#titan sub

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[shima-draws]

Is this actually happening. Are you for REAL right now

[pymdrake]

Please, have a seat. We’re here to debate Steven Universe with you

[captaincalamity]

i know i should not be thinking about this. but. do you think markiplier is going to push back iron lung’s release date now

[foxfinding]

I would find it so much easier to care about the people in the submarine, if I wasn't constantly fucking seeing headlines about ships going missing that were full of refugees and asylum seekers.

Like- look. Realistically?

Everyone in that sub is dead, and they are never going to be found.

But. All these rich dipshits who have never had a consequence in their lives, who willingly chose to sign a waiver and hop into a seriously unsafe submersible for funzies and bragging rights, like-

They still live in a different fucking world than everyone else.

They have multiple governments and military organisations and others "the private sector" working together trying to find them.

(I do know that there are lots of people who do really care about helping refugees and asylum seekers, "private sector" and NGOs and sometimes governments and stuff.)

I just...

I don't fucking care about these stupid fucking rich people.

I'm angry, that they decided to do something stupid and the world is apparently desperate to save these five people, and not...

All the fucking people who sign up for dangerous conditions because they are scared and desperate and hopeful.

I'm angry, that there are posts like

"Do you know how awful it would be to die like that? Have empathy!!!"

Like.

No?

I don't really care how cold that sounds.

I have limited emotional energy, and I choose to spend it ...not on fucking loser billionaires who thought they were fucking invincible.

I choose use my emotional energy to have empathy for the people who were seeking help and didn't fucking get it.

[space-blue]

fresh off twitter

[werewolf-cuddles]

Oh god, I just found out the 19 year old that died in the OceanGate debacle didn't even want to be there in the first place.

According to a family member, he was terrified of going, and only went to make his dad happy because it was Father's Day.

God, just... fuck. 19 is too young, man. He deserved better.

[sketchygainedyoursoul]

I want to out my own opinion on the whole submarine situation out here so ignore if you want (it's more of a letter to the lost crew but anyway)

What the fuck.

Simply, what the fuck.

The Titanic is a beautiful tragedy, and the only people going down there to see it should be researches, not tourists. She's likely going to disapear by 2030, let her and her ghosts rest.

Have you not heard of Subnautica? Of Iron Lung? Have you not heard the tales and fears of the deep sea? Of the Horrors that lay within? Are you really so foolish as to expect it all to go fine, when any number of creatures could be down there?

Are you fools. Are you fucking imbeciles? You signed a waiver. This is your fault. This is the CEO's fault. I hope you die. I hope you are found alive. I hope you learn something from this, regardless of the outcome.

Icarus flew too close to the sun, and you dove too close to the sea. Your hubris is disgusting, and I fear for you and those you've left behind.

You'll be lucky if you live past beyond a cautionary tale.

Your oxygen is gone, and I wish you luck. Goodbye.

[deardiary17]

Like, I'm not an extremely superstitious person, but going down to a mass graveyard of more than a thousand people who died tragically is NOT a good idea from the start. I'm sincerely sorry about the people who are lost in the ocean now, but I just cannot comprehend their way of thinking. It's the bottom of the ocean. It's a place with a horrible history, where the rich survived and the poor died simply for being poor. And now the rich choose to go down there for entertainment. Seems like a joke on the dead to me. Why not make a machine that could go there without people, if people are so interested in the research? Why risk human lives? Why turn it into entertainment? Maybe I'm dirt poor and not educated on this particular topic, but I just can't wrap my head around it, what were they expecting?

[lzrdprsn]

New photos reveal cramped conditions inside of missing titanic-bound submarine

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

since theres a lot of discussions about shipwrecks and deep sea submersibles happening right now, im just gonna quickly recommend this video which details how caladan oceanic found the samuel b roberts.

the samuel b roberts was a destroyer escort sank during the battle off samar during ww2. the wreck was found last year and is 22,621 feet/6885 metres deep which is almost 10,000 feet or 3000 metres deeper than the titanic and is currently the deepest wreck ever found.

in the video, you see a deep sea submersible (which can go down to 36,000 feet/10,973 metres) that isnt a tin can finished up with duct tape, super glue and glittery gel pens. it is piloted by an expert and they swap out pilots every day to avoid exertion or fatigue, and they have a very complex sonar system for finding wrecks. the longest they can go down is 16 hours and they keep in contact with their ship above and have to get clearance just for half an hour more.

when they find the wreck, they look around it to ensure they can identify it and map it out as well as they can, and then head back up to shore. they then hold a funeral service for those who died and leave a wreath on the ocean surface above where the wreck lays.

while im somewhat sketched out by the founder victor vescovo, the company does important work in terms of furthering our understanding of the ocean and finding wrecks which are the gravesites of those who passed. and they are not disrespectful to those whose graves lay 22,000 feet/6700 metres down on the seabed.

and what i would like to point out is how the samuel b roberts is protected against unauthorised disturbance by the sunken military craft act. you would need a permit from the naval history and heritage command (and a submarine that can withstand all the pressure) to go see it.

which, as ive said many times in the last two days, is something that the titanic should also have protection against. there should be laws in place that do not allow people to treat a mass fucking gravesite as a tourist spot.

[ninjasmudge]

...

lot of people smarter than me have phrased the nuances around this whole situation better than i could, but sometimes i feel like stuff like this kind of speaks for itself

[maelkravn]

thinking of going down to look at the titanic in this later, 4 other homies out there wanna come with? im steering it with a ddr pad that i've taped to the wall.

[wwarborday]

TIL the sub company is actually fucking called “OceanGate,” and that’s not like, the Watergate style name we gave the incident. Holy fuck, dude. How dumb do you gotta be. Yeah this is my sub to see the Titanic, called the Titan, and I’m gonna name my company a synonym for the biggest scandal ever.

[mxalexwhat]

CBS tried to do an end of the year in memoriam for the Titan submersible and inadvertently pointed out the most poorly-aged-rotting-fox-corpse-in-the-woods quote by Stockton Rush

You sure didn't make sense of engineering bud, and we definitely remember you for breaking rules.

[styleinthemeanwhile]

NO FUCKING WAY PEOPLE WILL REALLY JUST WRITE FANFICTION ABOUT ANYTHING