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.
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…
Wouldn’t they just fall asleep from hypoxia? I think I’d prefer that to instant implosion.
Unfortunately no, losing oxygen in a submarine is a bit different than losing it at altitude. The thing that makes you feel like you’re choking is the relative amount of CO2 in the air you breath. At altitude, the CO2 you exhale dissipates into the atmosphere and you drift off to sleep from hypoxia. In an airtight container the CO2 has nowhere to go, so you’ll die of CO2 poisoning way before you die of hypoxia. The worst headache you’ve ever had, your blood feels like battery acid, vomiting, confusion, then death. Not fun.
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.
Except that you can: you hire intelligence. He paid people to build it and fired them when they weren’t comfortable with the design and had safety concerns. Lol
I don’t know anything about this guy, so take my pet theories with a pinch of salt, but…
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In my experience, people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs are often simply bad at perceiving risk. They start out with a certain hubris that is a product of this deficiency in assessing risk. Many of them will be taken down by this, but others will get lucky.
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When they get lucky, these people tend not to notice the element of luck but ascribe their success wholly to their smarts and hard work. This can lead to an inflated sense of how good one’s judgement is.
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It can also lead to a lack of humility. It takes both good judgement and humility to know when to defer to someone else’s judgement. These people had hubris to start with, and their success can compound this to the point where they consider themselves the best judge of everything. Then they stop listening to people who may know better than them.
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They also have the power to surround themselves with yes-men, so they are challenged less and less as time goes on.
Maybe this guy wasn’t like that, but his comments about safety measures being a waste, his disregard for safety standards in constructing this submarine, and the way he fired the employee who complained that the sub was unsafe, suggest he may have been in this mold.
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.
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 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.
AFAIK they had already been down to the titanic multiple times, so I can see people thinking it was safe regardless.
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 wonder if they have a blackbox built in. doubt they have since they’ve skip so many standard.
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.
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.
https://oceangate.com/ is (already?) unresponsive. I am afraid you are indeed right.
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.
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.
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)
Am curious how long this has been there and whether perhaps the “banging” was not related whatsoever.
I really hope that the sub imploded during the descent, and they’ve been dead all this time. Rather than the hull giving out after they sat on the ocean floor for days.
Much better since your brain wont realize the implosion is happening before you’re dead. Although, for some reason the idea that my body is forever in the deep ocean is not a favorable one
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.
