'Titanic' director James Cameron 'struck by the similarity' of historic disaster and Titan sub tragedy

Originally published at: 'Titanic' director James Cameron 'struck by the similarity' of historic disaster and Titan sub tragedy | Boing Boing

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This can’t be stressed enough. This wasn’t someone doing something groundbreaking where human lives are the price of progress. These are problems that have been solved in the 1960s and with which a group of professionals has been working with an excellent safety track record ever since.

This was someone who cut corners so they could offer a tourist experience at a discount price (and yes, $250,000 wouldn’t even cover the charter of the mothership if you mounted your own expedition with actual DSVs, so it is very much a cheap rate). It is the move fast and break things mindset that killed these people.

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So we should expect a big budget Titanic sequel based on this very soon.

This disaster puts me in mind of Richard Feynman’s statement in the final report of the investigation of the not dissimilar Challenger disaster:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

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Honestly, I can see him directing a documentary about this, but there isn’t really a feature film story in it.

“Draw me like one of your hedge fund managers…”

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That tracks. He’s a part of a very small and tight-knit community with their own scuttlebutt. I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where we knew something about our communities that the public would only hear about later (it certainly happens all the time in mine).

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Next, conspiracy theories about “the deep submergence community”. :roll_eyes:

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I’d have thought the same thing about Deepwater Horizon. Yet we sit in a world where that movie was made. If it captivated corporate media for as long as it did, I suspect Hollywood can find a way to generate a movie* from it.

*I offer no comments as to quality of the presumed eventual products.

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Oh yeah, I’m sure Hollywood will make a movie about it, just not James Cameron


I mean there’s a lot of wiggle room between never leaving your home and not paying a quarter of million dollars to go on a deep sea joyride with a man who says things like this:

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That headline, tho… he didn’t know… he just guessed correctly out of a set of possible outcomes, which he was aware of… :woman_shrugging:

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If he knew that they’d released ballast, that two independent systems lost contact at the same time, and a loud gnab was picked up around that time, then it was a well-informed guess, but yes, “knew” was too strong.

I don’t doubt it was an informed guess, since I’m assuming he’s gone down to the site on submersibles before… but I just kind of hate the hero worship tone of that headline… he’s a film maker, not Jesus Christ himself…

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