• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

The oceangate story.

Migrated topic.
D

dragonrider

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Moderator
I hope i'm not insulting anyone and i realy hope none of you personally knew anyone who died on that sub. Tragic deaths are always awfull.

But the more i heard and read about that hobby DIY submarine, the more ridiculous the story became to me. Again, i don't want to insult anyone, but when i first read about it i couldn't help laughing about the whole idea of going to the debts of 4 kilometers (where you're being exposed to a pressure of 400 kg per square centimeter) in a cobbled-together, uncertified, dive tub, held together and working with the most low-tech, cheap, band-aid solutions one could think of.

I believe the moment that thing went missing, it was pretty clear that it had imploded.

There is some footage of the first failed human attempts of flight. Including a guy who jumped off the eifeltower with strapped-on wings. He probably tried a chair first, and when that didn't work he must have thought that he needed something higher to jump from.

That's exactly what this was.

The reason oceangate operated off the coast of canada, and that he did not try to get his submarine certified, is that the guy behind it knew that he would never get that thing certified anywhere, and that he would never have been allowed to operate that thing commercially from any first world country.

You truly have to be a sort of don quixote to, being fully aware of all these flaws, continue to dive in that contraption yourself anyway.

Let's call this guy a tragic hero, because this is going to be a movie or a novel some day. And well, eccentric people are the driving force behind human civilisation. And evolution. Even when it's just for winning darwin awards.
 
It's odd to me that we got so much coverage when people are dying and tragic events are pretty much a continuous human experience. I guess they were rich so that's part of it. Also the stupidity of the endeavour is somewhat newsworthy. I have found it difficult to find much empathy for the situation. I wonder as usual if it's just another distraction from the really important global story.
 
fink said:
It's odd to me that we got so much coverage when people are dying and tragic events are pretty much a continuous human experience. I guess they were rich so that's part of it. Also the stupidity of the endeavour is somewhat newsworthy. I have found it difficult to find much empathy for the situation. I wonder as usual if it's just another distraction from the really important global story.
Click to expand...
I don't think it was because they where rich. Rich people die on mount everest every day probably. It's probably the sheer eccentricity of the whole endeavour. If a group of poor guys went missing after they tried to launch themselves to the moon with a giant catapult that someone build himself in his backyard it would probably get the same media attention.
People would speculate for days where exactly on the moon they could be. Someone would make a picture of the moon with a telescope, right after a mosquito took a dump on the lens, and people would speculate if that anomaly on the moon could be them. It would go on for days, untill their remains are found in the local pond.
 
Voidmatrix said:
If I'm not mistaken, this has been a hobby for years and some good research has come from it, such as in rhe great lakes in the US.

Also, cartels also use "disposable subs" for drug smuggling purposes.

One love
Click to expand...
Yes, but the minisubs used by the cartels don't go that deep. Neither do big, military submarines. And the little minisubs that do go to such depths, or even deeper, are nothing like this titan.

Carbonfiber is apparently not suited as a material for submarine hulls. Carbonfiber is basically just very strong fibers, glued together with some kind of resin. The properties of the carbonfiber composite depend on how the fibers are woven, and what type of resin is being used.
But the resin is usually what makes it stiff and rigid, because the hardened resin is usually stiff and rigid. If you would make a submarine hull, just out of the resins used in carbonfiber composites, it would crack immediately. The fibers keep it all together.
But everytime you go to a depth of 4 km, the hull is exposed to a pressure of 400 kilo per square centimeter. So by the look of that hull that must be something like 600000 tons of weight.
So everytime that thing goes down, tiny little cracks appear in the resin. When there's enough of those tiny little cracks in that resin, you're basically sitting in a hull made out of incredibly strong rope, with the weight of over ten thousand big african elephants pushing down on you. Over 15000 big elephants if they're asian elephants.

The head of oceangate had been warned about this repeatedly by several engineers with much more knowledge and experience than he had himself. But he continued to dive in that little contraption of his anyway, because he thought he knew better.

Great visioneers are tireless. That's part of their charisma.
That's also what get's them killed sometimes.
 
dragonrider said:
Yes, but the minisubs used by the cartels don't go that deep. Neither do big, military submarines. And the little minisubs that do go to such depths, or even deeper, are nothing like this titan.
Click to expand...

I read this first thing in the morning and forgot to consider depth... :shock:

Thank you for the correction and great points. Definitely painted a graphic picture :lol:

One love
 
Reports have supposed that an implosion at that pressure would happen so fast as to beat the nerve impulses from the body to the brain. Death many times more sudden than the action of flicking a light switch. Depending on your view of what happens when we die the idea of such an end is intriguing.
 
fink said:
Reports have supposed that an implosion at that pressure would happen so fast as to beat the nerve impulses from the body to the brain. Death many times more sudden than the action of flicking a light switch. Depending on your view of what happens when we die the idea of such an end is intriguing.
Click to expand...

No time for the DMT release hahaha
 
I too was disheartened by the difference in coverage between the little sub and one of the many greek migrant boat disasters. I think that it was less to do with distraction and more to do with it being an interesting story. Billionaires stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a tube, half the world want them to be ok, the other want them to suffer because they are billionaires wasting 250k on a "life changing" experience.
Also it has a lot to do with identifiable victim effect in how we process stories.

Stalin (in)famously said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”
 
Back
Top Bottom