#SUBMARINE

[alexriesart]

Just 9 days left on the Kickstarter for 'Other Worlds: The Art of Alex Ries'!

Space art I produced over the years for Australian Geographic: A probe among flourishing life beneath the ice of Europa, and the CNSA Nanjing sampling an asteroid claim.

Check it out here :) https://bit.ly/403C70b

[marinebiologyshitposts]

fishjak. if this is anything

[nevvyland]

[cabbagewithissues]

Can’t believe I haven’t seen anything on here about the rich-people-tourism submarine (steered by a video game controller???) that went missing on the way to the Titanic ruins.

This seems like the kind of story this site usually latches onto

UPDATE/EDIT (I put this in a reblog as well but just so ppl see it): it seems like it was possibly carrying researchers/explorers as well? I haven’t seen a manifest yet, but either way, I feel awful for the passengers/crew and their families, this has got to be harrowing for them

June 22, 2023, 2:50pm EST Update: OceanGate released a statement saying they believe those aboard the Titan submersible “have been sadly lost.” According to the US Coast Guard press conference at 3pm EST, the debris found is “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”

[fake-destiel-news]

[prideprejudce]

the symbolism of billionaires willingly paying some greedy tech bro 250k to go sit in his backyard shed built tin-can submarine to find a sunk mass grave site of over a thousand people (many whom died solely due to being poor or third class passengers) only to become missing and likely lost at sea themselves is the type of karma you usually never get to see play out so perfectly

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[enigma-the-mysterious]

If someone told me that a submersible named the Titan, owned by a company called OceanGATE, carrying three billionaires, had gone missing on an expedition to the Titanic, I would think it was some pitch for a new thriller mystery novel and not something that had actually happened due to the hubris and stupidity of rich people.

[someloudmouth]

As an engineer, I see the wreckage of The Titanic as a monument to a critical failure in design that must never, never be repeated. The single "positive outcome" of The Titanic Disaster was that it exposed just how woefully unsatisfactory the safety regulations for seafaring vessels were at the time.

The Titanic had 20 lifeboats which, in total, at max capacity, could hold 1,178 of the 2,209 passengers on board the ship. Only 18 out of 20 lifeboats were launched, many of which were half full, cutting down the number of passengers on board to just 712.

That is a disgrace. That is a profound waste of human life.

But the real tragedy is that the Titanic actually exceeded the safety regulations of her day. According to the letter of the law at the time, she had more than enough lifeboats. It was assumed that if, god forbid, the hull was breached, she would stay afloat long enough that passengers could wait on board to be rescued.

To compound this issue, the ship had no real evacuation protocol, and the crew members who were expected to execute a mass evacuation were completely untrained in how to do so. There was one cursory drill performed while she was still in dock, during which only two lifeboats were lowered.

Nearly every mistake made in the Titanic's safety protocols can be attributed to the naive assumption that the worst case scenario couldn't possibly happen.

OceanGate's Titan submersible flies in the face of every safety regulation put in place since The Titanic Disaster. Just like The Titanic, The Titan was built and deployed assuming that every aspect of its voyage would be executed perfectly. When you're dealing with human life, perfection is a dangerous thing to plan for.

We have safety regulations for a lot of reasons, and The Titanic is one of them.

[8one6]

[gleep-glorp-bobcat]

[courferre-stan]

watching the news coverage on the billionaire submarine stuff like:

[carsen-daily]

[memingursa]

Human pet guy has thoughts on this with…. examples.

[animentality]

This whole thing is a fucking farce.

[its-night-again]

They...

I can't.