I’ve been thinking about vastness. It started in those early weeks of the hunt for Malaysian Airlines flight 370. Day after day they tried to figure out where it might be in the vastness. Amazing how long it took to find the hundreds of square miles of ocean where it probably crashed, and then how many days later they narrowed it down to a smaller area of rough ocean, a dot 1,000 miles from Perth, Australia.
As information flowed and overflowed, we learned that it’s hard to find bits of an airplane in the vast ocean because there is so much other stuff out there. The sea is the great gathering ground. It’s the final resting place for everything that’s not tied down. It’s hard to imagine how much garbage must have accumulated on the surface of the sea to make it visible from a satellite orbiting the earth 300 miles away. There are lost containers (10,000 go missing each year). The garbage from Fukushima is still out there. Then there’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas, that floats around in the North Pacific Ocean. People who study these things say the oceans may contain as much as one hundred million tons of plastic. “It’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said one pundit about the jetliner. “We’re looking for a piece of garbage in a garbage dump.”
Once (and never again) I traveled on a container ship from Long Beach, California, to Tauronga, New Zealand. I am glad I did this, because I experienced first hand the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. It took two weeks, during which time we saw the sun rise and set, ate three miserable meals each day, read every book that we had brought with us, played countless hands of gin rummy, and were bored beyond belief. For exercise we walked on the deck while the ship plowed relentlessly ahead. It was a numbing experience. And while we were moving ahead, there were thousands of other container ships doing the same thing, carrying cargo from continent to continent, burning millions of gallons of diesel fuel. And, not to forget that, overhead, jet planes were carrying human cargo and burning through millions of gallons of kerosene. I am bewildered when numbers get into the millions. When there’s a visual I can sort of get my mind around it. I’m used to real estate ads offering ten million dollar homes, and I can almost imagine millions of tons of garbage because I’ve seen landfills, but what does one hundred million tons of half-submerged plastic look like? Or an area twice the size of Texas? I can’t and don’t want to imagine the number of fish or turtles or birds that are killed by garbage in the sea each year. It’s also impossible to comprehend the speed and numbers of satellites and wreckage that orbit our planet.
Vastness is not an uplifting thing to think about—at least not for me. Some might feel a glow thinking about heaven or the infinity of space or a sunset on the ocean’s horizon. These are awesome matters to contemplate, but I worry about what’s here on earth, and I can’t help but think of how quickly we have ferreted out and put at risk the depths of the sea, the forests, the mountains, the sky, and the earth’s innards.
Vastness is a dwindling commodity. We’ve solved so many mysteries, found solutions to so many problems. A hundred and fifty years ago we used horses, mules, wheels, wind, and muscle to get things done. Then we found steam, and then we made steel and quickly found petroleum, which gave us the internal combustion engine. Think of the submarine, the telephone, the computer, the airplane, the helicopter, the paved highway, the trucks, the ships, the rockets, the X-ray, the lunar landing. With each step, a certain amount of vastness and mystery disappeared. We’ve gone nearly everywhere and compromised nearly everything. And now, if we keep at it with our good brains and technical expertise, we will soon solve the vast mystery of how a jet plane could simply disappear. Hurrah for us!