One of the crazier theories this week to emerge about the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was that it has been abducted by aliens. This huge mystery has certainly captivated people on a global scale rarely before experienced, possibly because it feeds into a number of our fears and paranoias.

Fear of flying:

Let’s face it. There’s something not quite normal about being stuck in a tin can 35,000 feet in the air. Evidently about 60% of the population experience this ‘aviophobia’, not to mention claustrophobia as an addendum. But the reality is that no other form of transportation is as scrutinised, regulated or monitored as is commercial aviation.

Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety and found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million – pretty good odds I ‘d say compared with travel on our roads.

 

 

Addiction to / suspicion of technology:

We’ve rapidly developed both an addiction to and a suspicion of technology. We’ve been seduced into believing that we can trust technology to subsume so many aspects of our daily lives- communication, finance, travel, international relations and the rest. We’ve willingly handed over the difficult, boring stuff to the god of technology and hoped for the best.

At the same time we fear the hackers and the scammers and the ‘crashing’ of systems just when we most depend on technology’s reliability. It’s a schizophrenic relationship for sure. In the case of flight MH370, we can’t quite believe that we’ve been seduced and then abandoned by what we expected technology to deliver. Technology was supposed to be a safety net, not a source of threat. Why has it turned out to be so unreliable?

 

Fear of terrorism:

The threat of terrorism unfortunately now seems to be part of our global vocabulary. When something falls down or blows up or goes missing, as with flight MH370, terrorists zoom immediately to the top of the suspects’ list. True there are daily reminders that we live in a perilous and cruel world, and some countries are more hazardous than others.

Don’t panic:

Living on such a vast planet, often at the whim of impersonal technologies or faceless terrors, we can feel as lost and insignificant as those passengers on flight MH370. As puny individuals in the endless history of mankind we may seem but small fry but we do have choices to focus our attention elsewhere. We may seem small and inadequate at times but as a counteraction to this mood, we can be also be magnificent and heroic.

I was reminded of this truth this week (March 17th) when I watched the unfolding story of Tara Winkler (http://www.abc.net.au/austory/) a young Australian woman who, despite struggling with her own demons, established an orphanage in Cambodia to rescue abused children. If we look closely around us there are many such examples of how brave, funny, surprising and selfless human beings can be.

At times of global paranoia, in which we currently seem to be stuck, we are also able to focus on the wonder of human beings and how they never cease to triumph and astound. Those lost passengers too on flight MH370, have hopes, dreams and loves and focussing on our humanity reminds us how remarkable we human beings can be.

As Carl Sagan says in ‘Cosmos’, “every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”