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?
I’m a bit confused that this is receiving so much attention. What’s so special about this case compared to all the other cases of people being lost at sea every year, besides them being rich?
Honestly, this case is somewhat extraordinary, in a deeply disturbing way.
First there was this amazing quote from the CEO who is missing on the craft right now
“You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste,” Rush told CBS’ David Pogue during an episode of his “Unsung Science” podcast. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.”
Second, aside from being made from questionable experimental materials, the sub was being controlled by an old, off brand xbox controller. There were numerous design and safety issues that were known at the time of departure. They kinda just did whatever in the F they wanted to. It’s a millionaire game of Fuck Around and Find Out and they’re not used to finding out.
Third, the damage waiver
The disclaimer, read out by CBS correspondent David Pogue, read: “This experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.”
A nervous-looking Pogue makes a face and says, “Where do I sign?” in the footage recorded when he went on the $250,000 (£195,000) trip to see the Titanic at the end of last year.
I get that it’s just some rich idiots (and one of their kids) crossing the river styx, but it’s not very often you see such amazing disregard for basic safety.
I don’t get why the Logitech controller is so focused on. I get that it’s probably not the right controller due to it’s age and wireless only nature but COTS parts are often more reliable than in-house ones. The lack of certification as you mentioned is a much larger issue.
Any game controller, would be insufficient to put 5 peoples lives in danger.
If you were going to use a game controller to do so anyway, you’d use one that can be easily replaced, maybe something manufactured in the past decade. That F710 is old (2011) and honestly didn’t rate all that well compared to other controllers of it’s time. It’s wireless, adding needless risk.
The certification is all part of it. The control systems need to have backups. The gamepad aspect is interesting because it’s blatantly spitting in the face of safety which seemed to be the CEO’s style anyway.
Would it have been better than a new xbox controller? I’m not sure, perhaps not if it the new one was at least wired.
I work on robotics and drones for the military and we use game controllers for teleoperation all the time. There are some times we use more rugged and robust controllers, but they are essentially just expensive, yellow Playstation controllers with e-stop buttons on the bottom (look up Fort robotics controller).
I think you’d be surprised at how often the military uses game controllers for mission critical tech. The convergent design of game controllers has kind of solved the problem of minimal, handheld, input-output machines that are capable of commanding difficult procedures.
flying any passengers with em?
Rarely in my line of work but we do do it sometimes. To your point, outside of what I do I’m not sure how often game controllers are used in situations like passenger flight or submarines where you can’t just mash the e-stop button and bail out.
Yeah, I know the navy has used them for ages on robotic control.
And fly by wire is everywhere now. But the systems involved, they’re pretty hardened.
I think a wired control on it’s own isn’t a horrible sin, it just seems to me that in a world with as much tech as we have sitting around, someone can make something a little more rugged for something as critical as this particular part.
And of coure the elephant in the room is we have little data about this whole setup. It’s possible he had a laptop in there where he could open up a terminal, or maybe he had access to the lines and motors directly. If someone can reach back and trigger the ballast tank themselves, it negates a lot of control worries.
Good money is on explosive compression anyway. That hull shape is dodgy AF
Do you think it’s fun killing people and pretending it’s a video game?
What? They don’t pretend it’s a game, they just use game controllers. Killing people is the game for them.
I don’t operate anything in the field but I design and build the stuff. Fortunately, I haven’t had to build any weapon systems or combat vehicles yet because I also have some moral apprehension to that as well, but I try not to shame those who do work on that stuff if I can avoid it. It’s a pretty standard meme that wide-eyed aerospace engineers with dreams of space travel get stuck designing missiles to pay the bills. I’m sure there’s not that many engineers in weapons tech that wouldn’t switch to rockets or self driving cars in a heartbeat if they could afford to and had an in.
Hey I appreciate the honest response. I was being a bit of a dick and I feel bad now. Peace.
No it’s okay. I completely understand the sentiment and it’s the reason I tried my damnedest to avoid defense entirely in my job search, but with my skillset and the absolute cutthroat competitiveness of the space exploration industry, I had to broaden my search eventually. A lot of people that design the death machines also have similar reservations (I have met some that think explosions and death are cool but they are the minority…), but it’s usually those far outside the industry that hold such vitriol to those that work in the military industrial complex.
The problem isn’t the people, it’s the system and I try to remind people that when I see them attack me or others for working in defense (hopefully I can transfer out to space flight soon). Be mad at your representatives and politicians for voting for the ever expanding defense budget. Be mad at the CEOs and shareholder boards that push war for their war profiteering. Be mad at capitalism that forces the labourers into jobs they’d rather not have. Don’t be mad at the 23 year old fresh engineering grad that couldn’t land the job at NASA and Raytheon handed them a fat check to pay their loans back with.
dear God just think if the part that failed was the controllers batteries
I wouldn’t trust that controller for a dungeon run in the Elder Scrolls Online and here’s this dude visiting the Titanic in person with one. They did say he has backups on board, though.
I just … can’t
I wouldn’t think it would be too hard to swap either. With Joystick.h it would just be changing a few numbers in code, but they obviously didn’t care enough about maintenance or upgrades.
Nobody is objecting to it being a standard commercial controller. It’s been widely noted that the US military uses X-Box controllers for drone operation. It’s the fact that it’s a cheap/off-brand item compared to an official Sony, Nintendo or MS controller being used in a life-critical situation, and as you note, wireless.
The safety comment reminds me of some of the more irritating things I’ve been told in life about illness. Many people make remarks like “Well it’s not cancer” or “It isn’t going to kill you” as if things are black and white. An illness either kills you or you’re fine, right? Uh, no. The thing this brilliant CEO is missing is that obviously there are degrees of danger. Getting out of bed or getting in my car are measured risks. Taking a rinky-dink submersible to 2 miles underneath the ocean with a cavalier imbecile is a very different class of risk.
Wait, so they’ve done this dive before? For some reason I thought it was the first time
Apparently there have a number of dives.
They have money
They did have money but the people involved Tham Luang cave rescue didn’t and that received a ton of attention. Similarly with the Chilean miners stuck underground for 2 months. You also have Kathy Fiscus (an old story but well known at the time) and Nutty Putty caving incident. There is no shortage of similar stories about people getting stuck in places that received wide attention.
The fact they are they rich is only really influencing where they ended up and how they got there.
It’s mostly the being rich thing.
It’s really sad that something like this gets so much news coverage and international support, while poor people are facing similar fates and we all pretend it’s not happening.
I understand the news coverage. These are folks who are relatable to a lot of western audiences. People aspire to their wealth. The international support and rescue efforts though are a little shameful. You don’t see this kind of efforts when it’s migrants fleeing war and oppression.
I see the attention on the war in Ukraine similarly. What Russia is doing is shameful and I’m glad Ukraine is getting so much help. At the same time Yemen has it much worse. Hardly anyone even knows there is a war happening there, but it’s American built bombs that are dropping on neighborhoods. They’re not quite white and relatable enough to get us all putting their flag on our Twitter profiles.
For me, it’s because this situation is a nightmare situation. I can’t think of many more aweful ways to go. There is a chance that right now people are dying in a tube at the bottom of the ocean. Slowly. Or even worse, they could be on the surface. Able to see out their window but suffocating to death just hoping to see a ship come by. Maybe they saw a ship and it passed by. Maybe they died instantly is a rapid collapse.
I dunno, it’s just the epitome of horror. I keep finding myself thinking about possibilities and what it’s be like and what I’d do.
If they’re on the surface the interior is probably sloshing in vomit, as well as everything else.
More mysterious. Spookier. Generally more novel. Like you said, people get lost at sea all the time. People rarely get lost thousands of miles below sea.
No wonder they can’t be found—they have sunk to the fucking core of the planet :'D
Haha oops, I am dumb. I apparently have no concept of the scale of the earth. I read an infographic and read meters as kilometers which is then head converted to miles. Off by quite a magnitude.
Nah, it’s only 4km. If they weren’t lazy billionaires, they’d get out and walk home.
One thing I can say is if they ever do find the sub intact, its very likely these guys recorded their last hours on their phones and we are very likely to see that at some point… talk about nightmare fuel.
Woof. That is terrifying and definitely something I won’t be watching.
I agree with your general point for sure, but how deep do you think the ocean is?
I already confessed to being dumb 😭
the quality of the sub really triggers my schadenfreude
It being so completely ridiculous. If a boat sinks, it just sinks… bad luck.
But this was some crazy person using some jerry-rigged submarine and then rich people actually trusting that.
Traditional media coverage + social media hype. Add in the fact that it’s a group of billionaires gallivanting in the deep sea. It’s a recipe for becoming a media sensation across all types of people.
Probably the significance of the dive site, and I’m not sure how many commerical submarines go missing every year, maybe a few private ones, but seldom in waters this deep.
As other have said, there’s more going on than just these people being rich that is causing the story to receive attention. Having said that, them being rich is definitely a contributor, not because that means that their lives are worth more but because it contributes novelty to the situation, and our collective attention tends to be drawn, for better or worse, to situations which are novel rather than situations which are routine, even if we should be caring more about the latter than the former.
It seems you’ve already identified the main part. Also the fact that it is a sexy story, shipwreck squared
They are not just rich - they’re very powerful people.
It’s unusual. That’s what it boils down to, whether we like it or not. The ongoing nature of the story makes it additionally intriguing, since we don’t know what happened and what will happen.
You or me getting into a car Crash? Not unusual, not (major) news, and “done” - no further news are expected: not interesting. A gang member shooting another gang member in Gary, Indiana? Not unusual, not (Major) news, not interesting.
Size of the tragedy doesn’t necessarily matter either, but cultural connection does to some extent: Another warlord committing another genocide somewhere in Africa? Not unusual, not news, not interesting. A large disaster in a country culturally close to you will be more relatable, and more likely to be covered, than a similar disaster in a poorer coutnry, but “unusual” still overrides this.
33 adults killed in a mining accident? Not news. Maybe a footnote on a slow day. 33 adults buried, possibly alive, after a mine collapse? Even if it’s in a far away country, now it’s news: relatively unusual, developing story - worldwide coverage and a movie. 13 kids trapped in a flooding cave? Now THAT’S some juicy news! All cameras on it! Didn’t matter that these were poor kids from Asia, unusual + ongoing beats everything else.
This submarine went into an extremely hostile environment, making it unique. It’s an ongoing story, making it more interesting. Of course it’s going to be covered, just like Apollo 13 was.
Do you know what the most recent mission to the ISS was, who is there, how they got there? I don’t, despite being somewhat interested in space - it’s not news. If they had a minor fire or leak - that’d make the news, but it has happened before and will happen again, so it wouldn’t be big. Rock hits the ISS, leaving them stranded in separate capsules not knowing the status of all crew members, with long debates whether rescue is possible? Evening news every day until they’re all rescued or all dead. Even though they’re neither rich nor famous.