For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
There is so much misinformation around all of this (which isn’t helped by two of the largest social media networks being compromised) but:
If the “someone is knocking every 30 minutes and is near the surface” is true? Yeah, I think they will be rescued. That can be triangulated and they are near enough to the surface that a rescue is “low risk”. Whether they are in good shape after that rescue is anyone’s guess.
But in the likely event that this is wishful thinking? No. Time is running out (last twelve-ish hours if I can do timezones right?) and the likelihood is that any rescue attempt will be a severe risk to the team doing the rescue. That is not the kind of thing you can do as a last second race against time. We might find the sub but I genuinely do not believe we have the ability to mount a rescue in that amount of time. And the risk of something like “have a military sub lift them up” is not something anyone will sign off on.
I would also say that I don’t think people SHOULD be risking their lives at this point. We’re looking at a case of people who took an informed risk and understood that there was danger associated with the recreational activity they were undertaking. These people either had vast monetary resources and could have consulted the best experts in the world, or had significant prior experience and knowledge. While obviously withholding information interferes with informed consent, and that may or may not have played a role, I don’t think this is morally equivalent to rescuing someone from a burning building. There’s also simple probability - the odds of rescuing them alive and well aren’t good, and to put someone else’s life at risk for the off chance that they succeed would be unethical in my opinion.
Eh. I am very much not going to be losing too much sleep over a few billionaires dying from their own decisions.
But these were almost definitely not informed decisions. Even ignoring the current revelations that the company was even sketchier than one would have imagined: I am not sure how many “extreme” sports things you have done. The “So if you die it is totally your fault and not ours and even if we were criminally negligent, you will defend us” waiver is incredibly common. And without a proper understanding of the material science involved, it would come across as “as dangerous as sky diving”
I do very much blame the guy who apparently had dedicated his life to the Titanic. But the other rich folk are in the same category as someone living in a visibly dangerous/condemned building. If a rescue can be done with comparatively low risk: Go for it. If it is likely to kill the rescuers… maybe erase a few recordings.
I’ve had to sign waivers like that to take my kids to bounce house birthday parties.
What do you consider “not informed” vs. “willfully ignorant”? Personally, I think that a billionaire, who could have afforded any reputable service (which does exist), and who could have hired experts to go over every miniscule detail of the mission was willfully ignorant. The CEO of the company, who was personally warned and knew all of the internal issues, was also willfully ignorant. If either of them thought this was equivalent to skydiving, or just though “fuck it”, that’s on them. Of course, if the company actively lied to them or hid information then that’s obviously a huge issue, but if they just said “yeah like, this tube is made of stuff from the junkyard and literally no regulatory body has OKd us” and they agreed with the resources and knowledge available to them, then they carry some responsibility.
I think the case of say, signing a waiver before you go ziplining is very different for a few reasons. Most people who go ziplining don’t have any expertise, and don’t have the financial resources to find out more about the activity or the company offering it. They’re essentially relying on what they’re being told, so it’s far more coercive to tell someone like that “yeah uhh, we’re mostly safe, here sign this”. Ziplining would also presumably have some regulation around it, so undisclosed risk would leave not only the provider, but also the regulatory body, and in a larger sense government and society morally culpable. Thirdly, I think in a legal sense you have to consider what an average reasonable citizen would have interpreted the risk to be, just like in other criminal cases. I think it’s fair to say that the average reasonable person would have understood the risk of a titanic mission to be far greater than that of ziplining, so the burden to convey risk is much higher in the ziplining case.
Again. If you are used to going raftign or climbing with orgs, you are used to the complete nonsense “YOU WILL DIE” waivers. While a billionaire could afford it, I don’t think any of us expect them to commission a study to evaluate the integrity of every pothole in every road they ever travel on.
And a lot of these giant red flags like “they used a game controller” or “the lead designers weren’t old white dudes and were instead new grads” are… not at all red flags and are all very normal. There is a LOT of messed up stuff with this sub, but it also mostly highlights how little the average person understands about just how janky all of this is by default.
I mean, you yourself are talking about how you expect heavy regulation for all those “extreme sports” activity companies and… there really isn’t. Most of the regulation comes from their insurance companies and even those are severely lacking. Which is the issue. You know it is jank. You don’t know how jank it actually is.
That’s why the “average reasonable person” standard is used in criminal cases. Most people do not expect to die driving over a pothole, and don’t drive over them intentionally.
And the court case against the dead CEO will be very interesting