OK, I saw some pics and short video of this thing.
It had no business putting around the shallows of a reef, much less 2 MILES (MILES!!!) under the ocean
It doesn’t look, to me, like there are enough redundancies for power and control, even if it is mechanically sound to remain sealed. Though, honestly, if I was at the bottom, I’d rather rapid implosion, vs suffocation. Though, I guess, there is a change it is at the surface. But you would think if that was the case it would have an emergency beacon. That seems like a very basic thing to have.
It’s even better because he’s dismissing the actual-innovation-by-actual-businesses-with-actual-bottom-lines of moving from semi-sacrificial saturation divers to robots for doing deep water stuff (“understandable but illogical.”) as apparently not-innovation because it doesn’t serve the interests of recreational deep dive submarines.
Techbros laundering their tastes as ‘rational’ certainly isn’t atypical; but he is not being subtle about it.
That’s the beautifully tragic thing about stifled innovation, it was stifled, so you can’t see or measure it, which means there is literally an immeasurable amount of loss! The sheer infinite weight of it all! And these techbros carry all of it around for you, for me, for all of us, with nothing but the footsteps in the sand of endless VC cash to help them portage it.
It occurred to me shortly after reading about this that a nominal 96 hour oxygen supply could actually last several times longer, depending on how many people were breathing it.
Surely, rather than disclose those known unknowns to the Enemies Of Freedom, they’d rather let the sub full of disaster tourists cark it, even if they are quite rich?
At that depth it is pitch black, literally, the darkest of darks, a rescue sub (even if one of the few that can go that deep could be brought and prepped in time) could pass a few meters away from them and not be able to see them
Yep, this is why space probes are better than humans wrt exploration. Underwater probes aren’t any different in this regard. I swear some folks just wanna visit a thing for bragging rights.
Underwater, a sub’s searchlight would have to be shining directly on them anyway. But even then, bright colour would help to differentiate it from the sea floor.
It seems likely that they’re still underwater, but your point is a good one. If they managed to surface but weren’t found before their air ran out they’d still be just as dead. That hatch is bolted on and can’t be opened from inside the sub.
I don’t expect that they’d be willing to do anything that they think compromises ‘sources and methods’; but I wouldn’t necessarily rule out vague-but-helpful advice more along the lines of “you’ve drawn up these 5 different search patterns based on last known positions and expected currents; #3 sure looks especially sensible to me”.
An outright “good old SOVIETSNIFFER picks up those carbon fiber hulls clear as day in this part of the Atlantic; just check at X,Y,Z!” seems unlikely; but, if the sensor data is actually helpful at all, politely suggesting that, a particular independently conceived line of inquiry might be the one to start with is potentially less revealing.
From the NYT, a more recent quote that I predict will also not age well:
“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” Mr. Rush said. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need.”
I keep hearing about the 96 hour oxygen supply, but no one is talking about carbon dioxide scrubbers. Is there any info about how/whether the sub is equipped?
