Why is light weight important for a submersible? Isn’t not imploding more important?
Titanic tourist submarine missing 6-19-2023 (Debris field found, passengers presumed dead. 06-22-23)
I would assume a lightweight submersible might require less beefy surface equipment. I don’t know if that’s important.
And let’s face it, discussions of what’s important break down fast when the owner/operator was so willing to half-ass life-safety engineering. Whatever the priorities were, they weren’t rational or sane.
Light weight would matter if it helps maintain neutral buoyancy.
But given what we know about the shortcomings of the submersible, did they did so with fully informed consent?
Maybe the required wall thickness would be too much weight compared to the relatively small interior volume in terms of buoyancy.
Huh, so I was right, then.
It could be considered tragic because of the hubris involved with the CEO, who ignored repeated warnings from people who knew what they were talking about, even going so far to fire engineers who protested the lack of certain design or materials certification and testing.
If he was running solo and became fish chum that would be one thing, but because he took four other people with him, including a father and son (On Father’s Day) maybe that is the distinction.
Certainly, this is the absolute requirement of the classical dramatic tragedy: the hubris that brings down the hero of the play. But the word “tragedy” has broadened beyond a phrase of classical literature analysis and means “whatever makes me sad”. And if you have an “eat the rich” mindset, or feel like stupidity should be rewarded with death, these deaths may not make you sad.
Cameron rejected the idea of using a composite submersible in favor of steel. In the past he warned others that someone would die in that carbon fiber submersible. When he heard about this dive years later he assumed the known problems had been addressed somehow. They weren’t.
There also are big multiagency searches when an ocean-going fishing boat with the same number of low-income people goes missing. Do we really know that the cost was wildly disproportionate? The same news conferences would have been held, they just would have been local news at the home port.
When you add in continuing costs of bringing parts up to the surface, that must bring up the costs. I think there is some justification; when the vehicle type is rare, there is more still to learn.
As for there being more public interest in some tragedies than others, this is true and inevitable.
Excellent analysis. “Tragedy” has almost become a catchall word for “something bad happened”. I’d add one more element: unnecessariness.
In respect of crimes we often hear the buzzphrase “senseless violence”. It’s not the violence that’s bad, it’s the senselessness of it. The fact it was unnecessary.
People dying doing something essential, like in combat, is often not a tragedy. People dying in a tourist accident of whatever nature is a tragedy. It’s the whipsaw between “intended to be fun” and “turned out to be deadly” that renders it a tragedy in many people’s minds.
Kinda like Gilligan’s Island, this set of 5 castaways have different stories and there are differing levels of tragedy for each, despite them all dying at the same instant in the same way in immediate proximity to one another. The hubristic CEO, the actual scientist, the two adventuresome billionaires, and the 19yo reluctantly accompanying his father are each separate stories.
With varying degrees of sympathy and feelings of tragedy (in both senses).
Exactly.
Stupid, tragic, and unnecessary. As I said above: they threw their lives away (at least Rush did) for nothing. He took 4 people with him who may not have understood the risks.
The teen did not want to go by the stories I’ve seen. Hell the kid wasn’t old enough to drink.
This was all to look at something that could be viewed better by watching existing videos.
The tragedy is the waste of time, money, and lives for a stupid pointless “thrill.”
I’m so sad for that kid that got dragged into this,“adventure.”
I’ve only read this far, so far; but a question just occurred to me. Titan’s hull was cylindrical, like an airplane (good for keeping pressure in). I can’t think of any deep-diving submersibles that aren’t spherical (good for keeping pressure out). Are there any?
Calvin’s dad would approve.
I guess my difficulty results from an unclear personal understanding of the definition of the word tragedy.
First, I think we ought to agree whether we are using the theatrical definition or not. Some of the above comments seem to conflate the definitions. I personally do not believe most descriptions of this as a tragic event are NOT intending to compare it to Greek theater, but I may be mistaken.
So that would leave definitions such as: an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe. My personal view is that this sort of occurance ought not cause “great” - at least in terms of widespread - suffering and distress. Instead, my perception is that a lot of people perceive some benefit out of presenting themselves as distressed by some remote incident which has little or nothing to do with them. When, in fact, what they are is titillated.
I feel the word tragedy, like hero, is grossly overused. But I also suspect I am in a minority and would be described as insensitive.
IMO …
I don’t think you’re insensitive. I think that you’re appropriately sensitive.
If you or I were part of a primitive tribe of 30 people and 5 were killed doing something unnecessary and fun like, oh, maybe cliff diving when the cliff failed and they were crushed, I think feeling that event was a “tragedy” would be appropriate. They were your friends, your neighbors, and on the scale of the 29 people you knew on Earth, they were nearly 20% of everybody.
Where people in our modern world go wrong is some people effortlessly do the emotional math to say “5 people out of 8 billion? Pfft.” while other’s simply can’t do that. They think “5 people, just like the 5 people that are me, my spouse, my kids / sibs / parents.” These latter folks are the ones who leave flowers at celebrity graves, buy People magazine, and fill social media with highly wrought expressions of distress over that teenager.
Meantime 325 Americans die every hour of every day, 7700 per day, and 2.8 million per year. That’s just Americans; the worldwide figure is ~10x that many. But because those deaths are emotionally invisible, they aren’t tragic to the emotional thinkers. Despite over 10,000 times as many Americans dying outside the sub as inside it during the short lifetime of this drama, and nearly 100,000 times as many humans.
The monkeysphere is a very real feature of human nature. Like so many other of our built-in features, it fits poorly with the modern world. Or said another way, the modern world fits poorly with human nature.
‘The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.’ – Josef Stalin
Unless the life insurance contained some kind of rider excluding things like extraordinary actions on the part of the decedent. No clue of that’s even a thing - but similarly, if someone died during an Everest expedition, I could see an insurer trying to avoid paying.
Some companies also have policies on key executives, to cover the problems caused by the death of such a person. It would make sense to have such a policy on the CEO, for example.
Is anyone listening to the whole ocean at all times?
Yeah, if the search was already underway and sonar was being use in the right place, it should have been detected. But unless there was routine monitoring of the expedition, I’m not surprised that it wasn’t detected.
ETA: Aha: it looks like it WAS detected. In the NY Times article linked above, “On Sunday, a secret U.S. network of acoustic sensors picked up indications of a possible implosion in the vicinity of the submersible around the time communications with it were lost”.