neckspike

contemplating a crab's immortality


pervocracy
@pervocracy

We have an update from the Marine Board of Investigation! Unfortunately the update is that there is no update and we are not getting a report this month, but they hope to hold a public hearing by the end of the year. It's okay, I can wait 😢

The Coast Guard captain in this video confirms at 14:20 something I'd heard speculated a lot but not officially confirmed, which is that the Navy immediately knew the submersible had imploded but dragged their feet on announcing this because it's supposed to be a secret what their underwater monitoring capabilities are.

...after James Cameron has said "oh yeah they told me right away" at 12:00, which does make it kind of a bummer that someone in the Navy must have thought "we can't tell the families, we have to keep up the pretense of a search... but James Cameron needs to know, this is his thing"

Also, I kind of suspected this, but the "transcript" that was "leaked" of the sub's final texts has been confirmed to be a hoax.

Finally, I've seen a lot of people posting "the ocean hungers for billionaires" memes upon seeing the news that another billionaire wants to dive to Titanic, but I regret to inform you that the company he's working with, Triton Submarines, actually has an excellent safety record and by all accounts is run by adults who do not treat it like a tech startup. They built DSV Limiting Factor/Bakunawa, which has been much deeper than Titanic and, unlike Titan, has actually been independently inspected and classified as safe for crewed operations at any depth. So they probably can do this right and the billionaire will not implode. Sorry.


lupi
@lupi

...after James Cameron has said "oh yeah they told me right away" at 12:00, which does make it kind of a bummer that someone in the Navy must have thought "we can't tell the families, we have to keep up the pretense of a search... but James Cameron needs to know, this is his thing"

as someone in the space know, i will say. When you're embedded in a space like James Cameron is, you make contacts and there's plenty of stuff that gets passed around quietly NDAs/classified/proprietary/etc be damned.

There are stories i've heard about things here at the cape that I can't tell, and I'm next to nobody. But when you're that deep in your field, there is absolutely off-the-record gossip.

I'm not surprised in the least that he has contacts in the navy, thru woods hole or whatever or whoever, given his history and track record with submarine things.

Shit leaks, but it never leaks in the right directions, I'll say that much. They definitely should've told the families, that's the point you were trying to make, but bureaucracy got in the way because as the coast guard captain said, "yes, there was an implosion, we were given that information right at the start by the navy, but we wanted proof beyond all doubt before we actually made the call that they were all dead"

and it led everyone on because the difference between knowing and proving was a miserable week of false hope


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

he's got an obsession, and its nice at least because he usually takes cameras with him and shares it after a while.

Ghosts of the Abyss is the first movie I remember seeing in theaters.

also tangent fact the navy has had that capability for decades

it's how we located that one soviet sub and sent the glomar explorer to try and heist it (project azorian)

it's also part of how they knew roughly where to send Ballard to hunt for Thresher and Scorpion though he had to actually locate the wrecks himself, using the method he'd proposed of "find the debris field that'll lead to the wreck"

him perfecting that technique ON thresher and scorpion was what allowed him to find titanic and actually do what his cover story said he was doing.

Yeah the fun thing that came out "recently" (within the past 5-10 years) was that Ballard's "titanic expedition" was a cover for the Navy wanting to find and inventory the wrecks of their lost submarines. He just also happened to do such a good job that he had time to spare, and in that time to spare he actually found Titanic.

And then Project Azorian is just. peak cold war insanity bullshit.

That whole navy thing was completely nonsense. We need to give the families false hope, and also not reveal we have the capability everyone already figures we have until a week later when we reveal we have the capability everyone already figures we have.

Also it would really say a lot about us as a society that when there's a Titanic-related disaster, we invite the guy who directed the movie Titanic to talk about it, except that he's also legitimately one of the most relevant people to talk about it.

Yeah, I figured the transcript was bogus. Submarines go fast when they go. Comparing to Thresher, one of the only submarine sinkings where transcripts are publicly available, the last three messages they sent to their escort ship were 1) "experiencing minor difficulty, attempting to blow", 2) garbled beyond coherence, and 3) "exceeding test depth" (cut off by the implosion). And their escort there was a dedicated submarine rescue ship that would have been able to help them if Thresher had been intact and able to communicate. They just didn't have time.

That one is so spooky to me. I know there's a zillion extremely mundane reasons why a submarine about to implode might not be giving off clear communications, but something about garbled and mysterious messages is just so horror to me.

It's such a fascinating incident.

I really hope they didn't know what was happening before the implosion; I like to think that they were all having a cool time underwater one moment and then they just ceased to exist the next moment. It's a shame some of them were young but it does seem like a more merciful death than most of us will get.

I'd never heard of the transcript until now, but surely if OceanGate had recieved messages discussing the alarm going off and trying to ascend, that would've been part of the discussion when the incident first happened, instead of the narrative being that they had lost communications and were wandering around somewhere down there? I mean, I do already think that the media idea that they were still alive somewhere down there was kind of unethical because in retrospect it seems really obvious that it had already imploded by the time they started searching, but knowing that that's likely is different from having messages where they actively discuss being about to implode. It doesn't seem like a believable fake. But maybe I'm missing context?

in reply to @lupi's post:

I was a little snarky about that, I realize that the families couldn't be looped in because they couldn't be trusted (if that's even the right word) not to immediately announce what they'd been told. But I feel like in a situation like that it's best not to run to tell your buddies either. But I'm well familiar with the speed of news in a tight-knit community, so... yeah it was probably inevitable it worked out that way.

It gets slipped to the peers because you can trust the peers not to run to the press and undermine your job, yeah.

One of my friends was doing some FOIA stuff and literally started getting threatened by a defense contractor in the most unprofessional way (a random engineer at said contractor getting their phone number and yelling at them) over it, and I think what they were investigating and seeking FOIAs on got publicized the wrong way there would be a big trouble.

I genuinely cannot say what the incident was that they were FOIAing for more information about, but i know it. It haunts me. Deeply. Part of me wants to scream it to the heavens but I know I would get people hurt or endangered if i did.