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Elon Musk's Team Is Talking With Thai Officials for Cave Rescue (bloomberg.com)
Representatives for Elon Musk are in talks with Thai authorities about aiding in the rescue of a boys' soccer team stuck in a cave, said a spokesman for the billionaire. From a report: Musk's companies could help by trying to locate the boys' precise location using Space Exploration Technologies or Boring Co. technology, pumping water or providing heavy-duty battery packs known as Tesla Powerwalls, the spokesman said. It's unclear whether Thai officials will accept the offer. Twelve boys and their coach, who had been missing since last month, were found by a pair of British cave divers late Monday. Efforts to rescue them are hampered by narrow passageways and rising waters in the cave system. Most of the boys cannot swim.
Cave diving is highly technical. In one part of this particular dive the diver has to be remove their gear and push it ahead of them, in the dark, without getting tangled. This isn't a simple open water dive. An untrained non-swimmer will panic and die, trapping everyone else in the cave behind them.
If divers got in there, surely they can get some more divers in there with some more equipment, and then tow the kids out of there in spite of their lack of swimming ability?
You mean getting kids that can't swim to use SCUBA gear for their first time and not panic while navigating through an underwater maze of twisty little passages, all alike for over a mile, underwater, in the dark, for 5+ hours? I'm a 55-year-old super experienced swimmer and that might freak me out a little. While I'm confident that I could keep it together, I wouldn't be so sure about my 11-year-old niece.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
As a diver I can highlight a few dangers with this kind of diving:
1) Panic. If someone panics they lose all rationality, these means they will do things like reject their equipment, take their mask off, taking their breathing apparatus out, flap about and risk knocking any rescuers dive gear off. When you do rescue diver training one of the first things you're taught is that if someone is in panic to only approach if you believe you can restrain them, it's better to let them run out of energy, fall under, and pass out, then try and recover them once they're unconcious/drowning than it is to risk a rescue and get yourself knocked out by a flailing arm. There are tactics you can use to approach a panicing diver, such as approaching them underwater and removing their weights (so they can't descend), or approaching them from behind and controlling them by holding their tank where they can't reach you. The problem is, none of these approaches are any use in a tight cave. There have been plenty of recorded incidents over the years of even the skinniest, most petite young girls accidentally knocking even the strongest most experienced dive instructors for six as a result of panic.
2) Low visibility, due to the rainfall and porous nature of the rocks, there is quite a lot of silt in the water, that means visibility may be next to nothing at points, that's a perfect recipe for panic. When you start to do tech diving, one of the things you learn is to use shorter fins, and kick differently than you do open water cruising reefs watching turtles and stuff. You learn to kick in a way that limits stirring up silt, and in fact don't even kick at all if you can pull yourself along a guide line or something - getting the kids to avoid a natural tendancy to kick, or to kick using the right finning style if they do will in itself not be easy without significant practice. If they kick or flap they're just going to make visibility even worse.
3) Parts of the dive are 30 metres, whilst that's not massively deep for even fairly casual recreational diving, it's still ample depth to suffer effects like narcosis, which can cause anything from making someone deliriously happy, to deliriously stupid like with panic in rejecting equipment.
4) Some parts of the cave system are so narrow, the only way through is to take your equipment off, push it through, swim through, then put your equipment back on. Cave and tech divers in general usually have long hoses for this type of scenario so they can keep the regulator in whilst they do this, but keep your regulator in, or removing it and replacing it whilst de-kitting, and re-kitting when you reach the other side isn't something a beginner should ever attempt.
5) Air consumption. It's an hour dive, and an experienced diver can easily do an hour on a typical 12 litre tank, but these aren't experienced divers, the stress of the cold, dark, and tight passages, coupled with poor buoyancy and trim, and zero experience means these kids will be burning air like no tomorrow, and with parts at 30 metres this means they could trivially run out in as little as 30 minutes. That means at some point you need to switch their air supply.
6) Keeping track of them, the normal way to safely cave and wreck dive is to follow a guide line that you've tied and run through the system, this means the kids have to pull themselves along it for an hour. That's fine in itself but what if they lose it? If there's zero visibility due to silt then how do you find them again? You can tie them to an experienced diver with a buddy tether, but that's something else that can get tangled and create a crisis- if it gets tangled round the kids breathing apparatus it could accidentally pull it out and you might find all you have at the other side is a drowned kid. There won't be room at times to have someone swimming side by side with them.
7) Buoyancy control. It takes a while to get that right, get that wrong and serious accidents can occur. If you inflate your buoyancy vest too much you'll get an u
Uh okay. Except he was approached to help and said that he suspected that the Thai government had it under control:
"Elon Musk has said he is “happy to help” with the rescue of the Thai soccer team currently stuck in a cave.
The Tesla CEO was asked by a Twitter user if he could provide a helping hand with the recovery of the 12 boys and their coach who have been stuck in a Thai cave for nearly two weeks, and Musk replied in the affirmative a few hours later.
I suspect that the Thai govt has this under control, but I’m happy to help if there is a way to do so
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2018"
He *may* be getting high on his savior complex, but he was asked for help, he responded that he would but that he didn't think the Thai government needed it, and then you took to Slashdot.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
> That he's a CEO who boasts about his own organizations? Every CEO does. It's their Job.
Most kinda try, but very few are as good at it as Musk. Most companies don't trade at infinity times earnings, like Tesla does. Typical price to earnings ratio of a well-established, consistently successful company is 20-25 times earnings. Tesla's earnings are *negative*, but it's priced as the most successful car company ever, with billions in profits every year.
It's valued as the world's largest and most successful car company, while it's actually tiny, less than 1% of the market, and losing money fast.
Musk may be the very best hype man alive today, up there with PT Barnum.
My biggest concern with this would be how much research has been done into the effects of those drugs on people underwater.
People often don't realise quite how much of a profound effect the mammalian dive reflex can have on the human body, I can't honestly be arsed to find the study but I'm sure someone can if they can be bothered, but essentially they measured the heart rate of a bunch of free divers and a good proportion of them had their heart rate drop to 20 bpm, and incredibly, a tiny minority as low as 5 bpm whilst free diving.
I'd wager there's a risk therefore that a combination of the two could simply cause the heart to go into cardiac arrest.
That's before you factor in the other effects of diving too of course of which there are many - you end up with different gas mixes in the blood, on normal air mixes in a scuba tank you build up nitrogen, eventually this can reach toxic levels if you do a couple of deep dives in a row it's sufficient. To counteract this and allow people to do repetitive dives you can get gas blends in tanks with higher oxygen percentages, for recreational diving this usually means up to 40% oxygen. Tech diving has other blends, but I won't go into that. The problem with even higher oxygen blends is that they restrict your depth limit, because past a certain point with a great oxygen percentage you can suffer oxygen toxicity which will cause a seizure, something that's almost always deadly underwater. I probably should memorise the nitrox tables but I think if you have something like a 32% oxygen blend then you're at risk of oxygen poisoning and subsequent seizure at only about 30 metres or so.
But I digress, the point is that other changes happen too - capillaries get constricted at the outer regions of your body such as around your legs, as above, you have different amounts of nitrogen and oxygen in your blood stream. You potentially have a much higher level of stress, and so on and so forth. Is it still safe to take those drugs with all those things going on? It's certainly not safe to assume that drugs that work fine at sea level in normal conditions, are safe with the physiological changes that happen when diving.
But there's one other big problem, when diving you have to be able to equalise the pressure in your ears, if you don't do that you'll burst your ear drum and be in absolute agony. I'm not sure how you're going to do that if you're not lucid.
I have had PR firms offer me the service, while I've been a corporate officer.
Read the story here. The people who have bought shorts have billions at stake. They are very motivated to pay for this.
Bruce Perens.
$4.9 billion in subsidies as of three years ago, and still counting.
If you had bothered reading the article you linked to you would have seen that the subsidies break down as follows:
1. $750 million to build a solar plant, and $260 million in property tax breaks, on a project which New York state expects to generate 3,000 jobs and replace a Steel factory.
2. $497 million in tax credits for solar installation; a tax break available to ALL solar providers.
3. $1.5 billion in subsidies paid to solar consumers (ie. not paid to Elon or any of his companies).
4. $1.3 billion in undefined "incentives" to build a battery factory - probably also composed of tax-breaks intended to support an extremely profitable venture which will greatly benefit Nevada (later in the story they point out that Nevada expects to get back $100 billion in "economic impact").
5. $517 million from collecting "environmental credits" from competitors. This is not "taxpayer money".
6. $20 million in yet more undefined subsidies for a launch facility; again, a great deal for Texas given the profitability of SpaceX.
Now, the original claim was that "an awful lot of tax dollars are spent inflating his ego", and, to support this claim, you linked to a jumbled mass of programs totalling $4.9 billion. Out of that $4.9 billion, we can discount $1.5 immediately since it was given to consumers as part of a larger solar subsidy which has nothing to do with Elon. That leaves $3.4 billion. We can further subtract the $497 million given to Tesla because, again, these are programs available to (and used by) all solar providers. We are down to $2.9 billion.
We can also take out the $517 million taken from competitors because ... well, don't be stupid. Now we have $2.4 billion.
Of that $2.4 billion, $750 million is being used to construct a facility which the government will own. So that's about $1.6 billion left.
So the actual amount of money, according to your own source, which is being spent specifically to "inflate his ego" is about $1.6 billion ... and, again according to your own source, almost all of this money is composed of tax breaks rather than direct spending. Tax breaks which, according to the government, should stimulate the economy to the tune of $100 billion over 2 decades.
Quelle horreur.