[HN Gopher] Titanic digital scan reveals new details of ship's f...
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Titanic digital scan reveals new details of ship's final hours
Author : jnord
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-04-08 22:58 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm curious why there aren't drone cameras that can explore the
| interior.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| Take your pick:
|
| * Difficult to navigate in a narrow underwater structure
| without crashing
|
| * Signal penetration, or lack thereof, in an iron hull at the
| bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
|
| * Extremely niche technology that would have few practical uses
| in other contexts since most of the seabed does not suffer from
| the same complexities as a shipwreck
|
| * Can't see for shit underwater in general
|
| * We already know whats down there and why it's down there,
| therefore unlikely to lead to significant new information
|
| * This could actually be considered desecrating a mass grave
| under maritime law
| shadowgovt wrote:
| One does wonder precisely how many decades (or centuries)
| have to pass before "desecrating a mass grave" becomes
| "archaeology" (... "he ruminates while thinking about that
| fascinating Pompeii exhibit that toured through town one
| year...").
| refulgentis wrote:
| I think they're just throwing answers out they would find
| plausible.
|
| They are not reflected by reality. (i.e. from inside,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pun18bi_0-g)
| snickerbockers wrote:
| oh man, idk if you've ever been to the metropolitan museum
| of art in NYC, but they have dozens, maybe even _hundreds_
| , of dead bodies that were removed from their burial sites
| without consulting any next-of-kin (not that you'd be able
| to figure out who that is) on display in glass cases. But
| apparently its alright since nobody's left to argue on
| behalf of whatever pagan religion or cult they participated
| in.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is a museum near me with an Egyptian mummy on
| display and notes that the Egyptian government now wants
| it back even though it was legally bought from Egypt 100+
| years ago. Last I heard it wasn't going back, but I
| suspect just a matter of time.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > even though it was legally bought from Egypt 100+ years
| ago
|
| One might ask - _particularly_ in a colonial history case
| - if that "legal purchase" was made under fair
| conditions and not by exerting undue pressure, as it
| often happened.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Cultivating unfair conditions and exerting pressure is
| just good negotiation.
|
| The modern Egyptian government doesn't actually want
| mummies back, they just want to get paid again. They are
| going to use various means at their disposal to get paid
| once more. Which is "fair" in the _All 's fair in love
| and war_ sense.
|
| Edit: Egypt just wants to pivot a subscription model:
| https://tutankhamunexpo.com
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Cultivating unfair conditions and exerting pressure is
| just good negotiation.
|
| I heavily disagree. Bullying may work in a short term but
| in the mid to long term it can have disastrous
| consequences - we're seeing this play out _right now_
| with the US government and all its major allies looking
| for a way out and divesting from the US.
|
| Decades worth of "soft power" building effort and
| hundreds of thousands of lives lost in various wars (WW2
| alone >400k!), for nothing, all gone in the space of a
| few months.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| An interesting counter-example is the Museum of Us in
| Balboa Park, San Diego. They have on display a Mexican
| mummy (if memory serves, naturally dessicated by a desert
| burial) that was smuggled across the border from Mexico
| to the US. At some point, the museum got in touch with
| Mexican authorities and agreed to repatriation. However,
| the museum they've worked with in Mexico doesn't really
| have use for the exhibit, so it's on indefinite loan to
| the Museum of Us with full understanding that this is a
| generous privilege provided by the museum in Mexico and
| the people of the nation.
|
| ... All in all, a quite excellent win-win negotiation to
| mutually-agreeable conclusion, it seems.
| Lammy wrote:
| It depends on the profit motive of who might want to use a
| morality argument to maintain their exclusivity lol https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Exhibitions#RMS_Titani....
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's not usually time based. Some countries have laws like
| NAGPRA in the US that protect the graves of specific groups
| regardless of age but otherwise it's a very fuzzy line to
| draw. The two extremes are:
|
| - If the polity that the person belonged to still exists,
| then it's a _very_ sensitive issue - like US civil war
| graves. Likewise if there is a clear cultural continuity -
| for example France 's first republic to the modern era.
| Both of which are themselves fuzzy criteria but largely
| fall into the desecration camp (although there are
| exceptions, not all cultures view it as taboo when done for
| scientific/historical purposes).
|
| - If neither the polity nor the culture - often delineated
| by writing system or state apparatus or other semi-
| arbitrary line - still exist then the grave is pretty much
| fair game ethically speaking (legally it depends on the
| jurisdiction).
|
| That fuzziness in the middle is _very_ problematic but
| modern archaeologists have a whole process for reaching out
| to governments and getting consent from any descendant
| communities if applicable, and then coming up with an
| ethical plan to rebury /preserve the remains afterwards.
| IME the majority of such communities are very cooperative
| because it helps them answer questions about their past.
| fortran77 wrote:
| or the bog people of Ireland!
| billforsternz wrote:
| One of those rare occasions where I can't possibly just
| salute an excellent comment with a mere upvote. Superbly
| balanced effort, each bullet point equally devastating and
| perfectly expressed.
| refulgentis wrote:
| You have inspired me to do a quick Fisk-ing, in homage to
| rationality, remaining tethered to reality, and preferring
| _some_ research before free-associating, if only to avoid
| information pollution.
|
| (note: we can quickly discover footage from inside the
| Titanic that obviates all these points. Here, we endeavor
| to cover this from an angle of how you could detect the
| arguments presented were weak, without that knowledge)
|
| * Difficult to navigate in a narrow underwater structure
| without crashing
|
| Passenger ship? Too narrow for a drone?
|
| * Signal penetration, or lack thereof, in an iron hull at
| the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
|
| Wireless signals aren't used for companion submersibles.
|
| * Extremely niche technology that would have few practical
| uses in other contexts since most of the seabed does not
| suffer from the same complexities as a shipwreck
|
| The seabed does not have any tight spaces?
|
| * Can't see for shit underwater in general
|
| We are commenting on an article that _reconstructed a
| massive ship as a 3D model via photographs underwater_
|
| * We already know whats down there and why it's down there,
| therefore unlikely to lead to significant new information
|
| We are commenting on an article that reconstructed the ship
| from the exterior _despite this same factor applying_.
|
| * This could actually be considered desecrating a mass
| grave under maritime law
|
| Not even wrong. Just throwing stuff out there.
| billforsternz wrote:
| Bravo. I am speechless at this point.
| Lammy wrote:
| > * Extremely niche technology that would have few practical
| uses in other contexts since most of the seabed does not
| suffer from the same complexities as a shipwreck
|
| This is why the wreck of the Titanic got found in the first
| place though https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/artic
| le/titanic-w... (https://archive.is/jibqF)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > desecrating a mass grave under maritime law
|
| That never made sense to me. Massive efforts are made to
| retrieve bodies from airplane crashes, sunk boats, collapsed
| buildings, etc. Why is recovery from some other disaster
| sites "desecration"?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Undersea drones are a remarkably (and fascinatingly!) complex
| field.
|
| Ignoring all the mechanical challenges (airtight, watertight
| machine that can operate under crushing pressures and still has
| a way to separate delicate, saltwater-sensitive electronics and
| actuators from external-facing motive devices), the
| communications are also a challenge: radio does _awful_ under
| water (VLF can go 100 feet, but now you 're trying to control
| something inside the Titanic with radio signals that bounce off
| all the still-existent metal in wild ways; problem is a bit
| harder than "get full WiFi coverage of your house"). Sound
| would actually probably be a great tool, but sound also behaves
| strangely under water that deep. The most well-researched,
| well-tested solution is a long cable back to the control ship,
| but that constrains how deep you can get into the Titanic (one
| idea I've never seen floated: attach a _fleet_ of robots to the
| cable, a main one for exploration and observation and multiple
| wire-managers who 's full job is to anchor to something and
| manage the cable slack... But now you're anchoring to the
| wreck, so that's also not good).
|
| Fully-autonomous robots might actually be the best option here,
| and the only thing stopping that is the actual research and
| development to build a machine that can make independent
| decisions exploring an environment with unknown shapes,
| dangerous sharp edges, and possible currents, in full 3D. We've
| put more research into rovers on Mars than into this problem.
| bluGill wrote:
| > exploring an environment with unknown shapes, dangerous
| sharp edges,
|
| We know the original blueprints. We can program that into a
| robot, along with existing known differences. Then the robot
| needs to just detect anything that isn't like expected and
| photograph it and return. After a few rounds of that you
| would get most of the interesting areas explored.
|
| Currents are handled just by comparing expected return
| signals to what you really see.
|
| OF course worth it is questionable.
|
| The above fails in the general case only because generally in
| navigation we also have safety considerations. Your self
| driving car cannot run over a child no matter what. However
| there is much less to worry about in the Titanic. (don't
| confuse that with this is easy, only that if you don't worry
| about safety it is much easier)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Since there are already submersibles and cameras that work at
| that depth, that cuts down the size of the problem space
| quite a bit.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Anything you're remotely sending down there is going to be
| attached to a long wire and rather big. Also navigating tight
| spaces underwater can be challenging even for a human, in
| person. Navigating them with a brick remotely is much harder.
|
| Some setups have smaller ROVs launched from another
| submersible, like ROV ROBIN.
| refulgentis wrote:
| s/why there aren't/whether there are
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pun18bi_0-g
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The Titanic is on a perpetual news cycle. How every decade it
| somehow manages to make news is interesting.
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(page generated 2025-04-11 23:01 UTC)