![Titanic submersible]()
1,514 people lost their lives when the Titanic sank on April 14, 1912.
Now, you would think that number would be high enough that we as a society don't feel the need to continue to add to the total lives claimed by the ship that was once thought the be unsinkable.
But for some reason, humans love to tempt fate and do stupid things - like going to the wreckage 12,000 feet below the ocean's surface in a homemade submersible crafted from Camping World parts and controlled by an Xbox remote.
Of course last year, over a century after the sinking, the Titanic claimed 5 more victims when the OceanGate submersible imploded during an expedition to the ship's wreckage.
Kinda wild that the Titanic is still killing people after all this time, right? Seems like that's a pretty clear sign that maybe we should just let it rest in peace.
Well apparently not everybody agrees.
An Ohio billionaire decided after the disaster involving OceanGate's Titan submersible that he, too, wanted to try to visit the wreck site.
Honestly, that's how you know you have too much money. If you see a bunch of rich guys die doing a rich guy activity and that just makes you want to do it yourself to prove you could survive, maybe it's time to take a step back and rethink your decisions. But hey, it's his money and his life, so who am I to tell him what to do?
The latest expedition is the idea of Ohio billionaire and real estate investor Larry Connor, who says that he decided he wanted to visit the Titanic after seeing the OceanGate tragedy just to prove that it was possible.
I mean, that sounds great Larry, but you know what sounds even better? Not dying in an underwater implosion two miles beneath the ocean's surface.
But Connor, who's already visited the Mariana Trench and the International Space Station (he's not just a rich guy but one of them "rich-rich" guys), called up Triton Submarine's CEO Patrick Lahey to partner with him on a better submersible that could actually make the dive to the Titanic without...you know, catastrophically imploding and killing everybody on board.
And Lahey was publicly critical of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush after the Titan disaster, calling out the late CEO for circumventing safety practices in the interest of expediency and cost-saving. So he's convinced that the $20 million submersible Triton 4000/2 "Abyssal Explorer" will be able to make the dive.
No date has been set for when the two-person dive will launch, but I'll at least give them credit: This seems like a much more credible mission than the duct tape-and-WD40 submersible that OceanGate put together. All of Triton's submersibles are at least certified by third-party safety agencies, which seems like the bare minimum until you realize that OceanGate decided to skip that minor step in their operations.
But still, I think at this point maybe we as a species should stop tempting fate and giving the Titanic opportunities to add to its body count this late in the game. It's been over a century since the ship sank, and the fact that it's still claiming lives seems like a warning sign that we should probably just stay away.
