Steve Fossett and his Bellanca airplane have now been missing for over three weeks. Although the story has fallen out of the media's spotlight, a significant number of folks remain either interested in, or consumed by, the ongoing search.
It's amazing how quickly we've all become accustomed to the information age. The are no unanswerable questions anymore. Anything worth pondering can be explained with either a few clicks or by applying technology to new research.
Wonder what's the name of the flower that suddenly sprung up in the backyard? A couple of minutes searching Google and you should have your answer. Wonder what the surface of Mars looks like? Let's launch a rover and find out. Who was the MVP of the 1957 World Series? It took me about ten seconds to discover that it was Lew Burdette.
This is all in stark contrast to the vast majority of human history. If your uncle was a Roman ship's captain and went missing, you'd probably never learn what really happened to him. In fact, if you lived in Middle Age Europe, you'd never have had a chance to find out what other cultures existed in other parts of the world. Their science, beliefs, foods and languages were simply unfathomable.
That's why something like the Fossett case is so difficult to accept - we expect every question to have an answer, if we just look hard enough. Even twenty years ago, a missing pilot probably would have been written off as "presumed dead". But with modern scanning and radar equipment, satellite imagery, Amazon Mechanical Turk, etc... we just refuse to accept anything less than certainty.
Will there ever be another Amelia Earhart? For that matter, how long until somebody pieces together what really happened to the Amelia Earhart?
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2 comments:
I suspect they are close to solving the Amelia Earhart mystery. I once told someone you could find almost anything via the Internet (back in the 90s) and by George there is a whole mess of us who are bound and determined to include Steve Fossett among those things found via the Internet. We just have to search hard enough. ;-)
Cheers
How long before someone finds Earhart (and Noonan).... Well I've been working on it since 1994 and am getting closer. See www.electranewbritain.com for the detail.
Won't be long now, maybe in the 71st year of the loss.
David.
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