On one hand it's nice to see the valley: 'let's solve this' attitude. On the other hand, it's common to see them blinded by hubris, resulting in problem solving approaches divorced from reality.
Weird to see comments like this. Elon Musk was asked to help, he agreed to come there and now people talk about "hubris" as if he had tried to force his help on them?
Can't famous people even help kids stuck in a cave without someone criticizing them for it?
1) If someone is helping, I don't give a ---- what they say about it. Actions speak louder than words. People criticizing Musk probably haven't lifted a finger themselves to help the kids.
2) How do you know if Musk's help wasn't helpful? Do you work at the rescue site?
I think the criticism of Musk is exactly that the words spoke louder than the actions.
Very few of the people criticising Musk had the ability to do anything to help the kids. He is in a rare situation to have the flexibility and resources to make significant financial and/or logistical contributions to literally any cause he notices. In this case, he did it in the most self-aggrandizing way possible, while appearing to make no actual contribution.
I kind of agree with (1) but (2) in this case is just 'built something to meet the requirements but everything had moved on by time of delivery' which I think is something all of us engineers here have experience of.
They didn't ask him for money, money was not the issue. If they had asked him for money he would have probably helped out. They asked his engineers for help and they tried to help. He didn't think he 'knew better' he tried something and offered it as an idea to the people responsible. Did he say 'fuck those assholes they should have used my solution'?
The toxic nature on the internet is so disgusting and unnecessary.
Not that he knew better, just that he/spacex could contribute something that no-one else could. I don't think money was ever a problem in this situation.
These are some new level religious terms and conditions.
Expecting and feeling entitled for help to arrive on your terms and conditions.
In fact you seem to have taken this a little tad too far. The observers wish to declare on what terms(moral, ethical or others) the victim and helper need to comply with to work with each other. With the observers themselves contributing nothing to improve the situation at hand.
A little common sense here. He’s trying to develop a de novo hardware solution in short time. If you wanted to help, you’d buy/rent top of the line drysuits with helmets, send those through with instructors and be done with it. You probably wouldn’t decide to start on hardware development.
They already have that stuff (drysuits). Thailand is not a poor country and they do a lot of diving. You are talking about a situation you don't understand while accusing musk (who actually talked to people on the ground) of not understanding. Musk builds things, that's why he was asked to help and that's why he built a thing.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. I can’t read the guy’s mind, but my instincts point towards publicity stunt. I doubt arguing further is going to change anyone’s opinion.
What have I claimed about Musk's intentions or actions? I'm not the one who criticized him, but I have not lauded him for it either. I don't know what's going on at the rescue site nor am I claiming that I know. I'm just seeing Musk trying to help and people claiming (without any evidence) that he has some hidden agenda. Of course he could have a hidden agenda (again I don't know), but I'm not making a claim in either direction, just calling bullshit on people who think they know.
From your comments elsewhere in this discussion, your motivation seems pretty clearly to be to defend Elon Musk by inventing the spectre of things he might have done, but very likely did not. And at the same time pretending to be impartial about it.
Nah, I'm simply tired of people trashing someone without a reason.
The things he might have done are just examples; there's loads of different scenarios that might be true and we don't know really much about it. I'm not speculating, that's what all the shit talkers in this thread are doing. I'm reserving judgment instead of latching onto a forced narrative created by the media outlets with just a few tiny pieces of information that has leaked out of the rescue effort.
Yeah, and while you are doing that you are pulling stuff out of thin air, like the fact that he was asked to help – by some unknown stranger on Twitter. Surely doesn't look like that neutral stance that you are claiming to take.
> Yeah, and while you are doing that you are pulling stuff out of thin air, like the fact that he was asked to help – by some unknown stranger on Twitter
What about high end rebreathers? The top of the line ones can sustain their oxygen cycle for six hours it seems that the divers are using oxygen canisters and there has already been one death due to a diver running out of oxygen.
Rebreathers are frail and bulky, and not good for cave diving (one of the divers involved had a special front-mounted rebreather to work around this). A lot fewer divers are trained to use rebreathers, too.
Cylinders are hardy and portable, and can be carried with one hand through narrow openings. They can be attached to lines, and stored along a prepared route for other divers to use during a single descent.
I remember they said at some point that the children could not be rescued with diving equipment because it's dark, they are not experienced divers and they might panic under water. Maybe his solution to build a submarine instead comes from there?
I am not asking you to rely on faith, I'm simply asking you to drop your faith on "knowing" what goes on at the site and in Musk's mind and admit that you simply don't know.
> It was quite obvious nothing of the size of that submarine could fit in that narrow portion of the cave.
What? How did you come to this conclusion? They deliberately designed it to be 31cm so that it would fit through the narrowest parts they knew of (38cm? 35cm?), and it was obvious to you that it wouldn't fit?
There's a diagram if you look around. Sure the narrowest portion is narrow, but you need to bend your body because this narrow portion is at a curve.
A solid metal cylinder that can't bend had no chance at all to begin with. If a human cant go through without bending their body how can a cylinder containing a flat standing human get through? An engineer designing for this situation knows to optimise for the camera instead of the cave.
You know, I actually had been wondering about the length myself for a while, but I hadn't seen any comments or quantifiable information on that one way or the other. I was wondering how much they had considered that even in a narrow hole they might need extra room of more than twice the length of the tube afterward to make sure it goes through, if the passage doesn't go straight. The bendability per se I admittedly didn't explicitly think about, though (though it kinda factors into the size). Every diagram I've seen so far has been grossly not-to-scale for something this small, and every objection I've seen thus far has been about the diameter, not the length or the shape. If you have any information on the shape (besides the diameter) it'd be awesome if you could link it here. (Unfortunately I have to go offline so I don't have the chance to Google further right now.) Thanks for the reply!
It's obvious from the pictures of the submarine. When the press reports state that the cave is so narrow in places that you need to take off the scuba to get through, obviously the submarine that has a bigger diameter than a diver with a scuba won't pass.
Do you see that diagram says "gap approx 40 cm"? Do you see that I already told you they deliberately designed their submarine to be 31 cm in diameter? Do you see that there's a chance that the oxygen tanks and their human chest combined are indeed more than 31 cm, and hence having to take them off might not say anything about whether a 31 cm tube will fit?
I can see that but I can also see that there's an air tank mounted on the outside of the submarine. This could probably be taken off while passing the narrow passage.
On the other hand you would need to squeeze a person in that submarine over the whole diving range. That would probably not help feeling them more comfortable.
Last not least in article you will find the quote "'The equipment he gave us is not practical for our mission,' Narongsak said Tuesday morning", that might prove my point.
Finally I don't get why you are arguing that the submarine is such a great idea when it's clearly not.
Are you serious? You mean some unknown person on Twitter asked him for help? Someone who has a link to an obscure Play store app in their profile. Oh well ...
I'm pretty serious. You asked a question, I answered it. I'm sorry if you don't like the answer. I don't personally know the full set of people who have asked him for help, but the conversation following the tweet I linked is more than sufficient to prove to you that it was others asking him for help rather than Elon's hubris prompting him to dive into a situation he wasn't welcome at.
It's actually a bit saddening that you are serious. But on the other hand there are people who are doing global politics on Twitter. Usually when you are using the phrase "he has been asked for help" I would imply that he was asked by someone officially responsible for the rescue and not by random people on Twitter. Obviously that hasn't been the case.
> Usually when you are using the phrase "he has been asked for help" I would imply that he was asked by someone officially responsible for the rescue and not by random people on Twitter. Obviously that hasn't been the case.
If you aren't sure exactly who asked him for help, it's good to say that explicitly at the beginning, because saying it with no qualification actually does imply that the asker is someone involved in the situation and not just some rando.
Well for one, you were the one who claimed that he was asked for help, and now don't tell me, like your buddy, that this is true because someone one Twitter did that. For two, if the Thai government had actually asked Elon Musk for help, surely this would have made the news (and also been tweeted on his account).
If you read the above discussion first: this question didn't pop out of the blue. It was a direct response to someone suggesting Elon's hubris got the better of him and made him insert himself into a situation where he wasn't wanted. If you read the Twitter conversation I linked you, it addresses this point pretty directly. It's obvious that he had no plans to insert himself into the situation until someone else (random guy or not, I don't know) nudged him to.
> I did read the discussion first, and my common sense interpretation of the question was whether someone of relevance to the event asked.
Right, so in coming up with that interpretation you completely ignored the rest of the discussion and what the point of this question was. The point was not who the person asking was, or what their credentials were. The point was to figure out whether it was some external or internal force that prompted Elon to help. The status of the person who requested his help does not change whether he was the one who came up with the idea of helping or whether it was someone else who did.
By your logic, I can personally consider myself invited to any party, as long as a random person (even one who has no connection to the party) on Twitter invites me to said party.
That tweet might have motivated me to join the party, and I might even contribute to and be very welcome at that party, but to claim that I was invited to the party because some external force prompted me to go there is not common sense.
> By your logic, I can personally consider myself invited to any party, as long as a random person (even one who has no connection to the party) on Twitter invites me to said party.
Or, you know, you could use try to be more sophisticated in your reasoning and realize it's completely possible and sane to have different criteria when evaluating whether Musk's decision to join a party in response to a stranger's suggestion was an act of hubris compared to when the event in question was an international rescue effort.
Or, you know, you could just admit that the wording was poorly chosen and caused a lot misunderstandings, and that Musk wasn't officially asked for help, but that a random stranger on Twitter asked him to do something.
> Or, you know, you could just admit that the wording was poorly chosen and caused a lot misunderstandings, and that Musk wasn't officially asked for help, but that a random stranger on Twitter asked him to do something.
I would rather not claim more than I know, given that I don't know if he was asked officially.
