In terms of loss of life, this is a bad car accident that gets a couple days of coverage in the local newspaper.
In terms of being interesting it has that in spades. Rich adventurers, the Titanic, a search and rescue, the possibility of them being alive and trapped for days… it’s interesting. The 500 poor souls who died trying to escape a terrible situation with their families is far more tragic but doesn’t have any new concepts or gee whiz ideas to captivate the public that maybe heard about it in passing.
For keeping pressure in or out, a sphere is the best shape. But an airplane’s mission requires a shape that accommodates lots of passengers, handles modest pressure difference (up to the equivalent of about 20 ft of water) and offers acceptably low aerodynamic drag. A cylinder works best for this.
Well, military submarines dive at least fairly deep: Googling suggests the max is around 3000’. They, too, must be of a shape that both accommodates lots of people (& equipment) and offers moderate drag at decent speeds.
Out of boredom, I pulled out my current life insurance policy. It’s a normal run-of-the-mill term life insurance, purchased originally for about 3x my annual salary. The only exclusion is if I committed suicide during the first 2 years of the policy (I didn’t), the beneficiary would receive all the premiums paid to date plus interest. After 2 years, any reason of death would be payable in full.
On the application, there was a list of activities that it asked if I had done in the past 5 years, or planned to do in the next 2 years. These were:
Fly as a pilot, student pilot, or crew member on anything other than a commercial airline
Engage in hang-gliding, ultra-light flying, hot air ballooning, mountain, rock, or ice climbing, motor vehicle or boat racing, scuba diving or sky diving?
I honestly answered “No” to those questions. Had I dishonestly answered, and died doing one of those activities, I assume that would have caused legal issues with the payout.
If I started one or all of those activities now, and died, I can’t see how the company would have any legal recourse to not pay the policy.
On a previous policy, when I had been scuba diving within the past 5 years, (and was planning on continuing), they sent a separate questionnaire where I listed depth & location for all the dives I had done in those 5 years. That must have been OK, because they sold me the policy at the original quoted premium, and did not add any restrictions about scuba diving.
This is correct. I suppose they could write a policy excluding benefits if you died scuba diving, for example, but I’ve never seen a policy like that. The one’s I’ve seen ask about past activities in their application, but don’t have any consequences if you start after you have the policy.
Yup. “Tragedy” - Mass shootings for example are often described this way, when the word they are really looking for is atrocity or slaughter.
Euphemisms. They don’t want anybody to look under the hood on anything, so to speak. “Empathy” is now just some sort of super-duper sympathy available to anyone.
IMO the use of words like “interesting” and “captivate the public” support my view. People LIKE to read/see about other persons’ private lives and misfortunes, and derive perverted entertainment from accidents and death. “if it bleeds, it leads!”
I personally consider such widespread voyeurism - and media’s pandering to it - more tragic than the death of 5 reckless people.
Don’t know if any are cylindrical. This one used titanium end caps. I think they’ve spotted the end caps in the debris field, don’t know in what condition. Squeezing a cylinder with end caps will produce problems at the joints with the end caps. The cylinder will deform unevenly under pressure because the end cap joint will be stronger than the cylinder wall. This causes problems maintaining the contact surfaces in the joint and causing delamination by eventual fiber failures. Carbon fiber laminates are extremely strong but the fibers cannot stretch much, the material is extremely stiff, and any deformation puts a great deal of tension on fibers that don’t want to lengthen in order to follow a change of shape. Unlike materials like steel, carbon fiber doesn’t stretch and weaken under excess tension, instead it fails rapidly, and in a cascading manner as one layer of fibers after another breaks. If there was any reason to use carbon fiber composite to make a submersible, perhaps because for some reason you want it to be more expensive than necessary and more likely to fail, then I don’t see why if wasn’t constructed with integral composite endcaps. There would be no joints, and it would all be stronger from the addition of continuous fiber oriented at 90° to the cylinder windings.
Makes sense. I’m pretty sure some policies exclude things like “acts of war”, as in if someone bombs your city, your survivors are out of luck.
If you had a history of scuba diving or whatever, they might consider you higher risk and either refuse the policy, exclude such activities, or charge you more. Same as with anything else risky (e.g. higher premiums for smokers).
You feel most descriptions do intend to compare it to Greek theater?
(Apologies Dinsdale. Your subsequent sentences made it clear that the double negative was accidental. I’m posting this in a moment of weakness. Again, apologies.)
I don’t know how any legal issues will work out. I think you should be able to wave liability if you want to risk you life traveling to the bottom of the ocean, and if you are an adult.
Sorry, can’t help it, have to ask: Does this guy qualify for a Darwin Award by killing himself and his young son?
I want the antique shark’s tooth necklace recently discovered. If I had the means I’d 100% yoink that. (Although it looks like a Great White tooth and not a meg like all the articles say.)
I think for a traditional Darwin Award first class you need to kill yourself without having offspring. The father has a surviving daughter. So he’s disqualified for a first class award.
A second class award obtains for killing yourself in spectacular fashion but leaving offspring. I think he qualifies for that one hands down. Waaay down.
IANA expert on the “official” criteria but philosophically I agree 100% with you. Killing yourself and all your non-reproductive children or killing yourself before siring / bearing your first child amounts to the same thing for the remaining human gene pool.
I suppose there should be bonus perversity points available for killing your actual kids, not just your putative future kids. And double bonus points for killing real kids who went along under protest.
It’s the capabilities of the system that are classified. When I was in the navy I worked at high frequency radio direction finding facilities in the middle of a CDAA – Circularly Disposed Antenna Array. They were hardly secret but what we could detect – and what not were classified.
I’ve scrolled through the whole thread to see if anyone else commented about this; the other day, I watched a YouTube tour of the Virginia-class submarine U.S.S Indiana. The captain pointed out the periscope was operated by an Xbox game controller; the Navy replaced the earlier joysticks after determining that the newer sailors were more familiar and more comfortable with video gaming equipment. Relevant portion begins at 08:40:
CNN has a thoughts-and-prayers story online, about the reactions of the victims’ families and friends. Oddly enough, the only one not eulogized by family was the OceanGate CEO Rush.
(As I was typing that last, autocorrect changed “OceanGate” to “OceanFate”. The AIs are developing a sense of irony, it seems.)
It’s interesting when people die Give us dirty laundry
Don Henley
Meanwhile, CNN reports that “OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein cautioned against rushing to judgment over the catastrophic loss.”
Speculating on what we now know is irresponsible. Why, the submersible could have been attacked by a pod of killer whales, imploding an otherwise safety-first expedition.
