A Malaysia Airlines plane making its way on the runway at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang. - AFP
It’s such a strange covenant, the one into which we enter when we board a plane. We sit down, buckle up, and blithely ignore the safety instructions, secure in the knowledge that we are about to be teleported thousands of kilometres away. Planes are to transport what dentistry is to medicine – there’s something mildly terrifying about the whole process, even when it works precisely as it is supposed to.
If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then the ease with which we accept that technology is indistinguishable from faith. I haven’t the foggiest idea how a jet engine works. Getting on a plane is the closest I will ever come to the certainty of religion. And yet I’ve done it, time and time again, just as you have. Just as we will continue to do.
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