For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
Yeah I don’t think you’re very far out on that limb. The likelihood of successful rescue is extremely low.
I can’t really believe anybody would spend $250K on a submarine expedition with the guy in charge of Ocean Gate, and his incredibly cavalier attitude toward safety.
Yea when I first heard about this I kinda just wrote them off tbh. The ocean is massive and moving, plus they’re in a glorified, malfunctioning, soup can.
I’ve never heard of the guy, but I can imagine based on that description jeez.
“It’s all apart of the experience” probably.
Maybe for a camping trip, but not this lol. Your already completely and literally out of your element.
I’ve heard somewhere it’s easier and safer to explore deep space than to explore the deep ocean.
I mean just superficially space is 0 atmospheres of pressure and sea level is 1. Compare that to the many hundreds of bars of pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
The distance is greater when exploring space but there’s nothing there. No currents or waves or storms or sharks… Just nothingness.
I wonder…is that only because we use probes? Or is it something to do with atmospheric pressure? Like I’m assuming water is heavier than space so even if you had a space suit on underwater you’d still get crushed or eaten by some big ass squid.
I’d love if a scientist could weigh in on this.
My layperson understanding is that with space you only have to have something robust enough to keep the atmospheric pressure in (as well as other considerations of course) which allows for less robust materials. For deep sea exploration you need something robust enough to keep the water pressure out.
For additional info: 10 metres of water depth is approximately equivalent to 1 atmosphere’s worth of pressure (ATM) - so 50 metres is 5ATM and so on and so forth. So theoretically a submarine would have to combat hundreds of ATMs of pressure, whereas a space craft only has to combat at most a couple of ATM.
In the ISS a minor hole can be patched pretty easily and quickly as it’s a slow leak of air out, however if a leak occurs in a submarine the results can be explosive and deadly.
To add a little: when a thing fails in compression (submarine), it’s usually unpredictable and catastrophic. When it fails in tension (spaceship), it starts slow and fails in a predictable way.
Tension is also much easier to calculate when you’re designing structures. Engineers will often go out of their way to make sure that tensile failure is the controlling failure mode, just to make sure that we don’t have to fuck with compression.
Thank you, yes this is what I had in my head, I appreciate you wording it properly, with examples!
So, I’m not a scientist, but I’ve watched plenty of space and ocean documentaries because it’s interesting to think about, so I’m pretty qualified, right? So, space is actually the opposite of heavy. It’s a vacuum, so the vessels designed to operate there have to deal with holding pressure IN, instead of out. Also, there’s no big ass squid in space to eat you, lmao.
Yes you are qualified, cause you summed it up pretty good! Summary: ocean is sketchy af!
even if you get a hole in your space suit you’ll live for a minute or so before freezing/dying of lack of oxygen. Get a pin hole in a sub down by the titanic and it will basically instantly implode killing you before you even knew something happened. space is far easier other than getting there and the radiation you need to protect against long term.
I never thought about it this way, but I think you’re right. I’m an engineer, and we go out of our way to avoid designing things that need to resist compression. Tension is much easier to calculate and things fail in a more consistent and predictable way. When things fail from compression, it’s usually unpredictable and catastrophic.
You compensate for that by making it as symmetrical as possible to balance forces and increasing safety factors to stay very far away from a runaway failure situation.
The designers of this sub were crowing about some kind of “active monitoring” system to see if the hull was in danger in real time. My take on that is they cheaped out on construction and slapped some strain gages (detect micro-bending or stretching) on it to make sure they didn’t get too close to failure from going too deep. But if there was a material or construction failure, it would just pop like a bubble before the strain gages could tell them anything was wrong.
But anyways, a spaceship is mostly under tension, but a submarine is under compression. So I think you pretty much nailed it there.
I mean everyone says “omg they’re crazy”, but it’s so easy to say that, and all of us have at least a few things that we’d be willing to do that an onlooker could point to and say “lol why do that when you might die”.
There’s nothing wrong with taking an informed risk, and it’s really up to you what kind of risk you’re comfortable taking. Most of these people seem to have a consistently high risk tolerance, and three of them were very experienced, so I don’t think it’s fair to call them “stupid” or “idiots” just because your risk/reward assessment doesn’t line up with theirs. If that was their idea of living the best life possible, then that’s good for them.
I’d also say that the majority of people in life aren’t as happy as they could be because they’re too scared to let go of convenience and familiarity. People turn down dream opportunities because it means moving to a different country, they stay in jobs they hate because they’re scared of what comes next, they don’t travel to places because five years ago someone died there, and they stay in unfulfilling relationships because they hate the thought of being alone or having to meet new people. So if you’re the kind of person who basically spends their life on the couch with the same old people in the same old place eating the same old food watching the same old shows and you dream about what could’ve been, I’m not sure you have the right to lob criticisms at people who chose to get up and do stuff.
I get what you’re saying about taking a calculated risk - like going for a bungee jump or paragliding or bouldering. However, the more you read about this particular craft the more you realize how much they ignored highly standard safety procedures and design. So I feel like the people criticizing are less saying “why bungee jump when you could die” and more saying “why would you bungee jump without a cord and pay 250,000 dollars for the privilege.”
The idea here is that messing up due to unforseen problems and things that couldn’t have been included in calculations is a “part of the experience” but messing up due to recklessness and disregarding required safety features isn’t in my opinion. Daredevils and adventurers would first and foremost work on safety so that they can keep on doing their extreme stuff. We can go to the space, to the very bottom of the ocean, to many other places, and we can do these because we have been careful. The times when we messed up are usually when we could call it like the infamous rocket explosion of NASA, which the engineers did try to warn NASA before launching it, only for NASA to disregard those. In extreme adventures, safety is a golden rule and death is a rare possiblity, not something to expect.
Lol, we aren’t able to do “extreme stuff” because of safety, we’re able to do it in spite of that. We would advance much faster if we didn’t value human life, full stop. It’s one of humanity’s biggest, albeit necessary inefficiencies. That value isn’t the norm either - throughout history we’ve generally been pretty comfortable with the expectation of death in exchange for advancement, and we owe a lot of our modern knowledge and technology to people who suffered for it. You’re taking a tiny sample size, i.e. the western world for the past 60ish years, and pretending that it reflects a precedent. To the extent that you need humans, safety and risk are always going to compete with one another, and human life is always going to be disposable to some actors.
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