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Comment by kitd | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea of being trapped in a confined space kilometers under the sea has a visceral effect on the imagination that a boat voyage on the surface doesn't, regardless of how tragic the outcome is in both events. It pokes and prods many of our deep phobias.

Similar stories like the Thai boys trapped in the cave, or the Chilean miners, had a similar effect.

A bit like "Snakes on a plane". Again, trapped with your phobias.

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I think being trapped on an overcrowded ship, bodies pressed into you, as the ship capsizes, is also viscerally terrifying. You don't know where you are. You don't know who is around you. You have nothing except what you could've carried. You are trying to leave a downed ship with hundreds of pressing bodies. The waters are rising. There's too much froth to see where you're going.

Everyone is screaming, death is all around you. People are drowning, and in their drowning flailing limbs they are pulling others to their deaths.

[Edited to add: The migrants would've had time to process what was happening to them. There would be many long minutes of terror, suffocation, as they died. Hundreds. Women, children.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Sewol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o

A friend of mine was involved with computer forensics on recovered cellphones on this one. Just awful.

I agree with you but I also realise it’s very hard to imagine what a proper tempest on the sea feels like if you are never experienced it on a ship. It’s an experience which is so far removed from a modern person traditional experience - a sunny summer day at the beach - that they just can’t grasp it.

Yes, it's good entertainment, for many.

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