I’m delaminating right now.
Too soon?
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Has someone linked to the info that this bunch of arseholes were just doing the rich fool tourist gig as a proof of concept for the real money in the destroying the planet industry?
Fuck those guys.
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I suspect that we’ll never know short of a juicy leak(which is probably being retention-policy-ed away as quickly as possible now that the possibility is moot and the internal discussion would be seen as either dangerous optimistic or crass depending on its tenor); but I have to wonder how seriously he was taken by actual oil and gas industry types.
I’m sure they’d be happy to pay less rather than more for deep water operations if someone else ended up validating the procedure; but they have no emotional attachment to man-in-a-can implementations over ROVs of various sorts; and, while I’m not sure what “cool story bro” is in Danish, it seems like the sort of thing that Maersk Drilling might say to a guy piloting a tourism can whose electrical and comms systems fail fairly regularly while they are busy descending to 3,628m and then drilling an oil well.
Rush had sort of the same vibe as a lot of the more…enthusiastic…manned space guys; insisting that obstructive regulators and/or a world deprived of their special genius were to blame for the lack of sturdy lunar homesteaders; while the people interested in science are sending probes to jovian moons and operating big space telescopes and the people interested in money are constructing substantial satellite constellations without apparent distress.
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However there are a few recent articles (connected to this drama) talking about how the fuel industry already solved their cost/liability issues by no longer sending manned subs, but using robotics and rovers to replace humans. So if Rush was trying to re-solve their issues with less safe subs, I think they’d tell him to get lost.
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Even with unstaffed diving bots, deep-sea drilling is still pretty expensive, at a time when a significant portion of land and coastal leases are going un- and under-used because it’s not worth the cost to drill/frack/refine/ship the various oil & gas components to market.
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It’s also the case that people (especially rich white men) have theories like the rest of us about what has happened but don’t say anything, then claim afterwards that they knew all along in their press tours and ghostwritten books.
The gap between what people think they know and what they actually know is larger than they want to accept, especially for rich white men. They sure do love to claim credit and prescience for everything that happens, though.
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I don’t think the Coast Guard was putting on a show. That’s too cynical.
They have an ethical obligation to continue searching long after everyone thinks the victims are dead. A whole lot of disaster survivors in this world would be dead if first responders had given up when “everyone” said they should.
Let’s give first responders the credit they deserve and not frame them as part of some dog and pony show going through motions for nothing. It’s easy to look back in hindsight and say “oh yeah, they were dead all along, so what a waste”. In the moment, nobody knows. We might think we do, but we don’t. If I’m ever in that much trouble, I sure hope rescue teams don’t give up on me because lifestyle blog pundits say they should.
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Especially since what they did was continue the search for like three days to make sure. In truth, that’s not really that much.
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I mean, that’s absolutely true. But I don’t see any reason to doubt Cameron here. It is a tiny community and I’m sure they talk. I was reminded of this when I talked to a friend over the weekend. She’s a runologist, which is a worldwide community maybe even smaller than that of deep sea explorers. You might remember the below story breaking in January this year. It was a big deal in my circles. She is not involved in this discovery, but had known about it since last September.
This sort of stuff happens all the time in my line of work in archaeology, too. I have been the one knowing things the press only speculated about or didn’t know about at all just because I had friends or colleagues who worked on it. I’m sure that’s a position that is familiar to you as well. IIRC you work/ed in the game industry? That is an industry where the press is speculating at fever pitch all the time.
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That said, can we get on with it an discuss why several survivors independently described that the first responders didn’t respond at first, and when they did they tried to pull the ship out of their zone of responsibility, forcibly,and in doing so sank the ship by accident?
I am not talking about the sub, as y’all might have noticed.
I read the topic. I read that other topic. It is all fascinating. I am trying to get over the fascination myself, and failing. Which is ok. It’s such a good story, and so has nothing to do with anything I have influence over. It’s from a different reality. It’s entertainment. I force myself to admit it: it is fun to think about the what dying in milliseconds means, it is fun to think about rich and influential people and have the hindsight and moral high ground, it is fun to learn about the physics and engineering. And it has a irritating part of virtue signalling to write all this.
But I’ll be damned if I allow myself to forget about what happened one week earlier. And what continues to happen. I have an influence over this.
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Woods Hole created Alvin because Trieste was just so hard to use.
Here’s a fascinating history.
Apparently Alvin has been lost several times.
During the launch for Dive 308 on October 16, Alvin ’s cradle support cables failed and Alvin slid into the water and sank to the bottom in 5,000 feet of water. Ed Bland, pilot, received some bruises and a sprained ankle while exiting from the sub. Poor weather conditions and insufficient recovery equipment prevented recovery during the remainder of the year.
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I wasn’t saying Cameron is lying or that him and his community didn’t talk about this. Of course they did.
What I’m saying is his community didn’t know what was happening. They had theories. Well informed theories due to their experience, sure. But theories nonetheless. Then after the fact, once proven correct, they assert their theories were facts all along. This is a very annoying human habit, particularly among wealthy men.
People (and Cameron) are talking in here as though Cameron knew they were dead all along and the whole search was waste of time. That is what I’m arguing against. Until there are bodies or debris in hand, nobody knows a goddam thing. Just a lot of know-it-all men who think they know things because in their heads they don’t draw much of a line between their opinions and facts.
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Indeed! At the very least the rescue teams were able to exercise their craft in a real situation, esp. the cross-border, multiple jurisdiction stuff. Stuff that’s likely practiced on paper once in a while. Investigations should result in further improvements these aspects.
Hopefully no responders were hurt in this effort. They’re the real heroes. I suspect there are a few injuries too small to make the news. Hard to mobilize all those resources without a twisted ankle or pinched finger or two.
I can only work up sympathy for the 19-year old; I’ve read he wasn’t very keen on the idea. And the families of the deceased.
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That makes a lot more sense. I couldn’t work out his business model - 5 people on board, one of whom is staff so not paying, means $1M / dive. That kind of money would not run a support vessel that size and the crew to run it, even if the submersible worked perfectly every time [narrator: It did not work perfectly any time]. Nothing added up, so the goal was most likely to be bought out by a bigger company that did… something. I hadn’t pieced together what “something” was, but deep sea resource extraction is about the only field that makes that kind of money that deep underwater.
I’d say that OceanGate is unlikely to be bought out, now.
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There was a CBC story about the company and they have a number of revenue streams. The tourist dives to the Titanic was their biggest money maker, actually. But they also did filming, location scouting, and other Hollywood-adjacent submersible related activity. All under the guise of “research” to skirt around a lot of licensing, insurance, and maritime law requirements, of course. According to this reporter, the company was actually doing okay. Probably in the black, until now. The company won’t survive this, though.
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From their website, they would do the titanic mission once a year, with five voyages in each mission. Up to six people on the voyage but not everyone could go on every dive. So they could make ~$6M from the Titanic voyages each year.
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This claim keeps bugging me about this company and the Explorers Club.
Oceangate calls everyone Mission Specialists and the Explorers club claims their goal is increasing scientific knowledge.
Meanwhile its a bunch of rich guys doing expensive / dangerous tourism activities. As far as I can tell taking a bunch of people down to.the Titanic (or up Everest etc…) today has as much scientific value as someone of more modest means going on a resorts zipline.
The money these trips costs exceeeds a large fraction of actual scientific grants that contribute real improvements to human knowledge. Pretending it’s anything more than tourism is insulting to real research.
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The problem is that other passengers in the previous excursion stated they hear audible cracking which apparently the CEO said it was the sub’s carbon fiber shell ‘settling’ which isn’t possible with carbon fiber since it’s laid all the same way to get the most strength out of it. The design wasn’t rated for the depth they wanted to do and it goes double for the port hole that was installed. So many other possible spots could’ve easily failed which led to their demise.
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Even the term “explorers” bugs me. As though these rich guys aren’t all doing the same things that every other rich guy does, and imagining they’re finding the headwaters of the Nile or whatever. Explorers, my ass. You’re tourists, that’s it.
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