Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "What's Going on with Shipping Joins Scripps News To Discuss Discovery of Submersible Titan" video.

@MrTimbeatty But you don’t need human passengers to develop new vehicles. You can use crash test dummies to uncover the majority of problems.
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Interesting. I suppose you could do real world pressure testing of the design and materials with uncrewed vessels being sent down to the appropriate depths. And really, you’d want to test at greater depths than the location of the Titanic to try and determine your point of failure. But that leads me to a weird question. Could you build a test model at 4x scale (for example, for a 10 cubic meter container, you build a 40 cubic meter container) for testing at lower pressures to derive the desired data?
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And deep water submersibles are not in the subsafe submarine classes of vessels, either. Subsafe doesn’t apply to submersibles. If your point is that there is a safety framework that could be adapted to deep water crewed submersibles, ok. Good point. If your point is that SUBSAFE already applies to this class of submersibles, you are wrong.
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@JBHRN That’s the thing, though. The number of vessels in this class is tiny. The vessel in question, the Titan, was unique. There are no safety standards established (yet). I’m not saying this is right or a desirable state of affairs. I’m just saying that it’s how it is. Many people in these comments seem to think that regulation is just a matter of ordering that something be regulated. There are a lot of different steps that go into creating a regulation regime, and we are at the very beginning. There is nothing to be done at this point while the mishap is being investigated, other than putting an immediate freeze on all crewed deep sea activities. In addition, given the tiny amount of people involved in the mishap, I don’t think that there is any reason to give regulation of deep water submersibles any priority over other much needed regulatory reform that affects millions of people.
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Very good interview! I hope it brings many more subscribers. Thanks for sharing it here because I doubt Scripps News would surface on my recommendations feed.
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@fortresseuropa Well, that’s the rub. This vessel was unique and deep water submersibles as a category are rare. There are no established safety protocols specific to this class of vessel and it’s not covered under the SOLAS convention. It’s only AFTER tragedies that protocols are created or adapted, and until you have a protocol, you don’t really have a basis for a checklist. Whine all you want about capitalism and putting the almighty dollar ahead of safety, but safety standards are even worse in communist countries. I’ll take 5 deaths from experimental technology and an overall better workplace safety record, thank you. If there were shenanigans such as misleading passengers, I mean, paying crew members, that will come out in the investigation and subsequent law suits—but keep in mind that the person who is ultimately responsible was himself on the Titan and is now beyond earthly justice. It’s also going to be hard to determine if the deceased paying crew members were fully cognizant of the risks or not, because they’re not around to tell us what they knew before signing release forms and boarding the vessel. A full inquiry will answer some of these questions, but probably not all questions with 100% certainty. And once the inquiry/investigation is complete and a report issued, there will be a better basis for setting up a safety framework for these types of vessels, so they can be registered, certified, and inspected.
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⁠ @misarthim6538 I heard it was millions of victims, perhaps billions. You’re counting sperm, right? If we are talking about all forms of tubes, such as condoms, there are probably quadrillions of innocent victims. Even inside a natural tube used for reproductive purposes, only a single lucky one survives. The rest of the cohort that gets deposited in the tube (usually around 100-200 million sperm) perish. Now as far as these rare and exotic deep sea submersibles, there is no certification agency for this class of vessel. Criticizing the company for using an uncertified vessel makes you look ignorant. I think the most one can argue is that much more unmanned testing should have been done.
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@asbestosfiber The only counter to that is, what if the company was concealing or minimizing safety issues? On this point I can only speculate, so it’s better to wait for an investigation or inquiry to be completed and a report issued before reaching any conclusions.
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@lcmattern So the CEO, the guy who should face any consequences, has fled beyond human reach. No earthly court can impose a sentence on him or compel him to pay a penalty. Maybe he’ll face those consequences in an afterlife. 🤷🏻‍♀️
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@WindTurbineSyndrome How do you propose the CG or any other agency inspect a deep water crewed submersible vessel? To do an inspection you first have to set a standard for inspection. You can’t just make it up on the spot. This is a very rare class of ships. I’m pretty certain they are not insured in the same manner as commercial ships are insured (if they’re insured at all), so there’s been no call for a regulatory regime until now. Until there is international agreement, the most any government can do is to ban such activities in its territorial waters. I don’t think they can ban transport of experimental vessels from their ports to international waters (although I could be wrong about that).
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The interviewer certainly asked the right questions to bring out the answers. I don’t think it contained (no pun intended) anything new to regular viewers of this channel.
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