Back in 2016, a 3-foot scale model of OceanGate’s Cyclops 2 submersible underwent high-pressure testing:
Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.
“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”
“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.
The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.
In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model.
This design, later renamed Titan, made it down to the Titanic in 2021:
It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.
You have to respect a man willing to eat his own poisoned dogfood.
Let’s re-write it using our experience with the political left’s social engineering designs:
The Socialist Non-workers party ran a test using their favorite ideas, including expanded welfare; more civil rights legislation; court interventions; and severe propaganda against Bad-thinkers.
The model imploded thousands of measurement units short of the safety margin.
In the In the high-stakes, high-cost world of social policy, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test.
The Socialist Non-Workers party didn’t do either thing. Instead, within months, they rolled out the same plan on society at large, resulting in our current wave of feral children; and sterile, irresponsible adults.