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by m_0x 1100 days ago
Does this mean the passengers had an instantaneous death?
8 comments

I believe James Cameron called it being turned into a, "meat cloud."

Absolutely occurred in under 30ms (upper bound). Possibly as quick as 2ms, and in all likelihood well under 10ms.

Rough estimates, but at that depth, it’s around 450 atmospheres of pressure, or around 6,500 lbs per square inch. Pretty much instantaneous.
blink of an eye is 100ms on average so it was faster than the blink of an eye.
They died faster than their brain could process any pain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N17tEW_WEU&t=166s This is what a controlled vacuum implosion of a liquid tank looks like at 1 atmosphere of pressure, including cameras showing the inside of the tank.

The depth of the Titanic wreck is 3800m; down there the vessel would be subjected to 380 times that pressure. So...probably.

How exactly can we compare these? The controlled vacuum implosion is 1 atmosphere outside and “a vacuum” inside, which would approach 0 atmospheres. The Titan is 380 atmospheres outside and 1 atmosphere inside. 380/1 is easy to calculate, but how do you calculate 1/~0?
It's not 380/1, it's 380-1. 379bar of dp vs 1bar dp. So 379 times worse, ish.
Yes.

Mythbusters did an episode showing what happens to a human body under deep sea implosion

> https://youtu.be/LEY3fN4N3D8

It's ugly.

It's ugly, it's only at 300ft, and it's an equivalent of a leaking valve, so they're not going from inside atmosphere to outside pressure in an instant.

At their depth, where presumably the carbon fibre let go, it's probably a lot faster too. At least they won't be able to even register what's going on.

Theres an avid discussion on the other thread about this, but the short answer is likely yes. They were probably crushed, incinerated and then bludgeoned to death in less than 3ms, and probably unconscious before they were aware of any of the rest of it.
While the physical trauma would have been instantaneous, they might have known it was going to happen. James Cameron just said in an interview[0] that they had a sensor system inside which detects when the hull is starting to fail, and that they probably had warning because they had dropped their weights to ascend.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThZLhNF_xg

How do we know the weights where dropped before the immplosion
Once they locate the wreckage, if the weights aren't nearby that's a strong sign they were detached before the implosion. They would have fallen to a different location on the seafloor than the hull because they're denser and have a smaller cross-section, thus not affected as much by the hydrodynamics during the fall.
I thought the drop weights were held on by electromagnets--essentially a dead-man switch kind of fail-safe. So therefore when the power failed due to the implosion the weights would drop.
Not an expert, but seeing hydrolic press videos using carbon fibre it snaps instantly, also seeing ocean gate videos they don't cross weave the carbon fibre
Damn, why don't we execute people that way (if we're still executing people, that is)?
Because the executed's family still have a right to bury their dead, not poor him in closed casket. Besides, once the person is executed, it's considered they paid for their actions and deserve basic human decency.
Man. Retributive justice done in a potentially more painful way so that family members can do a ritual on your corpse. I hope our society continues becoming more enlightened. :D
Can you imagine the torture of waiting to be turned into a "meat cloud"? It's also probably prohibitively expensive to construct a "meat cloud device".
It sounds gruesome, but maybe some people have a preference ?
Incinerated? Where did the fire come from?
When you compress all the gas in a volume quickly it gets very hot. This is how a Diesel engine works.
Like a diesel engine igniting just from pressurizing the cylinder...?
Mantis Shrimp kill using a similar concept

Video showing a Mantis Shrimp punching a shell incredibly quickly it creates a vacuum which generates intense heat and a flame .. under water!

> https://youtu.be/ti2Uoc1RXuQ?t=128

Heat of compression
P V = n R T
An attempt at an ExplainLikeImFive answer:

In a sizable volume of gas the air molecules have a lot of room to bounce around. Moving molecules and them hitting things is heat. So suddenly having a lot less room results in much more frequent impacts. Frequency of impacts is heat, so it becomes hotter. We'd sort of normally consider it the overall average velocity of the molecules, but if they never hit anything they never transfer energy, and aren't measured (or measurable). But when they hit things they transfer some of that energy and it's measured as heat as an aggregate.

So biggish volume of gas, suddenly in a tiny volume: huge spike in heat because all the molecules now slamming into each other and the people inside.

I'd say it would be very unpleasant, but it's so fast and so violent that exceeds the speed of human thought, so they felt nothing and just sort of stopped existing as corporeal beings faster than they could possibly comprehend the change in circumstances. They were. And then they weren't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD7CfnQC5HQ

Watch how quickly those glass objects imploded as much lower pressures than they would have been at, it would have happened faster than their brains could have comprehended it, so there's some mercy in that at least.

Likely crushed and incinerated into ash (air will get very hot) all in less than 100ms.
Yes
They went from alive, to clouds of molecules faster than humans can perceive. So effectively, yes.