Disaster Tourism is sure to make the People Magazine “Top 10 Dangerous Trends list of the 2010s”. I mean this with complete sincerity.
I have a hard enough time just reading about disasters like the Titanic sinking. I cannot fathom the mindset of people who have to go see for themselves.
Nope nope nope nope nope
From this video
Again: nope nope NOPE
But hope hope hope for a good outcome
The interior and controls do not fill me with any confidence
Maybe they made it to the other side.
Maybe they found magic sea-slugs and are in the process of building a libertarian utopia on the ocean floor…
From one of the interviews on the BBC live page:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-65953941
Mike Reiss, who travelled to see the Titanic on a submersible that has now gone missing, says it is “remarkable” how basic and simple the whole operation is.
We were all aware of the dangers going into it, he says, adding he had to sign a waiver beforehand that mentioned death three different times on the first page.
Holy sh*t that video, it’s like a card table to sit on, an Xbox controller, and a desktop monitor wtf?!?!
I had the privilege once of taking a ride 50 ft down in one of those cool glass dome subs and it was 50x higher tech…!
The weather only affected things on the surface. After the first few hundred feet or so, the weather in the ocean is always the same; cold, dark, and trying to kill you.
The fact alone that it is not painted a bright yellow or orange like literally every other deep sea submersible (even military ones, see the submarine rescue vessel in the pic), raises a huge red flag (pun intended).
It’s such a simple and cheap detail that could make the difference in spotting the vessel in bad weather after an emergency ascent. That they haven’t even done that says a lot about the safety culture in the company.
We’ve heard some more from former submarine officer Frank Owen who says the first stage of the search operation would involve trying to communicate with the sub via transmitters.
It will be massively difficult to find the sub due to its size and it being in the middle of a debris field, the former director of the Australian Submarine Escape and Rescue project says.
Owen says when the Titanic sank, parts of the ship sank with it, but not all in the same place.
“It’s like searching for a mine in a minefield,” he told the BBC, adding that "it would be hard to know what is a rock and what isn’t.
Mad Catz for player 2.
Also this just sank in: someone above ran the numbers that the ambient pressure at that depth is about 5000 psi.
Typical scuba tank, full, is 3000 psi.
So if you opened the valve on a scuba tank at titanic depth, water would go in instead of air coming out. Yikes.
Damn, you’d think maybe they would have carried an Air Tag in there with them, just in case it might have worked… 
Yeah the lack of some sort of pinger and/or EPIRB seems grossly negligent
Those things are cone-shaped for structural integrity so I wonder if they’re measuring the diameter on the exterior of the sub, rather than the smaller diameter on the inside that the people get to look out through. Regardless, if it actually provided a good view you’d expect that the company would post at least one photo, somewhere, of people looking out of it. They have plenty of other photos of the sub.
So the british billionaire joined the expedition as a “mission specialist”
What was his specialty again? Ballast with money?
That quote right there is enough to never go near this guy’s service or subs. Anytime libertarian tech bros complain about “regulations killing innovation” (show me one case where that has ever actually happened) you know they are in this for the wrong reasons. Ugh, I hate dudes like this guy.
Some good shots of what the view looks like, here
Like my 1st year physics teacher said: “F=ma and you can’t push a rope.” Fibre ≅ rope.
Adding to @Doctor_Faustus that BBC article picture raises more red flags for me that just the “sea foam and clouds” paint scheme. There seem to be no redundant thrusters, no main prop at the back, no exterior frame to protect the hull and provide something to hook onto in case of rescue, no external power or communications to be seen. And a Logitech video game controller as your primary directional control seems to me to be a clinically insane engineering choice that screams “directive from the billionaire at the top” to me.
I wonder if (channeling the recent observation about atheists in foxholes and libertarians in a banking crisis) this libertarian ethic extends to having themselves extracted at great public cost from their soon-to-be-watery grave? (Although the occasional live exercise does help keep the troops sharp.)
