What's the maximum depth that materials science could allow a submersible to dive to?

That was a good nitpick! I learned something. Thanks.

In real life, Ice Nine also produces some cool sounds.

Some TV reports in the last few days have compared the pressure of the ocean at the depth of the Titanic wreck to “the weight of the Empire State Building, if it were made of lead”. Another journalist used the same metaphor but said it was “the weight of the steel in the Empire State Building”, so presumably something less than the lead version.

So, question, how much are we talking about here, and are either close to accurate as far as water pressure goes?

The math is pretty straightforward. The density of lead is 11.33 (g/cc), while seawater is 1.02. So 11x denser.

The Titanic is at a depth of 12,500 feet. So the equivalent depth in lead is 1130 feet. The Empire State Building is 1250 feet. It’s in the right ballpark, with allowance for the fact that the ESB has different layers, and also a big spire at the top. I’m basically assuming here that it’s a giant rectangular prism of solid lead.

Steel has a density of 7.8 g/cc. So the equivalent height in steel is 1650 feet. The Taipei 101 is about that high.

The steel that makes up the real ESB obviously weighs far less than if it were made from a solid block. I don’t know how much that is. It could be though that someone took the whole surface volume of the vessel and found that the force was equivalent to the weight of the steel from the ESB. It’s possible it’s in the ballpark but I don’t have the numbers for the surface area or the weight of the steel in the ESB.

Ok, I looked up some figures. The hull cylinder apparently was 8.3 ft long by 4.6 ft diameter. Including the endcaps, I get 186.5 ft^2, or 26,856 in^2.

The pressure at Titanic depth is 5,600 psi, which gives a total force of 150,400,000 lbs, or 75,200 short tons.

The ESB was apparently made of 60,000 short tons of steel. So, not actually that far off (and probably within the error bars).

Note that this is a different type of calculating the equivalency. Here, it’s about the amount of total force on the hull. Previously, I was calculating the pressure under a hypothetical block of lead the height of the ESB.