Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#41

Post by jazzyjackson »

anshumankmr wrote: post #40
klabb3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot found that very likely belongs to the airplane. It's just not a particularly sexy story. Most likely it's pilot murder-suicide, they did find a highly suspicious looking path in the pilot/copilot's flight sim. Iirc, during the handover from Malaysia to Vietnam ATCs, the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar, and once out of radar reach heads south ac…

>the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar wtf... Why is there a way for one person to depressurise the cabin?

Because if you can't trust the pilot you're fucked anyway?

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#42

Post by lostlogin »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #31
gerdesj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir Terry Pratchett often declaimed in his novels that "Million to one chances happen one times in ten". The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.

"Fiction has to make sense, reality can do whatever it wants."

You sound like someone who has witnessed the last 5 years.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#43

Post by bertrand-caron »

jumboshrimp wrote: post #37
taylorhou wrote: post #36

Speaking of finding, we still haven't found a significant trace of MH370. T_T

I’m not so sure that’s true: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...

Wow, thanks for that, that is a fantastic write-up, and a pretty compelling argument (at least to me) that the mystery of MH370 has been mostly "solved" (spoiler alert: all evidence points to a murder-suicide by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah).

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#44

Post by wizofaus »

Alan_Dillman wrote: post #28
vikingerik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small. The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher. This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything tha…

Exactly. This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical." It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was. Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.

Going on the evidence we have, it's certainly not impossible that our own planet (one out of something like 10^25 likely planets in the universe) happens to be the only one that life has arisen on, which I'd say qualifies as astronomical odds against for any random planet at least.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#45

Post by jahewson »

anshumankmr wrote: post #40
klabb3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot found that very likely belongs to the airplane. It's just not a particularly sexy story. Most likely it's pilot murder-suicide, they did find a highly suspicious looking path in the pilot/copilot's flight sim. Iirc, during the handover from Malaysia to Vietnam ATCs, the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar, and once out of radar reach heads south ac…

>the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar wtf... Why is there a way for one person to depressurise the cabin?

Can be used to clear the cabin of smoke in the event of a fire.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#46

Post by themerone »

googlryas wrote: post #9
jl6 wrote: post #5

What seems amazing is that it isn’t covered in more sand and sediment. It would take such a small thickness of covering to hide it from view forever.

It could be U shaped and not just a flat panel. Also, I assume the ceramic tiles have a very low coefficient of friction, so if it was stuck at any kind of small angle, the sediment might easily get carried off.

I got to hold a sample of one of the white tiles a long time ago. I don't know if it was identical to the flown versions, but it was anything but smooth.

I remember being able to feel and see individual silica fibers. It was very much a 3d surface.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#48

Post by userbinator »

jahewson wrote: post #45
anshumankmr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar wtf... Why is there a way for one person to depressurise the cabin?

Can be used to clear the cabin of smoke in the event of a fire.

Or in case of overpressure, which can be just as bad.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#49

Post by Grimburger »

userbinator wrote: post #48
jahewson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can be used to clear the cabin of smoke in the event of a fire.

Or in case of overpressure, which can be just as bad.

You sure about that?

Humans regularly work at 30x atmospheric pressure and can probably go to 100x

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32640/what-is-the-...

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#50

Post by afterburner »

Grimburger wrote: post #49
userbinator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in case of overpressure, which can be just as bad.

You sure about that? Humans regularly work at 30x atmospheric pressure and can probably go to 100x https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32640/what-is-the-...

These seem to talk mostly about diving, where you breathe from a regulated air supply. I assume that air supply is not at 30-100x atmospheric pressure?
Post reply on HN