The implosion of the Titan submarine (OceanGate) was so rapid that the pain wasn't even registered by the brain. They didn't feel anything at all. Utterly instantaneous.
Served on a submarine. The access hatches had an upper and lower watertight hatch, and the space between was designed to be free flooded for us to use submarine escape suits in. One of the tests we did was opening the upper hatch and flooding it at depth, leaving only the lower hatch to stop the sea pressure from getting inside. Even at wayyyy shallower depths than the titan, the A gang chief told me that if that hatch fails we’d be all dead within a second.
When I was a teenager I thought I wanted a career as a submariner…instant death is one thing but realizing the size of those those coffins/bunks and dudes wackin’ it around me was a a big ol “maybe I’ll do finance instead”.
Do you have submarine dreams? Or do you have any after effects of serving? Being on a submarine is such an extreme difference between everyday life I'm curious how your post-brain processes it, it at all.
Yeah occasionally I’ll dream that I’m underway again and have 2 months to go. I used to dream about waking up underway, standing watch for 8 hrs and then working, just to actually wake up and do that whole routine. That was the worst lol
American nuclear subs seem to be pretty cool, they apparently have the best food in all the millitary because of how important morale is when you are underwater for weeks,
Also, millitary submarines are built by engineers who believe in the basic laws of nature, not a megalomaniac billionaire who believes to know better than actual scientists.
Like seriously this entire story is still so insane to me because the outcome was so ridiculousy obvious,
The sound that thing must have been making prior to the implosion would have been terrifying. I only feel sorry for the 19-year-old who shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Really had to force his kids hand to not just do something extremely dangerous but in equipment using experimental material for the application. From a CEO who boasted about breaking away from guidelines and regulations.
I can’t I just can’t. One thing choosing that path for yourself (idiotic) and a totally different level of asswholeness to then convince someone else who doesn’t want to into taking on that risk. And let alone your own kid who you are biologically engineered to protect and be more careful with.
Even worse, if you read more about it, they built an acoustic system to try to predict when it would fail, and the guy in charge then fired the people responsible because the system kept coming back with the answer “Real Soon Now”.
If ai remember the story, this guy said that safety rules were just there to stop him from doing something fun. I supposed briefly turning into a burst of incandescent plasma from the collapse of a cavitation bubble, briefly lighting up the ocean bottom like the world's stupidest flashbulb, is SOMEONE'S idea of fun.
From the documentary I watched it seems like the noises were there even when it was "working correctly". So hopefully they didn't feel too worried before it finally failed.
I don't know if we watched the same doc but Stockton Rush was talking out his ass about it working correctly. He acted like that was normal for the submersible and that it meant the increasing pressure was settling everything into its designed/fitted space. But this isn't metal, it's carbon fiber. The popping sound was the carbon fiber delaminating and losing its structural integrity.
The documentary was wild. I went into it thinking "how'd this tragedy unfold?" and walked away thinking "holy shit I can't believe it took so long to fail". One of the most infuriating, arrogant piece of shit situations.
More of those utterly infuriating documentaries are the Chemical Safety Board ones on YouTube about industrial accidents, because half of them are "20 different safety mechanisms hadn't been working since 1976. The operator was his 30th day straight of 12 hour shifts. 19 people died. The executives promised they would do better and got bonuses for their commitment to safety. 2 years later 14 died in another incident."
And this is why it is fucking bullshit, when CEO's and similar don't go to prison after such accidents. They didn't suddenly happen, they had been coming for a long time, and the only way they couldn't have known, would be by deliberately staying ignorant, which means they were not doing their jobs.
Sorta kinda yeah. There’s one video where Rush is recoding a test dive or some shit and you can hear constant creaking throughout the ‘sub’ and feel his uneasiness. However there’s no actual ‘black box’ device in the sense of hearing what all went down that day in the cabin. Instead it’s a clip of his wife and support team above water staring at the monitor trying to contact them when all of a sudden you hear a faint “bloop” or “bang” come from the subs coms. One of the guys looks over at his wife and you can tell he knows what happened.
Edit: I don’t think they were trying to contacting them, just talking to each other where they should be at sea level wise.
I think you are correct. The “bang” made it to the hull before the last message “dropped two weights” made it back to the audio from the Titan. Which is fucking insane if you ask me.
Yeah, when he was diving down below 3000m himself or whatever it was and he was talking to himself as the creaking started... he was super unsettled but as soon as he got on the radio, he went into full bullshit mode and didn't mention a thing about it. Very "oh we don't need to go all the way down to finish the test, it's super good, just gonna come back up now, like 500m before our intended depth, just because everything was actually so good!" vibes.
The sound didn't come from comms. There were no audio comms. What they heard was the actual sound of the implosion as it reached the surface of the ocean
The implosion happened in less than 5 milliseconds, it takes a brain 300 milliseconds for the brain hardware to register and process a conscious reaction to it. They literally just stopped existing with zero knowledge that it happened.
Edit
To those people disputing the time, this is an average human, yes you can lower your reaction times by training your reflexes, your brain can process visual stimulus in 13 to 16 ms, but you wont consciously comprehend it for another 100 ms at best and there is another 150-300 ms delay to physically react like saying oh shit or blink, and even still in this scenario the last image your eyes picked up when the sub imploded 3 milliseconds ago is still being formed in your retina.
I recently watched a video about what would happen if you were 6m away from a nuke when it detonates and it was essentially the same outcome. Your entire body is converted to ionized plasma in a few billionths of a second and you instantly cease to exist
The OG sauce. That wild scenario aside, our modern world has a whole lot of things goin' on with such extremes and intensities of speed, power, pressure, etc. that can make our puny fleshy bodies just fffffpt in a snap. The Byford Dolphin diving bell accident is another infamous example.
Damn, the Medical Findings read like a Quentin Tarantino movie scene.
"The postmortem suggested that bubble formation in the blood denatured the lipoprotein complexes, rendering the lipids insoluble.
The cavitation bubbles cooked the fat out of the blood, talk about unlocking a new achievement in the craziest ways to die.
And then this
With the escaping air and pressure, gross dismemberment ensued; it included bisection of his thoracoabdominal cavity, which resulted in fragmentation of his body, followed by expulsion of all of the internal organs of his chest and abdomen, except the trachea and a section of small intestine. These were projected some distance from the bell, with one section being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above the exterior pressure door.
A while back, I learned that when someone dies from a fall from a great height, they don't experience the impact. They are falling so fast that the last thing they will be conscious of is being a short distance from the ground. The actual impact will not have time to register in the brain.
Seems similar to a hit and run I was the victim of on my motorcycle. I was only doing about 25mph through an intersection, but someone made an illegal left turn in front of me as I was passing through.
The last thing I remember is seeing their crinkled hood passing by right in front of my face as I flew over it. I don't think I was out for long, but the next thing I remembered was being splayed out on the ground.
The woman driving got out of her car, I sat up, yelled what the fuck, and by the time I got my bearings and was able to stand up, she was gone. Left me with a totaled bike, a gnarly bruise on my thigh and a fractured right shoulder that as of two and half years later, I still don't have full mobility with.
Fortunately, I was wearing gear, or it would have been worse. According to a witness (and the marks left on my gear), I shot off my bike, flew over the hood superman style, hit the ground on my shoulder (explaining the fracture) and proceeded to slide on my face a bit before rolling onto my back. All I remember is the hood and being on my back.
Local PD was pretty inept from the start, but they gave up on it fairly quickly and that woman got away with it. I still think about her occasionally. She's just out there living her life and I'm left with the consequences.
My mom died from ALS and there's very little if anything worse than it. Cancer at least typically has some possibility of early detection and recovery. If I get a terminal diagnosis of something, I'm traveling and making peace before I go out my way
The body can't actually detect a lack of oxygen, only an excess of CO₂. By slowly increasing the composition of inhaled air from 78% to 100% nitrogen, the brain will go from delirium to euphoria to comatose to inanimate without ever processing that something is awry.
As stated above, the actual event happened faster than they could register but they likely knew they were in significant danger and were going to die for the better part of an hour before the instantaneous end came.
They also may not have been in the right orientation for some or all of that time.
I just read the wiki and it seems that they (OceanGate and rush) didn’t think anything abnormal was going on.
The last human-written communication by Titan indicated that they dropped two weights, amounting to about 70 pounds (32 kg) of the 200 pounds (91 kg) to 300 pounds (140 kg) of dropweights on board. This was apparently routine to adjust the Titan's buoyancy from negative to neutral as it approached the seabed,[90] and was an indication that the crew was not aware of any emergency situation.[91][29]: 28 The last automatic ping was received by the Polar Prince approximately six seconds later, after which contact was lost.[80]: 24
They were in normal communication until it imploded. There is video from the command ship in communication with them. Everything was perfectly normal and then pop
Watched an interview with James Cameron and he was like "as soon as I heard about it, I knew they were done. Pretty much any other submarine owner would have said the same thing. It's a small community and we all knew what he was doing and what would probably happen"
Which is crazy for something that's been done for near 100 years now.
Shows how much of a fucking jackass Stockton Rush was.
Also I think I remember James Cameron saying he had friends who quite quickly said their sensors on the seabed had heard the implosion so he knew right away pretty much that they were goners.
In 2012 he was actually the deepest in the ocean that any human has gone: 10,898m. He was the one piloting the submarine camera rig for the filming of Challenger deep. Said it was so dangerous that he refused to put another camera operator in danger for the filming and they needed it to be a manned sub. He’s since been over taken by another diver, but yeah. James Cameron knows his subs.
Pretty much everyone involved expected it to be a salvage mission, not a rescue mission. But there was the chance that the sub was merely disabled or stuck rather than imploded so basic sense tells you that if there’s a chance it’s a time sensitive situation then you should operate as if it definitely was.
Ok but the hope wasn’t that they survived an implosion, the hope was that their comms or mobility were hampered. Anybody that was smugly claiming the oxygen timer was meaningless was doing the classic Reddit behavior of only considering one aspect of a situation then confidently proclaiming their opinion to be fact.
Fr I don’t get it, no one in the world thought if they imploded they’d be alive until the oxygen ran out, that doesn’t even make sense. Obviously the counter was because we didn’t know if they imploded or not.
The reason was that the sub was jury rigged together and to ascend they'd just try and shake some pieces of scrap metal off of hooks. So it was totally reasonable that they could get stuck at the bottom. They had the scrap metal get stuck before.
Absolutely insane. How about some actual clamps that can release the ballast? How about some sort of rapid-inflating emergency airbag things? So many options other than just… jiggling.
"During one unsuccessful dive of 2021, Titan became stuck at the bottom of the ocean for at least four hours because of mechanical problems, and was unable to ascend to the surface and unable to reach the Titanic wreckage. Passengers aboard this dive spent 20 hours inside Titan before they reached surface and were able to get out of the submersible"
it's not the lack of oxygen that's bad, it's the buildup of carbon dioxide
Without oxygen the brain just kinda goes to sleep and doesn't wake up again. Peaceful.
The burning in our lungs and sense of urgency come from carbon dioxide buildup as every evolved instinct is screaming BREATHE NOW RIGHTNOW YOUAREGOINGTODIEBREATHEHURRYANDBREATHE
If it's a slow reduction in oxygen it wouldn't be so bad, you're just going to slowly feel basically drunk and pass out - vs. quick asphyxiation/drowning where you suddenly go to getting 0 oxygen.
I've seen this a lot and I still have trouble appreciating it. It's as if my brain just casually equates it to crushing a can. I've seen those tankers, I know they're big, but somehow I remain unimpressed, unable to take in the magnitude.
One of the really great things about steel is that it is ductile. It is not a brittle material. Steel can undergo very great detectable deformation before it fails.
If you have even been in a (steel) submarine you know that it SHRINKS measurably as it dives. (e.g., A tight string/wire across a compartment will go slack during a dive.)
That deformation translates to notice about a pending failure and TIME to remedy it. ("It should not be bending like that; stop going down and start going back up...")
That is just not the case with brittle materials like carbon fiber. They fail suddenly and all at once. Think of a glass canning jar: if you drop it, it either breaks/cracks or is unharmed; there is no in-between.
Making a PROTOTYPE submarine out of carbon fiber and riding it down on what is effectively a test dive is suicide.
Everyone should watch the ocean gate documentary. He did so much shit wrong. When the dive season ended, he left it out in freezing temps because he wanted to save money on transport costs.
That's when I think their qa manager left. You're apparently really not supposed to do that with carbon fibre.
Didn't he also basically admit that he knew of other experts that stated carbon fiber was not the right material for something like that, and he pompously bragged something along the lines of "well clearly it's working for me, I've done X dives and the sub is fine?"
Not the way he's done it, but it's worth noting that the material hasn't been written off by submersible experts. Initially OceanGate was doing much shallower dives, and a carbon fiber hull (not his carbon fiber hull though) might have been well-suited for that. But Stockton Rush wanted big big money and a big big reputation so he saw Titanic as the ultimate goal and, well, he did get the latter wish in the end.
I have 2 degrees in materials science, BS and PhD. I can put the sheer foolishness of this mistake in perspective. This is the kind of question you can ask a 2nd year mechanical, civil, or materials engineering student. It is also the sort of question that is considered a gimme.
Somewhere around the end of the first month of the intro to materials course you learn about ductile vs brittle fracture and materials. You are shown engineering diagrams, fracture surfaces, atomicistic and molecular reasons as to why materials are ductile or brittle etc. You learn that brittle materials fail fast and that the cracks in them propogate at the speed of sound (km / s). You also have quiz, hw, and exam questions about selecting materials for different applications. This mistake isn't even about leaving it to professional engineers this mistake is the kind of thing we use as freebee points on a quiz for the youngest students. THAT'S how bad this mistake was. We expect what are basically children to get this correct.
It wasn't a test dive, the Titan actually made it to the Titanic 13 times prior.
The issue, as explained by James Cameron, was that each time a sub dives the material experiences fatigue damage and eventually fails. It's like a soda pop tab, it doesn't break the first or second time you bend it, but if you keep bending it then it will eventually break.
Rush didn't want to do the standard test to the hull after each dive because it was expensive and took a long time so he created his own acoustic monitoring system which obviously didn't work.
James Cameron says subs are normally retired after 6-8 dives, if Rush wasn't so cheap and replaced his sub more often he would probably still be doing dives today.
Yep. Also ignored the “oops we let the untethered submersible bang dozens of times against another vessel in heavy ocean for several minutes” on the mission prior. And left it outside in winter. And and and
This is why when you’re an inspector or safety supervisor in any serious position, they drill into you to never assume that people will follow a rule, no matter how obvious it is, or how many flashing lights you put in their face. Given enough opportunities, it is a near guarantee that eventually someone stupid will do the obviously stupid thing. Human creativity, and thus capacity for stupidity, is nearly infinite. People will find a way to bumble their way into situations you never even considered could be a possibility, because you are likely a reasonable person with a rational mind. They, however, are not.
There was a graph going around that shows how many lives the Titanic has claimed and the timeline, and there’s obviously a bump in 1912 when it sank, but then another small bump in 2023 💀
Not only does that already exist, but James Cameron is an actual expert in deep sea exploration and uses his Hollywood money to fund actually safe explorations and studies. He basically directs movies to fund his deep sea exploration hobby, but he goes about it the smart, safe way unlike the OceanGate people.
I've always thought the hate for the controller was pretty stupid. Using a preexisting controller to control the thing was fine. That's not why it failed.
It is dumb. People who are making fun of it, even though it's just input controls, which can be anything, and Logitech controllers are generally decently reliable. It shouldn't be the only way of controlling the sub, but it can be one of them, but that's an issue of error prevention. People making fun of controller would be shocked to learn what US military (and other militaries) use on the regular to control machines of war.
Everyone saying "oh, they took a joystick from a game console" and saying thats a bad thing...
It's not. If the pilots were familiar with it, its fine.
The U.S. Navy uses standard Xbox 360 controllers to operate the high-tech photonics masts (digital camera systems that replaced traditional periscopes) on Virginia-class attack submarines like the USS Colorado.
Familiarity: Younger sailors grew up playing video games, which cuts training time for the periscope controls from hours down to minutes.
Better Ergonomics: The original heavy, helicopter-style joysticks were clunky and unpopular with crews, whereas gamepads feel natural and comfortable.
Atleast the implosion made the death instant, I couldn't imagine if the ship just lost power and drifted on the bottom of the ocean in absolute darkness.
My co-workers bought into the line that 'They're still alive, but trapped at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,' as if that were a better outcome than the much more likely instant death scenario.
Lots. The sub was showing signs of stress and fracture leading up to the implosion on previous excursions.
They also had this acoustic monitoring system that was intended to pick up the sounds of the carbon fiber strands snapping. As the hull became more and more compromised, it really started pick up on their excursions from infrequently, and then there was one big BANG on one dive (Dive 80) and the audio system picked up more and more on every dive until Stockton had them, IIRC, just turn it off (or else just disregard the system).
The submersible creaked and groaned and popped a lot, but OceanGate assured their passengers it was normal. And some groaning is normal. Not that, though. Very, very likely as it was happening the popping was accelerating past the point it was rationally deniable.
The asshole CEO no doubt kept telling them it was completely normal. “Seasonings the fibers,” I believe he called it. I hope the families sued the fuck out of his widow.
That’s Randall Munroe of XKCD, originally describing someone being targeted by a sun-powered laser: “You wouldn’t really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.”
Thank god the kid didn’t feel it. I feel no sympathy for the adults, but he just wanted to spend time with his dad and he didn’t even want to be on the sub.
I feel the need to dispel this myth whenever I read it.
He absolutely wanted to be there, took his mom's place onboard and brought a Rubik's Cube to get a world record for being rich enough to solve it really deep underwater.
The claim that he didn't want to go comes from an estranged family member who didn't even know he was aboard until after the implosion and made up multiple contradictory stories for anyone that would pay for an interview.
Sure, but the fun part was when they lost power and drifted without thrust or depth control for up to 40 minutes before the implosion. They might not have even been in a "comfortable" orientation...
And then there's the cracking. As the depth increased, the carbon fiber would be crackling like rice krispies prior to failure. There might even have been some decent "bangs."
Nothing in either documentary or the hearings indicated that they lost power or drifted for 40 minutes. The last message Titan relayed was "dropped 2 wts" that was within a few seconds of the implosion sound. The debris field was found not too far from the Titanic wreckage.
Carbon fiber does not do well with tons of load then no load. It will develop cracks that will fail. It’s why the nice subs are all titanium and steel. It will flex but not crack.
Especially compression. Carbon Fiber is made for tension. You can get it to work in these applications... kind of... but it will be as stable as compressing a piece of spaghetti from the long end.
It’s okay, they didn’t. That was a previous hypothesis, but the crew didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary right up until the implosion. I still assume there were pops that would have scared the passengers, but Stockton had heard them before and assured the passengers it was normal on previous dives
I had a run in with the CEO, Stockton. At the time I worked at an industrial supplier. He came into my branch, walked up to the sales counter and declared, “I’m building a submarine, what do I need?” I thought he was joking so I replied with “probably an engineering degree.” He, unfortunately, was serious. I told him that “if I could tell you what you needed to build a submarine, do you think I’d be working here?” He really didn’t get it. Then 10 years later this story broke. I can’t say I was shocked, but I definitely feel for the families and people who died due to his narcissism.
I still have a morbid curiosity to know WHAT human remains they recovered. Like I know it was supposedly bone fragments, but I want to see what state they were in.
You can see the state of the pieces they recovered, and how some things were like compressed, some were flayed out, etc.
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u/Fulcrum58 1d ago
Served on a submarine. The access hatches had an upper and lower watertight hatch, and the space between was designed to be free flooded for us to use submarine escape suits in. One of the tests we did was opening the upper hatch and flooding it at depth, leaving only the lower hatch to stop the sea pressure from getting inside. Even at wayyyy shallower depths than the titan, the A gang chief told me that if that hatch fails we’d be all dead within a second.