i’m just glad this whole thing is over. what a sick world we live in where five billionaires in a submarine sparks wall to wall coverage and five hundred migrants lost at sea gets barely a passing mention
In my country, they started the newscast 2h earlier than usual just to say “Debris were found; may be unrelated”. I think they initially went live earlier because the conference was meant to happen earlier and they couldn’t wait to show it; it had to be live. When it got postponed, they spent 2h just talking about it with commentators and different specialists; all just theorizing what could have happened, and whether there might still be a chance for rescue or not, and repeating that there would be a conference “so stay tuned!”.
But refugees you barely hear about.
I get this story has some more “thrill” and novelty to it, being a submarine near the titanic and all, but this really is ridiculous.
The more prosaic explanation – bordering on “banality of evil,” but still – is that a story about a rickety overloaded fishing boat full of desperate war refugees sinking in the Mediterranean has become a fairly common occurrence in the years since the Arab Spring turned into a decade of civil wars, but whiz-bang private subs going missing while diving on the most famous shipwreck of all time is unusual. Horses vs. zebras and all that.
Yup. Also why do people want more media attention on this. It’s not going to stop the human traffickers from overloading their boats. It’s not that no one did anything. The coast guards and navies of multiple countries acted as soon as they became aware the boat sank and as a result saved a ton of people. Would people really be happier if we had end to end coverage of a disaster that had no mystery to it just an all too common occurrence of lives being lost fleeing Africa and the Middle East dangerously.
I think it’s more how uncommon the situation is, the complexity and odds of the rescue, and the ‘ticking clock’ effect that came from them only having 96 hours of oxygen. Stories need to be interesting to get mass media coverage (look at the Tham Luang cave rescue - none of them were billionares), and, as incredibly bleak as this sentence sounds, a boat capsizing with hundreds onboard just isn’t interesting enough.
Yea it’s totally not that every major news outlet is owned by and serves the interests of the rich.
Agree, I don’t think much of the coverage at all had to do with “Oh no, look at the poor rich people in trouble!” And had a lot more to do with the potential for a Hollywood style life-saving mission.
Interesting enough to get a gaggle of billionaires in a bolted metal box and explore the capsized boat. 🤨
Not to say that that idea itself isn’t saddening
There’s also a sort of morbid fascination and curiosity that comes from a situation this unique. I definitely agree that of course the sinking refugee ship should have gotten far more help and attention, but I think the “morbid curiosity” element is certainly part of why this got so much attention. The whole situation of paying a fortune for visiting the Titanic in a janky unregulated submersible and then vanishing underwater is…bizarre, and surreal, in a way that captures attention
I still can’t get over how janky that tin can felt to me when I was looking into it. Not even getting into the safety cuts, the whole picture felt cheap. The Poop-Bucket a foot away and audibly masked with turning up the music; five people sitting cross-cross applesauce on basically an exercise mat in cramped real estate; working with two desktop monitors and a Logitech controller; the CEO explicitly bragging about cutting corners and breaking rules.
I think that even if the sub more closely resembled expectations and even if the CEO was on top of safety, the story would’ve still been a quick sell on mass media. A sub exploring the Titanic going missing invokes the kind of visuals and what-ifs that start to depart reality and arrive to movie territory. Add the schadenfreude to it and the minivan as described above and that movie becomes a sort of dark humor comedy blended with horror.
I think that this story makes for a good sideshow to gawk at. It’s also a good vehicle to laugh at the rich. The shipwreck in the Mediterranean, as much as it demands our attention in contrast, is much more grounded in reality—hard and painful realities—that I think a sizable chunk of society gets squeamish about. It demands we answer questions and take actions that certain someones would rather we don’t.
4 billionaires and one guys 19 year old kid.
Definitely shows where the media’s priorities lie, ie the wealthy lamenting the loss of their own
Were all of them billionaires? I can’t imagine the people actually operating the thing were, surely, just the passengers?
The CEO was the pilot.
The pilot may not have been, although anyone described as an “explorer” is pretty likely to be wealthy. Three of the other four (including the CEO) were, and the last was one of the billionaire’s 19 year old son.
Edit: Checked, the pilot (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) was also a billionaire.
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it was literally just the five of them
Maybe we should send another 150 or so subs, also filled with 5 billionaires each.
I find it incredibly sad that the teen, Sulemon Dawood, only agreed to go on the trip to appease his father. Left on his own, the teen was not interested in going. And although I’m saddened to hear all five perished, the four older adults made their own independent decisions to take the risk. I feel an extra sense of sadness for the teen though who was influenced by his father into going.
It sucks that 4 other people were killed by the CEOs own hubris. But at least they don’t appear to have suffocated to death. At that depth, it would have been instantaneous.
Yeah, that was my concern when we got reports of regular banging noises.
Wonder what made the banging noises…?
The phrase “red herring” originated because the u.s. navy mistook fish noises for incredibly stealthy russia submarines for years :P
Could be anything
“Red herring” as a term originates from the early 1800s. Although you’re absolutely right on the larger point; the ocean is noisy and sound carries, there’s no telling what it was.
What if the banging was them trying to crack the window to avoid suffocating?
Implosions require a lot of pressure, so whatever took them out did it while they were still deep.
My guess is it happened as they approached extreme depths. Metal fatigue and poor design aren’t always instantly apparent, but they stack up exponentially. The same way the CEO had piloted it down before he did again, then BANG and done. Would have been practically instant and without warning.
Worth pointing out that only the end caps were metal (and titanium at that, which is already brittle), while the bulk of the hull was carbon fiber, which doesn’t
gradually fatiguebend and buckle, it fails catastrophically.Also, they lost signal at 1 hour and 45 minutes into a ~2 hour dive. I don’t know how much their dive rate varied, but if we assume it was effectively constant, that puts them at ~3500 meters at LOS.
Combining those two points, two to three years after building the ship, they identified cyclic fatigue in the carbon fiber that reduced their calculated rating to 3000 meters. Since that’s not enough to get to Titanic, they completely rebuilt the ship, two years ago.
So yeah, I think you’re right. With the public facts available, I think the most likely scenario is the carbon fiber hull was fatiguing again, they decided to trust their acoustic/strain monitoring system that they believed would give them enough warning to resurface (which the guy they fired in 2018 said might only give them warnings milliseconds before there was a problem), and it failed somewhere below 3000 meters.
Definitely not. For one, the banging was heard a couple days ago, when there would still have been hope of rescue. Two, if 375 atmospheres of pressure hasn’t broken it, you’re not going to break it with whatever random stuff you can find. And three, although we don’t know that the implosion happened at loss of signal, it’s more likely than them losing signal and then imploding at some later point.
Edit: Should also add that if the sonar buoys that the search team dropped were able to hear them banging on the hull, they would almost certainly have also heard the implosion.
Is the general thought that the banging noises was the vessel imploding…?
Unlikely, implosion makes a very different sound. It could be almost anything. Might have been parts of the wreckage getting moved around by currents and knocking together, might have been some undersea life bumping into the wreck of the Titanic, might have been completely unrelated.
I ought to concede I have plenty of disappointment around this. I feel like there were well established means to do this kind of thing safely, and I think because Seagate failed to meet that, five lives were needlessly lost. I wouldn’t be surprised if this story lives on for a while as a sort of fable in hubris. That’s not even getting to, say, the sense of injustice invoked in comparing how this was handled to the recent shipwreck in the Mediterranean. I think all of those thoughts distill down to the Eat The Rich flavored fan faire, and I think there’s already plenty of that here.
Still, the Rich and Foolish nature of this trip all said, I find it commendable that the likes of the US Coast Guard, the Navy, and international groups came together and put up a sizeable and respectable search and rescue effort. I think it would’ve been well in their right (and in fact realistic) for them to wave it off and say something like “they made the wine, they drink the cup.” But they didn’t. I can respect that the collective weight of the wallets on board likely played a big part in it to say the least, but I’d also wager that it also takes a mighty large amount of forgiveness in people being foolish to go through that kind of effort to try and save them. Similar can probably be said for rescue missions helping out others in equally foolish incidents.
There’s a lot directly and indirectly connected to this disaster that doesn’t reflect well on the bulk of society, but the effort to try and help others even if they don’t necessarily deserve it? I’ll admit it feels naive to say, but I’d rather live in that kind of society than one that errs toward extending a callous hand. I hope we’ll hear more often about us extending a hand to those who indeed deserve it, like those in the Mediterranean, but I’m also in the camp of continuing to extend that kind of forgiveness to The Foolish we’ll continue to stumble upon. I hope to have the will to do that, at least.
We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.
We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.
It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.
Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.
Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.
I’d say you’re right about all you said. It’s a shame and a bad look on our society that’s how it works out more often than not. I’d like to try and do my small part to leave things a bit better than how I found them, whether that’s in cultural values or in political action. But as you alluded to about the United States: that is much easier said than done.
You sound like you have a vital and focused framing to what I said, and admittedly more relevant to, well, This. I’m inclined to extend the sum of my takeaway to a broader scope, however. To try and extend generosity when we are in the circumstances to do so, in both large and small incidents and in large and small ways. It’s the kind of reminder that personally comes to mind whenever I hear about these kinds of rescue efforts.
It’s also admittedly getting outside of what this incident was and starting to get into more trivial manners, but I seem to get inclined to try and find something positive and/or productive to get from tragedy. Lamenting about the likes of capitalism and the US has definitely been a crucible that helped shaped my perspective for the better, but as crucibles go, it drains and exhausts me.
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All that said, I can’t deny what you said. It’s the state of affairs, and it’s a sorry one. Let’s see what we can do within our means to help change that 🤝.
Better that than them surviving all that time slowly dying on the seabed.
If it were me or one of my loved ones, aside from rescue, this may be the best outcome.
I do feel awful for their families. But I feel more awful for the refugees in the Mediterranean.
The CEO’s wife lost her parents to Titanic and now also her husband.
Her parents? Wouldn’t that make her more than 110 years old…?
It was her great great grandparents
Maybe he kept her in a liquid nitrogen cooled hyperbaric chamber, like Mr. Freeze.
I think they were her grandparents.
You’re right my bad.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna90336
good thing we put so much effort into saving a billionaire with a deathwish while we let all these poor people die. Good thing so many peasants were more interested in a billionaire’s life than our brothers and sisters the billionaires oppress and exploit out of proud, insatiable, sociopathic greed.
Thanks for sharing the link. Fewer deaths is definitely less tragic than more deaths, but less tragedy makes it easier to talk about - it’s not a judgement.
Watching shows like Succession really gives you a proper picture of how people like this view the world. It’s disgusting.
I’m so glad this story is done now. Rich people dying paying huge money for dumb things makes me 😴😴.
Literally couldn’t care less…
The more I have read about this, the more disgusted I am. This company generally, and the CEO personally, took all sorts of shortcuts to build this thing.
The CEO stated that he didn’t want to have any ex military submarine experts as part of the team, because they were “uninspiring” and “50 year old white guys”, and he’d rather have young college grads who are inspiring. The real reason: the college grads were simply cheaper. He didn’t want to pay the ex military experts. That’s it.
The CEO lied to CBS news in their CBS Sunday morning report and told them that Boeing and University of Washington consulted with them on the design of the submersible. Both organizations told the NY Post today that they had no involvement with it. So that was a fucking lie. All he did was use the UW lab after hours.
The use of a Logitech PS3 style controller to navigate the vehicle…what the actual fuck.
Because this was a submersible in international waters, there are virtually no regulations. That needs to change. If the UN needs to draft a treaty for countries to ratify to regulate these things in international waters, then that’s what needs to happen.
I don’t see the issue in using a controller, the US Navy does the same
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136808/us-navy-uss-colorado-xbox-controller
I do think it’s ironic that they used a Logitech controller instead of an Xbox controller, but the reasoning is probably similar to the US Navy’s
I don’t see the issue in using a controller, the US Navy does the same
I do. I’ve been an avid PC Gamer my entire adult life and I’ve never had a Logitech product that wasn’t terribly glitchy. When I heard that bit it made me feel like Moss in The IT Crowd.
The difference is they collab with the military to make actual quality shit. Their consumer products are just a side-gig!
Did you use this specific controller? It is actually a beast, very high quality and durable. I’ve used a Logitech Rumblepad 2for almost a decade. The only issue I had with it is that it did not support xinput, only direct input, so a lot of games do not support it anymore. But still works like a charm.
However I won’t trust my life on it.
Logitech used to make good controllers - dunno how they are now. But they shouldn’t have used a bluetooth one. But they did have a backup controller also. And probably didn’t plan on getting close to any obstacles they could collide with.
Imo it’s the least problematic part of the whole setup.
Using a controller is fine, but I’m sure they are hardwired. There is a Today show interview where the CEO specifically said they use them over bluetooth.
Absolutely all shit made up in my brain from my hatred of bluetooth. I could definitely see the controller dying because they forgot to charge it, tried to connect the spare but bluetooth being bluetooth wouldn’t. Then they drift into the Titantic, get a puncture and implode.
Vivid imagery befitting the general reliability of Bluetooth (witness me covering one of my EarPods to get the other one to connect up and sync with my phone at least once a day) but putting all the pieces together, my best guess is that the pressure vessel split at one of the seams between the cylindrical carbon fiber center section due to fatigue at the joint, well above their target depth. There’s a reason why every other DSV designed to reach those depths uses a single-piece spherical pressure vessel.
I keep people saying the porthole window was only rated for ~1300 meter dives, though I haven’t seen the source for this yet.
Also fiberglass as a material and the way they were cheaping out on checking it for imperfections.
But yeah also the join. It seems so obviously a horrible idea.
Ahhhh now that’s insane, there’s no good reason for that to be wireless at all…
The big difference I see is what it’s controlling. Sure, the Navy used Xbox controllers for intuitive use of the periscope. I bet if you asked them “please make all ship attitude controls, and therefore crew safety, reliant on this,” they would laugh at you and walk away.
The fact that it’s a wireless controller is what I really don’t understand. Why would you want to risk interference, battery issues, etc?
I think it’s because they said they’d pass it to the passengers to let them control it. Easier to hand around. Maybe? Which would still be dumb because it introduces risks and they could just swap seats instead.
I have to admit that a game controller, at least the ergonomics and controls of one, likely makes more sense than it would seem at first blush.
I think it’s more a problem with circumstances and optics. If all was well and this whole fiasco didn’t happen, I could see it being framed as a sort of goofy trivia piece, just like the US Navy’s use. But when things go wrong as they did here, it feels like the kind of bit that’s incredibly easy to reach and dunk on.
I’m not inclined to hinge my disappointment on the game controller, but I can’t blame anyone for doing that, either.
Oh yeah. There was a show years ago called Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan where EOD techs were on deployment detonating roadside bombs. The robot they used was controlled by an Xbox controller and the guy best at the job was their youngest team member because….video games
sad PC gamer noises
I’ve done some mountaineering. The people going down would have known the risks and accepted them for an opportunity for a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to the titanic.
Whilst in retrospect, things like this seem like a stupid risk, sometimes, you become so focused on wanting to do something that you take them.
Personally, the idea of being stuck in a tin can with thousands of pounds of pressure surrounding me with absolutely no redundancy/backup though isn’t my kind of thing (same reason I take a rescue beacon when hiking, i always want some kind of backup. Even on Everest, they have some backup)
I’m inclined to characterize this loss as reckless and needless, but I find myself agreeing with likewise here. Some opportunities are the once-or-so in a lifetime sort. There’s likely such opportunities out there that I’d love to take if I had the means, even if the risks were great.
I can completely understand people wishing ill on those lost here. As I said, I think there’s an element of hubris and needlessness in this disaster that makes it upsetting, and that doesn’t even get to the likes of the discrepancy in coverage between this incident and the greater loss near Greece this week.
Still, I suppose I hope this risk was worth it to at least a few of the souls on board.
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The people going down would have known the risks and accepted them for an opportunity for a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to the titanic.
[Open Only if you’re down with adding another bummer of a news article to the pile.]
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I say “at least a few of the souls” rather than “the souls” for a regrettable reason. The aunt of Suleman Dawood has gone on record to claim that he told a relative he was “terrified” to go. Whether this is the likes of pre-trip jitters or substantial anxieties is not for me to say, but however way it checks out, it adds to my disappointment in how this submarine was slapped together.Did paying customers fully understand the risks, though? Seems the CEO was rather adept at bullshitting. And saying he didn’t want military experts on the team because they weren’t “enthusiastic” is just a load of crap. I bet they saw what a death trap the sub was and wanted no part of it.
Yeah. Paying customers fundamentally can’t become submersible experts overnight, even if they were inclined to do as much research as possible. Our modern society relies on trusting that experts know what they’re talking about, and that they are involved where they should be in the first place, and often assuming that “they wouldn’t be allowed to do this if it wasn’t safe, surely”.
Yeah, we’re sorta inclined to believe in what an authority tells us and it’s not easy to tell when we’re being fed tasty looking bullshit. Especially when we want it to be true.
Did paying customers fully understand the risks, though?
You know what, that’s a good question and getting to a perspective I somehow found hard to explore on my own 🤔.
Generally I’m quite strongly in favor of regulations precisely because of this kind of question. The lay customers likely didn’t fully understand the risk they were taking—fully and throughly understand as an expert would. Achieving that kind of understanding takes expertise in a field, and expertise takes years, if not a lifetime to build. I don’t it’s reasonable to expect everyone to have an expert and informed opinion on everything, so I think a society ought to have the responsibility of establishing regulation to protect people from that kind of valid and inevitable ignorance. Sure, the five on board were billed as brave adventurers, but can I confidently say they were informed? Save for the negligent CEO, I’m not so sure I can.
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I think my hesitation to extend that mindset to this is because the idea of underwater tourism, let alone deep sea tourism felt like uncharted territory to me. Not “against” mind you, more “hesitant.” I think we ought to make progress safely and responsibly, especially if we’re doing so with lay people tagging along, but part of me worries that putting up too many guard rails and too much red tape can stymy legitimate, good faith progress. A regrettable part of regulations is that a fair amount of them are written in blood. Sacrifice, in a way, is sometimes necessary to know just where those guard rails ought to be.
But I’m starting to realize that this is likely not as uncharted as I thought. I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me on my first impressions, but of course we have the potential to make informed safety decisions here—submarines have been around a hot minute, we have the precedent to build an informed understanding of what’s safe and what isn’t. It’s starting to settle more in now, too, that we have more expert individuals and groups in this area than I thought that can help define informed standards.
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For the sake of those that were on board and their families, I still hope that this was indeed a risk that at least some of them legitimately wanted to take. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if you’re right in that most of them didn’t fully grasp the risk they were taking.
As for my stance on how this should be approached going forward, I dunno if it was your intention or just a side question, but I suppose I can say I changed my mind! I think we’re at a point where we can make informed decisions on how to regulate this, and we ought to do so sooner rather than later 🤝.
I can’t say I fully thought out my comment to that extent, but I do agree that we need proper regulations to protect us from shady business practices, even if the CEO in this case believed it to be safe enough to take the same risks as the customers. But that is beside the point. Proper regulations protects the public even in that case.
How those regulations could be enforced on international waters is whole bag of cats that I don’t even have a shoot-from-the-hip kinda opinion on. UN somehow? I don’t know.
I certainly wouldn’t have an informed idea on how that could be handled, either. What I have to offer toward particulars amounts to spit balling 🤷♂️.
If I had to guess though, I’d bet you and @patchymoose@rammy.site are getting at it. A UN treaty could play a part in establishing a baseline to build up on. Perhaps the key could be to indirectly govern it rather than trying to directly govern happenings in international waters? Operations that depart from signing countries could guarantee that their vessels meet basic standards, even if those offshore operations are ultimately conducted in international waters.
I’d imagine that it may shift a noteworthy amount of operation departures to non-signing countries, but I’d also think that increasing the barrier of entry and making such standards highly visible would make a noteworthy difference regardless.
Although, the CEO did go down with his ship. I think he at least believed his own bullshit.
Fair enough. If he had done it all by himself, it would’ve been fine. If someone wants to risk their own lives, it’s up to them. It is honestly kinda impressive to roll your own bat like that and actually manage to get it sorta working. But as soon as he started selling the trips, the situation is completely different. He knew his glorified tub wouldn’t pass any sort of inspection and still went full steam ahead. He had numerous people telling him it wasn’t safe and he just ignored them. He knew, he just hoped it would work anyway because he was in to deep.
I forgot to mention in my earlier reply that this was a reminder that also helped change my perspective. Putting your own life in danger unfortunate, but ultimately your own decision. Making a negligent decision that affects a wider industry is unfortunate, but seems like a risk in business in general.
Willful negligence that costs the lives of others demands consideration for how things can be done differently. The first best time to have defined and enforced those standards would’ve been before we lost these lives. The second best time to do so is now.
I agree. Can’t really see how it would work in practice in international waters though. Who should enforce it for example? UN, maybe? Some new international coast guard type organization operating only on international waters? Should the local marine or coast guard be responsible for the vessels under the same flag even on international waters? Kind of a big job, that. I’m no maritime expert by any stretch and international law and treaties aren’t in my book of tricks either. It can’t be entirely impossible, but I’m not your man on this. There’s quite possibly some simpler solution that would at least improve the situation, but… Maybe if local companies was bound to local regulations even on international waters and their actions could be prosecuted according to that, things might at least improve. At least for a case like this, provided his company was US based in the first place and/or the boat they used. I dunno.
I think the problem here is that there’s willful recklessness buried in the risk taking here. It’s like running a shady skydiving operation and being like “yeah, the professionals are full of it and just want my money, you don’t really have to repack the chutes carefully, just stuff that shit in there, it’ll be fine. Trust me bro, it’s worked for me, like, five times.”
There were so many obvious and stupid risks this guy took. There were multiple near misses that should have raised alarm bells, as well as expert whistleblowers who were dismissed. It’s frankly a wonder it took this long to fail, and a shame this moron took other people out with him because he was able to just hand wave it all as “risk taking”.
I do tend to agree actually…
With Everest, there is a huge amount of risk management. Same with Parachuting.
With this maybe slightly less. That being said, if I found out the CEO was going to be piloting it, I’d assume it’s safe. However, then again, there was the Rob Hall and Everest Incident too (but I feel like that was less preventable on Rob’s side)
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Wow! Like the Simpsons!
A Simpsons writer was a former passenger on the billionaire death sub. Makes you wonder how much money Simpsons writers make. He said he knew it was janky and he was taking a risk getting in the thing.
Also both had a lot of iron in their structure. One might call them ironic.
With all the red flags I’ve seen in the 4 days of them looking for it, I cannot understand how anyone spending that kind of money on this didn’t see enough to back the fuck off.
i’m sorry but the cables on the OUTSIDE of the sub? hell even just LOOKING at the damn thing. And once I saw the controller I’d be out so quick.
The controller was probably the least problematic aspect of the whole thing, and that’s saying something given that they were relying on fucking Bluetooth at the bottom of the ocean.
Main character syndrome, wealth-induced hubris
It does seem like Oceangate advertised in a misleading way, emphasizing claims of safety and compliance with safety standards. There’s also probably an unfortunate bias, of sorts, of “rich and powerful man saying something is safe in a confident and authoritative voice so it must be true”
For those wondering about James Cameron’s comments, I’d thoroughly recommend watching the Deep Sea Challenger documentary. It is enthralling. I have a friend who actually worked on the sub and went on the expedition with Cameron. In his words: “to underestimate the safety requirements is, put simply, to die.”
This is incredibly sad but at least it was a quick death.
I feel sorry for thecreww members who were just there to drive the thing, but the rich I could care less and I’m pretty hungry
The CEO/founder was the operator.
I still don’t think this is anything to celebrate though.
