Okeanos Explorer has been great though! So maybe you just need to specify the right Titan…or, you know, actually pay attention to risks.
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In the context of this particular dive site? Not so much.
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What do you mean? 48 years and still going strong!
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Ignoring experts because the idea of carbon fiber is cool. Saying you’re relying on logic because you don’t have the data to prove your point. Dumb way to die, killing other people with your hubris.
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IANAUAE (underwater acoustics expert) but…
First, the walls of this craft were 4" thick. What kind of banging noise can they possibly make that’s going to get through 4" of solid material?
Second, distance… how far is this faint banging sound going to travel?
It makes no sense that some acoustic sensor a mile away is going to hear someone on the inside of a sub pounding his fist on the 4" thick hull.
And that’s exactly what someone who isn’t an acoustic expert would think. But then I looked up the opinion of real experts. According to real underwater acoustic experts, sound can travel for thousands of miles under water due to refraction. It bounces off regions of temperature difference, and keeps bouncing through this channel. This means it could be very confusing to figure out what a sound is and where it could be coming from.
I hope I’m never in such a situation but I think I would tap out the universal “I’m a sentient being” signal, which would be a sequence of prime numbers, so no one would think it’s a natural phenomenon.
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The last news report I heard was that the search vessels were likely just hearing noises created by each other.
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According to the submariners I saw interviewed by news outlets, the protocol is something like “on every hour and half-hour (i.e. *:00 and *:30), bang for 3 minutes”. The timing tells surface folks you’re a sentient being who understands clocks, and not a random humpback or something.
There’s so much echo and refraction they can’t tell what the sequence is you’re banging (it’s like listening at the far end of a canyon, apparently). But the timing tells them it’s a people-noise.
ETA: Sounds like in this case they were looking for that pattern, and found some noises that fit. But now it seems likely the implosion happened before they heard the noises.
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Thanks. I had been waiting for Cameron to chime in. He makes a few food points and is about as scathing as he can be considering the circumstances and the fact that he had a friend on board.
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I was wondering why they weren’t doing/listening for Morse code, but that makes sense. And there’s no easy way to differentiate dots and dashes.
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Titan in this context means as much as Acme does.
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And that was at ground-level pressure (~14.7psi, 1 atm). It’s hard to comprehend how much faster the implosion would be at 400x that pressure.
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Got it, another useful fact to add to my list of things I hope I never need to know.
Yes definitely. It was a false hope. From some of the interviews I saw after the knocking but before the debris, the pros didn’t think the knocking was meaningful and didn’t think anyone was alive.
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I put the question to ChatGPT (good for something!). I gave it the dimensions of the sub, and the depth, and assumed that the whole thing failed all at once (rather than a 1cm hole with water coming in, for example.)
ChatGPT did some calculations based on Boyle’s (gas compression) and Torricelli’s laws, and came up with water rushing in at around 5,900 cubic feet per second. I don’t think it’s a perfect conversion, but 5900 feet per second is around 4000 mph, or 5 times the speed of sound in dry air at sea level.
So, I’m not a scientist, so I might have asked the questions in a way that generated wrong answers. Someone who’s more mathematically inclined might get a better answer.
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I haven’t attemped to do any of my own calculations but I can tell you that trying to determine a linear velocity based on a flow rate that’s given in cubic feet per second doesn’t work that way. Unless you’re measuring the velocity of water traveling through a pipe where the cross-sectional area just happens to be one square foot.
But whatever. The collapse would have been incredibly fast and determining an exact number doesn’t affect much.
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Somewhat relevant to some of the posts in this thread
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there are technical details, but mixed in with marketing fluff. And possibly damning comments recorded for posterity.
here’s an explanation of why they chose composites.
Metallic hulls, however, because they are not buoyant in designs for depths of more than 2,000m, present challenges when it comes to managing ballast for ascent and descent. In particular, metal-hulled craft require the use of syntactic foam attached to the outside of the craft to achieve neutral buoyancy.
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SME talks about underwater sounds and noises:
https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/1672241889871818753?cxt=HHwWgsCzhfLI_7QuAAAA
https://twitter.com/BrynnTannehill/status/1672241888009543683?cxt=HHwWhoCzleTI_7QuAAAA
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