Originally published at: Message from Titan submersible before implosion: "All good here" - Boing Boing
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Absurdly negligent cowboy operation; but most of us will probably end up wishing that whatever ends up killing us finishes the job in under 50ms; so they could have done a lot worse.
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Yeah, if I’m going to get into a submarine, it’s not going to be one designed and operated by a thrill-seeking son of privilege who thought regulation of tourist submarines “needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation” and who once said:
“You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
The rules of physics and material engineering don’t typically reward those who break them.
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50ms is 3 frames of your favorite video game.
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I’d agree with “all good here” for 3 of the 4 people – the French explorer knew enough to know it was a stupid risk, so I include him in that group – but that teen son bullied into proving he loved his father by going will always haunt me.
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Some bonding experience…
Yeah, the kid is the one person I’m really sorry for.
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Yeah, have watched a few Titan videos. General consensus that i’ve seen is they were reduced to paste before the brain even recieved any pain signals. Making it a perfect painless death…
The whole thing just fascinates me. The carbon fibre hull was always going to fail eventually, every dive weakened it.
As for the audio-based monitoring of hull-integrity, that was insane. If they heard a failure forming they’d already be dead…
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Hopefully this will finally put to bed the obviously fake transcript that people have been insisting is real for almost a year now.
It won’t, but I can hope.
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Oh, they experienced it. They just didn’t know it.
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How soon before a sub is lost diving on the site of the Titan’s wreckage?
Rest in peace, Suleman Dawood.
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Yeah, I guess their whole approach, of using sensors to tell when the carbon fiber shell started to get dangerously stressed, didn’t work out too well for them. It’s a very small mercy that at least no one suffered at all.
I can’t tell what I’m looking at, in terms of the wreckage picture. Did some portion of the body of the sub not implode, or is it some sub-component?
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Looks like the fiberglass fairing, an external sub-component not part of the pressure vessel.
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I think the brain was reduced to paste before it could process the signals appropriately. 50ms is easily long enough for me to send several thumb presses to a stopwatch. Much like how you don’t know you really hurt yourself until the brain starts thinking about it.
The only way I see a material like carbon fiber potentially surviving repeated pressure cycles like this is in a spherical shape. Even then, it will eventually fail. Once you understand material properties and the physics behind things the world looks a lot less glamourous than movies.
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It’s one thing to say that regulations add to costs and delays. That would seem to be true in most cases. But it’s quite another thing to decide not to take advantage of experienced and trained scientists and engineers who just might be able to prevent a disaster, and who know more than the “innovator” about the subject.
This would seem to be where the axiom of “rich does not equal smart judgement” comes into play. Proverbs had it right long ago. “Pride goeth before destruction”. And the Greeks knew all about hubris 2000 years ago.
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It’s interesting to contrast the effort put into rescuing and investigating cases like the Titan submersible and the Bayesian yacht sinking, with the attention to migrant drownings in the English Channel and the Mediterranean.
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I don’t know, I’m up to over 54 years and I’m honestly not in that much of a hurry.
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As an engineer myself I have to say that I don’t actually see much difference between the two. Regulations should be followed unless there’s a damn good reason not to, and in that case you’d better be able to convince the relevant authorities to grant you some kind of justfiable exemption.
There’s a saying: Regulations are written in blood. Most of the safety-related regulations in this world were not written by some bureaucrat who was trying to give the little guy a hard time. They were written by groups of experts in the field who investigated some kind of disaster or tragedy and were trying to prevent the next one.
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