Titanic Oceangate Submersible

It's well past the time when the five submariners aboard the submersible "Titan" should have run out of oxygen. We have questions but not really many answers.

UPDATE: Some questions answered - it seems the Titan imploded, it seems that the knock signals were spurious - but still leaves open if they were deliberately faked.

My first question is: Why were there so many stories? I don't mean journalitic coverage, I mean the things the experts surfaced. Today I broke my embargo on slavishly following the press and looked to see what's happening now that the official time limit's passed. 

I found two stories - you'll be able to find literally hundreds if not thousands - here and here. 

The Stuff That We Can Know.

Titan had 90hrs of oxygen on board.

Let's take this as a fact, that OceanGate thought the oxygen aboard would last five people a total of 90 hours. That figure has to perforce be a best guess. Panic - and you could halve the amount of time the oxygen would last you. Meditate and force yourself into slowed-down respiratory state and you could get to 100-120 hours. 

How Did They Scrub the CO2?

It doesn't matter if you have oxygen for 200 hours - you have to get rid of the CO2 (as Apollo 13 demonstrated in frightening detail) or you still suffocate. It seems that the lithium hydroxide filters might be a baseline to compare this to, the A13 had canisters of lithium hydroxide that could keep the expired CO2 of three astronauts scrubbed out of the air so I'm going to presume that Titan had at least that sort of a scrubber. 

The A13 had multiple spares so I'll presume that they had at least three, one to start on, one to replace halfway through the original mission, and a spare. Basically I think an A13 sized cartridge would scrub COS of 3 people for several days. The OceanGate missions were expected to only ever last eight hours and since the submersible had oxygen for three and three quarters days I'll presume they had the foresight to ensure redundancy.

The Implosion Sound?

In the investigation, it turns out that there was a sound similar to an implosion, right around the time that contact with the submersible was lost. Since that was at the 90 minute mark, the submersible would have been close to three quarters of the way down to the wreck of the Titanic. 

However, would it surprise us if we theorise that since one of the principals of OceanGate was on board and probably piloting, that the descent was maybe sped up  a bit? That may have put strain on the hull that it normally didn't experience and it imploded. Or perhaps they weren't really watching their descent and pancaked into the seafloor.

The Debris?

Whether the Titan imploded at 3/4 of final depth, at close to final depth, or on impact, can perhaps be established because the rescue ROV has apparently spotted a "debris field" that would be consistent with any of those senarios, and by analysing the pattern and spread of the remnants it would be fairly easy to work out at what altitude above the seafloor the incident had occurred.

The analysts also thought the debris found could well be materials similar to the composition of the Titan.

The Knocking?

Given that they found that debris and say that it looks to be similar to material that you'd expect to find if Titan had imploded, that makes it likely that the crew has perished and the Titan is destroyed. So where did the knock signals come from? The choices here are 1) implosion of the submersible at the 90 minute mark of the mission and loss of all aboard, or 2) the submersible is intact on the surface or the seafloor and someone is alive inside and signalling. 

The Stuff We Don't Know.

There are two scenarios and each has a few subvariants. 

The knocking signified that the submersible is on the surface or the seafloor and running out of time. I don't believe it could be floating at some intermediate depth just because that would mean it still has manoeuvring capability and should have surfaced once whatever incident they encountered was seen.

Given the loss of contact and a sound that could have been an implosion, my favoured guess is that the submersible did implode at or near target depth and is no more.

That means that the signal knocking was either the imagination of someone listening to the hydrophones, or some spurious noise that appeared to be intelligent signalling, or else an outright fraud committed by someone making such sounds to throw confusion into the search & rescue mission. 

Now A Crazy Thought.

• Paul-Henry Nargeolet was one of the people that first explored the Titanic and a French Navy diver.
• Stockton Rush was one of the principals and his wife was related to two people who died on that fateful Titanic voyage.
• Hamish Harding was a business jet trader and significant for his explorations and the records he's set.
• Shahzada Dawood is/was a friend of King Charles. 
  His son Suleman would be the traditional successor to that line.
• Given that the whole history of royalty is more labyrinthine and Byzantine than Machiavelli's deepest plots.
• And given that people close to the throne turn up dead from time to time.
• And also given that - had the most likely scenario occurred - then someone had to have been making the spurious signals in the vicinity, possibly to sow confusion.

So what are the chances that the Titan was deliberately scuttled for some ancient vendetta?

I'm aware of how crazy that sounds. But it's remotely possible so I mention it. 

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This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

... on the coalface. I said just a week ago that people who don't want to have children are okay to stay endlings. 

Now a bit more has come to my attention, and it says it right in the article that more than half of people who are active in climate change in any way (research, papers, activism, reporting, etc) believe that humanity is doomed by it. 

In my article I said "I couldn't imagine raising a small human . . . in the climate of uncertainty that was already evident when I was a parenting age . . ." and my choice of words was deliberate. Back in the 80s it wasn't yet a media phenomenon like it is today, but we had BBS systems and we were swapping the usual chat - weather reports: "yep, it stayed warmer, longer, before this winter. Beginning to believe that weird report hey?" - odd plant growth: "my tomatoes died off earlier this year, and my parsley shot away early too - must be something in the water?" 

In the 90s it was more obvious - my tomatoes cropped for longer, and they didn't even die off that year or the year after, and I had early crops off them. I had the Internet now and also ICQ. And I was chatting to people who were definitely reporting signs of weird weather. Not just one or two, either. It was a wake-up call. 

And by then it was getting a bit late to have young'uns, anyway. People stopped asking. I breathed a sigh of relief. But not about the climate, because by then it was starting to become A Topic Of Discussion everywhere. Not enough for people to actually do anything about it, but talking, at least. The rest is history. 

But look at it - the amount of distress that climate science - and the news it brings - has been creating. That last article BTW is from 2021. The Crikey reader comments roundup is from this year. The first two articles are also from this year. Here's another one.

I'm sure the climate is warming. I'm not sure the human species will survive the coming climate changes. I'm not sure most of plant and animal life on the planet will survive it. But I want to do everything I can to slow or avert it.

End Of Line? It's Terminal.

Are you the last of your lineage? After you, no more <insert family name here> running around the yard? No more <insert family tree name here> DNA in the world? 

Don't be too discouraged and don't feel too guilty. We share more DNA with other humans than we do with molluscs or mushrooms, but the variation in our genotype is only about 0.1%. While that means that our particular genome will end with us, the rest of our unique DNA is spread out among billions of other humans. 

So we're not really denying the gene pool of too much mixing. We think there have been only around 108bn home sapiens born on the planet since the species diverged from the hominid branch. There will soon be 9bn of us on the planet at a time, so maybe around 7-8% of all the h. sapiens that ever lived are here on the planet right now. Even if that figure was closer to 4% that's still a pretty large gene pool. It can do without contributions from some of us.

Don't Worry, Others Have Worried For You.

Starre Vartan had this same question in mind. (For podcast listeners - the link will be in the article when it's published.) 

And I had this question in mind when I decided I'd be an endling. (An "endling" is technically the last of a distinct species but the same concept applies to DNA of a family tree I think.) And actually - technically - I'd only be an endling of this branch of the <insert family tree name here> family tree. But I have female siblings and now quite a few nieces and nephews so their DNA contribution will outlive me.

There are also so many other things tied up in this. For one, why do we have this implacable drive to have our DNA be propagated into the future? Are we really the fittest h. sapiens that ever lived? Some people in history thought so - the eugenicists. "Terminate all inferior bloodlines, only the One True Race!" but that's just so much hokum. 

Because when you press any eugenicist to imagine the point where only their race exists on the planet with numbers approaching 9 billion, and ask them what this Superior Race will look like, it turns out they all look like that eugenicist. "Only Skwarkians with straight spines, brown eyes, three nipples, fine (but not too fine) musculature, a height of 180cm, and thick protective hair on their head!" they exclaim, and they're describing only themselves. 

When it comes down to a point where you've subdivided Skwarkians into 27 sub-races, only one will do. When you divide that last 1/27th into your family and the other 80,000 families, only YOUR family meets the standard. And then, do you know what you get? Have you got there yet? You get in-breeding, that's what you get. 

Imagine a time in the unimaginably far distant future when humans can instantaneously move wherever in the Universe they want and can form breeding unions with whomever they want, and the number of humans alive at any one time has so many zeroes after it that it's staggeringly close to the number of all planets. And the matter of "whomever they want" becomes inconsequential because there aren't any more variations possible of that 0.1% of the DNA... 

Slight Hiccup:

There may be a genetic predisposition component to not wanting to have kids. (The old joke "If your parents never had sex, chances are you won't either" comes to mind.) But truly - if there's a slight genetic variation that predisposes a person to not procreating, then that's a trait that will obviously breed itself out. 

But that's okay too. It means that the eager breeders will breed, meaning that again, your action (in not adding to the gene pool) won't affect the viability of the species. We family endlings have the best of both worlds. The hiccup turns out to not be an issue either. 

On A Personal Note

I decided, as I said, to not have kids. A lot of things. I could never imagine me with a young'un, I mean, a pup was already a huge commitment... I couldn't imagine raising a small human and teaching them al about life - if I wanted that I'd have become a teacher I suppose - in the climate of uncertainty that was already evident when I was a parenting age. 

And if you've decided you'd prefer to make our population growth figures a bit less frenetic, don't worry. Everything will work out just fine.