#oceangate tw

[gizmocreates]

It’s kind of wild that in like 50 years some director is going to make a movie about how the Titan sub incident victims actually discovered Atlantis and were saved by merpeople, with stockton rush portrayed as an evil but charismatic zillionaire that wants to steal some sort of ancient treasure from the titanic’s wreckage for his own ends

[creativelyabsentminded]

✨We all live in a crumpled submarine✨

[freakinbads]

honestly it's fine to fucking hate the rich but like I think there's a reason that people are so interested in this: it's not because people CARE. It's because it's a morbid fascination with death and the unknown.

[primeministerofantarctica]

i cant stop thinking about it like "oh a submarine exploded and the people inside fucking disintegrated into nothingness that's so crazy lol what a weird dream" and then its like "oh. oh yeah it's real." i don't have many strong opinions or sorrow for the people (except for the kid that went with his dad, fuck) but fucking hell how you can just. explode into a million pieces and have them lost to the ocean forever. not leaving a body just completely blinking out of existence like you never did in the first place.

[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.

[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.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[demonoflight]

Okay, so, this is a VERY morbid question for the science side of Tumblr, BUT. Seeing how the Oceangate submersible imploded so spectacularly with debris everywhere, is there anything left from the people onboard? Like, could the deep sea critters in the abyss around the Titanic get some nutrition, like a very small scale whale fall? Or is it just like, a fine mist helpful to no one?

[lunar-lumi]

so fucking conflicted about oceangate. one one hand, yeah, that was such an incredibly stupid thing to do. why would you spend a fucking insane amount of money to get in an iron-lung-esque death trap controlled by a repurposed video game controller to visit a gravesite where so many people, the poorest of them especially, horrifically died? the things that billionaires do. the whole situation just seems surreal to me.

but also, what a horrible way to die. stuck in a cramped tin can, suffocating, lost in the depths of the ocean. one of the passengers is allegedly only a teenager. no matter how stupid and hubristic those billionaires were, no one deserves to suffer through or die from such a horrific event.

important addition: the oceangate disappearance has gotten way more news coverage and attention than the greek migrant mass drowning. 700 migrants or more from syria, egypt, and pakistan were on that ship. the greek coast guard did nothing when the ship sank under their watch. the people aboard that ship are much more deserving of our sympathy. i hope everyone who died can rest in peace. i hope their loved ones can get the support and care they need. i hope all survivors recover physically and emotionally.

i urge you to read more about it yourself. here’s an article.

[mrsmarlasinger]

Oh? My fucking god??

THIS WAS THE CONTROLLER FOR THE SUBMARINE THAT WENT MISSING???

The Logitech F710??

Like, okay, apparently the U.S. military* uses Xbox 360 controllers. I get that. It's cheap. It's technology already familiar to many young adults. I get it, I do.

*(fuck 'em)

But still. STILL.

I don't know anything about gamepads, but I do know the Logitech F710 came out thirteen years ago. I just found it on Ebay for $16 including shipping.

But surely that means that through the test of time, the Logitech F710 has proven itself to be the best around, right? A work of video game engineering so flawless, even a relatively sane individual might agree to trust it with their life....right?

Oh. Oh. Jesus Horatio Christ.

Imagine your joystick drifts and your buttons get stuck and your controller lags...while you're steering a submarine...13,000 FEET UNDERWATER.

(That's about 4,000 meters, or just under 2.5 miles. And yes, I know it's actually a submersible, not a submarine.)

Oh my god. Oh my god.

For context, according to Naval Post:

A submarine specifically built to rescue people from subs sunk deep in the sea has a maximum depth of 7,500 to 10,000 feet (2,250 to 3,000 meters). But no, with the Titan, we're talking 13,000 FEET.

So if the pressure at approximately that depth is 5,775 psi, which means 5,775 lbs (2,619 kg)—or ALMOST THREE TONS—per square inch...

...and the atmospheric pressure where I live is sitting at 14.5 psi today...

That means the sheer pressure of the ocean at that depth is, like, 400 times that of the air we breathe. So if your fucking 13-year-old video game controller drifts you into the wreckage of the goddamn Titanic, the moment your hull sustains a little damage, even the tiniest leak, you're gonezo. The sub implodes and you're pulverized. Instantly.

(Plus I hear the compression rate is so extreme, the molecules so fast-moving, that everything heats to combustion in the split second before the water puts it out. So really, you'd be incinerated before you'd be crushed. Ain't that a treat?)

But hey, maybe the pressure hull remains intact and you just lose power. Or get entangled in the wreckage of, again, THE GODDAMN TITANIC.

Then it's just you and your four rich buddies crammed into a metal tube, waiting for your 96 hours of oxygen to run out.

Navigational computers on the fucking floor. No backrests. No seats. No padding. Nothing. Just one small toilet sat in front of one tiny window.

So when the power dies and the lights go out, it's just a claustrophic sardine tin of the wealthy, alone in the suffocating pitch-dark at the bottom of the ocean, choking on the smell of their own shit.

All this, for a quarter of a million dollars per head.

Which they paid even though Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate himself, said that SAFETY IS A WASTE. OH MY FUCKING—

A sadly unshocking thing to hear from the CEO of a company that's engendered safety concerns! For! YEARS!

Also unshocking: the waiver apparently mentions death three times on the first page.

You know.

In case it didn't get through to you after the first two times. Or after reading that the sub is experimental and hasn't been approved or regulated in any remotely meaningful way.

But it's okay if the MacGyvered fucking submarine crumbles like a Saltine cracker, because IT DOESN'T MATTER IF EVERYTHING FAILS! AS LONG AS THE PRESSURE HULL'S INTACT, IT'S OKAY IF YOU'RE STUCK 13,000 FEET UNDER THE SEA WITH A RAPIDLY DWINDLING SUPPLY OF OXYGEN! THE CEO OF OCEANGATE SAID SO!!!

HAHA! HA! YES, THE TOTALLY SUCCESSFUL MACGYVERED SUB WITH A COMPLETELY INTACT PRESSURE HULL!!!!

Oh my god. Oh my GOOOOOOOOD.

But hey! Remember! :) If the Juulpod-sized, Atari-run hunk of hubris doesn't literally fucking implode with you inside it, it's okay that there are 18 bolts locking you in that can't be undone without external assistance! Because Stockton Rush said you're safe as long as the (definitely pristine) hull is still intact!

So if you're bobbing on the surface of the ocean, watching seagulls cross blue sky through your single tiny porthole, listening to the pulse of white-crested waves ruffled by the cool sea breeze, drowning above water because you can't escape the slow ceaseless hourglass that is your stagnant air supply without a rescue crew—a rescue crew that can't even find you because you're mired in a vast expanse of savage ocean and oh, by the way, your communications going down is what started all this in the FIRST PLACE...

...well, don't worry! Titan's many, many, MANY successful past voyages should give you comfort! :)

But, on the very off chance this could be a dangerous and likely deadly situation, tell me: which would be the worst way to go?

Incinerating in the abrupt birth of a terrible, crushing singularity?

Asphyxiating in the lightless abyss that lurks like some arcane hell at the bottom of the ocean?

Or suffocating just as slowly above the water, with air so close you can see the misty breeze yet still...just...out...of reach?

God, I hope we save these dumbass idiots. Especially since one of them's just a 19-year-old kid. I don't even care how rich and stupid they are. I just can't imagine dying like that.

[fox-bright]

not that my thoughts on oceangate matter, but.

I have had to kill three groundhogs so far this year.

There is no bottom to their appetite, and they destroy my garden. I preserve the vegetables I grow--in the last couple of days alone I've had tomato sauce, chili, fruit, and green beans from last year's harvest, and herbs grown already this season; in the next couple of days I'll probably have chard, more fruit, salsa, pickles, more herbs. The groundhogs can't be allowed to stay, and they can't be moved, so they have to die. I hate it. But this is how it is. Either I let them destabilize my house and tear a swath through next year's food, or I kill them. My partner will stop taking his shower to let a spider out; I could not put such killings on his karma. So. The minimum of suffering requires that I do the job.

The internet is full of people delighting in killing their own troublesome rodents. I read those posts with no small amount of queasiness. It might be a small life, but it is a life; it is very important to me to kill them cleanly. Many of the methods that these people suggest are vile.

I know that there is no such thing as a bloodless revolution.

I know that there is no such thing as a good billionaire.

I very much doubt that most of the people on that submarine were good people. Maybe none of them were.

I do not think that being a bad person means you should be tortured to death.

Reading all the posts about hah, hah, it's been three days, I bet they're covered in piss and shit and terrified as they suffocate in the dark, feels like reading the posts about blocking off all entrances to a groundhog tunnel but one and stuffing dry ice into it.

Lois McMaster Bujold said, "There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else." and I always thought she meant, the violence leaves a mark even if the people it was enacted against are obliterated. It changes the murderers, and as they move through the world they change their society in crooked ways, ways that would not occur if they had not become murderers.

We may be very glad that a bad person has died. It is not unreasonable, at all, to exult in the passing of an oppressor.

Delighting in another's suffering, I think, is corrosive to the spirit.

(It is very, very important to me that the groundhogs, and my husband, suffer as little as possible.)

(So it must be me who does it.)

I think about my father, before he took off, taking my closest-aged brother to hunt prairie dogs at a relative's farm. I think about him telling jokes about a shot my brother took, about what it did to the prairie dog's head. "Fantastic flying frisbee face!" he said. My brother was eight.

We are taught to delight in others' suffering very young.

I do not have a religion to hold on to; getting out of the one I was reared in has left me unfit for all others.

I heard that the submarine suffered a catastrophic hull failure, and everyone in it was killed before they knew that they were dying, and all I could think was, thank God, thank God.

[primeministerofantarctica]

this is so morbid but at least we're all on the same page

[see-arcane]

I’m glad it isn’t someone else.

I’m glad it isn’t another loss of the desperate, the poor, the threatened, the forsaken masses scraped off the consciousness and consciences of those steeped in wealth and power who couldn’t be bothered to care as they drowned.

(Thousands have died and disappeared in the waters of migrant routes. Some make it to the shore. Some are sequestered in camps. Some of them are forced back out and abandoned on rafts in the middle of the sea. Where are their spotlights after the flavor of their misery fades in a day?)

I’m glad it isn’t a brave group there for a good cause rather than a VIP in-person death tour of a submerged mass grave of the unfortunate and abandoned, a trip embarked on only for the sake of its exclusivity.

(Any commoner can look at the pictures of the site on a screen. What’s the point if just anyone can do it?)

I’m glad it isn’t people who had no idea what they were risking, who didn’t have a slew of repeated ignored warnings from experts, repeated ignored signs of danger, repeated ignored near-misses leading up to the sight of the vessel itself, sat inside a tin can that bolts from the outside and steers with a shoddy knockoff of an outdated toy.

(They paid enough per person to save lives. Enough to cover a year’s expenses for whole families. Enough to do something, anything better, for personal pleasure or for the paupers. $250,000 a seat. On a whim. For a little jaunt. In that. Which they saw with their own eyes before ever taking off their shoes and crouching inside. With the ink still wet on the waivers.)

I’m glad it isn’t the story of five people who didn’t know better, who were on a mission, who did not make their respective livings on monetizing a tragedy with exorbitant fees for a ride in a vessel proven again and again to be unsafe and cheaply built, or selling private jets to those wealthy parties who see personal planes as a little treat that’s well worth the cash and carbon emission, or being a billionaire and his college-age son sitting at the head of a company with a stranglehold on energy, fertilizer and chemical production, or being an apparent expert on deep dives and submersibles and having an entire career built around being ‘Mr. Titanic.’

(Five whole lives in that sinking can. Five lives untouched by any of the hundreds of pains and evils and clockwork despair that afflict the majority of the world’s population simply because they did not have money or privilege enough to be permitted a life that isn’t a constant struggle, let alone one of safety or happiness on demand. (No, of course you can’t buy happiness. But the items and actions needed to get to happiness all seem to come with a price tag.))

I’m glad it isn’t yet another update on how yet another group of people who luck never bothered with are suffering and dying for no other reason than their own disposability in the eyes of those who could simply cease to worsen the lives of anyone not themselves, and choose not to.

(Prince Prospero and his friends are safe in the palace and its endless party. The poor are locked out and the Red Death—all Death!—is barred with them. Life has proven they are blessed. Wealth has, anyway, which is just the same. Have enough of it, and nothing can hurt you. Nothing at all. (Who is that gauche man in the bloody mask?))

I’m glad it isn’t someone else.

(It is horror in itself to imagine. The most merciful thought is that implosion made it quick. The unfit window gave way and the crush of the ocean took them all too fast for them to know what happened. Painless. They’re already so much whalefall and the opportunists in the water will leave no scraps of them. But if they are alive?

(It’s too much. Far, far too much.

(No contact, no response. Perhaps even a power failure. It could be they’re sitting in perfect darkness. Even the vacuum of space has starlight. But there’s nothing down there, where they remain too deep for the sun, too high for the twinkle of bioluminescent fish to trundle by the glass.

(Can they steer? Can they move at all? They would come up if they could. They haven’t. Forward, then? Back? Or just endlessly down and down and down until they meet the carcass of the ship they risked their lives to visit up close? Would it be better or worse if a current knocked them along and away from the site? Irony might be a knife too many down there, their lives dwindling away in the extravagant paupers’ graveyard the sea has kept private to all but those endowed enough to come and gawp.

(Even if they reached the surface, even if they survived the nigh inevitable attack of decompression sickness, even then, the only way out is bolted shut from the exterior. They could sit like a bottle on the waves, peering out at the sky and the air and the seabirds, still waiting. Still dying. Clawing at a door that will never budge without somebody to open it for them, as doors have always been opened for them.

(The air is thinning. How much have they dared to waste on talk? Screams, shouts, sobs? Can they even muster the nerve to void their bowels in the convenient plastic baggies that stand in for a toilet when it risks the stench of waste crowding the oxygen? Did they eat before they descended? Or did they hold off, daydreaming of an ample seafood buffet when they returned to shore, filleted and steamed and ringed with little dishes of sauce and butter? Is there food aboard, or was that disregarded as too much clutter, too much risk?

(If they are alive, they are stranded. They are suffocating. They are starving.

(And if they are very desperate, very angry, and very aware, all at once, of what their host—the CEO wielding the off-brand toy with a history of defective operation as their controls, who sued the employee who tried to warn them of the vessel’s faults, who insisted that safety was a waste, who bolted them in a coffin he himself must have trusted to bend the rules of physics and regulation and reality itself in his favor as every other factor of life had bent for him before—has damned them to, perhaps there’s at least one less set of lungs to worry about.

(It's a horrendous idea, of course. Unthinkable. It always is until it isn’t.

(Just like it would be unthinkable to be in the situation those five are in, if they’re alive enough to have any situation now.

(Just like it would be unthinkable to have anyone else in that situation.

(Except.

(Who would that anyone else be, if not these million-and-billionaires?

(Other wealthy travelers lost under water and waivers? The ship up top waited hours before contacting the Coast Guard after they lost contact with the submersible, and that was with the CEO onboard. How long would they have waited for others? Would they have told anyone if they didn’t know there was important kin and associates waiting onshore for news?

(Or perhaps it would be those passionate enough to save and save and save for the chance, for one single extraordinary moment, burning what would be a fortune to them and pocket change to the sunken five, just for all that patience, work, and frugality to be repaid with this? Another handful of nobodies lost to a tragedy born of carelessness and callousness. A lawsuit would ensue, perhaps. No less, no more.

(And the world wouldn’t have batted a lash. Not for lack of care, but for it’s very mundanity. 

(Every day. Every day. Innocent people, good people, people living on tightropes and tripwires of varying levels of menace just because they exist in circles that have never and will never graze the gilded impenetrability of the 0.01% who own and choke the planet, they fall to pain and destruction like meat into a grinder. All while that blessed 0.01% rarely, if ever, have a brush with silly things like hardship or consequences or consideration. There are no real Ebenezer Scrooges.

(Though I would like there to be. I’d like a whole miraculous gaggle of them to be rescued from the sea. I want them to come stumbling from their carbon fiber casket, alive and altered. I’d like to see the CEO, the architect of said death trap who has sent multiple people down to those depths without thought to safety or science, to be skewered by his passengers, by the press, by a lifetime of reprisals for all he dared to tout as an enterprise far too innovative to bother with regulation or care for human life. I’d like to see revelations and second thoughts blossom in the survivors and the naysaying corporate heads who sneer at the lag and cost of proper safety measures, of the well-being of people other than themselves, of the powerful reality of nature.

(I’d like a miracle. But if there isn’t?)

I’m glad it isn’t someone else.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

since theres a lot of discussions about shipwrecks and deep sea submersibles happening right now, im just gonna quickly recommend this video which details how caladan oceanic found the samuel b roberts.

the samuel b roberts was a destroyer escort sank during the battle off samar during ww2. the wreck was found last year and is 22,621 feet/6885 metres deep which is almost 10,000 feet or 3000 metres deeper than the titanic and is currently the deepest wreck ever found.

in the video, you see a deep sea submersible (which can go down to 36,000 feet/10,973 metres) that isnt a tin can finished up with duct tape, super glue and glittery gel pens. it is piloted by an expert and they swap out pilots every day to avoid exertion or fatigue, and they have a very complex sonar system for finding wrecks. the longest they can go down is 16 hours and they keep in contact with their ship above and have to get clearance just for half an hour more.

when they find the wreck, they look around it to ensure they can identify it and map it out as well as they can, and then head back up to shore. they then hold a funeral service for those who died and leave a wreath on the ocean surface above where the wreck lays.

while im somewhat sketched out by the founder victor vescovo, the company does important work in terms of furthering our understanding of the ocean and finding wrecks which are the gravesites of those who passed. and they are not disrespectful to those whose graves lay 22,000 feet/6700 metres down on the seabed.

and what i would like to point out is how the samuel b roberts is protected against unauthorised disturbance by the sunken military craft act. you would need a permit from the naval history and heritage command (and a submarine that can withstand all the pressure) to go see it.

which, as ive said many times in the last two days, is something that the titanic should also have protection against. there should be laws in place that do not allow people to treat a mass fucking gravesite as a tourist spot.

[slumbering-shadows]

So the Navy has confirmed that the Titan imploded on Sunday when the vessel lost communication- that's why it lost communication. It imploded when it did because that's about the deepest that sub was actually built to go. They did not freeze. They did not suffocate. They probably didn't even know anything was wrong. A sub implosion is over in mere milliseconds. If you're worried about them suffering, about them being scared, you don't have to, because they didn't and it was quick. The Coast Guard opted to continue the search as long as they did because at the time the sounds the Navy found weren't definitive, but since the wreckage was found this morning, the timeline fits.

[werewolf-cuddles]

Oh god, I just found out the 19 year old that died in the OceanGate debacle didn't even want to be there in the first place.

According to a family member, he was terrified of going, and only went to make his dad happy because it was Father's Day.

God, just... fuck. 19 is too young, man. He deserved better.