Over the past few weeks, the world has been preoccupied with Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared an hour after takeoff last March 8. In spite of the efforts of 26 nations to find the missing plane, its location remains unknown.
The search for MH 370 is frustrating for those following its progress—how hard is it to find 239 people today? The average teenager today could easily have more than 400 friends on Facebook. But even though we do have the technology to find these people, we don’t know where to start looking. Although technology has made the world smaller, the search for MH 370 proves otherwise.
For those of us who spent our teen years in the 2000s, speed and convenience are everyday experiences. When any question can be answered with a quick Google search, not knowing the answer to something is incomprehensible. And while a TV show episode can be downloaded within an hour, no one could have expected a real life episode of Lost to happen before our very eyes.
This isn’t the first time a plane has gone missing. Seventy-seven years ago, Amelia Earhart famously disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe on a plane. Although the circumstances may be different, the situations are similar at the root: Both planes vanished mid-flight, both are yet to be found.
It isn’t the first time technology can’t answer a mystery either. Just last February the Ateneo was hit by a bomb threat. But as simple as it appears in the movies to track a cell phone number, the only information the police and administration were able to obtain was that the incriminating texts came from Marikina.
The problem with living in the 21st century is that we tend to forget that we don’t have the answers to everything. Google may be able to tell us how to win that elusive 2048 game, but search engine answers are never enough. Similarly, satellites and transponders aren’t enough to find MH 370—there’s still so much we have to figure out on our own.
Unfortunately, figuring things out isn’t as easy as 14 seasons of CSI have led us to believe. Murder mysteries and cases of missing persons can’t be resolved within a couple of days. Frustrating as it is, finding MH 370 is going to take a while and we have to be patient—at least, for the time being.
And in the long run, we have to ask more questions and answer these ourselves. As Gardiner Hubbard, the first president of the National Geographic Society said, “The more we know, the greater we find is our ignorance.” Information may be widely available, but its how we use and what we do with that information that matters.
There will always be a risk involved with air travel, as countless accidents and hijackings have proven. What really makes MH 370 terrifying is the not knowing what happened to it; in spite of the wealth and growth of information we’ve had in the past decade. It may appear as though technology has made our world smaller. But the truth is, our world is small because we make it so.
