"The capsule is strong enough to survive a storm at sea or getting crushed between two icebergs."
The first part is probably true. The second part is folly. "Remember the Titanic".
I’m amazed by the idea that providing escape capsules would have saved many lives. The Christmas tsunami caused about 230 000 fatalities in a densely populated area. People didn’t even get to higher ground. Where are you going to store the hundreds of thousands capsules that you’d need to even make a dent in that number. And how will people get into those capsules within minutes of the warning?
And who is going to find all those capsuled people and rescue them? Rescuers will be swamped with hundreds of thousands of non-capsuled people who should logically take priority. Depending on how these things float, if they get swept out to sea, you might need a ship with a crane to lift the capsule aboard. Does it float nicely with the hatch open or do you have to stay sealed up to stay afloat? Can you float with air ports open or do all of you have to stay breathing that scuba tank in the photo; how long will that last? What will many -- thousands? -- of EPIRBs all going off at once do to the SAR system?
there is only one way to find out
I am reminded of the earthquake detecting bed that drops you into its interior and closes you in a reinforced bed coffin.
Did Wallace design it? Sounds a lot like his early morning routine.
I don't think that is the business model: there will be a small percentage of people able to afford these, which will have transponders and 'priority rescue' status from emergency services, as part of the subscription package.
Yes, sure. But even that wouldn’t work - those people still need to have advanced warning and be close to a capsule. But if you’re close to a capsule, then you’re likely close to home and you can just build a flood safe room in your house.
Escape capsules is probably over complicating things. An inflatable life raft would probably be more practical. You can get them with gas cylinders so they inflate in a few seconds.
I can't imagine this would work. Can you not remember the footage of the wall of houses/cars/boats/trees/etc moving across the landscape? Your raft is getting flattened.
Missing from the article is any details on ventilation. You need fresh air to survive, which means non-water tight holes will be somewhere on that thing. Normally on a boat, they would be on the part that's above water. On a spinning ball, that wouldn't be an option.
My best guess is that it will be integrated in the center tube. Buoyancy ensures the center of the ball is usually above water, and one end of the tube would always be above water.
Also missing from the article is the fact that the maker hasn’t shipped any capsules yet… their site says you can pre-order one!
You only need to get rid of CO2. There would be oxygen enough in the sphere for quite some time.
Yes, so now you're talking CO2 scrubbers, air monitoring, O2 replacement, cabin pressure management, and reliable power to keep all this life support running. It's basically a submarine at that point, all for $20k per pod? I'm skeptical this is practical.
> He’s working with a company to develop nanosensors able to detect movement in the iceberg so he has advance warning of a flip
The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.
For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.
The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.
"Nanosensors" is useless technobabble. But I bet you could do it by carefully monitoring the rocking of the iceberg in waves. Watch the period of the berg's movements; as the melting brings it closer to instability, the period would get longer and longer, which could give you some warning. (You couldn't predict the consequence of some portion breaking off, but it might give you something.)
Laser matrix measurement would be an interesting fit for acquiring the shape data but there would be some interesting caveats.
Easier approach: predict “it’s going to flip at noon”, and then bomb it at noon until it flips.
Stability of icebergs is tricky. They don't "become" top heavy as the article states, they are constantly top heavy.
The center of mass of the iceberg is above the center of buoyancy 100% of the time. What prevents the flip is a flat base which hopefully counters the small tilts by moving the center of buoyancy in the same direction as the center of mass.
> The survivors, including Nobile, spent a month wandering the free-floating pack ice, at one point shooting and eating a polar bear, until their rescue
This sounds like something Jules Verne could have written. In fact I seem to remember this exact plot device in a book a read when I was a teenager, but the name escapes me.
Are you thinking of “The Iceberg Hermit”?
I read that book as well in my early teen years.
No, the library I had access to I think would not have carried that. I think it must have been my memory jumbling a couple of novels. Some part is from Captain Hatteras and some from "The Fur Country".
Another commenter asked how ventilation is supposed to work -- it does say "air ventilation vents" [1], though it's extremely unclear from photos where those are or how they work, and how it's compatible with not drowning when you get dumped into the sea and they're on the bottom.
But I'm also wondering about where fresh water is coming from and where waste products go. It talks about a water storage bladder/tank, but surely that's intended for weeks max, not a year?
So when the flip starts you basically have a few seconds to strap in before getting tossed around the capsule as it tumbles down the side of the berg right? Even if you are strapped in I feel like surely you're going to come out very concussed at the least.
His idea seems to be to detect the approximate timing of a flip or roll with sensors and then strap in and wait for it to happen. I have some serious concerns though lol. I mean if the ball rolled off a cliff on the iceberg and fell into the water I’m pretty sure it would be like trying to survive a crash at terminal velocity, and I doubt the racing chair would handle it.
That is what I was thinking. Are you also strapped down for the toilet? It's going to be messy when it flips while you're evacuating your bowels.
And, overall, it seems incredibly pointless! If you have a survival ball like this, why not just let it float? Why put it on a dangerously unstable surface?
> Why put it on a dangerously unstable surface?
I think that's the whole point? No "normal" person would think doing this is a good idea -- he wants the thrill of the ride with a minimum of recklessness.
You couldn't pay me enough to do this.
Not saying it’s full-proof but I believe it is a cage inside a ball w rollers so that the outside spins while the inside is at least somewhat stable. Nonetheless, they do mention that a full inversion is a worst case scenario due to the suddenness
Foolproof*
Fülprüf*
No it’s a self righting interior. Read the article.
Pretty risky bet for the company, if he survives that's great marketing, but if he dies, that's the end of it they're not selling any.
Assuming they ever ship any, and to him. This story may just be their marketing to try to get there, anyway.
It seems he moved on to a different project instead:
> In 2017 I crossed the Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Europe (Iceland) with skis and a sled in 15 days.
2015
Oceangate vibes
> The capsule is strong enough to survive … getting crushed between two icebergs.
Bullshit.
Christ this website is terrible. Blogspam to the core, scrolling even a little bit changes the url to random other articles on their site
Yeah it’s frustrating how many legitimate media outlets have made their websites basically unreadable.
*how many once-legitimate media outlets…
I used to religiously subscribe to Outdoor magazine in print. I had to go check if it was still being published [0] and it is, although it is perhaps quarterly now?
[0] Since so many magazines and newspapers are going out of business and just selling their domains to dogshit spam factories for the incredible Page Rank they have.
I mistyped Outside in my comment. But now I went to check my recent magazine arrivals and it turns out I also have a print subscription still. They're happy to send it to you for free because then they can publish higher subscription numbers and get more money from the advertisers who are the only ones funding these things now.
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techcrunch does the url change too
[dead]
Agreed. There are mountains that don't survive getting crushed between two icebergs. If the sphere were made of solid tungsten, then okay, I'd buy it. Short of that, I have doubts.
Correct. The forces involved when icebergs move are vast. This thing will be crushed like a coke can. Even a deep-sea titanium sphere might not survive such an asymetric load as being crushed between a berg and a rock.
The Titanic wasn't crushed, it was sliced, wasn't it?
The titanic was advertised as unsinkable and we know its history.
Advertising this capsule as uncrushable is a commensurate gamble.
Just make it out of carbon fiber. That's what they did with that uncrushable submersible that went to the Titanic.
Carbon fibre has poor compressive strength and good tensile strength.
That makes it inherently bad at holding pressure from outside in a submarine and good at holding pressure inside a spaceship or airplane.
Designed, paid for, and piloted by a complete jackass, but... He never claimed it was uncrushable. He claimed it was safe.
Still completely wrong about that, obv.