#leave her aloneeeeeee she’s just sitting pretty doing her thing let the scientists watch and document her rot away

[insignificantstrawberry]

I just watched a 60 minutes interview with James Cameron about this and there’s a clip of Stockton piloting his toy sub with visible condensation inside the window. He’s in his socks with a game controller going around in circles in the dark at depths unimaginably deep. He had no idea what literal pressure he was under and that literal pressure literally killed him.

I have a theory that the expert who Stockton hired, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, knew exactly how bad it was. PH had a personal death wish after the death of his wife and wanted to rest his body at the wreckage site because…well. people who get obsessive over titanic probably get it. It’s so incredibly dark down at the bottom of the sea floor and if you don’t know where you are going and what direction the ocean currents are you can easily get caught in the iron cables that held the smokestacks to the deck. It’s insanely dangerous for so many factors other than there’s a lot of water. Basically the entire thing was a shit show from the start and the only reason it continued and concluded the way it did is because of money.

Capitalism. Full stop.

i read the recent wired article about the ocean gate titanic sub and i think the most understatedly eyebrow raising aspect of that whole debacle honestly is that the ceo seems to have been personally manning half their unsafe deep sea dives... like usually in a story like this it turns out the people at the top were brushing off safety concerns because they knew they personally could avoid consequences and were willing to risk their employees and customers. and im sure there were some people at ocean gate doing that. but stockton rush was as far as i can tell genuinely convinced of his own genius corner cutting engineering hacks to the point where he kept manning these vessels even after tests where they were failing and warnings from university labs and boeing engineers and hearing the hull make ominous creaking sounds while he himself was piloting it like... man with zero survival instincts to a point seldom seen in wealthy startup assholes who absolutely have the financial wherewithal to save their own necks