I can’t imagine how terrible it is to be 4000 meters down in the sea in a small metal submarine, cutoff from communication and knowing you have a limited amount of life support left.
This is a terrible thought, but the people onboard apparently found the titanic wreck so fascinating to go to these extremes to see it up close. And now they’re getting the ultimate reality experience of what it was like to be on the titanic, slowly awaiting their own death. Pretty horrifying stuff really.
https://twitter.com/halkyardo/status/1671000633845993473
incredibly funny when the overly-industry-friendly tech journalists don’t realise they’re saying some really damning stuff.
jesus
who is this pogue dude? “hey everyone I pretend to be a journalist but actually I just do PR for this company”
possibilities at this point are:
does anyone have an educated guess at the probability breakdown?
if 2, they’re basically fucked, right? from what I’ve seen of this thing it’s just a pressure vessel, probably no way to do any mechanical repairs on the fly and there’s no realistic way to get down there and haul the vehicle back to the surface?
if 3, what happens? I assume these nets are heavy as hell and unless they’re able to cut through the net they’ll just sink to the bottom?
Is 4 surfaced but not seen not realistic?
I haven’t even read an article about it, but as I understand it, the people in the vessel have no way to do it - like the vessel doesn’t appear to have arms or anything to remove stuff that gets lodged on it, and they’re trapped inside and even if they weren’t, they’d die within like 5 minutes even if they had scuba gear.
So the real question is if they’re caught in a ghost net or whatever, how the fuck is anyone going to find them and if they did find them, how the fuck would they help them? It sounds like the best military subs can go about 600 to 1,300 meters down, and these guys are 4,000 meters down.
Seems like whatever the probability of this is, parlayed with the probability of finding them and opening it in time, is the likelihood they survive. Whoever designed this thing to be impossible to open from the inside was a real big brain genius.
Like, the lack of communication is also stunning. If you literally gave them floating transponders that could be released - not even on a harness if that’s too long, they could release these things and create a floating trail of transponders to lead rescuers towards them.
Although I guess if nobody can get deep enough to get them up, it doesn’t much matter.
Not having an emergency beacon is insane. Even if they’ve surfaced it;s going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack and they’re running out of air.
“Adding such a beacon was discussed”
wtf man sounds like these guys tempted fate once and won but then learned nothing
Taking no/incredibly half-assed safety measures seems very on brand for a ship designed to view the Titanic.
they apparently have some way to communicate with the mothership, I was inferring that this method gets unreliable at depth but I was assuming it would work fine if they’re surfaced
Reading about this story makes me physically sick.
NYT mobile app sending me breathless update notifications about this. 40 hours of air left! DIAGF
If they ran out of air it would have been bad, a lot of time to think before becoming hypoxic and passing out. If it was a pressure vessel failure it would have been really fast and really unpleasant.
David Pogue used to be a top tier technology reporter, not sure why he faded away.
I think, and stress think, that the actual dying part wouldn’t be too bad at least. People think you start gasping or choking for air, and I don’t think that’s what would happen in this situation.
The idea of the enclosed space and time is terrifying for sure
They learned they could save a couple hundred bucks not buying a beacon.
Every new story I read about this sub shows me fresh new examples of horrifying neglect.
Really bad negligence + dead rich people = people might go to jail.
I mean the main guy who did the negligence was on the boat…
