Bonus | The OceanGate Titan Disaster Explodasode of 2023

As you know, I do not run a current affairs podcast, but I received an extraordinary number of comments and questions about a certain homemade aquatic vehicle that kurploded as dramatically as possible. And hello and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, come with me and you'll see a big world of OSHA violations. Oh yes, you are going to learn the gory but educational details of a death as close as we have ever come to the existential horror of dying in a teleporter accident. And we'll explore why laughing at billionaires is actually good for the world and your health. This is not the show that you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, show the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. It was a story that filled hearts around the world with a mix of terror and joy. Terror because well, please reference the rest of this episode, and joy because, as we learned, the vessel was at capacity with billionaires. Did you know eighty four percent of people pulled believe a billionaire would use a servant as a seat a foot rest. Twelve percent believe a billionaire would use a poor person as target practice. Billionaires come across as two dimensional, mustache trolling villains, and the vast, vast majority of people absolutely revel in glee when a billionaire experiences even the mildest inconvenience. So to have almost half a dozen of them a race from the census in an afternoon, It's maybe weird that we act this way, but we do, and I'm going to tell you why. It's not just okay, it's the most psychologically sound and logical reaction that you can have. Before we dive in, I will remind you that an autographed doomsday barbag is only an email away. Oceangate was founded by Stockton Rush and Giermo Sonlin in Washington State in two thousand and nine. They wanted to build submersibles that made under sea exploration cheaper and more accessible. According to Oceangate, several submersibles were created and tested with the help of NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington go Huskies. But the reality of it was it was going to be hard to make big money offering tours of rocks at the bottom of Puget Sound. They needed a destination with a little more curb appeal. Let's take tourists to the top of Everest now Stockton. It's a submersible, right, I was thinking of escalators. Ooh, let's go to the Titanic. So in twenty twenty they planned a quote unquote survey mission to the wreck of the RMS Titanic for anyone who's been living under a rock for a good long while. The Titanic was a Transatlantic liner that bought the farm quite famously by claiming to be unsinkable and then proven otherwise after trading paint with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. It killed a bunch of rich people and a whole lot more poor people. It became a very popular movie and continues to sit at a depth of about thirty eight hundred meters or twelve thousand, four hundred and sixty seven feet at the bottom of the Atlanta. If I seemed cynical there, it's because these survey missions were really just PR cruises to race capital and get ocean Gate's name on the world stage. Two years ago, in twenty twenty one, they successfully reached the Titanic. It was a chance to trade comfort and a quarter million dollars for an exceedingly rare opportunity to visit a piece of history in quite possibly the most hostile environment on Earth. People it made the journey that came back with worries, creaking sounds, loss of communications, a tiny toilet behind a curtain. What made ocean Gates submersible unique was there, never before done, never before advised. Mixed use of titanium and carbon fiber. Titanium is no brainer. It's as tough as they come and a fan favorite in the space industry. And carbon fiber picture a magical kind of a newish space age material, several times stronger than steel but much lighter. They make commercial aircraft out of the stuff. Not bad, right, But this is kind of a one off episode, and so I'm going to show my cards really early here. There was a reason why I said not overly recommended. Carbon fiber has all kinds of tensile strength. Tensile strength is the amount of pressure it can withstand stretch wise before it cracks. Carbon fiber might make for some pretty hardcore coat hangers, but as the material in the oceanic exploration industry, it just had never been tested and kind of for good reason. See what carbon fiber doesn't have is great compressive strength. Compressive strength tells you how much pressure you can put a material under before it breaks squish wise, which is kind of important if you are going to be spending your time underwater. Material physicists know that any defect in the material is going to become ground zero for a failure under pressure, and the more and more you compress and decompress this thing, it's only going to create more points of potential failure. But clearly there were no material physicists in involve in the design of Ocean Gates Titan submersible. The closest thing would have been David Lockridge. He was their director of marine Operations and when they pressured him into signing off on the vessel, he had a few concerns. Glue was coming off, mounting bolts were poking where they shouldn't. The thing was designed with external snagging hazards and had faulty O rings, which is also what destroyed the space suttle Challenger. He didn't much care for the idea that some of the components, really important components, were held on with zip ties. Inside the thing, the floor was flammable, the walls were wrapped in vinyl, which is also flammable and toxic, and those walls had never been pressure tested for floss. The only monitoring for hole stress during the dives was a state of the art acoustic scanning system, but it was really only ever going to give you a couple seconds of warning before if something terrible happened. Oh and the all important porthole window, the one they bought, had only been rated to thirteen hundred meters. The reason was because a window rated strong enough for four thousand meters was just considered too expensive. In his words, it was an accident waiting to happen, and now he manages a costco in Shoreline, Washington instead of in a gray pen and a gold watch. They gave him a lawsuit for bringing it up. Stocked and Rush then pressured their accountant, Slash CFO, a woman with zero experience operating watercraft of any kind. Well, he pressured her into becoming their new sub pilot. So inexperience aside. When the Titan submersible had made its trips into the depths, let me say it this way. The reason that the people aboard were told not to eat or drink coffee before the trip was so that they wouldn't shot themselves from the noise. Writers described sounds as loud as fireworks or gunfire randomly going off from the hallway. Now matchine being asked to pilot the scariest vehicle known to man while your boss sets off firecrackerism randomly fires a handgun my head. It's not a great sale. And Stockton continued to pressure her until she finally quit, And when she quit, she didn't go happily, and she ended up spilling the tea on the fact that crucial systems for the subs had been designed by teenage interns with zero experience for fifteen dollars an hour, which was just above minimum wage at the time. Wow Oh, and NASA and Boeing did not help with this thing. Apparently they had bought the carbon fiber from Boeing at a discount because it was pasted the shelf life for use in airplanes, and NASA was all wooo and amazingly. As I began preparing this for you guys, Oceangate posted a job listing for a new submersible driver and engineer. Yeah, and then the next day their corporate headquarters was scrubbed out of existence. This is just another one of those things that someone had to have typed out with a keyboard resting on their massive balls to give you a sense of what kind of half assed tomfoolery was on display here. The submercible used a unique battery powered propulsion system, and by the third mission they discovered that one of those propellers had been configured backwards. They just sat there spinning around in circles. That was the third mission. The fourth mission got lost four or five hours. They had no idea where they were, had no idea where the Titanic was. And on those missions, if you watch the footage, you could see them ratchet the thing shut with bolts from the outside using a torque wrench by hand. Most mechanics won't even let you drive a car unless all the lugnuts are bolted in sync with a pneumatic socket driver. You want to hear the thing go ring lim rin rib until it goes ring. What you don't want to be hearing is Jeff outside going oh my elbow and do knock? Get me started on the game controller. No knock against Logitech, But I've owned more Logitech devices that didn't work and did and consumer reviews overwhelmingly back me on that. And there was another issue with those material choices we've actually talked about before. Might remind you of our recent episode on the Guadalajara siew Or disaster. We talked about a little something called galvanic corrosion. Remember, it was the idea that when different materials are in contact together, it can actually speed up corrosion. And apparently mixing titanium and carbon fiber in saltwater can lead to rapid corrosion of the titanium, which only weakens it and creates vulnerable areas for pressure to desploy. Carbon fiber sounds like glass fracturing until it splinters, which again it does catastrophically. Asking someone who works with carbon fiber, they say, you would have to be a special kind of stupid to use it like that and the most worrisome thing for me, if you look at the interior, the monitors that they used for all the operations appear to be screwed directly into the carbon fiber hole. You just you can't pick this stuff up. Any scratch or knit or cut or hole is going to create a stress concentration. It's just science. And the other thing about carbon fiber. They could have found any flaws at any point using simple ultrasound technology, but that sounded too much like safety for their rebellious ways, and they did not want to spend the money. The consensus is that they might as well have used paper, machet and cardboard for all the lack of consideration put into this thing, and Mission five would be the last mission of the Titan. Reportedly, as best we understand it, they descended way too fast and the rapid increasing pressure was too much for the improvised halt to withstand. They lost their communications. We believe they dropped their weights in hopes of returning back to the surface, but the damage was done. News outlets still held out a candle, a hope for rescue for days. Then the discussion turned into finding the bodies, and let me say this, even a basic overview of the physics involved, are worse than any horror movie you've ever seen. And we're going to circle back to that. So why would people risk their lives this way? Anecdotally and psychologically, the more money you have, the less of a grip you have on what is danger, both to yourself and everyone around you. The practical issue with living in a delusional bubble is most places in the world don't care about your bubble. The woods don't care, space certainly doesn't care, and you will not find anyone who cares more than one hundred feet under water. As I pointed out in the past, there are no vegetarians below three hundred feet. Having the ability to throw money at daily problems creates this false sense of and vulnerability in the rich. How many celebrities have you seen that appear to live in a kind of parallel reality where their actions have no consequences. Their normalcy bias is based on them seeing themselves as superior to everyone else. Well, we'll see about that too. One thing that unites us all, outside of status or means, is biology. And rich or poor, we are all a meat puppet hung over a skeleton powered by muscles and nerves. I've heard it described as a brain piloting a biological mechsuit that carries enol fat to make about seven bars of soap and sheds about six hundred thousand skin cells every hour. Okay, that's kind of fun, but let's get into all this pressure. When you're floating at sea level, you've got about one atmosphere of pressure sitting on you. Pretty comfy stuff. It's about sixteen pounds of pressure per square inch on your body. That's how much all the air sitting on your head and shoulders all the way to space weighs now. The Titanic sits over twelve thousand feet. That's closer to four hundred atmospheres. And at that depth, you've got a column of water two and a half miles or four kilometers tall, sitting on top of you. That's about six thousand pounds of pressure per square inch sitting on every square inch of your body. And if the average human is five nine and two hundred pounds fil aid and laid out like a carpet, that's about three thousand square inches of space. That's eighteen million pounds of pressure. That's a lot, and that's why most pressure vessels going to the seafloor are spherical. It's so that the extreme pressure is spread more equally. But in our case, they wanted more butts and seats, so to speak, so they went with a more cylindrical design living space. When a sub hule collapses, it moves inward at about fifteen hundred miles per hour or twenty four hundred kilometers per hour. That's twenty two hundred feet per second. The time required is about one millisecond or one thousandth of a second. The length of a blink is one tenth of a second. This thing could have imploded on an endless loop about one hundred times before you could finish a single blink. Eyesight itself takes about thirteen milliseconds. A human brain begins to sense things at about twenty five milliseconds. Pain, on the other hand, takes about one hundred milliseconds to travel the brain, which is ninety nine milliseconds slower than the implosion. So when they say these people wouldn't have felt a thing, that's no joke. Of course, while the investigations in an analysis continues. According to a study done by engineer and expert in submarines. Jose Louis Martin, taking into account thrust and mass and acceleration and the all important coefficient of friction of water against a falling body. I don't have to tell you about that well anyway, he released a study that read more like a horror story and long story short, the submersible is descending without incident until it reaches about seventeen hundred meters. At that point, there's an electrical failure, no engine, no propulsion, no communications. Without the engine compensating for their weight, they lost their balance and likely tumbled towards the portal, forming a kind of human dog pile. That titan itself changed positions and began to fall like an arrow, vertically descending uncontrollably for at least the next nine hundred meters roughly three thousand feet. By Martin's calculations, the submersible would have descended for somewhere between forty eight and seventy one seconds without any of the people inside it being able to do anything about it. Now, imagine the unparalleled terror of playing the most horrific sightless version of the game Twister while listening to the hull squeeze like glass. The entire time. Mortin concludes his report with what, according to him, the last moments of life for the passengers. Quote, in that period of time, they are realizing everything, and in total darkness. It is difficult to get an idea of what they experienced in those moments. After those forty eight seconds or one minute, the implosion and instantaneous sudden death occurs. Imagine the horror, the fear, and the agony. It must have been like a horror movie, he explained. And remember this was a scientific paper. So what about their physical remains? You ask? All right, cracks, knuckles and clear's throat. Here is what you come for, rough math. Here even images of the crew of the vehicle that day. Let's assume that the average weight of the people on board the Titan was one hundred and eighty pounds, altogether nine hundred pounds between the five of them. Now, the only reason that you can sit in the sub is because it carefully counteracts the exterior pressure. Inside is just one big bubble of air. When the sub failed and everything inside it was exposed to the impossible pressure outside, the all important center section, the carbon fiber tube with the titanium encaps it shrank like it was hit with a pim particle. It wanted to turn into a tick tack, and everything else around it just kind of popped off her fell away. And the thing is, everything in that space was compressed hard enough to cause a phase shift. A fahoo hoo. All the air wanted to compress from a gas into a liquid. All the blood in your body would want to compress from a liquid into a solid. You see what I mean. Compression forces particles closer together, which makes them move quicker. And quicker moving particles make more heat. There's a name for it. It's actually called the heat of compression. The phase shift inside the vessel would have released a tremendous amount of heat enough to quick fry everything inside as hot as the sun, about five thousand degrees, and all in a time frame that we can't even understand. Amazingly, they have claimed to have found what they implied or presumed to be human remains, and you're thinking, oh, no, like a finger or something. Nah, Exactly, this thing would have cooked or boiled these people down into a kind of plasmatic gel that would then squeezh out at velocities that I wasn't able to calculate. The speculation is that they found some kind of gelatinous human remainder that was captured in a crack or a nook in some piece of debris, And since they're unlikely to confirm for us, I'll say this, it's just as likely that all the human jelly disappeared exactly as you would think, but that a little piece of tooth, for example, may have flown with enough force to embed into a piece of and that that's what they found. The rest of your skeleton at pressure would become kind of rubbery, but teeth are a lot stronger than the rest of your bones, so speculate away. As for the rest whatever did get away, have you ever seen video of a dead vale on the ocean floor before? There are so many fish and microbes and bacteria and bottom feeders and assorted and vertebrates down there that anything that falls into the depths basically lands on their plate, and the mplosion of the titan would have just been a very loud dinner bell. All that sea life can strip a whale quicker than you know that joke about so four tires walk into a bad neighborhood. The other speculation is that there was nothing to eat because everything would have been cooked down to ash. It's true. In a crematory, the reason you see anything is because they just don't run it hot enough. Run a fire hot enough, you won't have ash, You wouldn't even have smoke. And the truth is, no one really knows for sure everything I just said, it's all speculative because it's just not something we've ever been able to test before, and why the hell would we. This is the only real data we have, and we don't even have that because Stockton Rush did not want to spend money on the data plan. Either way, everyone on board transformed from biology into physics. As my wife said, they changed from a noun to a verb. So the owner of a DIY sub company wants to sale you out to international waters where no laws apply, to tour you around in a barely tested, unregulated, uncertified piece of equipment built by engineers who were hired specifically for their lack of experience, and developed with parts from home Depot and campus World. Would you know what to do? Yeah? Yeah, thank them for their interest, and you hang up, And then you ignore the sixty to seventy follow up calls, and you get on with the rest of your life the way your parents would have wanted for the rest of us, who marked ourselves safe from dying on the ocean floor on Facebook because we're poor. You may have felt a slight twang of guilt. Should I really be making fun of these people just because they're rich? I mean, they are human beings. And the obvious answer is yes, that's inhumane and it shows a general lack of empathy. However, the obvious answer isn't always the correct answer psychologically speaking, sociologically speaking, biologically logically, and evolutionarily speaking, yes, screw those people go nuts. Allow me to explain it is not even possible for the vast majority of humanity to try to feel empathy for billionaires. And I don't just mean the five people aboard the submersible. Empathy is a trait that we evolved so we could stop lone wolfing it out in the plaines. Try not to get eaten. We built communities around us to support each other for safety and security and a NonStop source of food. We are stronger together than a part. Went from alone endeavor to a communal endeavor, and it could only happen because early people cared enough about themselves and others to work and live as a unit. But this empathy that turned us into the people we are today only extends so far. It's why you feel more empathy for people in real life than strangers on the internet. Your entire biological ancestry had a subconscious hatred of people like that, because they threaten your community. In sociological terms, a billionaire amongst a population of middle class is a tick, nothing more than a growth or tumor that suckles and hoards resources. Logic dictates that it is immoral for one to line their pockets to an unused degree where they could just take any societal ill at random and fix it without sacrificing their overall worth. But they don't, so they separate themselves from society physically. They just cut themselves off in some skyscraper or some mansion compound. It is actually considered not just counterintuitive, but dangerous to your well being to feel genuine remorse for someone who uses you this way. So when you find yourself singing, we all died in a home, it's of marine you are actually reinforcing and strengthening your community against a perceived evil. This is something billionaires know nothing about and apparently neither do rogue subdevelopers. Ocean Gate submersibles were intended for exploration and scientific research, underwater inspections, site surveys, equipment testing, underwater archaeology, marine biology research, and deep sea mining. So they said, truth is, they really only wanted to use it to look for new sources of crude oil and gas. But it wasn't going to be billionaires risk in their biscuit searching for oil and gas in these suicide tubes. Instead, ocean Gate and their magical collapsible submersible will be remembered as a kind of a joky footnote in the perverse history of negligent homice. General Douglas MacArthur once said, you are remembered by the rules that you break, and I learned of that quote from Stockton Rush's own mouth. He said he used logic and good engineering, followed by an acknowledgment that you're not supposed to mix carbon, fiber and titanium, followed by a further acknowledgment that that's exactly what he did. He refused to listen to logic, reason, regulations, co workers, peers in the field, friends well, wishers and actual passengers. And why then, his words, the whole industry was obscenely safe because they have all these regulations, but it also has an innovative or grown because they have all these regulations. His stated purpose was to bulldoze or ignore every law and regulation with dollar signs in his eyes. The connection between the titan and the Titanic are numerous and eerie. Captain of a vessel receives multiple warnings about danger ahead, steams ahead full speed, trying to set a speed record ends up killing more than fifteen hundred Stockton Rush was warned repeatedly across the board. He went anyways with his craft, temporarily laying in pieces beside the object of his undivided hubris. If you never heard of hubris, it's what you call man's unchecked over confidence. You only hear people using it when someone's ego or arrogance gets the better of them and they end up dying terribly for it. You know, Icarus flying too close to the sun. Kind of stuff. The Greeks firmly believe that the gods hated it enough to smite you for it. And it would have been one thing if oceangate had bumbled through all this because they wanted to be other submersible companies. But that wasn't it. I mean, yes, but they were trying to cheat physics, and how did that work. It's one thing if you want to build an experimental sub it's quite another to entice passengers, so they categorize them as mission specialists instead of tourists and operated in the open ocean where laws don't apply. I've talked about a lot of accidents and disasters over these years, but is it ever really an accident if you were warned every step of the way that it was going to happen. Oh that's for the courts to decide. You already know my opinion. I want to thank you again and again for helping support this show, and this is why I wanted to bring you this as a Patreon exclusive, because you guys have been so good. I just wanted to share that anytime I do anything like this, it's no small amount of work. But I'm being sincere when I say it is always my pleasure just to be able to bring it to you. Without you, I wouldn't be producing Squat. And since you already know everything about the show, just a reminder you ever want to reach out just to chat about anything Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Doomsday Podcast or doomsday pod at gmail dot com. After this, you're finally going to hear the Los Alfecz campsite disaster, which we've been teasing for so long, and following that, you are going to experience a one of a kind first in the history of podcasting. This is going to be a tetrology of terror, and it will be delivered in four D. It's going to be something else. In the meantime, we'll talk soon. Save to goggles off and thanks for listening.