How fast did the people in it die?

Of course once the sub filled with water they would die instantly because it would reach insane pressures (300-400 ATM or 5800 PSI)

2 points

Less than 4 milliseconds. They didn’t feel a thing.

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0 points

Do you think they died from the water rushing in and hitting them unconscious?

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3 points

They died by being crushed with enough pressure such that the air inside the sub ignited ie compressed so much it essentially exploded. Death was instant.

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0 points

I know a diesel engine works off compression, but it has a fuel. All fires must have oxygen, fuel, and heat. What fuel would they have in the titan to ignite?

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0 points

“Rushing” implies something like a wave. The thing crushed flat like the plastic tube it was, and would have done so too fast to even visually track.

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0 points

If you were to slowly lower an open glass into the ocean, it would gradually fill with water. So i just think its the same with the sub, albeit faster?

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0 points

How did you get this number?

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0 points
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1 point

Physics and math. J/k. I’ve seen similar numbers thrown about. Here is a link to a Quora question What happens to the human body when a submarine implodes from 2 years ago that may be of interest.

When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.

A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.

The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.

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1 point

Did some math based on that number since it seemed pretty insane. That would mean that each side of the outer hull would have been moving inward at about 425mph by my estimate. Seems slower than I would expect by that number, but 4ms is hella fast.

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4 points
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To add context here, it takes your brain somewhere around 100ms to detect and then another 250 to process pain. So 4ms is not only fast, it’s absurdly fast.

To get a sense of how fast it is, go ahead and stub your toe, the time it took to feel it is 100 times longer.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/42/10879

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3 points

I just take solace in the fact that they probably just snapped out of existence instead of having to slowly die in a dark tube over a few days.

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1 point

I had seen a comment saying human to salsa in 4 milliseconds. ಠ_ಠ

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2 points

I don’t think anyone has any real data on the failure point, which is the needed info to know how long it would take to die. There has been lots of speculation that the carbon fiber used (rejected by Boeing as being out-of-spec) or the use of dissimilar materials each with different thermal expansion and contraction coefficients, to the “bubble window” being way under spec because the CEO didn’t want to pay for a proper spec one.

Without those we don’t know exactly how fast. We don’t know if they passengers had any indication of a problem (sounds?) or if it started leaking before it imploded or if it was an instant catastrophic failure.

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1 point

I think based on the reported sounds from US Navy and James Cameron (what a weird sentence), we are actually pretty sure it was a rapid, catastrophic and instantaneous implosion.

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0 points

I really don’t get this. The CEO knows that the window is so seriously under-speced, yet he still doesn’t hesitate to jump into the sub himself.

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2 points

Specs aren’t a universal constant. They’re defined by humans. Expert humans, but humans. He must have thought he knew better than the experts. He was wrong, but I don’t think the lesson had time to sink in.

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2 points

He may have thought along these lines… So the window is rated for 1500m interesting usually engineers use a 3x safety factor when they rate something that’d be…(sound of slowly grinding gears) 4500m! But I’m only going about 4000m meters down?

Jackpot! I’m not going to waste my time certifying the window to some silly extra strong standard! Take that you nerds!

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0 points

I can’t find where I saw it, but the friction of the water as it poured into the submarine at those depths would have been so strong that it would have heated the internal components hotter than the surface of the sun. Supposedly they cooked to death before they were crushed. But damn I can’t find the link anymore, lol. Someone with better google-fu please link to the article

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1 point
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1 point

Thank you for the source, I stand corrected

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2 points

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8tW4zfTeJqM&feature=sharea

On the topic— interesting slowmo of a miniature titanium sub imploding. Its hard to even imagine the forces a sub can go through.

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1 point
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This is a good example, it’s a hydrophone recording of a glass sphere imploding, the level of sound and echo should give you a good idea of the kind of forces we’re dealing with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_qlQhBa5V4

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