Oceangate is broke with no assets. There's nothing to sue.

This is, admittedly, news to me. As someone who served on a submarine in the Navy I know first hand how serious neglect is. It can, and has in this case, kill everyone. It's not slow either. If you are negligent about anything for even a second everyone is dead. It's just a shame the person/people responsible also took innocent life. Preventable and inexcusable.

The 19-year-old reportedly told family he was terrified. It was Father's Day and his father is very interested in the Titanic, so he went anyway. He was just trying to impress and relate to his father.

One thing you can't buy with money is intelligence.

After a certain point, you consider the risks and have to make a decision weighing the pros and cons of the voyage. Yes, there's a very real chance of death if things go wrong, but there's also a chance for a life changing experience if things go right. For some people, the risk and adventure of it all is entirely the point of life.

As for the money, the $250K is a rounding error to a billionaire. Someone with a net worth of $1B spending $250K is similar to someone with a net worth of $10K spending $2.50 (e.g. about the same as a bottle of soda from a gas station).

I think a lot of people on here would be willing to take a trip to Mars if it came with a 1% chance of death and a 99% chance of the most memorable experience of your life. You'd probably get a lot of people willing to do the same if the chance of death were increased to 10% too, though obviously, many would view the 10% as too risky. If you increased the chance of death to 50% or higher, most people would decline, but there are a number of thrill seeker / adventurer type of personalities out there that would jump on the offer in a heartbeat. It all comes down to your personal risk/reward tradeoff.

I guess the CEO of OceanGate joining them for the dive would have given them a false sense of comfort.

Interestingly, that same CEO mentioned that the Titan submersible was already showing signs of cyclical fatigue back in 2020:

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-bigger-submersible-fleet-get-set-titanic-trips/

It would be fascinating if we could get an aircraft disaster style analysis but I don't know if they would do so for marine accidents.

I think CEO of the company being on the board made people think all those regulations were just unnecessary red tape. In fact that was what the CEO thinks.

BTW: kind of unrelated, but I find it crazy that CEO's wife lost her parents to Titanic, and now she also lost her husband to it.

same reason why people will climb mount Everrest.

They understood the risks; there is no question in my mind that they didn't. I think they were bored with what life could offer them with that much money. At a certain point you really can basically experience it all. Instead of going on a tested rocket ship; they gambled the ultimate wager. Their life or bragging rights. Image the tale you could tell coming back from the journey in such a rigged tube; or the publicity of your fatal demise and making a "historical" moment regarding it. The world was watching. Darkly their death reads better than any final service of passing or headstone does.

Most submarines/submersibles can't actually get that deep, and of the few that can, some are government run and others are already on other projects.

What made OceanGate's Titan unique is that they were selling expeditions to the Titanic.

Now with all that said, if I had the disposable income to take on such an expedition, $250k sounds way too cheap/good to be true. Unfortunately in this case it was indeed too good to be true.

Why take any risk at all? With the amount of money that they had they could have hired an entire crew of an actual submarine for a day or two.

I can't tell you what their motivations were, but I think there were 2 types of people doing this.

• Type 1: the "captain" and many/most of the passengers were adrenaline junkies who wanted to push the limits of what could be done. Kind of like the first people to travel to the north and south poles. They are "adventurers" and they understood that they were taking considerable risks with their lives.

• Type 2: people who were trying to purchase a great "cocktail party story" with their $$$. The same way that wealthy people today pay $$ to have sherpas lug their stuff up and down Mt Everest so they can take a selfie. The ability to drop a quarter-of-a-million $$ on this stunt already excludes most of the world's population from even trying it. Then they can brag at their cocktail parties and make the Mt. Everest climbers look like wimps by comparison. I suspect (not sure) that the Pakistani business man falls into this category. The fact that he took his 19 year old son makes me think he completely discounted the risk and was just doing it for personal vanity.

I'm speculating on all of this and I don't mean to cast aspersions on the Pakistani guy and his son. For all I know, my analysis could be all wrong.

Do you feel you could make those determinations? I couldn’t. Have you done so for your car? I haven’t. It’s all too common for us to trust that other people know what they’re doing. You can’t always check everything.

TBH what gets me angry is the fact literally less than a week before the single biggest sea faring tragedy that hit the Mediterranean sea, and easily one of the top 20 straight up sea tragedy in recent memory happened and literally nobody gave nor is giving a shit.

A boat full of migrants sunk between Greece and Italy, 80 have been confirmed dead, more than 500 are missing, and the worst is, the boat was being surveilled the entire time by Frontex and the Greek coast guard who straight up lied (or chose not to see) the distress the ship was in.

I can understand people lashing out at the death of rich people driven largely by their hubris and trusting a downright irresponsible psycho. In some way its a shadenfreude-like feeling over the overt and indirect violence that average people experience compared to that of the rich. It's distasteful to be sure, but it is what it is. In an unjust society both the exploitor and the exploited are pushed to brutish, revengeful, detached feelings towards one another and broader ressentiment. The solution is the end of exploitation.

I really didn't care too much about what was going on until last night when I realized the horror of sitting in a metal tube, knowing you probably won't be rescued with a ticking timer of when your resources would run out. It seems like the perfect horror movie but irl. I hope implosion was the cause because the alternative has cause my brain to go into a full panic / existential mode and I am just an observer.

I think he would be more interested in covering the Reddit story - he is the internet historian after all.

According to submariners in other communities, the worst part would be any period of time where they knew they were sinking. That could be an hour of slowly falling from periscope depth or no time at all if the hull failed at a deep enough depth. The water forms a piston much like one in a truck engine that compresses the air enough to cause combustion. Any of the three things in that nano second will kill you before your body can process the information. The water hammer, the pressure shift, and the implosion all occur too quickly for the nerves to transmit the information.

Sounds like they did not. An update:

A Navy official says "an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion" was detected shortly after the Titan lost contact with the surface. This official said the information was relayed to the Coast Guard team which used it to narrow the radius of the search area.

This is actually quite normal, and similar situations have occurred during search and rescues for missing submarines. The ocean carries sound quite well, and hydrophones will inevitably pick up noises of from all sorts of of things if observed for long enough. Add into that the extra noises of the all the search and rescue assets in the vicinity and the natural biases of the human operators to want to decipher patterns from the background noise; false positives are quite typical.

A similar situation happened with the sinking of the USS Thresher. https://www.forces.net/usa/banging-sounds-heard-during-search-sunken-us-submarine-uss-thresher

I really hope that the sub imploded during the descent, and they've been dead all this time. Rather than the hull giving out after they sat on the ocean floor for days.