Titanic: Still killing rich people a century later

Of all the ways to get killed at sea, being in an implosion at 13,000 feet underwater is probably not a bad way to go. Chances are it was faster than the speed of nerve conduction. 

 The internet is a place for idiots to force people to listen to their stupid opinions. I am absolutely not convinced it is a net good for humanity. 

 So obviously I'm going to talk about the submarine accident at the Titanic wreck site. 

 I am not an expert. My dad was. His first job out of the navy was as as a ship's electrician for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, aboard their oceanographic ships. Along the way, WHOI built their research submarine ALVIN and as my father was the electrician on the mother ship they also built for Alvin, he became an engineering tech on the ALVIN as well. He was there for the first dives, the recovery of the h-bombs lost in a B52 wreck, and for the Alvin's sinking, loss (for a year and a half), and recovery when it slipped out of the recovery cradle. 

   Even so, he wouldn't call himself an expert at anything but the things he worked on. And they worked on a lot of things. 

    ALVIN used life-cycle maintenance techniques where every bolt, nut and washer has a measured life span and is not used one day longer than that span.  I remember my father saying that they needed at least 100 man hours of maintenance and testing for every hour of use of the sub. 

   The story of the habitation sphere, where the people are, involves tens of thousands of hours alone just to pass inspection for acceptance for use, including mandatory destructive testing of copies of the sphere. 

 The Alvin's first sphere when built was pressure tested to over 9000 feet in a testing tank, which was the most powerful pressure chamber of sufficient size at the time. The destructive testing was a failure at first, when the pressure chamber door blew off, causing the multi-ton door to go airborne. The sphere passed. It was stronger than the test tank. A new test tank had to be built, and I'm not sure if they were ever able to test to failure for that first class of spheres. 

       Point being, deep submersible design is intense and the testing and maintenance is continuous and extensive and expensive. 

      I have no idea what the lost sub underwent for testing. It was revolutionary in many ways, and until this week, pretty damn successful. Obviously the company expected it to work. 

 I don't expect that there will be much in the way of human remains. The flash fire from the air compression, then the shock wave from the collapse... not nice. In theory it should have been fast enough to exceed nerve impulse transmission rate, so hopefully the poor pricks had no idea what happened. 

    Now, the only real thing I gotta say is that I'm pretty soggy and hard to light when it comes to seeing a few people's reaction over this. There seems to be a camp, mostly among the cultural marxists (read: unemployable class-conscious losers) of course, where the sentiment is that they're happy  a bunch of ultra rich strangers are dead. 

    If that's how you think, you're a giant sloppy gaping asshole. Just because someone has more money than you doesn't make them less human and worthy of pity- it makes you a jealous loser who sucks at being human and also at making money apparently. Sure you can smugly say that they had no business being there. And it's a weird adventure trip, granted, at a quarter-million a seat, but how much of an amoral cocksucker do you have to be to take pleasure in someone's death simply because they or their parents were good at a job? 

 Anyhow, I've barely got enough brain cells to get through the day after 25 years of smelling bulk oil vapors for 8 months a year. I don't really have much opinion beyond the above, except that I'll be interested in what this means for materials science in the medium term. The busted sub was an experiment. Perhaps the next one will be better, whoever builds it. The early history of the airplane was a lot messier than this. 

Oh, also I'm at home. Not at work. And it's whisky o'clock.