UPDATE: The wreckage of the submersible has been found by a deep-sea search robot some distance away from the bow of the Titanic, squashed flat by the pressure. Apparently it collapsed in on itself and fell to the ocean floor with about 15 minutes of descent time still to go before reaching bottom.
By now, that home-built submersible that dived down to the wreck of the Titanic, 14,000, yes, FOURTEEN THOUSAND feet below sea level, (that’s nearly 3 MILES deep where the water pressure is over 6200 pounds per square inch, enough force to turn a watermelon into a postage stamp), HAS RUN OUT OF OXYGEN.
To give it credit, the thing was professionally built to withstand such pressures. That doesn’t mean it succeeded, however, as it stopped communicating with it’s surface support vessel less than two hours into it’s descent.
BUT, there was no CO2 scrubber system on board. A CO2 scrubber separates the hydrogen back out from the oxygen and returns it to the air. There are 5 people inside the metal tube inside this thing, and even though fresh oxygen is being released from tanks (I assume, since there’s no actual mention anywhere, but they can’t be that stupid, can they?) still, the carbon dioxide (CO2) increases with every exhale because there’s nowhere for it to go.
As they breathe in this increasingly toxic buildup of CO2, they become sleepy and less able to think clearly. At a high enough level, they go to sleep, and then die. No CO2 scrubbers. In a closed, small metal tube miles underwater.
The controller for the steering motors is an X-Box controller. A video game controller. And no CO2 scrubbers, and the people aboard are brilliant people, rich, famous, talented. And just amazingly stupid. And now, dead.
HOW can someone rich, famous, talented be so futile AND so stupid?
THEY DIED FOR NOTHING.
Yeah, hard to understand why anyone with that much money, with the world in their hands, would choose to do things so dangerous that your average poor person would run from.