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.
Thank you, yes this is what I had in my head, I appreciate you wording it properly, with examples!
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.
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!
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.”