spend.
It’s not inherently bad, but charity is not quite the saving grace of billionaires that many make it out to be.
If people were willing to pay taxes and work toward equitability, charities for the poor wouldn’t be necessary.
Yep. I just want these fuckers to pay their fair share in taxes and to stop using their wealth to influence politics.
Found yes, alive no.
I’ve heard a lot about oxygen reserves and zero about whether they have enough water for 3+ days.
Don’t forget the frigid temperature at that depth…
There’s apparently banging in the area in 30 minute intervals. That’s hopeful.
Getting them to the surface within the confines of their remaining oxygen limit is another story…
It can be done. They have equipment and protocols for rescuing people from submerged subs.
They do, yeah, but not from the depth of the Titanic wreck. If they are truly at the bottom, there is only a small amount of machines that are capable of going that deep. This is all new territory for rescue teams.
Not saying it can’t be done, just that the prospects don’t appear hopeful to me, especially given they only have around 24 hours of oxygen remaining. They still haven’t even located them… I seriously hope they are rescued, but I think probability is against them unfortunately…
Depends how you look at it. I think it’s not hopeful because this implies they are in fact submerged and not on the surface (remember they can’t open the hatch from the inside so that has been a perfectly valid scenario as well). That in turn implies they’re most likely S.O.L I’m afraid. They have like 24 hours left and haven’t even found the sub yet. Getting the logistics done and hauling this one up itself takes a long time.
If you read the articles closely, the banging stopped a long time ago. They had 40hrs of oxygen, max, left on Tuesday, so time is running short.
Supposedly a Navy drone sub has arrived in Newfoundland that is capable of lifting the Titan. But they’re really running down to the wire and they still have to locate the sub and get the drone out to the location.
I’ve not read this detail. Got a source for it?
If they can get to them, they can hook external O2 up.
Or atleast drill some air holes if they are on the surface until they can find a wrench, but I imagine whatever size wrench is needed is being carried by a lot of people out there.
I don’t think they’ll be able to depressurize their ascension that quick without dangerous consequences. Likely they’ll need 02 before they get to that point.
i honestly don’t know if i can imagine a worse way to die than spending days trapped in a tiny tube in the middle of the fucking ocean with people i barely know, slowly suffocating suspended in a gigantic void. i hope they find those guys alive.
Cant imagine worse? Here, let me help. This is an excerpt from the Hoosac Tunnel incident wiki:
The deadliest accident was the explosion in the Central Shaft on October 17, 1867. Workers were digging the tunnel’s 1,028-foot (313 m) vertical exhaust shaft when a candle in the hoist building ignited naphtha fumes that had leaked from a “Gasometer” lamp.[12] The ensuing explosion set the hoist on fire, and it collapsed into the shaft. Four men near the top of the shaft escaped, but 13 men working 538 feet (164 m) below were trapped by falling naphtha and pieces of iron. The pumps were also destroyed, and the shaft began to fill with water. A worker named Mallory was lowered into the shaft by a rope the next day; he was overcome by fumes and reported no survivors, and no further rescue attempts were made.
Several months later, workers reached the shaft’s bottom and found that several victims had survived long enough to fashion a raft before suffocating
Thank you, that was helpful.
Sadly I don’t think so. This incident was absolutely preventable. Someone warned them about this and they got fired. A makeshift vessel that wasn’t inspected/certified, immersed to almost 3 times the rated depth, controlled by a wireless Logitech gamepad from 2010 with no redundancy and only 96 hours of oxygen. I really really hope for a last minute miracle though…
Seeing the construction of the submersible, I would not have ridden it… As soon as the inventer said “I got these from, uh, camper world…” I would be scurrying the hell out of that thing…
Apparently the acrylic viewing window was not rated for that depth, and the body of the submersible is constructed from carbon fiber… That whole rig seems sketchy as hell to me…
I mean, I agree that the construction is sketchy (runs the whole thing from an off-brand playstation controller? Couldn’t splurge on the $800 for a real cassette toilet?), but acrylic and carbon fiber are appropriate material choices, if they were used in the appropriate thicknesses and configurations.
if they were used in the appropriate thicknesses and configurations.
I mean, are there better materials to use where the thickness and configurations wouldn’t matter?
ya if there is any one part of the vehicle you would have trouble arguing its the hull it was designed by some of the best minds in the world that specifically specialize in this type of travel at Boeing and MIT.
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this video’s journalists even are like “dude this is incredibly scuffed”, those scientists with them should be considered heroes in some sense
No, nor do I think they should be. There will be millions of wasted taxpayer dollars wasted on trying to recover rich people’s dead bodies. They signed a waiver and knew what they were getting into. There’s nothing to be learned from whatever happened, since the company was clearly negligent. Let them rest on the ocean floor beside the other rich assholes.
That’s a bit harsh. If there’s anything that works in modern society pretty reliably regardless of status, it’s search and rescue. Sunk subs can also be an environmental hazard.
There is no rescue in this instance, only an expensive recovery. And there are enough environmental hazards in the world at this point, that I don’t think a 5m sub on the sea floor is going to matter much. Most climbers are abandoned to their fate as they made the reckless decision to ascend, just as these people made the reckless decision to descend.
It’s still part of S&R. Lost swimmers, ships, small planes, or just people lost in the woods, there are always attempts for recovery long after any chance of survival is gone.
Yea climbers may be abandoned very high up on Everest, when there’s no safe way to bring them down. But subs, we do look for subs. Let’s not needlessly be dicks about it.
Let’s not needlessly be dicks about it.
You do you. I will be whatever I want about it however.
Sunk subs can also be an environmental hazard.
Just out of curiosity… how do you figure that a tiny sunken submersible would become a hazard, much less an environmental one?
Probably not a big deal at that depth, I mentioned it as only a general addendum. But it probably has a battery, and those tend to be removed from sunken ships and subs together with other risky chemicals if possible.
I remember the case of a ship sinking with a shipment of new cars, and they recovered every one of those cars because they didn’t want even one polluting the environment.
Regardless they’ll want to search for it for the human(e) reasons primarily anyway.
I agree woth this post. Wealth has nothing to do with this. And if they survive they can easily pay the bill.
Pretty hilarious that you think a billionaire would foot the bill if they are (or their families if they’re not) rescued.
At least this method of winning the darwin award is going full circle.
‘Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.’
He hired a guy specifically to work on the safety of the sub and fired him when he raised too many concerns like the viewport not being rated for that depth.
'Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to the experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (‘PVHO’) standards.
'OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters.
Exactly, there’s enough evidence that they’re just willfully negligent. Fuck them. The victims should have done even 5 mins of research on the company before getting in the sub.
Not only that, one look at the thing they chose to go down into the water in was enough for me to wonder what kind of hallucinogens they must’ve been on to accept that risk.
According to David Lochridge (their Director of Marine Operations who was fired and sued), the passenger viewport of the original sub (buit in 2018) was only certified for depths of up to 1,300 meters (4,265 feet), and OceanGate would not pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport certified for 4,000 meters, the depth at which the Titanic rested.
Whether that defect was corrected in this version of the sub (built 2020-21) is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, a German entrepreneur who took a trip in this sub in 2021 reported several problems with the electrics and one dive was aborted at 1600ft. So whether these new problems were addressed (by someone who wanted to cheap out on a window) is also unknown.
4km down - I get the willies if I see more than 20 metres of water underneath me and I can’t see the bottom.
It’s kinda poetic for them to go down next to the titanic, itself a story of complacency and excess/opulance.
Darn tootin’.
Jesus Christ you people are insane.
Should we send rescue missions up Everest to ensure the families of rich thrill seekers get to bury their loved ones, or should we maybe put those resources into saving real, living people?
It’s unfortunate that their risky joy ride went south, but it would be an actual tragedy if we used hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars of public money to maybe find a few bodies. That money should be used more efficiently helping more people who actually need it.
I’m not the one getting in a rickety submersible and paying a quarter of a million for the displeasure.
they had to sign a waiver that mentions the possibility of death 3 times on the first page to dive in a vehicle that has never been safety certified and that was criticized years ago by almost 40 experts in a letter to the CEO. who is more insane? this safety mission will cost a fortune regardless of the outcome.
I’m a bit confused that this is receiving so much attention. What’s so special about this case compared to all the other cases of people being lost at sea every year, besides them being rich?
I don’t think that this is the right question for this community, but I’m not optimistic on their rescue.
Even under ideal conditions, the ocean is enormous, and even with all things going well, finding a properly-equipped submarine that wants to be found, can be a bit like a needle in a haystack, at least according to people with more naval experience than I.
I hope that they would be rescued, since suffocating to death in a metal tube that’s sealed from the outside seems like rather a horrid way to go, but at the same time, the submersible that is lost was not particularly well equipped. The control system was a wireless game controller which was infamous for having dropout issues. Using controllers is fine and all, since they’re often used in commercial and military applications due to their intuitiveness and better ergonomics (plus the manufacturer doesn’t have to design and build a new one from scratch), but using one that was infamous for having connection problems was rather tempting fate.
The lost submersible also didn’t have anything like an emergency beacon that could be used to locate them, and it was sealed from outside. Even if they managed to resurface, anyone aboard would still be trapped within the tube, unable to get out.
Could you imagine if it was something super dumb like the controller battery wasn’t charged prior and the USB port wasn’t working or something.
A couple things are potentially different from how op laid them out. (From my understanding)
The vessel was designed to automatically begin resurfacing after a set period of time underwater, even without pilot input, so it might not be very deep at all. The problem is it doesn’t sit very high in the water and is very hard to see.
They don’t necessarily have 2 days of oxygen left, those were calculated values, and there may be other gaseous build ups that impair the totally oxygen supplies.
I hope it was over quickly for them, I don’t know how you could resurface that type of vessel without breaking it. I hope we will find evidence and be able to piece together what happened, but I suspect it’ll just be lost at sea. I don’t think there’s any conspiracy up keep evidence away from the public, I think most people underestimate how difficult it is to find 4 cubic meters inside a 10 cubic kilometer area, hell that would be hard without that area being covered in water.
I don’t like millionaires/billionaires but I wouldn’t wish that kind of harrowing ordeal on anyone. I hope they survive somehow.
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These billionaires just bought themselves something money can’t buy, a footnote on a Wikipedia page somewhere that their deaths were loosely related to the Titanic.
Given that every billionaire has blood and suffering on their hands in at least ab abstract fashion and it’s hard to feel sorry for them too.
