Let’s start with the part that keeps me up at night. It’s not the technical specs of Ocean Infinity’s underwater drones, though their ability to map the ocean floor with near obsessive precision is objectively cool. No, it’s imagining what happens in those quiet seconds after the crew hits ‘power on’ for the first time in eleven years. Some engineer in a control room halfway around the world, coffee going cold, staring at screens that might suddenly light up with answers for 239 families. Or might show nothing but silt and shipwrecks, again. It’s the most expensive game of hide and seek ever played, with a $70 million price tag that only gets paid if the ocean decides to cough up its secrets this round.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 didn’t just disappear in 2014. It became a cultural ghost story, feeding our obsession with unresolved mysteries and the terrifying idea that in an age of constant surveillance, something the size of a Boeing 777 could still vanish without consent. The satellite pings, the debris found years later on beaches like taunting breadcrumbs, the conspiracy theories ranging from plausible hijacking scenarios to full blown sci fi fever dreams. But strip away the noise, and you’re left with a simple, devastating human equation: hundreds of people boarded a plane, and their loved ones have spent eleven years trying to understand where those lives ended.

Now private industry has entered stage left with robotics that look borrowed from a James Cameron documentary. Ocean Infinity’s fleet of autonomous subs can crawl the seabed for months with human levels of pattern recognition. If they succeed, their compensation could fund a decent indie film. If they fail, as every prior search has, taxpayers foot the bill for logistics while grieving families get yet another dead end. It’s a business model dressed as a humanitarian mission. The corporate rebranding of closure, sold back to us at cruise missile prices.

Here’s what nobody’s discussing while we fixate on the tech. The rise of no find, no fee contracts in disaster recovery isn’t innovation. It’s desperation. Governments that once handled these searches through public agencies now outsource the emotional labor of finding bodies to companies whose shareholders expect ROI. Ocean Infinity’s 2018 attempt proved fruitless, yet they’re back because venture capitalists smell opportunity in other people’s pain. And why not? If this succeeds, their marketing materials practically write themselves. ‘We find the unfindable,’ with small print about hourly rates.

But consider the absurd economics. Seventy million dollars buys silence if nothing turns up. If debris emerges, that same amount transfers to a company that’s essentially gambling with other nations’ trauma. Imagine if wedding planners charged this way. ‘Pay us nothing if you get divorced within five years.’ The incentives here are hilariously misaligned, but we applaud it because we mistake contractual gimmicks for noble intent. In reality, we’re letting profit motives dictate when and how we grieve.

A sneaky thought creeps in every time I read about this: What if the whole undertaking is a high tech placebo? The families deserve answers, absolutely. But after eleven years and countless false leads, the greatest service might be admitting some mysteries outlive both our attention spans and our tools. We forget that the ocean, for all our sonar and machine learning, remains less mapped than Mars. We deploy drones with names straight out of sci fi, expecting them to conquer chaos with submersible cameras. It’s a beautiful kind of arrogance, honestly.

Now, let’s slaughter a sacred cow. What happens if they actually find it? Beyond closure (a word so overused it’s lost all meaning), beyond geopolitical finger pointing about why Malaysia or Australia or China didn’t try harder sooner. Legally, wreckage changes everything. Lawsuits frozen in limbo could thaw overnight, with Boeing’s liability depending on whether investigators spot signs of mechanical failure. Insurance firms might finally calculate payouts instead of citing ‘unresolved circumstances.’ Conspiracy theorists would pivot to explaining why the debris appeared now, not later, because the internet abhors an unanswered question. Finding MH370 isn’t just technical. It’s a line in the sand for who controls the narrative of disaster.

But pause on the cultural side effects. In the decade since MH370 vanished, our relationship with aviation has curdled into paranoid resignation. Travelers glance nervously at flight trackers, wondering if their plane might become the next meme of disappearance. Airlines compensate by drowning us in data, showing airstream paths and estimated arrival times down to the second. It’s performance theater for peace of mind. If Ocean Infinity pulls this off, it becomes proof that tech can eventually undo even the most egregious vanishing acts. If they fail, it reinforces the modern anxiety that at any moment, the systems we trust could swallow us whole without explanation.

Then there’s this rich irony: The same companies developing MH370 hunting tech are quietly repurposing it for less altruistic gigs. The sonar systems designed to spot aircraft debris work equally well for sniffing out oil reserves or rare mineral deposits under the seabed. Corporate presentations likely frame MH370 as a PR friendly showcase, demonstrating capabilities to future clients in mining or defense. Tragedy becomes a foot in the door for industries that would rather not discuss how their robots are strip mining ecosystems between search and rescue publicity stunts. Nobody mentions that part when pitching grieving families on ‘recovery efforts.’

We’re also ignoring the time capsule effect. Imagine divers finally reaching the wreckage in, say, 2050. Would the black box data even be retrievable after decades underwater, or would salt corrosion turn it into a Rorschach test for investigators? The personal effects preserved under extreme pressure would be haunting. Suitcases with clothes still folded. Cell phones fossilized into sealed bricks of memory. A chilling museum exhibit waiting for someone to fund its curation. Future anthropologists might classify this search less as recovery and more as morbid time travel, sifting through the leftovers of 2014’s digital habits. Passengers’ Kindles eternally paused on page 176 of bestsellers that now feel quaint. A glimpse into predisaster normalcy, preserved in the deep freeze of the Indian Ocean.

Which leads me to uncomfortable questions about scale. Why MH370? Why spend another $70 million when hundreds of smaller tragedies disappear daily without a fraction of this effort? Because it became a spectacle. Because disappearing while crossing an ocean feels cosmically unjust in ways that smaller, messier deaths don’t. We’ve assigned value to certain lives based on media coverage and mystery rather than any ethical calculus. That doesn’t make the search wrong. It makes us hypocrites when we ignore countless other families begging for resources to find their own missing. The symbolism of MH370 overshadows quieter, ongoing disasters that lack a viral headline.

I’ll say this. Whether Ocean Infinity succeeds or fails, their robots are testing a new frontier of corporate responsibility. If they nail the search, expect disaster response to get even more privatized, with governments outsourcing ‘closure infrastructure’ to the highest bidder. If the drones come back empty handed, it might remind us that money and machines can’t fix everything. That sometimes loss stays loss, no matter how deep we dive.

So here’s the paradox. The whole endeavor is equal parts noble and cynical, wrapped in a glossy PR campaign. Families clinging to hope versus investors tallying potential returns. Engineers geeking out over waterproof drones versus spouses staring at unchanged phone screens, willing them to ring. The only certainty is that even if they find the plane, the ache won’t disappear with it. Because grief doesn’t work like sonar. There’s no frequency that bounces back a clean image of what’s missing. Most days, you just learn to live with the static.

Which brings me back to those engineers about to flick the drones’ power switch. I wish them boredom. Mountains of uneventful data until suddenly, a shape that shouldn’t be there. I wish them $70 million well earned. But mostly, I hope against reason that decades of guessing are almost over, and somewhere out there, the ocean decides to spit the truth back at us. Not for the spectacle, or the contracts, or the tech bragging rights. But because even when closure is outsourced to robots, human hearts still beat louder without it.