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

Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 1001 posts

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#461

Post by krisoft »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #275
hawk_ wrote: post #206

I am curious how we (the society) justify the shared costs incurred in searching for people involved in such a reckless mission.

I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find you. And not just the rich either, no matter what Twitter would have you believe.

> I think there is value in living in the kind of society where you know that if you are lost at sea there will be arguably irrational levels of resources thrown into trying to find you

I wouldn’t know, because i live in the kind of society where if you are lost at sea and you call for help but the call handler assumes that you have the wrong kind of passport they just tell you to call some other country and then hung up on you. [1]

But i would rather live in the kind of society where we spend our pooled resources to heal those who have fallen sick, than in one where we spend our pooled resources to rescue statistical anomalies. Everyone can become sick one day, not everyone will get suckered to buy a deluxe sea going group coffin by a conman.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/13/uk-coastguar...

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#462

Post by davidw »

thinkling wrote: post #266
AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the search team/agency simply eat the cost or does the cost get passed back to the insurance for the company, the company itself, or the CEO personally since he has the means to pay. Further, everyone on board has the means to pay for a recovery, should they too share some of the cost?

I believe almost all Search and Rescue is free because S&R organizations don’t want people to hesitate to call 911 (or equivalent) because of cost concerns, and have the situation deteriorate while they delay calling. As to who should share in the cost… my take is that it’s time to discuss whether some expeditions (e.g. risky commercial tourist rides) should sign a Do Not Rescue pledge before they head out and/or sel…

Yeah this question gets asked somewhat frequently in the mountain(ish) town where I live after someone does something dumb and requires extraction.

It's just better that they call right away rather than wait too long and die.

If you search around on the internet, you can find people writing this up in much more detail and more eloquently.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#464

Post by RhodesianHunter »

scotty79 wrote: post #416
ommpto wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us…

I don't understand why they didn't just drop it to the bottom of the ocean without people hundred times to see if it still holds. Who experiments with a crew in the age of remote control sensors and computers?

`Over the years it has carried out more than 200 dives with its three submersible vessels in the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.`

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#465

Post by ryanthemadone »

itake wrote: post #457
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the migrant boat disaster is horrible. But I was more interested in this missing sub because it was a bit mysterious what happened to it initially. Then it all comes out how badly built it is, how it's a death trap, etc. It's just more interesting personally. It doesn't mean it's worse than the migrant boat, it's just more interesting and I'd rather read about it. Mysterious cases always get more traction on…

Do you have any details about why it was a death trap? I watched one video that complained about off the shelf parts being used, but the two examples was an RV light (not safety related) and the gaming controller (which they had multiple back ups). They also claimed to have been reviewed by Boeing and University of Washington. There was 7 different mechanisms that could force a return. Some of those were purely mecha…

This flying lady doctor had lots to say on this

https://twitter.com/LadyDoctorSays/status/167170098942929715...

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#466

Post by kristjansson »

beowulfey wrote: post #331
FinnG wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that the Oceangate ship ignores everything that it's not 'expecting' to hear. I don't really know anything about deep sea exploration, but having general purpose microphones in the water seems like a bit of an oversight to me, given the marginal cost of having them.

So many things about this venture were not really considered. I am terrified that this guy was an aerospace engineer. It feels like he threw the book about engineering safety out the window. The big one is designing the sub to travel to 95% of the expected maximum depth, leaving a 5% margin of safety. I was taught to aim for a margin of safety of (I think it was) 50% back in the day. Operating so close to the safe li…

There ... there were screws into the structual carbon fiber??

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#467

Post by 0x0203 »

SirMaster wrote: post #190
EA-3167 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It imploded right away" explains everything. "It imploded later" requires at least two failures, first of power/comms, and THEN of the structure itself. Occam's Razor

How does it explain why the support boat heard no implosion while listening for the 15 min pings? Wouldn't an implosion be really loud?

Loud is relative. You wouldn't hear it standing on deck of the support ship. And the hydrophones they were using for communications and pings were possibly (likely?) passed into an FFT, band-pass filtered to look for the expected frequencies of pings, and triggered on a signal spike in that range. I doubt they had somebody just listening to a straight up amplified signal straight from the hydrophones. Even if they did, someone unfamiliar with what they were hearing might not recognize it as an implosion event and attribute it to something else. And given the apparent attitude and methodology of the whole operation, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bother making recordings of the raw data. So it's entirely possible they wouldn't hear/notice an implosion event.

As for the banging sounds heard days later, there are a thousand possible sources of those, especially with a dozen or more other vessels on the scene. Anything from a buoy with a loose part clanking away, to some waves breaking and clapping on the surface, to a whale slapping its tail, to extraneous noise from one of the search vessels or its equipment, to other sources of sea life making a racket. It's a bit like trying to listen for the buzzing of a bee in a basketball stadium with a game going on. Any signal you get is far more likely to be something else, but when you have literally no better options, every signal, no matter how unlikely, is worth investigating. Then they report they investigated and found nothing, and in a bit of target fixation, people assume it must have been people in the sub. Understandable, but it's not necessarily the most likely/logical conclusion.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#468

Post by gamblor956 »

renewiltord wrote: post #208
Certhas wrote: post #187

It is notable how much news-coverage this received (for understandable reasons [1]) relative to the almost simultaneous disaster in the Mediterranean [2], where a shipwreck killed hundreds of people. [1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot cl…

Yes, it's more similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue than to other disasters, which should illustrate that it's not about the kind of people so much as the story itself. I lived in South Asia for a while and the thing that would strike me is the everyday catastrophes. For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US https://apnews.com/article/indi…

For instance, there was a recent Indian derailment that you barely heard about here in the US

It was only covered in the NYT, LAT, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, WSJ, USAT, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News....just to name a few.

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#469

Post by EatingWithForks »

kitd wrote: post #227
Certhas wrote: post #187

It is notable how much news-coverage this received (for understandable reasons [1]) relative to the almost simultaneous disaster in the Mediterranean [2], where a shipwreck killed hundreds of people. [1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot cl…

I think the idea of being trapped in a confined space kilometers under the sea has a visceral effect on the imagination that a boat voyage on the surface doesn't, regardless of how tragic the outcome is in both events. It pokes and prods many of our deep phobias. Similar stories like the Thai boys trapped in the cave, or the Chilean miners, had a similar effect. A bit like "Snakes on a plane". Again, trapped with you…

I think being trapped on an overcrowded ship, bodies pressed into you, as the ship capsizes, is also viscerally terrifying. You don't know where you are. You don't know who is around you. You have nothing except what you could've carried. You are trying to leave a downed ship with hundreds of pressing bodies. The waters are rising. There's too much froth to see where you're going.

Everyone is screaming, death is all around you. People are drowning, and in their drowning flailing limbs they are pulling others to their deaths.

[Edited to add: The migrants would've had time to process what was happening to them. There would be many long minutes of terror, suffocation, as they died. Hundreds. Women, children.]

Re: Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

#470

Post by aaron695 »

Certhas wrote: post #187

It is notable how much news-coverage this received (for understandable reasons [1]) relative to the almost simultaneous disaster in the Mediterranean [2], where a shipwreck killed hundreds of people. [1] What springs to mind: Dramatic search action well suited for live blog coverage; psychological impact of the idea of people stranded in a submarine for days; And of course the average person here is probably a lot cl…

[dead]
Post reply on HN