Vanishing act is just hard to fathom
Surely, planes can’t dematerialize on our 21st-century high-tech watch? Yet one has.
SAN FRANCIS CO A few months ago, my wife called me in a panic. She was on her way to John F. Kennedy Airport after a business trip to New York and couldn’t find her iPhone.
Although she was convinced the pricey device was under a table at the restaurant where she’d eaten lunch, I told her otherwise in about four clicks of a mouse from a desk in San Francisco.
“According to the Find My iPhone app, your smartphone is currently traveling on the Long Island Expressway toward JFK,” I said a bit too smartly. “In other words, it’s in the cab with you.” And so it was.
Mystery is a scarce commodity in our digital times. Whether deliberately or accidentally, we can pinpoint the whereabouts, activities and movements of friends and family with shocking and pleasing ease.
And that’s all on the overt side of the street. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that on the darker side few lives can hide from the high-tech monitoring abilities of government agencies.
So how is it that a Boeing 777 can simply vanish? The question has been gnawing at me from a perch here in the capital of always-connected culture.
If any one of us can pinpoint in seconds a device the size of a power bar in a New York taxi from 3,000 miles away, it frus- tratingly makes no sense that a Malaysia Airlines jet can disappear from the snooping view of countless satellites in 2014.
So on top of the heart-wrenching tragedy, we have the incongruous mystery, one that makes us question the seemingly limitless question-answering power of the technology in our grasp.
After all, this isn’t a connected world — we’ve already made the hyper-leap to hyperconnected, with recent sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos dedicated to topics such as “Risk and Responsibility in a Hyperconnected World.” According to a Davos report, 10 billion devices are connected to the Internet today, and 30 billion will be by 2020. One of those, sadly, is not Flight 370.
In fact, the jet’s vanishing act nearly two weeks ago conjures up unsolvable aviation puzzles from more technologically innocent times. Squadrons of fighter planes were said to have disappeared into the fabled Bermuda Triangle at the end of World War II, and for decades the only explanations ran to the fantastic, from UFO raids to strange magnetic disturbances.
But that was before the creation of GPS-enabled portable phones that can take pictures and label their locations without you expending a single brain cell. Surely, planes can’t dematerialize on our 21st-century high-tech watch? Yet one has.
As a species, we thrive on solving mysteries as a way of removing doubt and pushing our society forward from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge. This painful and still unsolved airline saga is, among many things, a reminder that our know-it-all world doesn’t know it all. And humility in the face of mystery is a good thing.