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.
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.
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 don’t personally think this vessel passed the eye test, though. The CBS reporter who took the trip even seemed to call it out in his segment (though he still got in it)
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.
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Type 1: the “captain” and many/most of the passengers were adrenaline junkies who wanted to push the limits of what could be done. Kind of like the first people to travel to the north and south poles. They are “adventurers” and they understood that they were taking considerable risks with their lives.
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Type 2: people who were trying to purchase a great “cocktail party story” with their $$$. The same way that wealthy people today pay $$ to have sherpas lug their stuff up and down Mt Everest so they can take a selfie. The ability to drop a quarter-of-a-million $$ on this stunt already excludes most of the world’s population from even trying it. Then they can brag at their cocktail parties and make the Mt. Everest climbers look like wimps by comparison. I suspect (not sure) that the Pakistani business man falls into this category. The fact that he took his 19 year old son makes me think he completely discounted the risk and was just doing it for personal vanity.
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.
